The Long March of the YIMBYs - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
Seven years ago when I first encountered it, the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) movement was almost a joke — a handful of transplants living in San Francisco who wished the city were more like New York. The idea that such a small band of squawking misfits might one day mushroom into a nationwide movement for housing abundance would have sounded either sarcastic or insane. And yet here we are.
YIMBY organizations have sprouted up all over the country, and are even appearing in other countries like Brazil, Canada, Italy, Peru, Sweden, and the UK who suffer similar housing shortages. And even where the YIMBY label isn’t used, the same stories are emerging of the same battle lines being drawn. On one side are those who seek to freeze the U.S. pattern of urban development in stasis, while on the other side are the increasingly vocal people — most of them young — who have had enough of the spiraling cost of living in the country’s most desirable metros.
The supporters of stasis — generally referred to as NIMBYs — have the weight of history and institutions on their side. From the 1970s onward, Americans erected a dense thicket of laws designed to freeze their urban development patterns in amber. Many of these took the form of local housing regulations — single-family zoning, maximum height laws, minimum lot sizes, parking requirements, setback requirements, and so on. These regulations were supported by local homeowners who showed up to planning meetings and dominated local government. That dominance in turn was made possible by America’s urban fragmentation — our metro areas tend to be carved up into a bunch of tiny towns rather than amalgamated into huge municipalities, a pattern that was originally put in place for the purpose of racial and economic segregation. And on top of all that, parochial interests were empowered by badly-designed federal and state environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the California Environmental Quality Act; these farmed out environmental protection to local groups, allowing anyone to challenge development projects on environmental (or “environmental”) grounds.
