Working Through The Tension

We should talk about it, and listen to understand

This series shares major takeaways and specific lessons from YIMBYtown 2024, a pro-housing advocacy conference held February 26-28 in Austin, Texas. Roughly 600 advocates and policy experts gathered from across the U.S. and Canada, and as far away as Australia.

I had finally decided to call this piece “YIMBY Infighting Is Overstated,” until I got dinner with a friend, a veteran land use reform advocate whom I deeply admire and have learned a lot from. Infighting is not what I would call it, but my friend helped me fully grasp that there is substantial tension coming out of YIMBYtown, with many individuals on both sides of the divide over conservatives’ place in the YIMBY movement. I enjoyed Conor Dougherty’s YIMBYtown overview in The New York Times, while my friend liked Jerusalem Demsas’s writeup in The Atlantic. I want to define and examine the tension, even though many of you reading already have some familiarity, because I think there is a risk in downplaying it.

I also see a danger of entering a cycle of navel gazing and self-sabotage. And of overstating. The YIMBY movement still needs to mature and professionalize, but it is strong, successful, and broadly popular. Yet as friends or certainly allies, it behooves us to understand each other’s concerns. We should try to resolve the tension, at least to a sustainable level. There may not be a serious problem, but I imagine the regret of the crew of the container ship that just ran into and destroyed a bridge in Baltimore, causing unknown loss of life and shutting down the harbor. Better for us to work through the tension, just in case.

These conversations should be internal, not on social media, nor in think pieces declaring victory one way or the other. “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pi**ing out, than outside the tent pi**ing in,” our 36th president once said of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. YIMBYtown’s main stage was the LBJ auditorium, which I took great pleasure in. The master of the Senate was not a nice man or good person by any stretch, but he was legendarily effective. LBJ urged his aides to look people in the eye, to peer into their souls, to empathize with them and understand their desires.

My friend and I both came into our conversation with a lot of skepticism. Our perspectives still differ on a basic level, I think. My friend felt less than fully safe in Texas. They worry about perception from potential allies and antagonists in their local political context, where bipartisan messaging and market-driven theories of change are liabilities at best. I was mostly unaware of the scope of the tension while I was at the conference, and remain convinced that the YIMBY movement should continue to be a big tent, not that my friend argued otherwise.

A lot of mutual respect and trust helped us to have a fruitful conversation. Pretty early on we both felt some relief. We listened to understand. We laughed. We both offered vivid examples to help the other person make a tricky point. I changed my mind about a few things. We did not just see where the other person was coming from, we also sincerely agreed on most points, as far as I know. I know for sure that I agreed with most of what I heard. My biggest concern as we parted was that other folks might not be able to have the kind of conversation we did.

Do mess with Texas?

I also came away with reflections. I would define the current divide in questions: How comfortable are you with the YIMBY movement’s embrace of conservatives and Trump supporters? Does it make you feel disrespected or unsafe? Can we really say that housing is non-ideological when its regulation is inherently political and driven by racial and class prejudice? A few aspects of YIMBYtown were controversial:

• Convening in Texas, albeit in proudly weird and famously liberal Austin

• Featuring conservatives from Montana including Governor Greg Gianforte

• General platforming of politicians who are skeptical of trans and abortion rights

• Organizers leaning into themes of a big tent, non-ideological national movement

• Far less programming and fewer events directed toward minority groups than the previous edition of YIMBYtown in Portland, where that was a major theme

Two weeks later, North Dakota Governor and unforgettably forgettable Republican presidential candidate Doug Burgum went viral on Twitter for denouncing zoning and car-centric land use at a National Governors Association meeting. The video has 3.6 million views, partially because there was a progressive backlash, then a potentially larger, mostly progressive YIMBY backlash against the backlash. It all pushed the post-YIMBYtown friction into the open, and seemingly added to it.

I will dig into Texas as a point of controversy, because it captures the broad themes and raises some of the thorniest questions for YIMBYs on both sides of the divide.

To be fully candid, on the matter of folks feeling physically unsafe in Austin, I hardly know where to begin. I will admit to some skepticism, or maybe uncertainty, but Texas is obviously a frontline in the culture war. If folks really do feel unsafe in such places, especially if evidence shows that they are unsafe, we should take that seriously. The rest of us should hear them out and listen with compassion. This illustrates that these conversations should probably happen between two people or small groups.

With that said, Austin was a glaringly obvious host for YIMBYtown. Texas is arguably the first place to look in the U.S. for current examples of functional housing policy.

Houston has exceptionally favorable local land use regulations and is held up as a national model for fixing homelessness. Its housing is famously affordable and undeniably abundant. Dallas will soon overtake Chicago as the third-largest U.S. metro area, thanks to booming northern suburbs with big ambitions. Austin is a Lone Star exemplar, the rare American city that has seemingly added population in its urban core across the past few years. A surge of new apartments has helped push rents down. The Wall Street Journal just ran a comically bearish article decrying Austin’s falling home prices. Its population has roughly doubled since 1990. Locals boasted, somewhat nervously, about being the fastest-growing U.S. metro. The art in my hotel room was a zoning map and the painting below. Cranes really do pervade the skyline. Austin did not just host YIMBYtown, it might be YIMBYtown.

About 30 million people live in Texas. Its population has roughly tripled over half a century. People are choosing Texas, largely because it has chosen to build housing. I understand why those facts might be painful to someone who sees the state’s politics as inherently hostile to them as a human being. But fast-growing Austin is a liberal bastion, the blueberry in the cherry pie as a different friend, from Dallas, put it. Maybe Austin is a kind of sweet spot, with its artists and technologists and dreamers.

National, statewide, local

Common ground is tough to find. As one of my wife’s friends recently put it, true compromise is not just a weaker version of one perspective. It is a new perspective.

I do feel conflicted. I do see where both sides are coming from. A somewhat similar tension defines my political and personal beliefs. I am a devout Catholic with a gay mentor. I am a free speech absolutist who prizes civility. And I am a loyal NPR listener who pretty regularly winces or rolls my eyes at what I hear.

With an eye toward America’s experiment in self-government, the Republican party’s devolution into a personality cult troubles me far more than even the foamiest critical theorist. I know Gianforte as the politician who assaulted a reporter in 2017. I was and am profoundly frustrated that more than 74 million people voted for Donald Trump in 2020, after four years of chaos and mind-numbing incompetence. I nearly cried on January 6th as I realized that the peaceful transition of power in America was forever severed. I wondered about the safety of reporters I used to work alongside in the Capitol. I looked up the dictionary definition of fascism and it fit Trump like the black glove around the fist he raised halfheartedly that morning, a B movie Mussolini. I could not have believed that he would end up with the best odds of winning in 2024. I do not want to work with people who think Trump won in 2020, for example, but if we do not, YIMBY policy objectives might be an order of magnitude harder to achieve.

As I have gotten older, my political philosophy has become pragmatic, oriented more toward power than principle. I think non-violence is important, I have enlightenment values, and beyond that I am pretty open-minded. My moral ethics have evolved toward, of all things, Dr. Phil’s trademark question: How’s that working for you? Are people suffering, or are they better off? Do people have a place to live or not? I might write an essay with the working title, “Losing (some of) my deontology.” I suspect that if I explained the YIMBY movement’s soul searching to the average homeless person — so probably a middle-aged man — he would say whatever he needed to say to get me to shut up, then ask: “Son, can you help me find a place to live?”

I am most persuaded that winning on policy trumps almost everything else (pun intended). Our movement should doggedly prioritize its mission. More and more I respect old school Marxists’ preoccupation with the common person’s material conditions. How do we engage with allies of different political persuasions? How do we approach nonpartisanship and bipartisanship? How do we work with Trump supporters? However we build power to enable abundant, affordable housing, and to build humanizing urban places. That depends on political context, including the level of government.

At the national level, YIMBY is a national movement. There is a common thread, a consistent program of policy reform, starting with abolition of exclusionary zoning. The national media attention will be nice while it lasts, but today’s media darling is tomorrow’s villain. One day it will be our turn, I assume. YIMBY is a strong, positive brand — the people who say yes, the big tent with room for most perspectives. We are blessed that the federal government has limited recourse in land use regulation. Trump tried to turn “saving the suburbs” into a culture war issue, but he failed. If he had succeeded, it would be self-evident. Instead, we got the “Montana Miracle.” Expensive housing is a kitchen table issue that will continue to worsen over the next few years, even if YIMBYs are maximally successful. So urbanism might be a media fad, but I think the housing crisis will give it staying power in the popular discourse.

Bipartisanship has been a consistent necessity for statewide housing reform in California, Oregon, and every other state where YIMBYs have passed a bill. The sole possible exception I am aware of is, ironically, Montana. Local, liberal advocates I met at the conference claimed that Republican lawmakers gloated about not really needing support for housing reforms from Democratic representatives of cities. In the past couple of years I have become confident that there is a proven, reproducible playbook for statewide housing reform. That will be how we succeed, in the end.

The grassroots is where we build our organizations and power, however. My local group in Northern Virginia helped seed a YIMBY group in Richmond, the capital of our commonwealth. Our two organizations were the small but mighty muscle that helped build up the Commonwealth Housing Coalition, which got a single-staircase apartment study bill through both chambers of our nation’s oldest legislative body.

At the local level, bipartisanship is an optional extra. Apparently some folks in YIMBYdom are asserting that YIMBYs should embrace Republicans everywhere. That is incorrect. DC, for example, is a unique civic environment with hyperlocal politics that lean far left. DC’s local Republican party is a joke, not an essential coalition partner. Although non-partisanship is a core principle of YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, nearly all elected officials in our region are Democrats, not to mention that most of our members are progressive Dems. We would be happy to work with a Republican politician but have not had a reason to yet, which does not really matter. Cities and many suburbs lean heavily Democratic, it is what it is.

Some supply-side housing advocates say the YIMBY brand turns off folks in their local community. Or they flat-out say YIMBY is toxic. There is some real history there; we must never forget that our movement was born of the feral knife fight that is San Francisco politics. Early YIMBYs express regret about their aggressive posture toward certain civic players such as tenants rights activists. And I have had my own negative experiences as a super-volunteer in the movement.

On the other hand, most regular people have still never heard of YIMBY, and when you tell them about it, they like it. Still, if you have concerns about the brand … just call yourself something else. Plenty of YIMBY groups insist that they are not really YIMBY groups, which seems to work fine. And if you are hostile to YIMBY as a concept, do not expect to sway the direction of YIMBY as a movement.

‘Too much‘

Maybe because these issues have been swirling in my mind, it keeps drifting back to the first conversation I had in Austin, with the Uber driver who picked me up from the airport. He was originally from Afghanistan. There was a language barrier but that has never stopped me from chatting someone up.

I explained why I was in town and somehow we got to talking about all of the buildings going up in Austin. ‘There are too many big buildings going up downtown, it’s crazy,’ he said. ‘It’s too much. Too much.’ I wanted to understand his concerns, so I politely asked, ‘Why do you think it is too much? Why do you think it’s a bad thing?’

His response was adamant: ‘No, it’s not bad. Too much is good. Too many buildings is good. Too many people is good.’ He was using hyperbole to emphasize how much Austin is building, and to him, it was obviously a good thing. More places for people to live, more people, was a good thing.

I could not summarize YIMBY more beautifully. That is what we believe, if nothing else: that people’s existence is essentially good, that we can make room for everyone. YIMBYs welcome the stranger. We have an broad view of who our neighbor is.

To ensure the health and neighborliness of the YIMBY movement, we will need to have difficult, awkward conversations in the next few months. I honestly believe they will be fruitful. We have so many shared goals and values to lean on. And we tend to be optimists. Just as my friend and I were, I think housing advocates will be pleasantly surprised as they come together to find a new, shared perspective.

Thanks to my 264 subscribers, especially my 5 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I would love to write about a topic suggested by a reader. Visit YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the all-volunteer grassroots pro-housing organization I founded, at yimbysofnova.org.