Yes to the city: millenials and the fight for affordable housing

Abstract

YIMBYism is a rapidly growing phenomenon that can’t be ignored, no matter how many Twitter accounts one mutes. Max Holleran’s Yes to the City is a timely introduction to those who proclaim “yes in my back yard!”; it is, to my knowledge, the first book-length treatment of the subject written by an author who is not a self-described or otherwise identified YIMBY. As YIMBYism spreads, readers can learn much from this book about the movement’s origins, its social composition, its strategies and its tactics. These are lessons that will be useful for understanding and responding to its emergence in various locales, whether one is a disciple or a critic. YIMBYism is, in essence, the enthusiastic embrace of higher density residential development and a retort to the much-maligned NIMBY (who I assume needs no introduction). YIMBYs want to remove barriers to densification: primarily zoning restrictions that prohibit denser building but also heritage protections, design standards, and other regulations that impose costs or constraints on the development process. While only a few explicitly oppose non-profit housing, the aim of the YIMBY game is to increase housing supply by lubricating the development process for the private sector. This, they claim, is the best solution to escalating housing costs. For this Holleran credits YIMBYs with “promoting a new framing within the housing debate: concentrating on supplyside mechanisms, working with (not against) developers, and emphasizing the rights of middleclass newcomers to wealthy cities” (p. 161). The novelty of this framing is questionable. Building more to reduce housing costs has been the solution pushed by private property developers for a long time, with great success if the metric is government policy but little if it is affordable homes. We can look to the work of the late great Mike Davis for one example of the framing’s durability: in City of Quartz, Davis wrote that Los Angeles developers in the 1980s responded to the power of NIMBY homeowner groups with