YIMBYism Is Ideologically Agnostic

A defense of political promiscuity.

UPDATE 7/29: Matthew Yglesias wrote a new blog post clarifying his support for single-issue YIMBYism and it’s a good read! Check it out here.

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A couple weeks ago,

Derek Thompson

and

Matthew Yglesias

were chatting on the Slow Boring podcast, when Yglesias said:

San Francisco started with a very progressive YIMBY movement but has ultimately moved into their kind of local moderate faction, where it goes with tough-on-crime politics, pro-business politics, because it's literally easier to write the policy… that is pro-housing if your allies are on the right in an urban context. But it's kind of easier to get people cheering, right?

As someone who has been dragged into countless debates about YIMBYism, progressivism, moderatism, conservatism, democratic socialism, libertarianism and every other -ism as it appears both in San Francisco and in every other city in America, this quote… frustrated me.

Most US cities are predominately one-party towns, and the press often flattens local candidates into a spectrum of blue, from far left to moderate. But when you zoom in, things don’t line up left to right because many local issues aren’t “naturally” moderate or “naturally” progressive. Much ink has been spilled with folks arguing that “you can’t be a real [conservative/moderate/progressive] if you’re bad on housing.”¹ But I’m going to sidestep this by saying that YIMBYism can —and should — be left, right, or center.² When you’re fighting regressive regulations, you can be anything.

Yglesias is arguing that we should attempt to join right-leaning coalitions in cities everywhere. But key to his argument is a bit of an overreading of the San Francisco story. Counter-intuitively to some YIMBYs, progressive hostility to us is not uniform. Progressives in SF may have refused to let YIMBYs into their coalition (for now), it is true, but progressives in many other cities have made very different choices.

That’s good for us. It’s our job to fit in where we can — we want to be up for grabs at the local level. YIMBYism’s ideological promiscuity is a feature, not a bug. (This argument also cuts against what Chris Elmendorf and David Schleicher said recently about YIMBYs needing to become a “party.”)³

I want to encourage YIMBYs to stop playing so much 5-D chess, and play checkers instead: Build your locally visible voting bloc, and pay attention to who tries to court you. Endorse candidates who want you in their trenchcoat over ones who are vaguely in your coalition.

And this ideological availability is extremely good for broad legislative coalition building. It makes us able to bring in environmentalists, Chambers of Commerce, Cato Institute fellows, religious organizations, and democratic socialist clubs depending on the legislation. We agree to agree when we agree. And our ideas are permeating into every ideology in America right now, as evidenced by the Bipartisan Federal YIMBY Caucus and Build America Caucus.

Being aggressively available means we get both hot Instagram videos about upzoning from two extremely cool progressive Brooklyn politicians and articles about how the YIMBY movement is for conservatives, too. And I feel extremely ideologically promiscuous for Oregon Governor Tina Kotek.

Historically, the YIMBY movement has spent way too much time and energy “advising” one another on which ideology we should align with. Most of it adds up to useless infighting. Depending on your locality, politicians will decide whether to choose you. The most important thing is to be growing our bloc and demonstrating its value. In San Francisco, there was no path with local progressives. But every jurisdiction has its own unique path — Elizabeth Warren is a YIMBY after all.

My favorite reflection on why only the moderate alliance was available in San Francisco is by the writer Benjamin Schneider in 2020. Moderates thought we should build downtown, be tough on crime, and support businesses. Progressives thought we should build affordable housing, increase spending on social programs, and tax businesses more. It so happened that progressives politicians couldn’t bring us into their trenchcoat without alienating their other voters. Moderates could. And so that’s where we ended up.

But getting chosen by any politician requires constant work. In fact, some urbanist-skeptics in San Francisco are trying to hip-check us out of their trenchcoats, and don’t mind dumping an urbanist supervisor along with us.⁴ People who consider themselves “moderate” in San Francisco include people who like their cars and who hate new housing. Some “moderates” want those voters more than they want YIMBYs, because they think it makes them more likely to win and because they fundamentally prioritize other “moderate” issues over housing. As always, YIMBYs have to demonstrate that we can put points on the board for our candidates right now.

Meanwhile, many San Francisco progressives do not seem to be making room in their trenchcoat for YIMBY. Doubling down on the Peskin-style NIMBYism, progressive political consultant Eric Jaye claims that “this is also very much about long-time residents versus new arrivals.” SF progressives remain the party of two things: long-time residents and irony.

My point is not that San Francisco is special. In fact, ALL political coalitions everywhere are made up of their own bespoke hodgepodge of interest groups whose goals are then coded as a cohesive ideology, even when it’s obviously not coherent.

For YIMBYs, this ideological hodgepodgery creates the illusion of choice. But it’s just that, an illusion. Could San Francisco YIMBYs have chosen to join the progressives in 2016? Not without choosing to abandon policy goals.

If you’re doing it right, politicians choose you. A single-issue group can’t choose who will open their trench coats to them. A lot of ideological YIMBYs spend a lot of time telling other YIMBYs that they “should” be in certain coalitions. But we have to let YIMBYs in particular places get into whatever trenchcoat is available to them. It’s not wise to make the movement as a whole adopt a single ideological framing. And it’s not wise to recommend (or judge) across jurisdictions.

Yglesias argues that YIMBYs in cities across America should try get into the moderate trenchcoats, and I get why he has that perspective. But, in my opinion, YIMBYism needs to be deeply trenchcoat-agnostic as our issue of housing abundance becomes ever more popular. Who knows who’s going to come out of the woodwork and come court the YIMBY vote?

Back in 2023, a pundit pointed out this very same thing: “The YIMBY movement annoys a lot of people who are highly engaged with politics because we are living in a time of intense political polarization, and YIMBYism is not aligned with either pole.” I agree with that guy.

1. You can’t be a real progressive if you’re bad on housing, but also you can’t be a real conservative if you’re bad on housing.

2. YIMBYs are naturally on the left says an article in the Atlantic called The Biggest Myth About the YIMBY Movement. But YIMBYs are both right and left, says the New York Times. The National Review says we are conservatives. Reason says we are libertarians. Jacobin says we are leftists (at least “parts” of us are). Planetzen says we are environmentalists, as did San Francisco magazine. We are “woke capitalists,” says somebody on Twitter. We are neo-liberals, says the neo-liberals. Sure.

3. I note with some amusement that they say “The ‘Yes in my Backyard’ pro-housing movement has scored a remarkable string of wins while behaving as a single-issue group,” and then somehow conclude that we should fundamentally change our strategy.

4. Last year, San Francisco voters closed the Great Highway to cars so that it could be used instead as a park. Now the district supervisor — a YIMBY — who supported that measure is facing a recall, which will be before the voters in September. As Politico recently reported, Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, one of the city’s most well-funded moderate groups controlled by moderates, has declined to back Engardio, which is somewhat of a surprise, given that they agree with him on most other issues. They are now joined by GrowSF, who is also declining to oppose the recall.