The Rise of the YIMBYs

Top Stories of the Year: #4

Young urban liberals for, um, deregulation?

This week, I’m counting down the top stories of 2024, as covered in The Tracinski Letter.

At #5 was the increasingly urgent question of what replaces religious belief in an increasingly secular society. At #4 is something more directly and concretely political, and one of the few good trends that emerged this year: the rise of the YIMBYs.

Most of my readers are familiar with the YIMBY acronym by now, but here’s a quick refresher just in case. NIMBY, with an N, is an old acronym for Not in My Back Yard, which identifies the kind of person who will rise up to oppose any new construction or development because they want their immediate environment to remain exactly the same by imposing stasis on everyone around them. In practice, this tends toward BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone. It is the one form of conservatism that is universal and crosses party lines. (That, and the idea that nobody should dare to touch any part of the welfare state that you personally benefit from.)

The challenge of this sort of movement is that it is easy for NIMBY movements to get angry people to organize against any new project—while the average person who would benefit from the project does not organize or show up for local planning meetings or possibly even know that the debate is happening.

But in the past ten years, a new YIMBY movement has risen up to counteract this. YIMBY stands for Yes in My Back Yard, and it was initially propelled by young people in urban areas who realized that the NIMBYs were making it hard for them to find an affordable place to live and nearly impossible for them ever to own a home. So this movement, too, has crossed the usual partisan lines, attracting young urban center-left types along with pro-free-marketers and classical liberals.

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The Supply Side Progressive Candidate

This year, the YIMBY movement achieved the milestone of having their cause adopted, partially and tentatively, by a major presidential candidate.

It was not the winning candidate. If it had been, this story would have been #2 in my countdown. But it is still a step forward, because the measure of success for a reform movement is that politicians start to feel the need to appease it.

As part of her campaign platform, Kamala Harris announced a push to relieve the housing shortage by setting the goal of building three million new homes. The actual proposal was a bit of a jumble, and here’s how I reviewed it.

Here is the key passage, taken a bit at a time.

There’s a serious housing shortage in many places. It’s too difficult to build, and it’s driving prices up.

As president, I will work in partnership with industry to build the housing we need, both to rent and to buy. We will take down barriers and cut red tape, including at the state and local levels. And by the end of my first term, we will end America’s housing shortage by building 3 million new homes and rentals that are affordable for the middle class, and we will do that together.

This is very good. It recognizes that the problem with housing is, to borrow a phrase, on the supply side. We are suffering from a housing famine. And it talks about taking down “barriers…at the state and local levels,” an almost-but-not-quite-explicit reference to zoning laws that limit construction….

Harris’s proposal apparently includes “a $40 billion innovation fund” to “empower”—i.e., bribe—“local governments to fund and support local solutions to build housing.” Maybe it will work, and a Democratic president exerting pressure on the blue states might accomplish something.

But then Harris follows with this.

And we will make sure those homes actually go to working- and middle-class Americans, not just investors…. Some corporate landlords collude with each other to set artificially high rental prices, often using algorithms and price-fixing software to do it. It’s anticompetitive, and it drives up costs. I will fight for a law that cracks down on these practices.

Rising rents and housing prices, like grocery prices, are an effect, not a cause. Rents are not going up because speculators are buying homes. Speculators are buying homes because rents are going up. This section of the speech is a relapse from the previous one. Harris briefly expressed a supply-side perspective—then lost sight of it.

This insistence that we’re going to build new homes, but not if icky corporations profit from it, is reminiscent of the contradiction of the “Supply Side Progressives,” who want America to build and grow but prefer only Big Government initiatives as the way to do it.

Since Harris lost, the details of her own proposals are no longer relevant, but the YIMBY movement lives on.

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The YIMBY Caucus

There is now officially a YIMBY Caucus in Congress.

House members aligned with the YIMBY—or Yes in My Backyard—movement are launching a first-of-its-kind, bipartisan caucus to help advance their case that America’s housing shortage is largely due to local regulations that make it too difficult to build new homes.

Led by California Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, the YIMBY Caucus is set to launch today with 25 members who agree on one key concept: that the solution to America’s affordable housing problem is to accelerate production.

Read this interview with Rep. Garcia, where he explains how Democrats and Republicans in the caucus get along on this issue:

Obviously, we have different ideas about policy and some bigger debates. But, in this caucus, we all agree that there is a housing crisis. We also agree that, oftentimes, housing policy is overregulated. And I think both sides understand that. For us, as Democrats or progressives, we understand that being a YIMBY is about jobs, growth. It’s also about deregulation. A lot of Republicans would say the same thing.

My impressions in that YIMBYism has gone from a small fringe movement to become part of the mainstream of the center-left. For the immediate future, though, most of what happens on this issue is going to happen on the state and local level.

The impetus for that is growing, and it is fueled by a political necessity that Democrats are just now waking up to. One of the direct effects of NIMBYism is that has been driving people out of the “blue states” that vote for Democrats and essentially paying them to move to Republican-dominated “red states,” thereby increasing the political power of those states.

Those voters do not necessarily move to the right in their own views, and they often live in urban enclaves where their immediate neighbors share their outlook on most things. (The big geographic divide in American politics right now is urban versus rural.) But they are a political minority in their new states, so they end up adding to the its representation in Congress and in the Electoral College without moving it substantially to the left.

I’m already seeing articles like this one sounding the alarm: “California, Oregon and New York are just five years away from losing 10 congressional seats and electoral college votes to Republican states.”

It’s not a quirky local issue anymore. The housing crisis in Blue State America warrants intervention by state and national-level Democrats because their pitiful housing production will cost the Democrats the Congress and the Electoral College.

Congressional seats are appointed to each state per decennial Census as a national percentage share of 435 seats. For example, after Census 2020 was counted, California represented 12% of the national population so California has 52 representatives in Congress. The Electoral College allocates points off the number of congresspeople a state has, plus two more electoral votes for each state. California for decades has had the largest share of Congressional representation and Electoral Votes.

But at this projected rate of population growth, California will be passed by Texas in twenty years. More immediately, Democrats are likely to be damaged by California, Oregon and New York’s decline in power in the 2032 presidential election.

So Democrats and the left now have a very clear political incentive to solve this problem—if they can manage to overcome some of their old anti-business, anti-development prejudices. And I am not at all sure they can do that.

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Mind Your Own Damn Business

This year’s election did bring out another small but promising thread in Democratic Party politics: Democrats have begun to make an attempt to steal the theme of “freedom” from the Republicans, who have dropped it.

Vice-president candidate Tim Walz, who was a disappointment in other respects, led off this theme.

The best thing to come out of Walz’s part of the campaign, so far, is this statement of old-fashioned cultural liberalism.

Some of us in here are old enough to remember…when it was Republicans who were talking about freedom. It turns out now what they meant was the government should be free to invade your doctor's office in Minnesota. We respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make, even if we wouldn't make the same choice for ourselves. There's a golden rule: Mind your own damn business…. When vice president [Harris] and I talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make your own health care decisions.

It would be nice, of course, if they applied this “golden rule” of “mind your own damn business” to other issues, too. But don’t expect it.

By the convention, this became literally the Democrats’ top priority.

I found out in my research that this was actually designated in one party meeting as “Message Imperative #1.” Here’s the report in Mother Jones.

On Tuesday afternoon, in one of the convention’s massive conference rooms, a couple dozen delegates attended a training session on how to most effectively speak to voters about abortion and reproductive health. “We are reclaiming the word freedom and we are running on freedom,” Gabby Richards, Planned Parenthood’s director of federal advocacy communications, explained to the crowd. A slide displayed on two large screens read: “Message Imperative #1: Focus on Freedom.”

I also combed through the transcript of the September 11 presidential debate and found an interesting pattern. Kamala Harris used the word “freedom” four times, in two very prominent passages. By contrast, how many times did Trump use “freedom”? Zero—and this is typical of his speeches. It’s a shocking reversal from the past 50 years, when Republicans from Ronald Reagan through the Tea Party movement practically trademarked the word.

I noted the problems with this approach.

After a decade or so of letting themselves be defined by the censorious “woke” left that wants to micromanage everything you say, Democrats are attempting a return to old-fashioned 20th Century left-liberalism. It’s the liberalism that will defend your freedom “to live the life you want to lead”—in those areas that pertain to your personal life, your lifestyle, and especially your sex life. You will be free to read the books you like, to get married to someone of the same sex, to get an abortion, and so on.

But the freedom is limited to those issues. In your economic life, you’re going to be told what to do an awful lot, particularly if you are producer of goods and services, rather than a consumer. That, again, is a part of the old “liberal” creed, which Ayn Rand memorably describes as the view of man as “a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.” Quite literally to buy a loaf of bread, if it is deemed to be “price-gouging.”

But I also noted how Republicans have been pushing Democrats in this direction.

This is what happens when the Republicans, under the influence of an illiberal nationalist movement, become increasingly hostile to freedom and individual rights and increasingly willing to infringe upon freedom in their chosen realm. (“The conservatives,” Ayn Rand wrote, “see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington.”) The Democrats have sensed the opportunity and decided to take up the banner of freedom—but in the way they are comfortable with, limiting freedom to one realm and denying it in the other.

Harris and Walz did not win, so one of the things to look for is whether Democrats continue on this path or conclude that it failed and abandon it. My nightmare is that they decide that the American people want unhinged populism and deliver their own version of it. Right now, having been (very narrowly) denied the mandate of the vox populi, Democrats are in a period of despair, confusion, and in some cases pre-emptive surrender, so there is no way to tell what direction the party will go once they have to confront Trump in office.

And look, I don’t have any great hopes for the Democrats. But it would be very good if we found somebody in politics who is willing to stand up for some aspect of freedom. Here’s how I put it:

Freedom has two main aspects: personal and economic. To have one party advocating one of these freedoms is better than having no party advocating either, which is where we’ve been heading in recent decades.

That is a preview of some of the items higher up on my list this year’s top stories—and it’s the main story I’ll be tracking in the new year.

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