Ideas for the YIMBY Movement to Better Include Women
A new series sharing takeaways from the big housing advocacy conference in Austin
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 enjoy working with strong women. YIMBYs of NoVA has provided many opportunities, within our leadership team and among our local allies. YIMBYtown’s demographic and, indeed, intellectual and ideological diversity pleasantly surprised me. It quietly challenged stereotypes of the YIMBY movement. Many (most?) of its key initial founders were women, from Sonja Trauss and Laura Foote in the San Francisco Bay Area to Susan Somers with AURA in Austin, who are still visible, active leaders in the fight for abundant housing.
The conference was an irreplaceable opportunity to take stock of diversity in the YIMBY movement, including the need to ensure that women are fully welcome in it. I think my friend Andrew Justus, a housing policy analyst at the non-partisan Niskanen Center in DC, deserves credit for being the only man to show up on time for a conference session called “Urbanistas and YIMBY Women” (more men would have attended if it had been clear to them that the session was not meant just for women).
By the time I arrived the conversation was rolling along, and I ended up jotting down folks’ various ideas [EDIT: technically I was asked to take notes, which I was happy to do!] for helping welcome female YIMBYs. In no particular order:
Male leaders taking ownership of inclusion rather than relying on women to elevate themselves
Men sharing the burden of administrative and backend work
Seeking out female leaders and candidates with high potential
Affirming women's qualifications
Focusing on the pragmatic and self-interested reasons for teams to diversify
Placing less value on aggressive online discourse like Twitter/X
Advocating for zoning reforms that would enable childcare facilities
Focusing more on the housing needs of families with children, especially moms
Reframing leadership from doing work directly to building an effective team
Street safety/personal safety as a primary goal for urbanism
When a woman asks to join a meeting, do not automatically say no (look for reasons to say yes!)
If we had time, I would have added ensuring that women’s contributions, especially in a leadership capacity, are visible. I have a few extraneous thoughts, like Twitter’s huge networking value (more so than as a public messaging platform), but I digress.
The most important point was probably that diversifying the YIMBY movement is not just a moral or ethical imperative, it also really will make our leadership teams and organizations stronger. Women are half of the talent pool, as Andrew noted. And I clearly see the valuable perspective and unique, highly individual skills added by the female members for my own local group’s leadership team. If you have thoughts on this important topic, I would love for you to share them below in the comments.
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.