In the very near future, YIMBY Action will be endorsing someone for Governor. I can’t say who it is yet, because we haven’t decided, but I do want to talk about how we make our endorsements, since people always have a LOT of thoughts. Every organization has a different playbook, and so I thought it would be interesting to walk through ours.

Insider Versus Outsider

Some organizations focus on an Insider Strategy, which has the primary goal of maintaining access to elected officials. It’s the “pick a winner” strategy. If you endorsed a loser, the winner is not likely to return your phone calls (or so the thinking goes).

People whose power is based on donating money often follow this insider-focused approach. They attempt to forecast who will win and throw their weight behind that candidate, building the relationship and making them feel obliged to follow their policy recommendations. Ideology plays a much smaller role, because as one political science paper put it, “no one wants to back a loser.”

On the other extreme, there are organizations that don’t care at all about viability. They’re so rooted in their status at Outsider Critic of the System that they prioritize ideological alignment over all else. If nobody is good enough, then too bad for the candidates, because no endorsement will be issued. For example, the LA chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America recently decided they wouldn’t endorse a mayoral candidate for just that reason.1

In other words, the Insider wants to be able to pick up the phone; the Outsider wants to be able to throw stones. Those are two ends of the spectrum, and most folks are somewhere in between.

Our Endorsement Strategy

The TLDR is that we want to endorse a candidate who 1) meets a minimum threshold of viability; and 2) aligns with us more than any other minimally-viable candidate.

Viability

Instead of fixating too much on a candidate’s chances relative to the rest of the field, we think about it as a simple binary. We ask “Is it possible - even remotely - that this candidate could win?” If the answer is “yes,” we’ll consider them.

But, of course, telling the difference between a Long-Shot and a It’s-Not-Going-To-Happen is something people argue over. Figuring that out is one of the most difficult conversations an organization can have.2 Ultimately, it’s a judgement call, but a basic heuristic is to ask whether they are raising money, have a kitchen cabinet helping them run, and are on track to get more than 10% of the vote. If you can check all those boxes, they’re probably minimally viable.

Subscribe now

One important caveat is that viability changes depending on what kind of election it is. Primaries are different from generals, and ranked-choice elections3 are different from first-past-the-post ones.

In primaries and ranked-choice elections, the viability threshold can be pretty low. Formats with two rounds give you two shots at endorsements; ranked-choice elections even allow you to put a Never Going to Happen at the top of your ballot without losing too much influence, so long as you list other candidates. On the other hand, there are often only two viable candidates in general elections and first-past-the-post elections. As a reality-based movement, it’s important not to be delusional about candidate viability.

So for example, in the primary race for California governor, there are a lot of non-viable candidates. (Tony Thurmond, it’s time to call it.)

Issue Alignment

Once candidates have met the Minimum Viability Threshold (MVT), we then grade them on issue alignment. A good endorsement process both pulls out information from the candidates and moves the entire field to adopt more pro-housing stances. Candidate interviews, debates and candidate questionnaires all give candidates opportunities to demonstrate their pro-housing credentials.

Getting candidates in front of members helps them see and experience that there are real voters who care about an issue. Candidate interviews give you a chance to build rapport with candidates you may not have known before. Any time a candidate speaks in front of your members, it’s an opportunity to crystalize a real connection and show that your organization is REAL. They should feel the value of your group joining their trenchcoat.

In addition to interviews, parties and forums, we also do candidate questionnaires. A good questionnaire gives you an accurate assessment of their priorities, but doesn’t bog a candidate down in a level of detail that isn’t important. You can read the questions we asked the California candidates here. You’ll notice our survey is short4 and relevant to the actual job.

You can dig into the responses to our candidate questionnaire for California Governor here in a less than gorgeous spreadsheet.5 You’ll notice that the top five candidates decided to answer, ie. Tom Steyer, Katie Porter, Matt Mahan, Eric Swalwell, and Xavier Becerra. This means these candidates actively sought our endorsement, engaged substantively with our ideas, and publicly pinned themselves down on several key policies. Even before we endorse, this is how our process moves the entire field in the right direction.

Share

Another key point: Our questionnaires are open-book tests. Candidates should cheat on them! Which is to say, they often ask a YIMBY Action member or a Chapter Lead to get coffee and give them the “right” answers. This is called listening and learning, and is encouraged. Every coffee we get with someone running for office is a victory in and of itself, even if we don’t endorse them in a given race.

Candidates do not hold fixed, immutable positions.6 So, the endorsement process isn’t an attempt to unearth a politician’s True Beliefs.™ Instead, it’s a part of changing their minds and demonstrating there is a voting bloc that will support them if they take up our positions on housing. If we can explain to somebody running for city council why something arcane like single-stair reform matters, we’re more than halfway to getting something passed into law.

Common Tough Outcomes

Sometimes deciding who to endorse is pretty easy — for example, when there is one viable candidate who is way better than the rest. Hurray, argument over. But frequently it’s hard. Here are two examples of where endorsements can be particularly tough to make.

Everyone Kinda Sucks

A common, tragic situation, especially for new YIMBY Action chapters, is that all the candidates are mediocre. And my advice boils down to: Tough shit. Endorse a Warm Body if you have to. Do not fall into the purity test trap where you resist telling folks who is the lesser of two evils because you don’t want to be blamed for their crappy track record.

Building power over time frequently means endorsing the lesser of two NIMBYs. Elections are sometimes harm-minimization events. Many districts will have candidates who all are varying degrees of bad. It’s our job to dig in with a good endorsement process to find the marginal differences and give voters clarity about their actual choice, not wish for a better field. It’s often the case that the candidate who won’t bother to return your email is worse than the one who engages in good faith but writes back something that’s half-garbage.

Building a voting bloc requires giving election guidance that more and more people go to year after year. It’s an iterative game and a muscle that you strengthen over time.

Everyone Kinda Doesn’t Suck

Alternatively, sometimes you’re blessed with several decent candidates, which can makes the arguments even more vicious somehow! The California Governor’s race is hard for a completely wonderful reason: Several of the candidates are actually pretty good! And seeking YIMBY Action’s endorsement! Hurray!

Comparing apples and pineapples is a frustrating game. Our process involves getting our cohort of volunteer activist chapter Leads to look over the questionnaires and interviews and debates, and muddle through a genuinely hard decision. With over 30 chapters in California, we have 123 Leads who got together last weekend. So what’s the chatter?

Matt Mahan has opposed major housing bills, but now has a great housing platform. He fought for local exemptions in the big Transit-Oriented Development bill last year (SB 79), but he did get San Jose to build more. He’s shown how cities can reduce fees on housing and still see good results on both their budgets and housing production.

Katie Porter had some great lines at our event about how Orange County needs to get its shit together on housing production. She has a consumer advocacy perspective on how the housing shortage is eating away at Californians’ pocketbooks. And she seems eager to crackdown on departments under her control who could be enforcing housing law. But she also expresses hesitancy about cutting fees and doesn’t seem to have the policy chops of other candidates.

Tom Steyer has been a vocal champion recently for big housing bills like SB 79, and has put real pressure on the environmental movement to get on the right side of housing production. His outsider status means he has little tolerance for all the stakeholders who list out reasons why building housing is so challenging. And he’s not scared to support policies like Prop 13 reform, which is one of the root causes of our housing shortage. But many question if he has enough experience to be effective.

And, popping up a bit late in the game, Xavier Becerra just submitted a quite impressive questionnaire. He’s got good ideas for increasing enforcement efforts and demonstrates he understands what a Governor could actually do on day one to increase housing production. But he’s been quiet on housing up until now, so some question if he will put in the work to push for the reforms that we need.

Do we hold it against Mahan that his previous track record is mixed? Do we question whether Steyer has the right experience to actually move a bureaucracy? Do we ask if Katie Porter is demonstrating enough commitment to housing production over other concerns? Do we worry that Becerra will really make housing a top priority? These are all questions worth considering.

Our volunteer Chapter Leads have argued, voted, and now made a recommendation to the membership. And tomorrow (today if you’re reading this Monday morning) YIMBY Action ballots drop for all California members who’ll make the final call… We’ll keep you posted!

Subscribe now

Share

The bill has a lot to like. It would incentivize local governments to cut down exclusionary land use and zoning policies; create a national building code for some types of manufactured housing; improve existing programs like Housing Choice Vouchers, Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Recovery, and the HOME Investments Partnerships program; and expand assistance for homeless veterans.

Subscribe now

Over the last two years, Congress has been kicking around a lot of bills that would address the housing crisis. In some ways, The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is a Frankenstein monster made of those bills. (Read the extremely long explainer from the Bipartisan Policy Center.) At least when I was there, the mood in DC about it was positive — a coalition of widely divergent groups are all pinching themselves that Congress might actually do something about housing production in the United States. (Just talk to the nerds at Pew about chassislessness!)

But at the eleventh hour, a single provision was added that could undo much of what this bill promises —a provision from Senator Elizabeth Warren that would undermine if not eliminate build-to-rent housing.1 If the bill were to pass as currently written, instead of increasing the supply of new rental units in the United States, it could reduce them, according to the Urban Institute: “Congress could ultimately decrease the number of rental units built each year by at least 72,000, meaning its package to expand the supply of housing has included a measure that would actually reduce housing development.” To state the obvious: we shouldn’t pass a supply bill that could decrease the supply of housing.

The build-to-rent ban has rightfully drawn a lot of criticism from bloggers, writers, think tankers, newspapers, libertarians, and opinion page editors. As Senator Brian Schatz said jokingly during the debate, “There’s literally no reason for this. They wrote it wrong.”

Behind the provision is the fact that both Republicans and Democrats have converged on a shared villain for the price of housing: Institutional investors buying up single-family homes.

They’re reaching for this populist argument because the public agrees with that story: nearly three in four Americans in one recent poll blamed real estate investors for high home prices. It’s hard to get three out of four Americans to agree on anything, so it’s not all that surprising that politicians would want to grab this moment.2 But meanwhile, smart chart guys like Matthew Yglesias are making the extremely correct point that “protectionism for small landlords is a dumb idea.”

As someone monomaniacally focused on supply, the big problem isn’t that this provision tries to block large investors from buying existing homes, it’s that it will kill an industry that is a significant contributor to housing production, including subsidized affordable LIHTC projects. The growing industry of Built-to-Rent single family homes is booming, and losing that would have a dramatic effect on America’s housing supply. As my friend Sharon Wilson Geno from the National Multifamily Housing Council told Semafor, “It really undermines the whole purpose of the bill.”

Share

Are investors buying up homes actually a huge problem? I don’t want to dismiss the very real ways in which private equity ruins everything, from your dentist to your yoga studio. The problem is that mom-and-pop landlords are not always better. Instead of banning one class of owners, we ought to regulate whatever bad behavior we actually think those owners might be doing. When we attack who can own things rather than regulating everybody we end up in weird places.3

There are very real negative effects that this ban could create. One is that because the bill would require built-to-rent owners going forward to divest their holdings, it could mean a steady stream of evictions in existing build-to-rent communities as they are forced to turn over into for-sale homes. And it’s unclear what would happen to single-family subdivisions run by Affordable Housing providers. This bill puts residents who went through income certification and more to get into subsidized affordable homes into very uncertain futures.

As we wrote in our most recent letter to Congress, “YIMBY Action is specifically concerned about Section 901 of the legislation, which creates restrictions on investment in build-to-rent housing that could limit the construction of new homes — particularly family-sized rentals — at a moment when the country urgently needs more housing of every type.”

We don’t know what will happen when Congress comes back from recess, but the politics on this bill are interesting, because they are all about economic populism. On the one hand, every elected official ought to be angry about how the middle class has been ground down. But populist rhetoric can lead to self-defeating policies like this one, because economic populism focuses on villains rather than outcomes. To me, economic populism is good at pointing out problems but lousy at offering solutions. Advocates and politicians have an obligation to channel economic frustration into policies that will actually deliver. We shouldn’t write policy based on whom we hate. We should write policy based on whom we can help.

As a political question, the bill’s fate is uncertain. Congress is in recess, with most folks making appearances in their home districts (or Disneyworld). So if you have the ability to get in touch with your Representative or Senator, now’s the time! Otherwise, use our call tool to make your voice heard now!

Share

Subscribe now

As you might expect from one of the nation’s most prominent YIMBY elected officials, there’s a lot to love, including a mixed-income social housing program to build four million homes; doubling the federal affordable housing tax credit to produce three million affordable homes; expanding housing vouchers, tenant protections, and worker protections; and making housing faster and cheaper to build by creating a Pro-Housing Incentive Fund to incentivize local governments to allow new homes.1

I think that any of these would be substantive pro-housing reforms that could move the needle nationally, but I want to focus on one in particular: the Pro-Housing Incentive Fund. Mostly because it’s an idea that Sonja Trauss (Executive Director of our sister organization YIMBY Law) and I have been pushing for a while, and I’m thrilled Scott is going to run with it.

From his platform:

To lower the cost of building housing across the country, the federal government must start to incentivize local and state jurisdictions to enact prohousing policies. In Congress, I will fight to create a Prohousing Incentive Fund to reward jurisdictions that are actually getting housing built. The jurisdictions can invest the funding directly into infrastructure, water, sewer, or any of the many needs that growing communities have. By taking this outcomes-based approach and rewarding housing production over policy changes, we can focus on supporting approaches that are yielding results.

Under Wiener’s proposal, the federal government would incentivize local governments to allow new housing by a straight-forward method. Paying them.

For every new unit of housing that a municipality certifies for occupancy, the federal government would transfer $10,000 to that city’s general fund. Whether it’s a new backyard cottage, a new unit of multi-family affordable, a new town home, whatever. Every new unit would mean another $10,000. Critically, this money would be unrestricted, meaning the local government could use it for whatever purpose that local officials thought would be most important.

Share

In our ongoing conversation, Strong Towns’ Chuck Marohn argues that local governments know best what their needs are and aren’t being set up for success, often because of federal incentives. As a result, every city has some neglected piece of infrastructure, and they often erroneously see a proposal for a new apartment complex as just another problem they’re going to have to deal with. The Pro-Housing Incentive Fund provides resources along with something the federal government rarely gives: flexibility.2

Transfers to a local government’s general fund gives them straight-up cash to address those needs, without the paperwork of applying for competitive grants or trying to shape their needs into restrictive federal programs. Maybe they want to experiment with a new social housing program. Maybe they need a new park. Maybe it’s just repaving Main Street. Whatever!

As background, it’s worth understanding that the assumption in most local government hearings is that new housing and new people are a burden on the existing community. This is either an exaggeration or just flat wrong. I’m not going to spend time trying to convince you, dear reader, that new people and the tax revenue they bring are Good Actually. But it is true that cities and towns are acutely attentive to the costs of new residents rather than the benefits. And the infrastructure costs are not zero — new housing does require spending on things like sewer lines, roads, bus service, schools, and public safety, just to name a few. So why shouldn’t we give local governments money to increase the level of service in growing communities?

Currently, many cities try to assuage this fear of increased costs from new residents by taxing new housing with impact fees, transfer taxes or other one-time fees. It’s a practice that rests on the assumption that new housing — and new people — have a net negative impact on local budgets that needs to be offset. Like most bad ideas from California, impact fees are increasingly popular across the country, as local governments try to grab some cash up front to defray the expected long term costs of those horrible new residents.

Subscribe now

The first objection I’ve heard to Wiener’s proposal is that it would mean cities would allow people to build a bunch of housing we don’t need in places where it shouldn’t be. If we think about this for more than approximately three seconds, the idea is laughably unlikely. As it turns out it costs a lot more than $10,000 to build a housing unit, so the only thing that would get built is housing that either a market rate developer or subsidized affordable builder determined was valuable enough to build anyway. The $10,000 isn’t enough to fund something that couldn’t have happened on its own — but it’s enough to incentivize a local government to get out of the way. There’s not a problem in allowing people to build housing in places where there is no existing incentive to build housing.

The second objection I’ve heard to this idea is that it would be expensive. But on the scale of “federal programs that could avert a national housing shortage,” it’s hella cheap. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there were 1.4 million new units of housing built in the United States in 2025. Let’s say we doubled housing production with this incentive. That would mean the yearly cost of this program would be $28 billion dollars — a small fraction of the $7.1 trillion the federal government spent last year. By comparison, the Department of Defense spent $849.8 billion last year, or two billion dollars a day.3 So we could radically transform the US housing market for the cost of two weeks of military spending. Not bad! And this money would be spent by local governments to improve communities in unexpected ways across the country.

Cost isn’t just measured in dollars, though. The Pro-Housing Incentive Fund would be structured as a simple, outcomes-based program. It’s meant to have low administrative overhead for both federal and local authorities. Because this program directly rewards cities for tangible outcomes, it does a great job at preserving state capacity.

Incentive-based policymaking is a great concept, but there are a lot of ways you can miss the mark. You can go awry by incentivizing an input rather than an outcome, such as rewarding cities for pro-housing policies rather than outcomes. Sonja registered her concerns about that recently. A crafty city could, for example, pass a transfer tax at the same time as an upzoning, resulting in negligible housing production while checking the box of having passed a pro-housing policy. There’s a lot more to be said about how much work it is to create a bureaucracy that has to analyze and evaluate policies, but I’ll leave it there.

Another way you can go awry in incentive-based policymaking is by incorrectly identifying whether something will actually be an incentive. For example, some have proposed denying LIHTC funding to cities that fail to meet housing production targets. This won’t work because it threatens NIMBY cities with a good time, telling them, “If you don’t allow more market-rate housing to be built, then you won’t get money to build low-income housing.” A rich NIMBY place like Beverly Hills would take you up on that offer in a heartbeat.

By contrast, Wiener’s proposal simply asks, “What do we want more of?” and dangles a carrot out. With the right incentives, many local governments will figure out what their problems are — and solve them.

Share

Subscribe now

In What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organizing—and Infighting, journalist Charles Duhigg compared two activist organizations that both started in the 1980s: DARE and Mothers Against Drunk Driving. His question is why did MADD become one of the most successful advocacy groups in the country, while DARE is little remembered except for its t-shirts?

Duhigg’s answer is that the groups had two different working styles, with DARE focused on what scholars of social movements call “mobilizing,” while MADD focused on “organizing.” Here’s how he explains it:

DARE was overseen from a central headquarters, in L.A., where staff guided nearly every aspect of operations [...] MADD, by contrast, wasn’t particularly focussed on mobilizing. Each of its chapters was independent and largely ungoverned by headquarters; volunteers concentrated on local advocacy instead of on national activism. As a result, local MADD leaders often supported sets of policy recommendations that diverged—or even conflicted—with the agendas of other chapters.

Organizations that focus on mobilizing have to be more staff-driven, with tightly defined messaging and limited, clear, and well-branded ways for folks to take action. An effective mobilizing strategy makes activism easy. It’s professional, strategic, and always on-brand.

On the other hand, organizing is frequently a hot mess. Organizing enables people to connect with one another and set their own priorities. Organizing is visibly and deliberately unprofessional, since it relies on networks of people following their own strategies. It’s organic, vibrant, and chaotic.

Duhigg makes the case for organizing. In anxiety-inducing detail, Duhigg showed how “the chaos at [MADD] headquarters led to the empowerment of local chapter heads and allowed the social bonding that a movement needs to survive.” As a result, MADD has not only gotten thousands of laws passed but caused a cultural shift in the United States around drinking and driving. By comparison, DARE never really got kids off drugs.

Organizing and Mobilizing: Two Great Strategies That Go Great Together

So what can YIMBYs learn from this article? Friends who emailed me this story assumed I would be 100% on Team Organizing, but my full answer is that YIMBYs need a bit of both, even if we do lean more to one side.

As Amanda Tattersall and Nina Hall wrote in the well-titled “Why Organizers Need Mobilizers and Mobilizers Need Organizers” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2024: “Choosing organizing means investing time and resources in developing new capacities in smaller groups of individuals, while those who mobilize focus on the tools and techniques that can reach large masses of people, seeking greater engagement from people that already support the goal.”

Case in point: On Friday, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act hit the fan. The bill is currently on the ropes, and organizations that previously were in support may be flipping to opposition. Apparently, Senator Elizabeth Warren has been pushing for a functional ban on Built-to-Rent single-family housing projects, and wants a new provision that requires them to be sold within seven years. But that would all but shut down BTR production, which could make the bill a net-negative for housing production as a whole. That’s complicated and wonky, requiring professional staff to understand WTF is going on. But if we want to influence Senator Warren, we also need to organize our local chapter to put pressure on her office.

Subscribe now

Organizations can end up too far on either end. There are organizations that become 100% organizing, who “uplift” the voices of their community without a coherent goal. It’s also true that when good things do happen in an organizing-focused group, the credit goes to the visible activists, and the background work of building that network is underfunded and unseen.

On the other hand, organizations that are too mobilizing-focused have constant “capacity” issues. If you’re too mobilizing-focused, your base becomes passive, simply waiting for the next action alert. You’ve got staff and an email list, and nothing but endless irritating text messages about how you should donate another $5 and sign a petition.

Most organizations are somewhere in between. Frequently, the most powerful coalitions are built by groups working in tandem. For example, when it comes to passing legislation, it’s often most effective for organizing-focused groups to rally their base while mobilizing groups work as lobbyists. Respecting one another’s strengths is key to making these coalitions work.

No matter where your organization lands on this spectrum, there are costs. Too much organizing, and the chaos can consume you. Too much mobilizing, and nothing gets done that isn’t directly done by paid staffers.

Why We Lean Toward Organizing

YIMBY Action’s core strategy is to foster local chapters and leaders to build their local power (without just doing the work for them). Once they are up and running, we want them to work with a great deal of autonomy, even while we coordinate state legislative actions or enforcement. A growing chapter with capable leads might see an opportunity locally to pass single stair reform or legalize ADUs, and we want them to take it. An organizing strategy means building up localized activists to have their own local political power, building up their ability to digest a complicated action alert and come up with ideas like “I was at a conference last week with a state senator from Arizona and can call their senator.” To which I can reply, “omg, yes please do that.”

But at the same time, chapters sometimes make poor choices on local endorsements or get drawn into side projects we wish they wouldn’t. When you empower people and give them tools, you’re not their boss. If anything, you’re teaching them how to ultimately overthrow you. (But like… please don’t?)

Balancing these strategies requires the right infrastructure. For example, we have YIMBY Slack, where all of our members can talk to one another, strategize, and get excited. We also have private channels for our leads to chew on more complicated calls to action and debate our positions. Maintaining online spaces is a resource investment, because it’s also a space where members can piss one another off, and therefore requires ongoing enforcement of a code of conduct and more.

The feature and the bug of a more organizing-based strategy is that it requires the organization to get buy-in from people. You have to make clear, compelling arguments to your base and demonstrate the value of being part of the coalition all the time. It means that members can point out when there is a flaw in the strategy or nitpick a policy platform. Which, ultimately, makes for better policymaking; a smarter, stronger base of power; and more sticky victories.

Share

Subscribe now

He eventually claims that pursuing state reform signals a broken theory of change. Marohn writes:

When local reformers push up against a system designed to protect asset values — and that system refuses to give — the natural instinct is to apply more force. When deregulation and new construction don’t deliver affordability quickly enough, the answer isn’t to slow down and reconsider the model. It’s to reach for more authority. State preemption. Federal mandates. Larger subsidies. Broader enforcement. More power, applied from farther away, with less tolerance for places that don’t perform as expected.

As YIMBY Action Board Chair, and someone who has been engaging with Marohn’s work for almost a decade, I find this confusing.1 Not because I disagree that we’ve built a system premised on perpetual real estate appreciation; instead, it’s his characterization of state-level reforms as a sign that regulatory reform isn’t working. State-level housing reform isn’t a failure mode, it’s how we enable local change. In my view, it’s also supported by the Strong Towns framework that Marohn has spent so many years developing.

Local Government Was Not Designed to Produce Housing Abundance

Marohn’s critique would be valid if housing advocates had actually implemented comprehensive local reforms and they’d failed.2 But we haven’t escalated to state-level reforms because local ones failed — we’ve pursued state-level action because local institutions are biased against reforms in the first place.

Local land use institutions enshrine vetocracy. This means the only people who get what they want are the ones that want to block, stymie, and slow down housing production. Politicians are swayed by the loudest voices in the room. At the local level, those voices are neither random nor especially representative of a community. I agree that our system is not designed to deliver affordability. However, this includes actors at the local level. Local constraints on housing production are the proximal, binding constraint on supply.

Insisting that housing advocates contest policy at only the local level is tantamount to requiring us all to fist fight with one arm tied behind our backs. And to put a stake in the ground on this, yes, there is a fight to be had. Marohn argues that we exist in a system designed to reject affordability. I agree. Where we diverge is that I see the gatekeepers of that system as local institutions designed to exclude, extract, and ensure change is always an uphill battle.

State Legislation Requires Local Support

If I’m reading Marohn correctly, he feels that state-level housing reform is something that’s done to local communities. That implies, however, that state policy is set in a vacuum and that local communities are indivisible wholes. But when Marohn argues for the primacy of local control in housing policy, he’s not defending the right of self-determination for a community from technocratic interlopers — he’s unintentionally defending the status quo. When we pursue state-wide legalization of missing middle housing (like what’s described in this excellent Strong Towns policy guide) we’re not overriding local control, we’re enabling local action.

The California ADU story illustrates exactly how this works in practice. In California, it took successive waves of state legislation to effectively legalize ADU development. All this was necessary because local governments can turn state law into dead letters through malicious compliance.3

The reason state-level ADU legislation eventually worked is because local advocates fully supported the spirit of the reforms. They monitored their own local governments, identified legal gaps for state policymakers to fill with follow-up legislation, and gave local policymakers the political support they needed to eventually embrace the reforms. The assumption buried in Marohn’s defense of local control is that communities are unitary actors. They aren’t. State reform doesn’t override the community — it shifts whose preferences within that community get to count.

We Should Take the Knowledge Problem Seriously

Marohn has expressed his theoretical concern about state action in terms of knowledge problems. Higher levels of government don’t know the conditions on the ground, and so local policy makers are best positioned to make decisions with respect to local policy. And there are great examples that show his point, like the federal highway system bulldozing neighborhoods. So, there’s something to the fear that federal (and even state) policy can amount to a bull in a china shop and we should be wary of bad intent and second order effects.

And yet…

Marohn asks us to give weight to local policy knowledge; I’d ask him to give the same consideration to local political expertise.

When local housing advocates (including Strong Towns Local Conversations) go to the state level for support, it’s because they’ve made the calculation that state capitols will give their ideas a fairer hearing than city halls. If local knowledge means anything, shouldn’t it include the judgment of local housing advocates that state intervention is necessary to overcome local NIMBY capture? Our understanding of local knowledge has to include the judgment of people who have worked within their own local institutions and concluded that those institutions need outside help to reform.

The Conversation Remains Ongoing

Marohn makes many other points in the piece I’m quoting here. I disagree with a great many of them, but I’m making a deliberate choice to focus on the specific issue of state reform here today. As always, I stand ready to be corrected on either substance or interpretation. And, if Marohn cares to go deeper on the role of financial markets or our respective theories of change, I’ll be happy to find the time.

Share

Subscribe now

Rancho Palos Verdes (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

As you may have heard, thanks to a NIMBY complaint in Southern California, the State Bar of California opened an investigation against me for practicing law without a license. It was an absurd attempt to delegitimize speech clearly protected by the First Amendment.

Now there is good news to share. The State Bar has announced the end of its investigation, clearing me of the complaint. You can read their letter here.

As the agency wrote, “offering her view on state housing laws as an affected California resident and as the organization’s director and the mere use of the word ‘Law’ in the organization’s name does not constitute the unauthorized practice of law in California.”

Several months ago, YIMBY Law, the organization I am the executive director of, sent two letters to the city council of Rancho Palos Verdes, a rich coastal suburb of Los Angeles, telling the council that it had an obligation under state law to approve an upzoning that would lead to 647 more homes — and that if it failed to do so, the city could face a lawsuit.

Thanks to those letters, the council agreed to approve the upzoning. Lobbying cities to live up to their obligations to zone for more housing is the kind of work we do regularly. But this time, NIMBYs tried a new tactic — complaining to the State Bar that by sending the letter I was pretending to be a lawyer.

Share

That sounds silly, but there could have been real consequences. The unauthorized practice of law is a crime, carrying the potential for a $1,000 fine and up to one year in prison. Even if an investigation doesn’t go anywhere, there are chilling effects. It costs time and money to deal with it, and it sends a message to other people who are pro-housing — anybody, really — that if someone doesn’t like what they say, they could face a serious complaint. These are important democratic principles worth fighting for. Everyone has the right to tell the government what they think: Me, you, NIMBYs, and YIMBYs. This is so basic I can’t believe we even have to say it. As I said earlier, this is the kind of delegitimization that YIMBYs often face. It’s wrong.

Share In Practice

Lucky for us, we were defended by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit, public interest law firm that defends the rights of ordinary people. As their lawyers argued to the State Bar, not only was I not acting like a lawyer in sending those letters, this kind of thing is protected under not one but two clauses of the First Amendment — the right to free speech and the right to petition the government.

Thankfully, the State Bar agreed:

“Throughout our investigation, there was no evidence obtained that showed [Trauss] represented clients, advertised legal services, provided legal services or advice, held out as an attorney, or otherwise engaged in the unauthorized practice of law,” the association’s investigator wrote in a letter to the attorney who filed the complaint.

In a perfect world, the State Bar never would have even opened an investigation. But I’m grateful that once they did, they quickly came to their senses. Now we have two victories in Rancho Palos Verdes — not only the one that approved new housing, but also one that vindicates the First Amendment rights of everyone to speak their minds.

Leave a comment

A few months ago we at YIMBY Law scored a remarkable victory in Rancho Palos Verdes, an affluent city on the coast in Southern California — lobbying the city council to approve an upzoning that would allow 647 homes.

We did it by taking advantage of the democratic process. After finding out that the city council was considering a housing element that would have bowed to NIMBY pressure, we sent two letters to the city, reminding it of its legal obligations under state law to approve the upzoning — and that a failure to do so would open the city up to a lawsuit. Not only were we well within our rights to send those letters, we were right on the merits too.

As we wrote in the second letter:

The options in front of you are to respect the efforts of your staff which led to a Housing Element and subsequent rezoning AND an application consistent with those measures, or to waste time and open yourselves to our lawsuit while crippling your ability to meet the statutory RHNA obligation.

These letters, which we often send to cities, are frankly delightful to send. Thanks to our work and the work of our allies, city councils in California tempted to vote against fulfilling their housing obligations are hemmed in from three directions — either approving the housing under SB 9, facing the builder’s remedy, or a lawsuit under the Housing Accountability Act. All roads lead to new housing. It’s delightful.

But NIMBYs in SoCal were less delighted. As you might have read in the San Francisco Chronicle, one of them filed a complaint with the California State Bar, saying that I was practicing law without a license. They said because I’m not an attorney (which is true), I was offering “legal analysis,” which only licensed attorneys are allowed to do.

Here’s an excerpt of the letter that the state bar sent me (I’m leaving out the name of the person who filed the complaint, but keeping their typos).

Our office has received a complaint [...] alleging that you are practicing law without a license in California. The complaint alleges that you [and] Yimby Law writes letters to CA cities threatening legal action and stating incorrect housing laws and city ordinance laws.

REDACTED includes with [their] complaint a copy of a letter you sent to the City of Rancho Palos Verdes/Citty [sic] Council on March 17, 2025. Your letter provides a legal analysis related to removal of certain sites from the “Housing Site Inventory.”

This is, to put it mildly, preposterous. Not only am I not holding myself out as an attorney, but, as the Institute for Justice pointed out in their response to the state bar, sending letters like these are protected under not one but two clauses of the First Amendment — the right to free speech and the right to petition the government.

As part of our work, YIMBY Law sends letters to cities in California that remind them of their obligations under state laws like the Housing Accountability Act. Those letters say something different each time, but the general gist usually is: “Hey, we saw you are thinking about taking some action that seems like it would violate state law. You shouldn’t do that. And if you do, we might sue you, and if we do we tend to win.” Most of the time, our letters never turn into lawsuits. We send a letter and city officials realize that not only are we right, it’s not worth the hassle of fighting in court. So they do the right thing. This is the kind of thing that we and other YIMBY groups have done ever since the lawsuit against the East Bay suburb of Lafayette. (You can see the whole list of those cases here.) Most recently, we’re suing the state of California over the governor’s executive order restricting duplexes in the areas affected by the Palisades fire.

I am confident that the state bar will agree with the Institute for Justice here, which cited case after case in which the courts have held that this kind of advocacy work is squarely protected no matter if a person is an attorney, not an attorney, offering legal analysis, not offering legal analysis, right on the merits, wrong on the merits, fighting for a good cause, or fighting for a bad one. The First Amendment protects our right to lobby the government as much as it protects the rights of the AARP, the NRA, the American Heart Association, the California Nurses Association, Liveable California, the League of California Cities, the Group In Favor of That Thing You Love, and the Group in Favor of That Thing You Absolutely Hate.

Subscribe now

It’s important to be really clear about this — not only do NIMBYs like the one who filed this complaint think that we are wrong about housing, they don’t even think we should be allowed to argue for more housing. They don’t think we are even entitled to a fair hearing. We should all recognize that silencing your political rivals is beyond the pale and that complaints like this one, even if they end up going nowhere, can have a chilling effect on activists and ordinary people who want to exercise their rights.

Speaking as an activist, this kind of delegitimization is a NIMBY tactic we have to put up with all the time. Not only do NIMBYs think we are wrong, a lot of them seem to think that we don’t even get to have a say. There’s a pretty consistent undercurrent to a lot of NIMBYism that can’t even imagine why somebody would be in favor of more housing and laws that make it easier to build it. Something about us breaks their brains. That’s frustrating. Democracy only works when we can have free-ranging conversation with each other. The only rules really are that you should give reasons for what you believe and that you shouldn’t force anybody else out of the discussion.

There are plenty more examples. One of the first times my colleague Laura Foote, the Executive Director of YIMBY Action sent a San Francisco Supervisor an email expressing her opinion on public policy, they wrote back asking “What’s that area code, where are you from?” The message being — it wasn’t 415 and therefore she didn’t count. One of the most common tropes in the early days of press coverage was journalists implying — or outright stating — that we were shills for the real-estate industry, as if they couldn’t believe someone would actually be in favor of more housing if they weren’t being paid to do it. We still get called shills sometimes, when we aren’t being called gentrifiers, inhuman, alt-right, white supremacists, and — for some reason I cannot explain — Scientologists. (Yes In Xenu’s Backyard, I guess.)

It’s not just online delegitimation. It’s distressingly common that when we show up at public meetings that NIMBYs will boo and hiss at us while we are talking. Laura was at a public meeting once in Cupertino where the NIMBYs in the crowd started shouting “Where are you from? Where are you from?” She started quoting Martin Luther King saying that an “injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere,” when a woman who later got elected to the city council ran up and pulled the microphone from her hand.

NIMBYs in Santa Monica convinced the state Fair Political Practices Committee that the mayor pro tem had to recuse himself from votes on housing because he worked for the Housing Action Committee. (If you think that makes sense, ask yourself if a mayor pro tem who also happened to work for a gun control group should have to recuse themselves from voting on a gun control measure? Or, more to the point, if a mayor pro tem who owned property and didn’t want the competition should recuse themselves from a zoning vote?)

More recently, a San Rafael planning commission hearing on a proposal for mixed-income housing became so heated that an opponent spat on a commenter supporting it.

In a democracy, even an imperiled one like ours, one of the most important things we can do is to not spit on each other for having different opinions. That seems pretty minimal and something that we could all agree on, even if we don’t agree on housing.

Share

Subscribe now

As a background, our chapter model is built to empower local volunteer “Leads” with a toolkit to build local political power. We leverage that network to create broad coalitions to enact policy change at the local, state and federal level to get more housing built.

Fundamentally, our chapters engage in three key activities:

1. Advocating for housing proposals

2. Citizen lobbying for legislation

3. Endorsing and mobilizing for elections

Each victory demonstrates to elected officials the growing influence of the YIMBY Parade. Each campaign can be leveraged to continuously building political power, via narrative power-building (press coverage), people power building (list growth), coalition building, and technical expertise.

Ok, yadayadayada, what cool shit happened this year?

We’ve tracked over 196 state and local policy victories that YIMBY Action chapters supported in 2025. And when you realize that our tracking isn’t perfect, and that YIMBY Action is far from the only YIMBY organization… that means that the pro-housing movement is accelerating at a truly astounding rate.

I cherry-picked some victories that illustrate some principles for activists that hopefully will inspire you in 2026!

Illinois: Parking Reform and More

This year, Illinois passed the People Over Parking Act, introduced by Rep. Kam Buckner, which prohibits municipalities from requiring car parking for residential and commercial uses in areas served by mass transit in cities like Chicago. As part of a statewide coalition, Abundant Housing Illinois helped lead the charge to get it passed, with its lobbying day advocacy making a decisive impact.

Also in Chicago, AHIL did a lot of work to have members show up at zoning committee meetings and talk to alderpersons in support of expanding ADUs across the city, earning local media coverage along the way.

Plus, Abundant Housing Illinois chapters do a great job wearing their swag for great photos. State lobby days are the perfect time for chapters to order more free swag from YIMBY Action central!

Colorado: Making Parking Reform A Reality

In August, YIMBYs in Denver celebrated the end of parking minimums in the city. It was the culmination of years of advocacy work, including at the state and local level.

A core part of how the Colorado chapters are making consistent impact at the state level comes from two major factors: 1) consistent growth and new chapters, and 2) high-quality events drawing attention.

They just started the year off right with another Legislative Kickoff, getting folks pumped about what’s to come.

Hawaiʻi: Saying ʻAe to Transit-Oriented Development

The YIMBY movement in Hawai’i continues to make steady progress, celebrating bills like H.B. 1409, which provides generous incentives to cities to allow apartments near transit stops and prioritizes affordable housing funding in transit-connected areas.

Hawai’i Chapter Leads have incredibly good vibes. They’ve joined strong coalitions who have gathered a lot of moral authority and high-impact messaging for solving their crushing housing shortage. Some of the most important national leaders are coming out of Hawai’i, so it’s a state to watch!

Asheville for All: Big Wins at the City Council

YIMBYs in Asheville lobbied the city council to make it easier for developers to build more multifamily housing, promote more walkable environments, encourage more bicycle parking, and reduce car parking. And in March the council voted yes!

The Asheville chapter has excelled at making dry materials accessible for their members. Explainers and victory posts can be hard to craft when you win highly technical victories, but they’ve done a fantastic job communicating about how the ball is moving forward on policy.

Seattle: A Clean Sweep

Winning elections is extremely fun. Most prominently, all of Seattle YIMBY’s endorsed candidates won in the November election. Katie Wilson prevailed in the Seattle mayoral election; Eddie Lin prevailed in City Council District 2; and Alexis Mercedes Rinck prevailed in District 8 (at-large). Earlier in the year, Seattle passed Proposition 1A, also endorsed by our members, which raises money for social housing through a local tax on payrolls of over $1 million. This follows a win in 2023 for an initiative that established the social housing developer (also endorsed by our members).

Demonstrating that the YIMBY voting bloc exists and is valuable is key to building influence that sticks over time. Building up that muscle by endorsing and mobilizing the base to volunteer for candidates makes a huge difference.

Tucson: Chapter Founder Elected To City Council

Here in Tucson we’ve achieved some really big wins. Our local founder, Miranda Schubert, was elected to city council in a big win. Congratulations!

They also achieved two citywide rezonings, one which allows for denser transit-oriented development on lots near major transportation routes and a missing middle reform that will allow up to four units on ALL residential lots in the city (minus a few horse ranches).

California: As Usual, Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

In California, the big news this year was the passage of SB 79, a landmark bill written by San Francisco State Senator Scott Wiener that will potentially bring multifamily units to neighborhoods across the state. Led by lobbying by California YIMBY, with YIMBY Action chapters mobilizing critical in-district support, it is the culmination of years of coalition work, and a major victory in a state plagued by the high cost of housing.

But it also comes with a lot of places for cities to enact malicious compliance and phased implementation. As with any state bill, local organizing will be critical to ensure that cities are held to the highest impact version of the legislation.

In my home town of San Francisco, the local government finally passed the Family Zoning Plan, literally the biggest upzoning in the history of the city, which will bring badly-needed housing to neighborhoods throughout the city.

And yet it still falls short of what was required by law, so we’re suing the city.

Across the state, close to zero cities are on track to meet their state housing goals. YIMBYs are continuing to fight for each step forward. Dive into the madness on the YIMBY Law & YIMBY Action Fair Housing Elements Tracker:

At every step, YIMBYs continue to show up for housing, demanding that their communities do better. Even in Marin County, CA, perhaps the most housing-hostile place in the country, victories are happening. Thanks to our project support system, YIMBY Action members in Marin helped 34 projects take steps forward. If built, these projects will provide 1,408 affordable units and 5,408 total new units. Every single one of these projects is using one or more state law to get through the process, demonstrating that state laws and local advocacy can get the goods if we keep fighting. Read more here.

Share

Subscribe now

In a post, Bernie Sanders — I mean Trump, wrote that he was “immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it. People live in homes, not corporations.” The New York Times reported that Trump’s proposal was being considered as part of a larger focus on housing affordability, which could include executive actions or legislation. Following that, the “details” subsequently came out, but things are still hazy — basic definitions such as what exactly an institutional investor or a single family home are have yet to be defined. NPR noted “Wall Street-backed landlords a target for both Trump and Democrats.”

Trump is echoing a point made in the pages of Jacobin magazine and by anti-monopoly writers like Matt Stoller.1 It’s one of those ideas that unites everyone from Vice President JD Vance to your dirtbag left friend who lives in Silver Lake and listens exclusively to the Red Scare podcast. (The number of local elected officials who have rambled on about corporations buying homes numbers in the thousands.)

So is this a great idea? Or actually a terrible one?

It’s neither. As usual with Trump, it’s a distraction.

Subscribe now

To be fair, there’s a thread of logic here. Housing prices are high — up 55% over the last five years, according to the National Association of Home Builders. “Investors” own about 20 percent of the nation’s single-family home. But the trouble is that “investors” is a much broader category than “institutional investors.” Investors include everyone from Blackstone to your rich uncle who rents out two or three properties in the neighborhood.2

Narrowing it down to large institutional investors like Blackstone shrinks us down to just two percent of all investor-owned single-family homes — something like 0.4% of the single-family homes in the country. So eliminating institutional investors from the market entirely wouldn’t domuch to put a dent in home prices.

Even if corporate landlords owned ten times the supply, the effect wouldn’t be that much. Once they buy a property, they are renting it out, moving the unit from one part of the overall housing market to another part of the overall housing market. Are they marginally better at squeezing rents out of renters? Much better than “mom and pop” landlords? The numbers don’t bear that out.

Fundamentally, why wouldn’t removing institutional investors from the market have a bigger impact? Because corporate landlords are a response to the housing crisis, not the cause of it. I’m going to repeat that a little louder for the people in the back: Wall Street is buying up houses because they think they can make money. They think demand will outstrip supply for years to come.

The investor class — which can put its money wherever it thinks will make the most profit — sees an artificially constrained asset that is unlikely to have new entrants delivering on supply and thinks what a great investment. They look at all the NIMBY-run city councils and say “These dumbasses are not going to allow competition. I should buy now!” In other words, what do you do when demand consistently outstrips supply? Gobble, gobble, gobble!

How do we know this is the case? Blackstone says so: “Rents are going up because there is significantly less supply of housing across the globe than demand for it.”

Institutional investors are the squawking canaries in the coal mine — they are a signal of the shortage, not its cause. Hot take: housing should be less like diamonds and more like potatoes. Plentiful, cheap, and if you want to charge a lot for them, they need to be au gratin.3

So, why is Trump (who is not exactly anti-corporate) fear-mongering about this corporate bogeyman?

Part of it is because if you talk about supply, you frighten homeowners into thinking their property values won’t just keep going to infinity and beyond. He said out loud, as he often does, that if we were to build more housing, prices would come down, and homeowners would lose that wealth.4

Share

Ok, but here’s my even hotter take. Literally none of this matters.

It’s incredibly likely that this is yet another shake-down of corporate America designed to line Trump’s personal pockets. Folks should be familiar with this game: Trump makes some big public moves that will hurt somebody’s interests. Those rich people quickly schedule time with him at Davos — or better yet Mar-a-Lago — to talk him down. Money will conveniently be deposited into bank accounts, commitments for fealty will be made, and just like that, the issue will disappear.

Subscribe now

Housing proposals always have their opponents. NIMBYs gotta NIMBY, because it “looks like Dubai.” Every politician in San Francisco got put in the hot seat.This Safeway redevelopment proposal might as well be an episode of “The Hills,” because not only are our most rich and well-off clutching their pearls in horror, but the rest of us cannot look away.

This proposal is many things, but in particular it is a gorgeous example of why we continue to push YIMBY Action chapters to engage in advocacy for individual housing proposals, even as they work on legislative and electoral politics.

Smart people often say that project-by-project activism is a “waste of time” and a “distraction” for YIMBYs. They’ll say it’s “polarizing” or worry that we’re “wasting political capital” or argue that we need to be working at a “higher level”. Right now I have no less than three men in my inbox telling me YIMBYs shouldn’t be so loud in our support of this project!

So, why should YIMBY activists be engaging in project-by-project activism? Why should we support the splashiest, most controversial proposals? Why make time for all this nonsense?

1. Earn press coverage

Reporters love a tangible story. It’s hard to get people to report on statistics or themes or policy generally. But they will be covering proposals in your area whether you’re quoted in those articles or not. The choice here isn’t “should we get press to cover this or not,” the question is “will there be a pro-housing voice in this article or will the frame be community vs developer.”

Housing proposals are a tangible opening for activists to draw the conversation from aesthetics to one about the actual needs of the community. If you’re not in the mix, talking about the need for this or that housing in particular, the articles will universally be “rich developer tries to build condos and the good people of the world are fighting back!” When you can counter with “local renter struggling to stay in the community says their neighbors should open their hearts to new neighbors,” the public narrative shifts dramatically.

In addition to press coverage, for every controversial housing proposal in your backyard, there is an opportunity for you to write a compelling opinion piece in your local newspapers. Rarely will your local paper want to publish your general pro-housing screed, but the controversial nature of a specific housing proposal means you are likely to get published. Local papers love to run these kinds of pieces because both NIMBYs and YIMBYs will click, click, click.

2. Demonstrate power to elected officials

The same local elected officials who write state and local policy are putting their finger in the air with every housing proposal, tracking how popular housing is in their district.

One of the core ways that YIMBYism has grown is by showing to elected officials that there is actually a large constituency in favor of new construction. For decades, the common wisdom was that there wasn’t — because those people weren’t showing up to public meetings.

Most politics is “thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” where the politician likes to come in on a white horse named Reasonableness to graciously find the middle ground. So if no one is staking out “thesis,” guess where that “middle ground” starts to move toward? (Hint: Not our side.)

3. Get better at doing policy and driving legislative implementation

Housing activism is a long-term iterative process of growing a visible voting bloc in a district and building power. The more proposals we are active around, the more we learn and grow.

Project advocacy gives you a front-row seat to how housing proposals get ground down. What exactly caused a developer to drop that fifth floor and 20 units? What mechanism gave the city council the ability to tap the breaks? What law is the planning department creatively interpreting and could use a letter from a state agency clarifying their legal obligations? What city officials have hidden power to shut down housing proposals? When you have influence with elected officials, what departments need new leadership?

And understanding where housing laws are breaking down is critical for closing loopholes. At YIMBY Action, all of our chapters housing proposal advocacy is collected into a central database. That database allows us to put out reports like “California Housing Laws: Lessons from the Field” charting the breakdown of 5 key bills. Check out our Implementation Guide for more advice on making laws matter.

4. Grow your membership

Local headlines draw in new YIMBYs. I can’t count the number of people who came into pro-housing politics because of previous fights like the supposed Wall on the Waterfront or the equivalent in their city.

Being active and engaged in your community is inspiring! People can see that there are real people they could join with. The loneliness epidemic is fought by inspiring others to join your club!

Now to be clear, there can be a drawback too. For staff-driven organizations, it can be exhausting and potentially not a high ROI to engage in project-by-project activism. But for volunteer-driven organizations that use activism to gain narrative power and grow their list, housing proposal advocacy is the meat and potatoes that will keep your chapters growing.

The point is this: You should be in project-by-project advocacy. And meeting hot local singles near you at the Dateway.

Share

Subscribe now

EDIT:

Comment from is spot on:

A city’s elected officials and staff have significant power over how much housing gets built in their community. Builders can even get free land on which to build homes, but only when city leadership is committed to making their city more affordable.

Of course, not all cities make it easy to build new housing. Some CA cities perfect the art of making it downright impossible to build.

If YIMBY Santa were to rank CA’s 482 cities by how easily they allow new homes, these would be his Top 5 Naughty & Nice lists:

Naughty:

• Los Altos Hills: In response to pressure from state housing laws, this wealthy enclave (median home value: $5.6M) reluctantly upzoned a centrally-located vacant lot to allow 600 condominiums. When the developer proposed to build these 600 condos, everyone freaked out and the town down-zoned the lot back down to just 100 units, an amount that is not financially feasible to build.

• Carmel: This coastal town planned to build affordable housing on their downtown parking lots. But after facing backlash, the town submitted a fake, unenforceable plan to convert existing hotels into affordable housing.

• La Canada Flintridge: This city received its first multi-family housing proposal in a decade, and it wasted millions of taxpayer dollars trying to stop it in court, against the advice of their city attorney. Although the proposal was “entitled” this fall, La Canada Flintridge found new ways to delay the development during the permitting process.

• Sausalito: This city re-zoned multiple sites, in accordance with state law, then figured out which sites were viable because developers started calling and submitting applications to build on them. The city didn’t deem any of the applications complete, but they did downzone the newly viable sites, making all the potential new buildings now illegal.

• Cupertino: Several developers submitted building applications in this town, the home of Apple’s headquarters. Some applications were denied, prompting the state to step in. Cupertino sent a letter back to the state, saying it “disagrees with the conclusions” made. There’s been no rebuttal from the state yet.

Nice:

• Santa Ana: This city has permitted 4,000 out of 3,100 homes it is required to build before 2029! Going above and beyond?? We love to see it!

• Murrieta: This city has handed out 1,700 building permits, out of a required 3,000 by 2029. Good thing YIMBY Santa is a Bon Jovi fan because Murrieta is half way there!

• La Quinta: There’s no coal in La Quinta’s stocking this year. This city has issued 910 building permits, out of a required 1,500.

• Monrovia: Ho ho hold up—this city has already handed out 1,100 building permits! It only needs 600 more by the end of 2029.

• Citrus Heights: This city has unwrapped 421 building permits out of 697— YIMBY Santa must be busy delivering some brand-new homes this holiday season!

If you want to see how your city is shaping up on housing, search for your city on our Fair Housing Elements Tracker.

Fair Housing Elements Tracker

Want to get involved? Join us as a watchdog and help us make that list and check it twice!

Join us as a Watchdog

YIMBYism is ideologically agnostic. There are many ways — and reasons — to be pro-housing. The Republican governor of North Dakota is a YIMBY. So is the centrist Democratic mayor of San Francisco and the left-wing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. YIMBYs are environmentalists, libertarians, and members of unions and chambers of commerce. And you don’t have to publicly identify as a YIMBY for us to celebrate you as a pro-housing leader.

So while that means it might not be surprising when a prominent left-wing leader embraces YIMBYism, it is still the case that it is big news when it happens. New York’s incoming mayor Zohran Mamdani is rapidly becoming one of the most interesting elected officials around the country on housing issues. By combining his support for rent control with his support for rezoning, he resonated with many New Yorkers.

As one writer in City Journal pointed out:

The results reflect the dwindling political clout of the small-homeowner coalition that once bolstered Mayors Edward Koch, Rudolph Giuliani, and Michael Bloomberg. That group, spread over outlying parts of the outer boroughs, is more suburban in lifestyle, has high auto ownership, and is less well-served by public transit. Its waning voting power reflects the substantially increased population in areas of Northern Brooklyn and western Queens rezoned in the Giuliani and Bloomberg years [...] Thus, the city’s governing Democratic political class has evolved from a posture that might be described as ‘Left-NIMBYism’ to ‘Left-YIMBYism.

If all politics is personnel, then at least as he prepares to take office, Mamdani is ensuring that YIMBY perspectives will influence policy in the new administration. Mamdani recently announced the names of more than 400 people who will help with his transition to city hall. Among them are a committee of 17 people who will advise the mayor on housing, who include prominent YIMBYs Annemarie Gray, the executive director of Open New York and Paul Williams, the executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise,

But not everyone is into it. Some of Twitter’s most anti-YIMBY leftists who had a very different reaction to the transition committee:

I’d be frustrated too if a candidate whom I supported for a lot of other reasons was opposed to me on an issue I care a lot about. And while Mamdani was increasingly signaling he was pro-housing as the election went on, I have empathy for folks who feel whiplash.

But, Mamdani represents the increasing popularity of left-YIMBYism. The ideological ice that said that YIMBYism and leftism can’t go together is cracking. Even the socialist magazine Jacobin recognizes it. While the loudest parts of the left discourse have long been hostile to market rate housing (including San Francisco, New York, and in cities in other countries too) the reality is that things are finally opening up.

There may be good theoretical reasons in the Left Canon that dictate that Left-YIMBY Cannot Be A Thing… Yes? No?I don’t know. Who cares? All models are wrong, some models are useful. The practical politics are clear: left-YIMBYs win elections in left-leaning cities with unaffordable housing.

Part of why this was possible is that Andrew Cuomo was a comic-book villain who literally did not care about achieving a more affordable New York City. Not everyone is blessed with such an opponent. What continues to be challenging for other candidates in blue cities is that there are a range of policies that have the stated goal of creating affordability, and it is often hard to get folks who agree on the goal of affordability to agree on the means to that end.

Subscribe now

Political coalition development is often a product of its environment. Mamdani had the luxury of being able to pull together a left-YIMBYs coalition more easily than most. Compare him to the Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who continues to court the still dominant left-NIMBY coalition, and San Francisco’s progressives who sadly continue to triple down on their opposition to the family zoning plan.

Mamdani was able to pull in a much wider range of supporters than progressives often court in city-wide elections. More often, there is a visibly sane moderate who slurps up pro-housing, pro-small business, and good-government oriented organizations. This shrinks the path for progressives, who end up courting anti-change progressives who prioritize community input, and create the classic left-NIMBY coalition, to the great frustration of pro-housing progressives. For example, in the San Francisco race to replace Nancy Pelosi, trans-youth-supporting Scott Wiener will run as a “moderate” YIMBY, while protect-our-cars Connie Chan will run as a “progressive” NIMBY. (And everyone will call everyone else a hypocrite.)

During the campaign, Mamdani embraced an abundance agenda, rightly pointing out that the cost of living was far too high for everything from housing to halal food trucks. Frankly, it’s been exciting to watch over the past few years as DSA members like Mamdani have embraced YIMBYism. The truth is that NIMBY zoning laws hold back progressive goals like affordable housing, social housing, community land trusts, and efforts at racial integration. (You can’t build Vienna-style social housing without being allowed to build housing.) And, despite what some left-NIMBYs seem to think, supply and demand are real. It’s not left-wing to deny it, and it’s not right-wing to accept it.

What’s most exciting (or threatening, depending on your perspective) about Mamdani is that he is inspirational. Leftist politicians in districts where left-NIMBYism has been the standard operating procedure for years should examine whether a left-YIMBY path is plausible in their race. Not everyone in their coalition will make the leap, but ambitious politicians who have made that gamble have often found success in broadening their appeal.

Subscribe now

Share

1) Upzone Your Christmas Village

You can pick up a cute paper kit from West Elm or get a gingerbread-esque light up village from Crate & Barrel. There are also a ton of cheap and cheerful printable villages to choose from on Etsy, including this kit for under $2!

2) Transit-Oriented Menorahs

Hanukkah is around the corner, so pick up a Trolley Menorah or a Bicycle Menorah for a more multi-modal holiday.

3) Books for Kids

Get started on indoctrination early with gems like CITIES and Goodnight Goodnight Construction Site. Lines like “cities are home to millions of people” and “taller and taller buildings are being built all the time” are ones you’ll want to read to your toddler hundreds of times! Almost every book by Richard Scarry is pro-housing. And there are probably thousands of kids books about trains.

Head to your local bookstore or pick up a YIMBY classic from RJ Julia, where part of the proceeds support YIMBY Action.

4) Books for Adults

For your aunt or uncle who enjoys a good think piece from the Atlantic, there is an Abundance of books about housing, transit, and advocacy that are slightly more obscure, but shouldn’t be! Grab a copy of Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman, Arbitrary Lines by Nolan Gray, or On the Housing Crisis by Jerusalem Demsas. There are so many great books, so be sure to add a comment with your favorite!

And for the die-hard YIMBY in your life, there is a book about how great shade is.

5) Actually Cool Gift Shops

Muni in San Francisco and the Transit Museum in New York both have great online stores. And you can often also pick things up in person at the MTA in New York, SEPTA in Philly, and the MBTA in Cambridge, MA. Most cities have a architecture museum or other gift shops with tons of cute things for your local urbanist.

And of course YIMBY Action has shirts and mugs that make a statement!

6) Mugs

If the classic NIMBY Tears Mug seems a little aggressive for the holidays, there are literally hundreds of cute city-themed mugs on Etsy that will warm both the heart and the hands.

7) Maps and Exploring Activities

Most urbanists love an educational adventure, and there are so many cool ways to explore your community. There are so many cool niche maps and kits for getting out into the world.

Grab a celebration of brutalism from Blue Crow Media or a scratch off adventure card pack from Reach International Outfitters. There are also cool apps like Fog of World that color in your path wherever you go, highlighting both where you have wandered and where you’ve yet to explore.

Finally, wrap it all up in apartments!

Grab this gift wrapping paper on Etsy or draw your own on butcher paper!

Got more ideas? Please share in the comments! Also, this is my new jam:

Posts like this are amusing, but they also indicate something more pervasive. They serve as a mask off moment illustrating a sentiment that infects far too much local policymaking. As such, a rhetorical vivisection can be useful for reminding us what truly lurks in the hearts of NIMBYs and what we’re up against in the fight for housing abundance.

Housing Isn’t Scarce. You’re Just A Failure.

After a little preamble, Wooding says the quiet part out loud — he doesn’t think you deserve to live near him:

Today’s home-owning San Franciscans worked hard, saved their money, lived frugal lives, and only then purchased houses commensurate with their income level. We cannot all live in Pacific Heights.

And after he gets done huffing Puritan work ethic like it’s paint thinner, he lays out who his enemies are:

State Senator Scott Wiener, developers, and YIMBY’s (Yes In My Back Yard) — mostly millennials — are on the verge of destroying the character of neighborhoods throughout San Francisco. They aim to make residential units smaller, denser, and affordable and place them throughout neighborhoods.

As soon as home interest rates become reasonable for developers to make a profit, they will begin building four-to-six residential units.

The tradeoff? They will add large tracts of residential housing to existing residential neighborhoods. Much of this new housing will be deemed “affordable housing.” These new homes are called “Wienervilles” in honor of Scott Wiener’s horrible housing legislation. With developer money backing, and an army of low-income millennials, Wiener became former San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s housing Rasputin.

Wooding is being quite clear — he thinks that building denser housing will ruin “neighborhood character,” the people who want housing are unworthy, and change is unfair to the virtuous San Franciscans who did things the “right” way and “earned” not just their housing, but their right to stop other people from having a house of their own.

Obviously, this is all asinine.

The argument is a clumsy attempt to draw attention away from a broken system and cast blame on the people trying to right the ship.

The only thing that tempers my anger is the absurdity of the whole thing. Remember, according to Wooding, the harbingers of neighborhood destruction are 4-6 story buildings. Maybe he imagines they’ll have to stomp their way into the neighborhood like a pack of wild kaiju? (Regardless, I guess we’ll find out with the passage of Mayor Lurie’s Family Zoning Plan!)

Wooding goes on to frame things as generational warfare. According to him, “entitled” millennials could stand to learn a thing or two from … Gen X?

What’s so different between millennials and Gen-Xs? For starters, Gen-Xs—born between 1965 and 1980 — came in on the cusp of cell phones, the Internet, and social media, while most millennials — born between 1981 and 1997 — grew up when these things were a regular part of daily life. Millennials are often called “the generation of entitlement.” They are the richest generation ever to be born in the United States. Many have been spoiled and pampered by their parents. They are the generation of participation trophies and instant gratification.

To be fair, it’s actually unclear what he likes about Gen-X (other than he doesn’t think they’re YIMBYs?) After all, this is the generation that was universally lambasted as directionless slackers.1 But maybe Wooding is right and the original sin of the millennial generation was our decision to not be adults during the Clinton years.

Hilariously, Wooding goes on to amend the SF YIMBY mission statement to reveal what he thinks is the true, inner essence of the YIMBY (Wooding’s subtle addition highlighted for clarity):

We (mostly entitled millennials) are a group of volunteer housing advocates in San Francisco fighting to end the housing shortage in our community. We are frustrated by tenant displacement, segregation, high rents and home prices, and long commutes that result from a lack of housing close to jobs, schools, and other community resources. We believe we can fix these problems and create a community with abundant, affordable homes for everyone.

What’s The Big Idea?

So, does some random blog post by some random member of California’s petite landed gentry actually matter? No. But the ideas it represents do.

If you’ve ever been to a council or planning commission meeting, you’ve probably heard a version of “Wasting Away Again in Weinerville” performed live.2 And that’s not just in San Francisco or the Bay Area, either. In Seattle’s recent election, soon-to-be former Mayor Bruce Harrell (a boomer deca-millionaire property owner) attacked Mayor-elect Katie Wilson (a millennial mother of one who gets by in part thanks to financial help from her parents) for … not knowing the meaning of hard work.

Whether it’s coming from homeowners or politicians, this all boils down to the belief that there’s virtue in unnecessary hardship and the status quo is not only fine, but morally right.

Share

Subscribe now

When housing is scarce, when prices are high and homes are unaffordable for average Americans, who do we blame? For JD Vance, the answer is simple: immigrants.

During the Oct. 1 vice presidential debate, Donald Trump’s running mate claimed housing is unaffordable because “millions of illegal immigrants [who] compete with Americans for scarce homes.” Just this week, he accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of “massively violating” zoning laws by having multiple families living in the same home.

Vance’s rhetoric perpetuates the same racism that caused housing to become scarce in the first place. Apartment bans and other exclusionary laws were written to keep people of color out of white neighborhoods. These outdated laws have caused a nationwide housing shortage that continues to segregate our communities and stifle the middle class. Laws that were originally intended to keep people of color out are now also keeping all young people, all middle-class people and all low-income families weighed down with high housing prices and ever-longer commutes.

Vance’s reductive reasoning is also based on a fundamental lie: that the amount of housing we have is fixed and that we must fight against each other for the homes that do exist. What JD Vance — and all of us — must instead acknowledge is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

We don’t have to fight one another for scraps. We can build enough housing for everyone.

It’s common in shortages to blame, to hate, to pick scapegoats. Relying on the age-old tactic of manufacturing anti-immigrant hate to win votes, Senator Vance brazenly blames a small group of individuals for a problem that exists because of a chronic housing shortage brought on by decades of bad policy. Blaming people for a systemic issue prevents us from getting to real solutions.

The housing shortage is caused by regressive zoning and byzantine permitting processes that stall or halt housing production altogether. Cities reserve land for housing but only allow a small number of homes on that land, which limits the number of people who can live in the community. In communities with many amenities like high-quality schools and high-paying jobs, demand for those homes increases. If very few homes can be built, prices skyrocket. As the shortage worsens, people are pushed into poverty and overcrowding. Everyone feels the squeeze as prices rise.

To be sure, building codes and other regulations are critical for health and safety. But restrictive zoning keeps down housing production and incentivizes sprawl by banning multifamily housing. With these restrictions on 75% of America’s residential land, we’re now nearly 4 million homes short across the country. (Per some estimates, the shortage is as high as 20 million.)

Subscribe now

The YIMBY movement, academics and many elected officials are working to examine and reform these laws. But instead of joining the movement for solutions, many have repeatedly villainized immigrants, both from other countries and even other parts of the United States.

The explicitly racist language has been removed from many of our zoning laws, but the housing shortage and racism persist. At any community meeting in America where housing is being proposed, you can hear rhetoric similar to JD Vance’s — regardless of political affiliation. In San Francisco, California, we’ve heard residents say, “This will bring the wrong sorts of people into the neighborhood.” In Fort Collins, Colorado, we’ve heard the argument, “Let’s reduce immigration to ease the need for more housing.” In Springfield, Ohio, we’ve heard the false claim, “The immigrants are taking up all of the housing.”

As vile as JD Vance’s language has been, it’s not dissimilar from the hateful language we hear from conservatives and liberals alike as soon as affordable housing is proposed near their neighborhoods.

Blaming a small group of people rather than the laws that created the housing shortage in the first place pits neighbors against each other. It perpetuates the racism that keeps these exclusionary policies alive and it prevents us from implementing the solutions we know work. The truth is that America’s housing production is not keeping up with demand because our own local zoning laws prevent it.

Ultimately, the only way to ensure everyone has an affordable home that meets their needs is to allow more housing in existing high-demand neighborhoods. Changing zoning laws to allow for “Missing Middle” housing, duplexes and triplexes, and making permitting easier to obtain will help housing costs to decline.

Cities and states, both red and blue, are seeing the results of this. The City of Austin, Texas is seeing rents decline after years of advocacy from our friends at AURA. In California, Berkeley is seeing homelessness rates drop thanks to YIMBY advocacy and the pro-housing city council members who voted to allow more types of homes. We’ve even seen Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz produce pro-housing rhetoric and plans.

It’s time for JD Vance to get on board and admit that we don’t have to accept housing scarcity. We can and must choose abundance.

Share

Subscribe now

As YIMBYs, we often focus on how more housing is a key way to address affordability — and we saw that dynamic play out not just in the headline races, but in local elections too. With a growing active base and popular messaging, YIMBY-endorsed candidates racked up wins in cities like Fort Collins, CO and Pittsburg, PA. This cycle, we made endorsements in 40 races. We won in twenty-nine of those races, with another four that are headed to runoffs. Not bad!

Across the country, voters want to attack the problem of unaffordable housing, and when given the opportunity to vote for affordability, they generally vote yes. In Santa Cruz, California, voters approved $4.5 million yearly in new taxes to fund affordable housing and homelessness services. In New York City, voters approved four measures that liberalized the city’s zoning rules. Denver voters passed a series of bonds that included $59.3 million for housing. Bellingham, WA strengthened its tenants’ rights law. And voters in Louisville, Colorado rejected a feel-good measure that would have reduced the new supply of housing. Even the famously NIMBY Marin county in California seems to want to do the right thing (at least some of the time). In general, in almost every jurisdiction in which pro-housing policies were on the ballot, voters approved them.1

The takeaway: Affordability is good. Candidates should run on affordability. If you do, you’ll win. And one of the best ways to tackle affordability is to tackle the cost of housing.

Bonus takeaway: Voter complaints about “the economy” are also complaining about housing. When there is more housing construction in places with jobs, everyone is able to access high-resource communities and economic outcomes improve. I dug into that topic on the Boyd Institute podcast last week.

It’s no surprise to YIMBYs that affordability is top of mind for voters. According to the National Association of Realtors, the median age of a first-time homebuyer in the United States recently rose to an all-time high of 40 years old. As a bitter, stunted, renter millenial I deeply feel this statistic. (By comparison, the median age of a first-time home buyer in 1991 was only 28 years old.) “It’s kind of a shocking number,” said Jessica Lautz, deputy chief economist and vice president of research at NAR.

This ties into what public opinion data is showing us too. In a Pew Research Center survey taken last year, 69% of Americans said they were “very concerned” about the cost of housing, a dramatic rise from previous years. As the Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told NPR after the election, “voters are feeling strapped. They’re concerned about their standards of living.”

In the three big races last week, the candidates who were the most focused on affordability won their races — Zohran Mamdani in New York City, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. What should excite and terrify YIMBYs is that the three candidates differed on how to tackle it. Affordability is very much a jump ball, and that’s not even counting how Trump is trying to capture the idea too. YIMBYs have the opportunity to prove that pro-housing policies create affordability, but our ideas are not a given.

“What’s notable isn’t just what the above messages have in common but what they don’t have in common,” wrote the journalist Derek Thompson. “Affordability is a big tent.”

I’m not even sure it is a tent. Affordability is a vibe.

What’s the lesson here? National pundits have framed the election in terms of Democrats gaining on Republicans, following President Donald Trump’s promise during the last election to fix the economy. And Democratic strategists are (correctly) obsessed with trying to figure out how Democrats can shed their elitist vibes and adopt the affordability vibes. But for me the takeaway is that when it comes to affordability, voters agree on the problem but not always on the solution. And that’s why our work is so important.

Share

Subscribe now

“We have to elect politicians who understand the difference between political discomfort and a political liability.”

Most people, he said, want more housing to be built (the polling generally backs this up). Average people are vaguely YIMBY. They want housing costs to come down, they want working people to be able to live in their community, they want apartments for their kids, etc etc. The problem, of course, is that they are too busy to connect their vague desires to specific policies, and they don’t want to show up for long public hearings when individual housing proposals are on the table.

“This stuff is boring to most people,” said Armstrong, which got a lot of knowing laughs at YIMBYtown.

The result is something YIMBYs are excruciatingly familiar with: politics is dominated by a small, loud minority of folks. When it comes to housing, that mostly means NIMBYs. But, as Armstrong said, just because they dominate the conversation doesn’t mean we should listen to them above all others: “If we allow ourselves to listen to the loudest voices who are just saying no to everything, we can’t build a community.”

So what is an elected official to do? On the one hand, they know that pro-housing policies work and that they are vaguely popular. On the other hand, a narrow but visible minority makes it seem like elected officials will be punished at the ballot box for supporting housing. “The number of votes I’ve taken in the last ten years where I was told I wouldn’t win reelection is astounding,” said Armstrong. (Narrator: he was in fact reelected.)

At another housing conference in October, a California Assemblymember had an incredible quote he asked me to keep anonymous:

We all [legislators] know the polls. We all know that something like 65% of California voters want us to solve the problem of high housing costs.

But the opposition is so loud. They’re in your face at every step. They seem like they’re going to get you. They’re gonna recall you. They create the a deep feeling of controversy and political risk.

…But elected officials are looking for reasons to take bolder action on the housing shortage. That’s why the activism is so important. And to be honest the lawsuits too.

These quotes get to the heart of the matter on political discomfort vs political liability. Discomfort is generated by all those loud constituents, with their angry emails and mean tweets. But is there actual political liability? Will voters actually punish candidates for being bold on housing? It’s critical to distinquish the noise from the signal.

Most politicians cannot distinguish between discomfort and liability. They swing from pillar to post based on the latest person in their ear, and they stand for very little. To advocates, these folks are irritating, but offer a lot of opportunities for the active YIMBY base to become the last person in their ear. YIMBY must be a movement that constantly mobilizes in order to help politicians see and feel that their pro-housing positions are popular.

Share

Good politicians have an excellent read on what is a discomfort instead of a liability. Maybe they’ve read our report that 95 percent of state lawmakers who sponsor pro-housing legislation go on to win reelection. Maybe they look at national polling on housing. Maybe they keep their finger on the pulse of their district, rather than just listening to the people who show up to hearings and send emails. Good politicians know that direct outreach is only one way to measure the opinions of community members.

But great politicians recognize that leadership is more. Being into something before it’s cool is not only good investment advice (and builds hipster cred), but it’s also fantastic politics. Politicians like California State Senator Scott Wiener don’t just vote for change, but become the face of that change. They inspire activists, and find new audiences, and use the legislative process to push for bolder and bolder reforms. By championing an issue that is controversial-but-ultimately-popular they can own a growing political space. And the reward is news coverage creating ever-larger name ID.

What does all this mean for the day-to-day work of YIMBY organizations? For the average politician, YIMBYs have to demonstrate that pro-housing policies are more popular than they realize. We do that with polling numbers, press coverage, and constantly being in their ears. We run campaigns to reassure them that there is no contradiction between what the evidence shows, what their hearts want, and what their careers demand.

And for our superstars, we celebrate them everywhere, with events and mobilizations, with fundraisers and social media posts. Great politicians must be at the heads of our parades, giving everyone else a bit of FOMO.

Last Saturday, we hosted the War on Cars podcast with Senator Wiener. I talked about how then-Supervisor Wiener read an op-ed I’d written about the housing shortage, and called me into his office to tell me how important it was that I personally keep working on this issue. At the time, I was working for a failing start up and desperately searching for some meaning in my life. That meeting with Scott was pivotal in my life: a respected politician was telling me that my voice was important and the work I was doing mattered. It rang in my ears for years.

Scott Wiener didn’t just want to vote the right way: he saw that this was a vital political movement in the making, and he wanted to inspire us to build the political army that would make change possible. And unquestionably, the YIMBY movement would not be where we are without the benefit of his unrelenting leadership in the face of discomfort. And America needs more politicians like him.

California just took a big step toward legalizing housing near high-quality transit, but, as noted, “dragging Los Angeles kicking and screaming all the way.” This historic legislation passed with a host of caveats and by the skin of its teeth, making it a perfect case-study to examine both the growing drumbeat for housing reform and the remaining obstacles to reaching that goal.

SB 79 is the third iteration of Senator Scott Wiener’s concept of a state guardrails bill that would overrule local zoning laws that currently prevent apartment buildings from being built near trains and bus stops across the state. The dream began in 2018 when Senator Scott Wiener introduced SB 827, which died with a “resounding thud,” as stated by CalMatters. Though this first effort failed to earn a vote in the Senate, the movement was undeterred. In 2020, Senator Wiener introduced a second attempt, SB 50, but it also faltered, this time in a dramatic midnight vote on the Senate floor. And now, almost seven years later, a partial victory has been achieved, and the solution to the housing shortage is that much closer for us all.

But what made the difference this time around?

How The YIMBY Movement Helped Create Change

Three key factors tipped the balance:

1. Steady growth in the YIMBY movement year after year in districts across the state.

2. A larger coalition of co-sponsors and supporters.

3. Better coordination of inside and outside games to leverage constituent pressure.

In 2018, there were only six YIMBY Action chapters across California, along with several other YIMBY groups. In 2025, YIMBY Action has grown to 20 chapters across the state, with increased membership, influential endorsements, and visible YIMBY activists in numerous Assembly districts. And other YIMBY groups like Abundant Housing LA, YIMBY Dems of San Diego and more are all going strong.

In 2018, media coverage noted that YIMBY supporters were dwarfed by NIMBY “enemies, enemies… a lot of enemies.” As the YIMBY movement has grown and the public narratives about how the housing shortage harms an ever-expanding community, it’s been easier and easier to convince more organizations to support major housing policy reform. Combined with a relentless negotiation strategy led by the tireless Senator Scott Wiener, this has resulted in a broader base of explicit supporters and a shrinking group of opposing organizations.

Finally, YIMBY organizations are upping their game with better communication between the inside game and the outside game. Strategic mobilizations coordinated across the pro-housing movement meant that constituent pressure played a key role in keeping legislators engaged. At critical junctures, pro-housing constituent pressure became the game-changing influence, mainly due to strong communication avenues between organizations like Housing Action Coalition, California YIMBY, YIMBY Action, and more.

Mobilizing constituent pressure is YIMBY Action’s core purpose, and everything we do feeds into that central goal. For the passage of SB 79, we managed a flurry of micro-campaigns across California, coordinating outreach directly from constituents to key legislators whose decisions would determine SB 79’s fate. Constituent pressure isn’t just about making noise — it’s about making the right noise, in the right rooms, at the right moments. By leveraging local voices, with insider intelligence, and rapid response coordination, the YIMBY coalition demonstrated how focused organizing can move transformative housing policy.

Building and Deploying Constituent Power

As organizations build out their people power, two strategic considerations must always be in mind:

1. Local credibility matters. Legislators are moved most by in-district constituents who can connect policy to their district.

2. Infrastructure is leverage. The ability to efficiently coordinate, track, and deploy advocates across multiple districts is what turns opportunity into victory.

These two insights have informed the YIMBY Action chapter model, giving us the flexibility for local organizers to create local brands that have a greater degree of influence with elected officials, while maintaining a tight communication network for coordinated mobilizations. National and statewide brands are useful on any number of other metrics, but unfortunately, many local elected officials will pay much more attention to locally branded groups advocating in their district.

While local brands and local leadership are ideal for building influence with elected officials, fragmentation can make it extremely challenging to mobilize that local power at the right time. Infrastructure in organizing is all about knowing where your power is, who is able to mobilize, and having the ability to get out the specific bat signals. This is where increased coordination between YIMBY organizations had a huge impact.

How YIMBY mobilizations Moved the Needle on SB 79

Targeted constituent pressure started even before the bill’s first hearing, when our South Bay YIMBY chapter met with Senator Wahab, the chair of the Senate Housing Committee. She made it clear she didn’t support the bill in its current form, and we’d have to convince other members of the committee in order to get it through. (Note: When the bill was amended in September, she signed on in support.)

With that knowledge, SB 79’s Senate Housing Committee hearing loomed large. We needed to pull out all the stops.

With 12 days’ notice, we organized 35 people from across California to attend the hearing from around the state, including as far away as Los Angeles. 35 people are a lot, given that people had to drop everything and we had to help arrange transportation, lodging, childcare, and work absences. But 35 is also a smaller number than you would think would matter for changing the fate of 2025’s most impactful housing bill. With our cadre of diverse, passionate YIMBY advocates from all corners of the state physically present in Sacramento, we moved the needle.

Subscribe now

While the hearing ran on for hours, our advocates used the delay as an opportunity to rally additional support. After we set up camp in the halls of the Capitol, we all texted our friends and asked people back in our districts to call their Senators. Every minute before the vote, we were calling the Senators’ offices and urging other people to do the same, as we knew that if they heard from a flood of constituents, our messages would be relayed directly to the Senators.

During the hearing, we all participated in a “ditto” strategy, which is when multiple advocates in a row take the microphone to state their organization and share their position on the bill. Legislators are deeply affected by in-person testimony, and when we rallied young people, clearly not lobbyists, who were excited about the bill, it shifted the tone and energy of the room.

Although there are strict noise rules in the halls of the Capitol (along with staffers whose sole job, it seems, is to shush people who have travelled long distances to make their voices heard), the hall monitors allowed us a very subdued cheer when the bill passed with 6 votes – not a vote to spare. Senator Wiener exited the hearing room to a crowd of YIMBYs, most of whom could barely contain ourselves.

SB 79’s second hearing, at the Senate Local Government Committee, was just as daunting, as it was led by Senator Durazo, who, unlike Senator Wahab, never cast an “aye” vote for SB 79. A week before the hearing, we sent 9,807 activation emails asking our advocates to call her office. In addition, we asked 593 constituents to call Senators Laird and Choi, who were also key votes on that committee. (Laird voted yes, but Choi did not. It’s not a coincidence that we have a chapter in Laird’s district, but not Choi’s.) SB 79 passed Senator Durazo’s committee with the thinnest of margins – 4 to 3.

At this point, since the bill had survived two committees despite opposition from both chairs of those committees, we were riding high. Our partners informed us that the bill was likely to pass the Senate Appropriations Committee, so we set our sights on the Senate floor vote.

Share

We emailed 22,256 YIMBYs in California, urging them to call their Senators a week before the floor vote, and focused our remaining energy on two swing votes in districts where we had already built a strong base of YIMBY support. We asked max donors to text their targeted electeds in the days leading up to the vote and on the Senate floor during the vote. This proved to be critical, as SB 79 passed the Senate floor by the thinnest possible margin – 21 to 13.

After this victory, we went back to work with two goals:

1. Thank the Senators who already voted yes, since we would need their votes again if and when SB 79 passed the Assembly.

2. Meet with the Assembly members to get their support.

On July 3rd, we drove over 2,500 phone calls into supportive Senators’ offices, thanking them for their votes. Then, throughout July and August, we hosted meetings with 14 legislators across the state, bringing as many constituents as we could, which ranged from 5 people to 40 (the office had to reserve their biggest conference room for us!).

For the July 16th Assembly Local Government hearing, we brought over a dozen folks to Sacramento, and the bill passed out of the committee with a vote of 6-1. We represented grassroots chapters all over California, with volunteers traveling from the Bay Area and beyond to show up for the bill in this committee hearing.

With the finish line in sight, we drove 9,844 calls to all the Assembly members, and we were relieved when it passed Assembly Appropriations with a vote of 8-6.

With the bill through all the committees, it was time for the big guns – we contacted all 22,769 people through text and email, asking them to contact their Assembly member & Senator. Our 226 volunteer leaders asked their friends, family, and networks to call their reps, expanding our reach by thousands. When we texted our list, we didn’t use a call tool; we put the Legislators’ phone numbers directly into the text, so the activists could call directly without filling out a form. Our priority was to create a seamless and simple outreach process, even if it meant we couldn’t always track how many people clicked through.

This tactic worked! On September 11th, SB 79 passed the Assembly with 43 votes, mainly because we repeated the strategy that won the Senate – activating thousands of constituents, prioritizing swing votes, and mobilizing key donors to call and text in the days and hours before the vote. We ended up mobilizing 10,303 new calls.

The next day, September 12th, SB 79 reached its final hurdle: the Senate needed to confirm support of final changes to the bill since June. In addition to all of our constituent activations, we leaned on the donors once again, asking them to text their Senators, even while they were working on the Senate floor. We also activated our donor and partner network to begin advocating with Governor Newsom, especially those with direct access.

Finally, on October 10th, the Governor signed SB 79, and the YIMBY Action team in California took a break from working. Just kidding! Feeding off the surge of energy from our members, we pulled together six impromptu celebrations around the state to gather and rejoice, while also deepening our relationships with our activists for the next campaign.

The Broader Significance

SB 79 represents more than a single policy win — it’s a proof of concept for the YIMBY model of advocacy. With modest resources, coordinated organizations achieved a landmark legislative victory by combining authentic local pressure with institutional precision.

Investment in infrastructure — data platforms, staff capacity, and local chapters — yields outsized returns. Each dollar supports both outreach and the systems that make outreach effective, including real-time coordination, easily digestible messaging, and sustained political credibility.

In an era where many housing reforms stall under the weight of complexity and opposition, SB 79’s success stands as evidence that smart advocacy backed by strong local networks can overcome entrenched barriers and deliver systemic change.

Share

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Marohn’s initial reaction to our post was positive, writing:

This is the kind of good-faith disagreement I think our movement needs more of,” wrote Marohn. “We all want to see more housing, greater access, and more prosperous, welcoming communities. The question is: How do we get there? And just as important: Who decides what ‘there’ looks like?

In his full length response post, titled “Is the City the Problem?”, he went on to say “Just because cities aren’t working the way they should doesn’t mean they’re the problem. In fact, I believe cities are still our best hope for real reform.”

Marohn said that meant he disagreed with us on one possible avenue for housing reform — state preemption laws, which take away cities’ ability to say no to new housing, arguing:

Again and again, tools originally meant to solve local problems — tools like comprehensive planning, the 30-year mortgage, even the credit score — are absorbed into centralized systems and gradually repurposed to serve other priorities.

But, he went on to say, he thought that cities ought not to be treated simply as “the lowest level in a hierarchy of governments, tasked merely with implementing state and federal mandates.” In other words, they have a life of their own, and we ought to be turning them into better places instead of only working at the state level. (We should add, we are curious to understand more how Marohn distinguishes the preemption laws he supports from the ones he doesn’t. The principle isn’t completely clear to us here.)

Where we disagree with him is a little bit of a chicken-and-egg thing. Marohn seems to argue that we should wait for public opinion to catch up before we change state laws, but we think that changing state laws is a great way to drive changes in public opinion.

On that same topic, a few days later, the writer weighed in with a thoughtful post in which he said that while he agreed in principle with Marohn, in reality, “it’s not exactly easy to build local capacity when an unrepresentative minority of NIMBYs controls the machinery of land-use decisions at the local level. So in my view—again, not held doctrinally, just my sense of the issue—freeing up that machinery is a precondition of capacity-building, not somehow contradictory to it.”

The Deleted Scenes

A Little More On Zoning Preemption

I’ve been following the YIMBY-Strong Towns debate over state preemption of zoning, as well as the issue more generally. Strong Towns folks are mixed on the question but lean skeptical of empowering states, even in a deregulatory way (which is one of the basic nuances of this whole debate—that unwinding government power is itself a political process); YI…

Read more

9 months ago · 15 likes · 47 comments · Addison Del Mastro

Our post also kicked off a great discussion on Reddit. One commentator wrote:

I see the impact of this tension between the motivation to retain or strengthen local control and the motivation to increase housing supply and drive down housing costs in the city where I work -- Milwaukee, WI. Despite the best intentions of the policymakers pushing reforms that try to encourage development while requiring community input and emphasizing aldermanic privilege, city departments themselves will tell you that standard, universal rules and practices will improve confidence among builders and financial backers and drive down construction timelines.

We would add that this case is an important example of why it helps to look at specific cities when you are talking about these questions — it’s harder to figure it out in the abstract and much easier with particulars.

Another said:

In Michigan the current city-township system was created for explicitly racist purposes, and the existing - sometimes almost comical - boundaries exist to service those purposes. For heaven’s sake, my own city of Grand Rapids, MI contains another city (East Grand Rapids) for this reason. These boundaries are not logical, and they are not laid out with any idea of coherence or efficiency - and they are legally and politically impossible to move. The power of land-use is delegated to cities and townships by the state, so even describing state action as “preemption” is IMNSHO disingenuous; the state is simply the superior in the hierarchy.

Many of the comments on our original post were very insightful as well. Special shoutout to the YIMBY Jeremy Levine, who reframed Marohn and Del Mastro’s commitment to handling decisions at the lowest possible level:

We all want to restore bottom up community planning, which means restoring agency over residential land use to the lowest level of decision-making possible, the individual property owner. State legislation that helps restore decision-making to the individual landowner isn’t the same as state-driven highway planning or other top down policies, it’s a fundamental part of reviving true bottom-up planning.

(We think that’s a good point as far as it goes, but obviously we and most YIMBYs are not full-on libertarians about property rights — governments can and should have a say.)

Scott, a land development planner in Asheville, NC, chimed in to say he supported state preemption, writing that he views “state-wide “standardization” as a pro, as it creates greater predictability and consistency for what Permitted Uses can be built and where they can be built.”

In the end, there remains much more agreement than there is disagreement between YIMBYs and Strong Town advocates. As Seth Zeren pointed out, “I am likewise in both camps and baffled by some of the fighting.”

That’s it for now, but we’re looking forward to continuing the discussion with Chuck when Laura joins him on an upcoming episode of The Strong Towns podcast — stay tuned.

Subscribe now

Share

Rancho Palos Verdes city councilperson Barbara Ferraro was caught in a vice. "I mean it's really onerous,” she said. And what was worse, was only one way out — a way that she didn’t want to take. But, she went on to say, she didn’t have any other options. “It's not something that we can go back to. We don't dare right now," she said

What she was referring to was a recent controversy in the Southern California city that according to at least one blog, “is known for its breathtaking ocean views, luxurious homes, and serene environment, AND has been named the richest retirement town in the country.” The problem was this: The city government was under pressure from local NIMBYs to block the construction of a new apartment building. Many of the elected officials wanted to give in to them, but there was one big problem. Thanks to California’s laws and the work of groups like YIMBY Action and YIMBY Law to enforce them, they couldn’t. In fact, the city was caught in a trap — one way or another, it was going to have to allow new construction.

Here’s how it all unfolded.

Like every other municipality in California, Rancho Palos Verdes has to prepare a “housing element” every eight years, which spells out the places it will allow new housing to be built and maps how it plans to achieve it. It did, and the state certified that plan. So far so good. As part of its housing element the city identified sites where it would allow 647 new units of housing, a plan that would require upzoning several low density parcels for multifamily buildings.

But when a developer purchased one of those parcels and submitted an application to build housing there, some neighbors freaked out. Housing element plans aren’t supposed to be real, after all!1

NIMBYs lobbied the city council to not only stop that project, but also to reverse the upzoning of several other sites. Bowing initially, the city council decided to remove three specific sites from its state-certified site inventory, including the one with a housing proposal on it. City staff prepared a revised draft housing element reflecting these removals and submitted it to the state’s department of Housing and Community Development for formal review, and HCD (appallingly) agreed to allow the city to remove these sites. In years past, that would have been the end of it. A bunch of NIMBYs would have steamrolled the city council and HCD would have looked the other way, reverting to the toothless inaction that characterized the department before we forced it to do more than just rubber stamp local plans, no matter how bad they were.

But not so fast.

Because of YIMBY Law's reputation for taking swift action to enforce housing laws, the developer's attorney reached out to tell us about how the city was planning to kill his client's project, and asked if we could help. We could and we did. Because neither the NIMBYs nor the city council nor HCD make the final decisions on zoning questions like this one. Nor do we. The courts do.

On March 17, before the first city council hearing on removing the sites from their list of suitable housing development sites and rolling back the previous upzoning, we sent a letter telling them they couldn’t remove the sites or roll back the upzoning. That seems to have scared them. They postponed the vote, and met again to consider it on June 3. We didn’t let up. Before the second meeting, we wrote them again, reminding them that removing these sites could invalidate their housing element and raise the possibility of the builders’ remedy, a provision in state law that allows developers to bypass local zoning and other requirements when a city fails to follow its obligations. All told, the two letters took us a couple hours of time to research and write — but drew on years of work to back them up.

Subscribe now

Our goal was to box the city council in. We told them they either had to approve the upzoning or face the builders’ remedy. Either way, housing was going to get built. We wanted them to realize that the housing was inevitable.

And the city officials knew that. All of Rancho Palo Verdes’ options involved building more housing — SB 9, builders' remedy, and housing element upzoning. Each reform closed off a choice the city might have made to deny housing. This isn’t by accident. For years, YIMBY Action and YIMBY Law have worked together with CA YIMBY and other pro-housing groups in California to pass laws to get more housing built.

Another part of our work is to help implement those laws. Thanks to California’s third-party right of enforcement, YIMBY Law can take NIMBYs to court when they fail to live up to their legal obligations. In other words, over time, we have crafted laws that prevent NIMBYs in local governments from blocking housing — and have built the legal capacity to enforce those laws. Checkmate.

The only option they had was, as the city attorney said, to keep the sites on their site inventory and let the application for housing proceed..

“The exposure to builder's remedy is not something to be taken lightly,” said the city attorney of Rancho Palos Verdes during the June 3rd meeting, adding that the southern California city was involved in four lawsuits already.

Share

Councilmember Sharon Yarbor agreed that she wanted to avoid the builders' remedy at all costs. "There is a possibility,” she said, “and I don't know how great or small that possibility is — that there could be a determination that because we are [attempting to stop processing the housing application, we would be violating] in some way some provisions — and God knows there's a lot of them in the housing act — putting us at jeopardy for builders’ remedy. That to me is a hill I would die on — I do not want there to be a scintilla of risk of reopening the door. And I'd like assurance from the council, from the city attorney, and the city staff, that there is no way on god’s green earth that if we do this, that builders’ remedy could come back to bite us on the butt. That is the worst thing that could happen, worse than having this project [..] I don’t know if you can assuage those concerns.”

Mayor John Cruikshank could not assuage those concerns: “I'll ask the city attorney to opine but my guess is that we can't assuage anybody's concern of any current or future legal action based on what we do tonight." The city attorney chimed in to say, "Amen. True. True."

"So unfortunately I mean we are in a very difficult position," continued the mayor, "The city's in a really bad position in terms of finances right now [...] We can't afford in the next couple months and next year to pay out [...] to try to settle lawsuits that we get from God-knows-who [...] about some housing element approval that we did not do or we took out from zoning. That's just the reality of it. And we're going to get hit with those applications and those lawsuits. It's just inevitable if we pull it out."

In the end, those letters worked. The city council voted not to risk it, keeping all of the sites on its inventory. Thanks to years of political organizing and legal work, cities like Rancho Palos Verdes are stuck. They may not want to approve new housing, but they don’t have a choice.

It’s just inevitable. That’s just what we wanted to hear. One by one, we blocked all of the NIMBY escape routes.

Despite many people making public comments urging the city council to fight, in the end, the city made the right choice. (It really didn’t have any other choice.) The city council voted 5-0 to keep all of the sites zoned for multifamily housing. Either they had to follow the law, or run the almost-certain risk of facing a costly lawsuit.

Without third-party enforcement by organizations like YIMBY Law, California Housing Defense Fund, Californians for Homeownership, and other pro-housing legal outfits, this story would have ended very differently. Cities are accustomed to bullying developers into not asserting their rights. Many state agencies are loath to crack down on local governments, since they have limited resources and know that enforcement can be a time-consuming game of Whac-a-mole with recalcitrant local governments.

Laws only exist if everyone believes they do. So that’s why YIMBYs work on implementation from many different angles. Sometimes that means making sure that State Attorney General Rob Bonta gets lots of positive press for his actions when he enforces state housing law. Sometimes it means encouraging the Governor to instruct his departments to take strong stances. And sometimes it means making things inevitable.

Share

Subscribe now