YIMBYs Need to Professionalize
I am burning out on advocacy and worry about our movement's sustainability
After years of false accusations that I am taking money from developers, a friend recently approached me with an idea for a company that would actually give them money — financing small development firms and scaling up infill, medium-density housing. Email lucagattonicelli@substack.com if you want to chat about getting involved, or if you are a developer who struggled to finance a small or medium-density residential project.
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.
At YIMBYtown 2024’s opening plenary, a speaker asked everyone who was a volunteering housing advocate to raise a hand. Something like 80% of the audience did as the room filled with cheers. The scene unsettled me. That percentage would have to be lower in ten years for the movement to survive, I thought. My trip was paid for by YIMBY Action because I was invited to speak on a panel. More housing advocates and YIMBYs will have to be paid for their work to be sustainable.
I have been stewing about this piece for a long time. I knew I would have to write it, and I started in earnest on a momentous day, May 1, 2024. Ten years prior, Sonja Trauss for the first time organized a group of people to attend a community meeting and deliver public comment on housing. She told me so herself:
Congratulations to Sonja and so many other pioneering advocates at groups like AURA in Austin, which hosted YIMBYtown, who blazed the trail for the rest of us. Not to mention fellow travelers like Greater Greater Washington in DC, which just celebrated its sweet sixteen at a gala the night before. I did not feel up to attending. I would have stayed home, except I decided to go to another event, a short drive away, to celebrate my local YIMBY group’s city council endorsements and see members of my Alexandria team, who are wonderful people. It was very much an exception. My third child is about to turn six months old, but for months before her birth, my bouts of burnout were becoming chronic burnout.
Notes on burnout
I thought I might bounce back this spring. I had vague designs to help build up Virginia’s statewide pro-housing coalition across this year to gear up for the next general assembly session in Richmond in early 2025. Then spring came and I did not feel like it. I do not have the energy, the drive. This is not a woe is me story, just a story I think needs to be told more, because I believe my experience as a highly active YIMBY is fairly universal. If I wrote another installment in the Building YIMBYs of NoVA series, it would likely be about dealing with the turnover my team has experienced. One or two folks simply dropped off the grid. A few left our team because their life circumstances changed: A baby, a new job, a move across the river to DC. To be perfectly clear, no hard feelings. We are all volunteers, by definition. I joked with folks a lot in 2023, reminding them, “You can always choose to do nothing.”
Only ignorance can explain why some opponents of the zoning reforms our group helped enact are still, even 13 months after Arlington voted to re-legalize Missing Middle housing, howling about YIMBYs being ‘paid outsiders.’ The irony throws my experience into such sharp relief. Members of our leadership team are just regular people from different walks of life. One or two of us are full-time students, the rest have full-time jobs. And we do this on the side, unpaid, because we are passionately dedicated to making housing an abundant, cheap, available commodity. NIMBYs cannot believe that YIMBYs actually support dense, abundant housing.
I do have to address two unique aspects of my experience. Obviously not everyone starts a new organization, as I did on August 20, 2021. It is a team sport, no question, but I grinded hard for the first few months, sending emails about who knows what and tackling sundry tasks big and small past 10:00 p.m. almost every night. Or I went to two or three evening events a week. And I took rafts of video calls. That level of intensity is beyond what most people would tolerate.
I had one or two major episodes of local advocacy burnout, but the past nine months or so have been different, steadily ratcheting up. Our third child has made me much less comfortable leaving my wife at home to attend after-work events. Weekends are even more precious now. Parents, especially of young children, especially moms, are much less able to work in a movement where even local leadership roles are unpaid. Most housing advocacy work can be done on a normal 9:00 to 5:00 schedule.
Community input and public comment are a zero-sum battle of attrition. They are designed, intentionally or not, to waste time and inconvenience people, detaining them for hours so they can speak for two or three minutes, a Kafkaesque pantomime that often reduces supposedly essential public input to a numbers game. Claiming that only volunteers should operate within that system is out of touch with reality.
The stereotypical YIMBY is a white upper-middle-class mid-career professional with a lot of free time and resources at his disposal. That admittedly describes me a little too well. Yet what actually rings true is the core element of being able to do hours of uncompensated work. Professionalizing the YIMBY movement would not only increase demographic diversity, but also allow individuals who are truly burdened by the housing crisis to work full-time to help end it. In addition to being a moral good, such inclusion would make our movement more effective and credible. We could hire talented individuals who are unwilling or unable to work for free.
A big reason I have taken my foot off of the accelerator — that I have felt able to — is that YIMBYs of NoVA has become self-directed. I still chip in and take the lead on a few things I am especially excited about. Yet the group is highly effective without me. That was always my goal. It is gratifying, but I am left with that worn out feeling. Again, I am not complaining, we just need to be honest with ourselves about the grind.
YIMBYs need a reproducible model that does not rely on super-volunteers.
I sensed some fatigue in my leadership team last time we met in person, and I do not think I was just projecting. I could see it in their eyes. As I had in Austin, I wondered how we would sustain our work for the next ten years. YIMBYs need a reproducible model that does not rely on super-volunteers. My friend Henry Honorof at Welcoming Neighbors Network is helping build such a model, so definitely check out WNN.
Notes on fundraising
A second unique experience I had — because most YIMBYs have the good sense not to try to become a professional advocate — was that I fundraised ~$140,000 in nine months for YIMBY advocacy. The context of why I still have not made one red cent from housing advocacy does not matter, but I did learn relevant things along the way. Here is an overview of the fundraising landscape for YIMBYs.
Few institutional philanthropies fund housing advocacy of any kind, particularly supply-side. The three I can think of are: Open Philanthropy, affiliated with effective altruism; Arnold Ventures, the private foundation of a billionaire couple; and the Koch network. Melville Charitable Trust is the only blue chip, household name philanthropy that has housing and homelessness as a cause area, though they do not, to my knowledge, fund housing advocacy. Pew has started to fund some housing policy research, a welcome development. There are some smaller foundations that give to groups like GGWash. But the drop-off of institutional funders is steep.
There are big tech firm housing funds like Amazon’s $2 billion (I still cannot believe how big it is) Housing Equity Fund, which invests in committed affordable housing in regions where they have a major presence (metro Seattle, Nashville, and DC). I tried to engage Amazon for some funding and quickly realized that would entail at least a year of intense courtship with lots of documentation. I realized I was too small for them.
A key limiting factor of YIMBY fundraising is that lobbying and electioneering are 501(c)(4) activity. 501(c)(3) activity is tax-deductible and gives people warm, fuzzy feelings. It is non-threatening and non-controversial. Think community health, art therapy, or turning part of your vast estate into a ‘wildlife reserve.’ Donations for 501(c)(4) activity can be anonymous but never tax-deductible, and the PR implications are way riskier. Broadly speaking, housing is not an established charitable cause. To the extent it is, funders are inclined to support warm and fuzzy affordable (c)(3) housing work, not the kind of advocacy that makes a random person like me a target of attempted character assassination and conspiracy theories.
The YIMBY movement will likely need to rely on large individual donors.
So the YIMBY movement will likely need to rely on large individual donors. By far the most prominent individual philanthropist in housing is Ron Terwilliger. You might know this name from the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center. Like so many others in the nonprofit world, housing advocacy org development (fundraising, in this context) leaders daydream about Jeff Bezos’ former wife MacKenzie Scott cold calling them with a multi-million dollar donation, as she has for a seemingly random string of nonprofits. The most famous example is probably the $84.5 million she gave to the U.S. Girl Scouts. In case you were wondering, yes, that is a ridiculously large donation, well into the territory of an Ivy League school naming a building after you. There are a few great white whales I would have tried to reach if I had become a professional YIMBY fundraiser — Joe Montana studied architecture at Notre Dame! The reality is, cultivating relationships with big individual donors is a long game. And note well, lots of people want a piece of them. They can smell insincerity from a mile away.
“Asking” by Jerold Panas is a nice little book that provides a crash course in soliciting large donations from individuals.
Another headwind is that the kinds of people who make six, seven, and eight-figure donations and the canonical suburban NIMBY have a lot in common: old, upper-middle-class or truly wealthy, late-career or retired, loss-averse. Odds are they live in a big single-family home or mansion, and do not want their neighborhood to change.
What about developers? They make money because they are cautious about how they spend it. I do think their desire to help YIMBYs outweighs their fairly comfortable position as successful players in the status quo, insulated as they are from fresh competition by the thicket of overregulation. However, speaking from firsthand experience, developers are not big donors. Maybe 15% of the money I raised came from developers. Most of my total was two big (by YIMBY standards) grants.
I am not a fundraising expert by any means, but a few factors work in YIMBYs’ favor:
The housing crisis is not going away. The worse it gets, the better for fundraising.
We have a positive “yes” brand and a clear story about how we will solve the crisis.
We have models of successful advocacy to point to.
We have strong empirical evidence for our policy positions.
Building more housing has broad appeal that cuts across ideological divisions.
Housing reform and efficient land use align with many other causes that potential donors might care about, from environmentalism to racial justice to economic competitiveness to frayed community ties.
One or two full-time YIMBY organizers can make a huge difference in a local jurisdiction or state legislature. We offer incredible value of impact per dollar.
YIMBY enjoys a rising tide of positive media coverage. The housing shortage is a mainstream narrative and talking point. “Build more housing” is a stock phrase.
Tied to the media coverage is growing general awareness of YIMBY as a concept.
We are able to build alliances with respected groups like local branches of the NAACP and Habitat for Humanity. That should help make donors comfortable.
The economy is chugging along. The widely expected recession has not come (yet).
Do not worry about “selling out”
Paid advocates are fundamentally less credible, right? I doubt it. Seemingly nothing would stop our local YIMBY group’s opponents from insisting that we are Astroturf. That is why many YIMBY orgs accept money from developers: You get accused either way, so it is a whole lot easier to just take the money. Doing so carries a responsibility to maintain independence, but that is far easier than you might think.
Developers who donate do not want to undermine advocates’ credibility. They understand that YIMBYs’ greatest asset is our sincerity, our rhetorical ethos. I was always extremely direct with potential donors that we do not take orders. They usually replied that they not only understood, they wanted to make sure we stay independent.
Additionally, nonprofits generally prefer “unrestricted” money, donated without conditions.1 There can be informal pressure to appeal to donors, obviously. So much of the messaging and programming you see from nonprofits is aimed at donors, not the public or even, on balance, the population an organization is supposed to be serving and benefitting, something else we should avoid. But the trope of YIMBY as developer shill has virtually zero basis in fact, even among paid housing advocates.
To use extreme examples, the Civil Rights Movement and push to legalize gay marriage were professionally staffed. I am not putting YIMBYs on the same moral plane. Rather, I wish to point out that being funded made those campaigns more effective and did not prevent them from gaining mainstream acceptance.
Notes on NIMBY hypocrisy
I cannot help mentioning that NIMBY groups in Northern Virginia habitually put fundraising front and center in their communications. Proper legal registration and accounting compliance are nowhere in sight. Organizers direct donations to personal accounts (I am not accusing them of anything, but what a foolish thing to do).
Anti-reform orgs launch with websites that prominently urge visitors to ‘Donate now!’ — for what purpose, they never say. They issue quixotic lawsuits then grovel to their email lists for money and volunteers for elaborate fundraising campaigns.
Our friends on the other side would fall over themselves condemning us if we did any of those things. It strikes me that the proper term for all of the money-related smears YIMBYs face is projection. In a stream of false accusations, the worst financial dealings attributed to YIMBYs are a legal, normal version of the activities NIMBY groups openly engage in. They obsess about fundraising while we take the time to ask ourselves if our movement should even fundraise at all.
YIMBYs should fundraise, and professionalize, and staff up our organizations, and create new ones, building a movement that is even more effective and formidable. YIMBYs’ worst sin is being influential and effective. That will continue to be true as we build a YIMBY movement capable of sustaining the long fight ahead of us.
Thanks to my 316 subscribers, especially my 7 paid subscribers. If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, especially on my concept for a real estate financing startup, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I would love to write about a reader-suggested topic. Check out YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the grassroots pro-housing organization I founded.
University endowments have taken on a life of their own and should be reined in, but individual donations are often heavily restricted to specific purposes. So yes, Harvard has nearly $50 billion in assets, but it cannot spend them on anything it wants to, by any stretch of the imagination. Put another way, these assets are liquid but not fungible.