What does “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) really mean?

In 1991, San Francisco resident and community organizer Richard Allman wrote a letter to the editor of the New Bernal Journal. The opening line reads: “I’m a YIMBY. That means I say ‘yes in my back yard’ when it comes to building more affordable housing or having a wider range of people able to live in my home neighborhood.” 

More than three decades later, the YIMBY movement has grown considerably, but kept pretty much that exact same goal. Today, most YIMBY activism surrounds lowering the price of housing in cities by building a lot more of it. On a macro level, YIMBYism is about creating dense, thriving urban areas where a larger tax base supports walkable commercial areas, green spaces, and better public services like transit and school systems. 

YIMBYs grew as an opposing force to their NIMBY counterparts. (The N stands for “Not,” if you needed a hint.) The architect and urbanist Steve Mouzon writes that the origins of the NIMBY movement can be found in the historic preservation movement, which emerged as a reaction to widespread urban redevelopment that was poorly conceived, poorly executed, or both. Throughout the middle of the twentieth century, American cities found themselves devastated as communities were demolished to make way for large redevelopment projects and highways under the guise of “urban renewal.”  To combat this trend, historic preservation groups formed to preserve the scale and civic fabric of neighborhoods in the face of such projects.

Over time, less virtuous threads emerged in this movement, including activists dedicated to protecting “neighborhood character” at all costs. In this movement, the preservation of resources would be weaponized for the preservation of property values. The invocation of threats like construction, traffic, crime, and noise would be used to maintain the status quo at all costs — even if it meant halting the repair of the damage that spurred the movement to begin with.

NIMBY proponents became regular fixtures in forums of local government, working to block zoning changes and new development in city neighborhoods across the United States. And they quickly grew to be a powerful political force, since the American legal system is structured to prioritize the rights and desires of property owners.

The inevitable consequence of such a philosophy is exclusivity — a community that struggles to accept newcomers, in both logistical and cultural terms. When homeowners invoke the preservation of neighborhood character, for example, they’re often employing a euphemism for keeping out low-income families or families of color. 

But another consequence has been, quite simply, that the number of new homes built in urban neighborhoods has been disastrously outpaced by the number of people who want to live in them. Following the end of the 2008 global recession, as property values shot back up from the housing market crash, a new crisis was brewing. Young professionals moving to booming cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin wanted to buy homes and establish themselves, but found themselves stymied by few and unaffordable options. Lifelong residents of these same cities were being pushed out into the suburbs and further, unable to afford property and rising rents.

Members of both of these contingents came to the conclusion that the root of their shared problems was a matter of supply. But building a lot more housing in cities — and soon — wouldn’t be possible without lobbying state and local governments to chip away at all of the obstacles in land use, permitting processes, and city planning charters that the NIMBY movement worked to erect. 

And lo: The YIMBYs. For the most part, American cities are dominated by large swathes of single-family zoning, which translates to a huge amount of underutilized land. The journalist Matt Yglesias, who has covered the YIMBY movement for over a decade, has illustrated how policies that keep housing scarce across valuable city land “destroy[s] an incredible amount of economic value” — and that affects existing homeowners as much as it does those who want to buy homes. He writes:

“The real issue is that the upsides to housing growth accrue across a city, a metro area, or even a state, while the nuisances of new construction (parking scarcity, traffic, aesthetic change) are incredibly local. So if you ask a very small area “do you want more housing or less?” a lot of people will say that they think the local harms exceed the local benefits, and the division will basically come down to aesthetic preference for more or less density. But if you ask a large area “do you want more housing or less?” the very same people with all the same values and ideas may come up with a different answer because they internalize a much larger share of the benefits.”

But beyond the economic benefits of density, YIMBY activists have appealed to the very relatable desire to be able to put down permanent roots in the community in which one has built a life. To that end, in the past couple of years the YIMBY movement has expanded far beyond its origins in blue coastal cities. In deep-red Montana and Idaho, a huge influx of new residents during the remote work boom of the COVID pandemic has pushed property prices to unsustainable levels, and conservative-led legislatures are adopting more pro-housing measures. GOP presidential candidate Vivek Rameswamy even addressed the need for land use reform to increase housing during this week’s Republican debate. 

YIMBYism is still young, and there’s a great deal of progress yet to be made before housing becomes truly affordable for most Americans. But as a movement with a potentially massive, bipartisan support base — who doesn’t want to be able to buy a home, after all — it’s bound to grow.