Power Building for Pro-Housing Reform
A post by Jeff Fong, YIMBY Action National Board Chair
Power in a democracy is about people. And not in a trite way. I mean that literally: power is the ability to mobilize large groups of people to act. It’s how you win at politics and it’s how you earn the opportunity to make policy.
There are a lot of ways to talk about this. Academics, organizers, and politicians all have their preferred languages. And although I’m a YIMBY and an urbanist through and through, I’m also a product person — so that’s the frame I’m going to use today.
As it turns out, building political power is a lot like building products — especially the platform-style products I’ve worked on in the past. Power building requires the kind of social infrastructure that makes it easy for people to come together, coordinate, and take action as a group. It’s not just about convincing people, it’s about enabling them to do something as well. This is the challenge YIMBY Action has been working on since YIMBYism began.
But enough with the abstraction, let’s start with something concrete.
Measure T: A Case Study in Deploying Power
To kick things off, we need to explain what it means to deploy political power. In 2024, San Mateo (a small city between San Francisco and San José) was set to vote on Measure T, which would raise height limits in the city’s downtown and transit corridors if passed.
NIMBYs were out in force to oppose the measure. But so were we.
To get the job done,
, Yimby Action California Organizing Director, and the local YIMBY Action chapter, Peninsula for Everyone, mobilized volunteers to knock on doors and talk to their neighbors.
Given the constraints that the local chapter was working with — 16 volunteers — the team had to prioritize specific neighborhoods for outreach. They targeted areas where they’d be able to cover the most ground on foot, maximizing the number of conversations with voters. Their message was simple: we need housing, and a refusal to plan for it will invite state intervention.1
The results speak for themselves. Where we canvassed, we won — and the measure passed with 60% voter support.
It’s been my experience that many of us in tech think about doing politics like it’s a marketing campaign. We talk as though it all comes down to the right message delivered through the right medium to the right cross-section of voters. And sure, there definitely is a marketing component, but there’s so much more to it than that.
In the same way that growth-hacking parlor tricks were never a substitute for having an actual product people wanted to use, no standalone voter outreach email is a replacement for the kind of infrastructure that brings people in, levels them up from being low-information voters, and equips them to engage in politics.
When you build that requisite infrastructure — when you build the right kind of platform — deploying a couple dozen folks to talk to their neighbors or even a couple hundred to call officials the week before a vote not only becomes possible, it becomes repeatable and scalable. In the case of the Measure T campaign, the underlying story isn’t about a one-off effort undertaken by random volunteers; it’s about a system able to build and deploy power on demand.
Power Building is Platform Building
A list of email addresses is no more a power base than it is a user base. That’s just marketing info (which is a start, but only a start).
Building political power requires building political infrastructure, and that’s an exercise in platform building.
At YIMBY Action, our platforms are our chapters. These are local organizations that serve as the focal points for political power. Volunteer Leads are the super users that help orchestrate the day-to-day activities. They run events, do the legwork on various activities, and generally serve as on-the-ground YIMBYs in their respective cities. Chapters are supported by full-time staff, who are kinda like Market GMs. There’s a whole playbook for “launching in a new market,” as well as what amounts to a marketing motion for helping new chapters grow.
And for my former colleagues from Lyft or Postmates, if this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Launching an on-demand anything platform in a new city is remarkably similar to setting up a local YIMBY org.
Putting my Product Guy™ hat back on, I see people joining, increasing their engagement, and sticking around YIMBY Action chapters for two reasons: to fix the housing crisis and to be part of a community they enjoy in the process.
I once asked a Lead from our East Bay chapter whether he would have spent his time on housing policy if YIMBY Action wasn’t there to help him speed run the political learning curve and provide him with all the requisite tools. He answered, “no, probably not.” And that’s a really important statement.2
YIMBY Action has productized everything necessary to do pro-housing politics. This YIMBY-in-a-box approach is what has allowed us to seed over 50 chapters nationwide and enabled thousands of YIMBYs across the country to push back against the housing shortage.3 In the absence of a nearby YIMBY Action chapter, the overhead of engaging in politics would be too high for many folks (even folks already bought in on the policy).
The second reason YA chapters are able to grow and retain membership should be obvious to any good PM — we make it fun.
I’m of the school of thought that there’s always more than one thing going on when someone uses a product. There’s the pure utilitarian, instrumentalized function for which the product was ostensibly built. But there’s also an experiential aspect. This is the emotional / social component if you’re into the JTBD Framework.
Good products don’t just work, they build positive associations with their users in the process. This is part of the fundamental genius of the chapter system; people work on housing reform not just because they care about housing policy, but also because they get to do it as part of a community. Chapter members — from Leads all the way down to the person who walked in the door five minutes ago — are all volunteers. Sure, they’re there because they care about the issues; but they’re also there because chapters are designed to cultivate community.
A recurring concern in the present day is the loss of community, the atrophying of civil society, and the epidemic of loneliness; well, in the growth and proliferation of our local chapters we very much see the antidote. Monthly happy hours give people a chance to connect socially and nerd out.4 The official YIMBY Action Slack provides an online space for folks to not only coordinate within their own chapter, but also interact with YIMBYs from across the country. As it turns out, there’s high demand for civic organizations that bring together like-minded people to work on a shared, positive vision of the future. Who would have guessed?
Building Homes and Building Platforms
There’s a lot more that we could say about how a YIMBY Action chapter works or what you can do once you’ve successfully scaled one up. But, for now, suffice it to say that, at least in a democracy, building power hinges on our ability to bring people together, solve collective action problems, and get everyone marching in the same direction.
In the same way that building great products goes beyond one-off marketing campaigns or single features, building political power requires more than any single political campaign or elected official can achieve. Building lasting power requires scalable infrastructure. Ultimately, this is an exercise in platform building. It’s also a problem space YIMBY Action knows well and it’s one we’re working on every single day.
Want to talk more? Drop me an email at jeff@yimbyaction.org
If Measure T had not passed, San Mateo would have been out of compliance with a state mandate to plan for more housing. That would have triggered something called the Builder’s Remedy. So the messaging here was an either/or close — taller buildings in concentrated places vs spread out at random throughout residential areas.
Having San Mateo actually plan for the housing instead of forcing state intervention gets us more housing more quickly, but that gets into a whole conversation about the ins/outs of implementation.
i.e. piece of user feedback.
Credit where credit is due; YIMBY-in-a-box was coined by my predecessor, former YIMBY Action National Board Chair Ernest Brown.
You’ve not lived until you’ve spent 90 minutes discussing the structural limits of wood frame construction over beers.