Housing Density for Whom?

Earlier this summer, New York City Mayor Eric Adams delivered a speech about the transformation he envisions for the city. “Going forward,” Adams said, “we are going to turn New York into a city of yes. Yes in my backyard. Yes on my block. Yes in my borough.”

The issue with this “yes in my …” framing is that a backyard, a block, and a borough are three very different spaces. They encompass very different social relations. When it comes to housing, the subject of many “Yes in my backyard” affirmations, the enthusiasm may not be shared by everyone who shares the block, or the borough.

If “Yes in my backyard” is now in the mayor’s office, Max Holleran’s new book, Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing, charts how the motto got there. The book is a slim but detailed overview of the “Yes in My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement. Based on interviews with activists in the movement, Yes to the City describes the push for housing density as a movement led by middle-class people in their 20s and 30s. Holleran begins with the origin story of the group’s founding in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2013, and he analyzes the effects that YIMBYs (the descriptor also serves as a personal noun) have had on their cities and the world. Whether there would be more or less multifamily housing in the Bay Area without YIMBYs is impossible to determine, but what is certain is that each new housing development has been politicized in a way unseen before the group’s cultural emergence.

Holleran, a sociologist by training and research fellow at the Urban Institute, examines the tactics that YIMBYs use to wrest control of the urban planning apparatus from wealthy homeowning baby boomers, whose parochial advocacy for single-family houses isolated from offices, retail, or social spaces has earned them the derogatory title of NIMBY—short for “Not in My Backyard.” This YIMBY-versus-NIMBY dynamic marginalizes several other advocacy organizations and their ways of interpreting urban space to focus on the pleas of the self-described “density activists.”

The YIMBYs that Holleran studies have a particular technocratic project. Instead of looking to finance affordable housing or build a mass movement, they seek to modify zoning regulations that make only low-density housing possible—replacing the relatively sparse single-family homes in American cities with more dense housing chockablock with amenities, from gyms to grocery stores. The goal, Holleran observes, is “to gain more control over city regulatory agencies as well as to make advocating for urbanism as a way of life a political brand for millennials.”

Evident in Holleran’s choice of cities (San Francisco, Boulder, Austin, Melbourne), the YIMBY solution might make sense only in cities seeing a large influx of highly paid, tech-oriented job seekers. And then, only from the perspective of those job seekers. Holleran’s cities all suffer from problems that many cities losing populations do not have. This point is not to downplay the very sorely felt housing crisis, but rather to indicate why YIMBYs have a tough time finding allies: They are often entering geographies with existing fault lines—of race, gender, and class, and also of space.

The local YIMBY leaders are relatively high earners who allocate much of their salaries toward housing. They reside in neighborhoods with active social justice and tenants’ rights groups, with no small amounts of overlap and tension. Unlike these other organizations, YIMBYs believe that housing affordability depends solely on an increase in the number of housing units—an abundance of supply to eradicate the demand that drives market prices. This can be done, according to YIMBYs, by pressuring planning departments either via public comment to these agencies or to their governing bodies—or, barring that, via blasting them on Twitter. The YIMBY position is racking up victories. Newly passed legislation in California, for example, allows unlimited density for affordable housing projects near transit and permits cities to allow 10 housing units on single-family lots of their choosing.

Yes to the City is written for a lay audience, or at least for self-designated urbanists—voracious readers and flaneurs who judge a city through personal (or vicarious) experience rather than through urban theory, politics, or economic vibrancy. Likewise, Holleran’s book seems to borrow its title from Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s 1968 book The Right to the City, which argues for collective claims by inhabitants to enact political change in the places they live. Holleran’s book makes glancing reference to geographer Neil Smith’s work on gentrification and the rent gap hypothesis, as well as geographer Stephen Graham’s study of infrastructure, but does not devote pages detailing their work and its influence on the YIMBY movement. Yes to the City instead chooses to situate its reader in current-day struggles.

In doing so, Holleran lets his subjects speak for themselves. “What we want is more homes in the already middle-class places so that younger people won’t be faced with the choice to be a gentrifier or not coming to the city at all,” one YIMBY says. This framing understands the movement as breaking out of a scarcity mindset: Many newcomers to the city can only find housing in disinvested areas, forcing them to choose between participating in displacement (“gentrifying”) or not taking a job or changing a relationship that will force a move. YIMBYs want to use market forces to build more housing, particularly in areas that are already well off. This interviewee sounds noble, but perhaps they misunderstand that the market is what initially created this impossible choice. Another interviewee tells Holleran that the refusal to build housing is “not all public policy, it’s really just a particular group of older people unwilling to share their neighborhoods with others.” Unfortunately, this description of age- and space-based exclusivity is the actual (and often clearly stated) public policy of many jurisdictions the YIMBYs compete in.

This naivete is difficult to square with Holleran’s description of YIMBYs as “highly educated activists offer[ing] a marketing push to translate planning jargon. … They focus on changing zoning codes to allow densification in places that have already experienced considerable gentrification.” At the project level, this often looks like YIMBYs campaigning for either increased or decreased regulation of the housing market (or markets, if one is so inclined). What it really is, as YIMBYs repeat throughout Yes to the City, is a long-term campaign to shape the housing market to the demands of the cohort itself.

“We want to build more, and that’s the most important thing,” Sonja Trauss, founder of the Bay Area YIMBY movement, says in her interview. “It doesn’t matter if it’s libertarians or developers, or anti-gentrification housing-justice people. Intentions are less important than action.” Holleran calls this a “post-ideological” declaration—Trauss does not care why someone wants to build housing so long as they help her get that housing built. Holleran dryly notes that it was “not satisfying to many in increasingly unaffordable neighborhoods who stood to lose their apartments.”

What he does not explain in this section, or anywhere else in the book, is how this YIMBY mantra interacts with the actual characteristics of the Bay Area. YIMBYs, according to Holleran, “would seek to upzone the most desirable places where people wanted to live and that are already expensive.” But desirable to whom? Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Mountain View—to name a few of the region’s wealthy, largely white suburbs—are saturated with high-paying jobs, high-performing school districts, and low-density housing. Why, then, are YIMBYs focused on neighborhoods like San Francisco’s historical Mission District?

By letting the interviewees take the mic, Holleran lets the YIMBYs grapple with an answer and reveal that “yes” does not quite seem adequate.

Questions of geography are not answered by Holleran. However, gleaning the YIMBYs’ statements, the reader may find that YIMBYs simply focus on where they are—in their own backyard. Yes to the City mentions early YIMBY momentum toward taking the housing fight to well-to-do suburbs. In 2015, Trauss pushed for a “Sue the Suburbs” strategy that has since transformed into the more anodyne “YIMBY Law,” whose mission is to “enforce existing state housing laws.” There is more housing to be built in “increasingly unaffordable” neighborhoods than in those that were never built with affordability in mind.

In the final chapter, Holleran looks at YIMBY movements outside the United States. This glimpse abroad demonstrates how local housing struggles are interconnected with regional and nationwide issues. A Swedish YIMBY criticizes low-density Malmö, a city facing racialized disinvestment as “large apartment buildings and … vast wastelands.” A British activist, speaking about the disconnect between the housing markets in London and Nottingham prior to the Brexit vote, optimistically tells Holleran, “We are really just at the point of solving the political constraints.” The problem, clearly, is more than just density and zoning.

“What counts as a city,” Holleran asks, “and what obligations come with that designation?” This is a big question to answer in a book that, minus its addenda, is a mere 165 pages. Holleran only touches on an answer when he discusses Boulder, Colorado, where NIMBYs passed a series of ballot measures in the 1960s and ’70s that have ratcheted up a greenbelt that separates the city—with its state flagship campus, numerous high-paying jobs, and limited housing—from its suburbs and their residents, requiring them to commute. Holleran provocatively refers to the first of these ballot measures in 1967 as an “original sin” because it restricted the vote to current residents—who were predominantly landowners—and disenfranchised the thousands who worked in Boulder, to say nothing of the millions of Coloradans whose taxes went toward the University of Colorado or who benefited from the city’s federal research centers. Why should they not have a say in the decisions that impact them? How do technocracy and democracy interact when deciding what housing is available where? Whose interests should take priority, and when?

By letting the interviewees take the mic, Holleran lets the YIMBYs grapple with an answer and reveal that “yes” does not quite seem adequate.