The YIMBY movement could be on its way out

The YIMBY, or Yes in My Backyard movement, has been steadily growing based on a simple principle: to solve the housing crisis, simply build more affordable houses. But while the YIMBY train of thought has been making waves in many areas, particularly in cities with high levels of homelessness like San Francisco, some economists think the movement has outgrown its lifespan. Others think it has more to give.

‘Supply and demand will lower prices for everyone’

The basic idea behind YIMBYism is that houses should be built in “dense, transit-accessible neighborhoods,” and eventually the “laws of supply and demand will lower prices for everyone,” said Julie Z. Weil at The Washington Post. But the concept does not just apply to lower-income houses. Some YIMBYs believe that “even the construction of high-priced luxury housing will improve housing affordability” because the people who live in these upscale buildings will “no longer be competing for another apartment that will become available for a lower-income renter.”

The YIMBY model has worked in places like New Haven, Connecticut, a “mostly poor, majority-minority, post-industrial city whose population is a double-digit percentage below its midcentury peak,” said Henry Grabar at Slate. Any type of housing reform that works in New Haven and “in San Francisco has got to be good — but also a kind of lowest common denominator in the complex politics of the city.”

These models have largely worked because YIMBYs “are united around a coherent goal, even if they differ in the details,” said Grabar. Many also feel YIMBYism doesn’t go far enough. After “neighborhood and small business groups sued San Francisco over a housing plan they said went too far, a coalition of housing activists is filing their own suit, arguing the city’s plan doesn’t go far enough,” said Adhiti Bandlamudi at KQED-TV San Francisco.

‘Brutal political realities’

Others view the YIMBY movement as an unrealistic and unmanageable goal for the modern U.S. housing market. There are some “brutal political realities that the YIMBY movement has to contend with,” said Greg Rosalsky at NPR. Despite many millennials and Gen Zers being stuck in a renter’s economy, about “66% of American households own their homes.” People who own homes are “more likely to be civically engaged,” which some argue works against YIMBYism.

America’s “land use regulations have created processes that empower small and privileged groups of neighbors to stop and delay new housing development,” Katherine Levine Einstein, a political scientist at Boston University, told NPR. The homeowners who “participate in the crucial local political and regulatory meetings that govern new housing supply” are “way more likely to be older” and “much more likely to oppose development” of new houses.

Others argue that deregulation won’t incentivize builders to put up more homes. “If I get richer in a city, I’m not going to demand more units of housing,” Schuyler Louie, the author of a paper on YIMBYism for the National Bureau of Economic Research, said to the Post. “I’m going to demand a nicer house, which is going to increase the price without actually increasing the demand for units.” This “uneven demand growth,” said a research paper from UC Berkeley, UCLA and the University of Toronto, is the “primary driver of declining affordability in recent decades.”