The Current State of the YIMBY Movement: 3 Takeaways from YIMBYTown 2024

People gather at the YIMBYTown conference in Austin, TX.

For the first time this year, I attended the YIMBYTown conference, the annual gathering of the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement. The event was in its sixth year in 2024, and it has been held in six different cities. This year’s was in Austin, Texas. It seemed a good time to see what the fuss is about. (And is there ever a bad year to hang out in Texas in February and eat some breakfast tacos?)

After all, Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn and I have a book on housing coming out this spring, one which devotes an entire chapter to YIMBY. Attending was a chance for me to deepen my own connections with some of the people working hardest to make it easier to build badly needed homes in this country. And not just more homes, but a range of homes more in tune with local needs and budgets, as well as the kinds of neighborhoods that are intrinsically welcoming, where it can be understood that each new arrival makes the party better, not worse.

Full disclosure: I consider myself a YIMBY. To be clear, YIMBY is not the same as Strong Towns, and I don’t think you have to be fully on board with one movement in order to align with the other. They have different starting points and different (if entirely compatible) ultimate goals. But I enthusiastically align with both labels, and I know there’s a lot of such overlap among our readers and members.

YIMBY is a big tent, and naturally I don’t endorse every policy prescription that every YIMBY organization or prominent advocate endorses. But the basic effort to reform local planning and governance to inculcate an ethos of “Yes” is, I think, hugely important. This includes for the Strong Towns vision of communities able to grow and change and strengthen over time, where bottom-up action to invest in a place is encouraged and easy to take. For this vision to manifest, it has to be possible to build new things in old places. We have to make saying “Yes” to incremental development into the default.

Here are three takeaways from two and a half days spent at YIMBYTown 2024:

1. YIMBY Is Winning

The modern YIMBY movement is roughly a decade old. (I won’t try to claim nobody thought of “Yes in My Backyard” before that, but the wave of organized pro-housing groups that use the label today clearly began in the 2010s.) For such a young movement, its momentum is absolutely astonishing.

Kirk Watson, the mayor of Austin, kicked off the conference with a full-throated endorsement not just of YIMBY, but of a very urbanist vision of the city’s future, including mass transit and a growing, lively, cosmopolitan core. This is the same city whose leaders voted down a comprehensive reform of its very suburban-style zoning code (reserving most of the city for low-rise, detached home development) as recently as 2018. Since then, the booming Texas capital and 10th-largest U.S. city has elected a pro-housing council and undertaken a host of significant reforms, including abolishing all parking mandates in 2023, allowing up to three units of housing per residential lot, reducing minimum lot sizes, and allowing taller and denser buildings along major transportation corridors.

Mayor Watson wasn’t the biggest political name in attendance, either. Keynote sessions were delivered by Montana Governor Greg Gianforte (Montana passed statewide zoning reform in 2023) and former HUD Secretary Julian Castro. Notably, YIMBY’s appeal continues to span partisan and ideological divides: Gianforte is a Republican, while Watson and Castro are Democrats.

The overall vibe at YIMBYTown was that of a confident movement that doesn’t need to be shy about its vision or restrained in its demands. Americans understand that the prevailing housing paradigm—one of a monoculture of development styles built top down in only a few places, while most neighborhoods are not allowed to evolve or welcome new residents—is broken. And its brokenness affects everything.

2. YIMBY Is Growing Up

If you’re mostly familiar with YIMBY from social media, you may perceive the movement as a bunch of loud, even arrogant, hyper-online activists, good at packing a public hearing to support a new apartment building but maybe not so good at the delicate work of coalition-building and winning policy change. Attending YIMBYTown makes it clear that that vision is firmly outdated.

The dominant focus of YIMBYTown was policy advocacy, and the attendees ranged from volunteer organizers and activists to lobbyists, attorneys, city and regional planners, legislative staff, and legislators, themselves. YIMBY advocacy has grown increasingly sophisticated in terms of lobbying, coalition building, and targeted messaging. If you wanted to go deep into the weeds of state housing law in Washington, parking benefit districts and curb management in Austin, or get training on better coalition-building with organized labor, climate, or tenant groups, there was a session for you.

Local YIMBY successes have provided a laboratory of policy experiments, and there was a large think-tank presence at YIMBYTown, reflecting the increasing role of these organizations in helping to distill the lessons from around the country and inform what is attempted elsewhere. The Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute has continued to roll out analysis and mapping tools for quantifying the potential of “light-touch density” (read: incremental development in existing neighborhoods) and walkable development to meet a community’s housing needs in a financially sound way. California YIMBY is even launching its own think-tank, the Metropolitan Abundance Project, to research and disseminate best practices for housing policy.

Indeed, one of the big purposes of a conference like this is to foster the cross-pollination of ideas, so that, for example, people working for missing-middle housing in Texas, Minnesota, or Massachusetts can learn from what has worked in Spokane, Washington, or Auckland, New Zealand. Or what has failed in early attempts at comprehensive zoning reform, and why.

I also saw serious conversations happening about diversity and equity within the YIMBY movement. The crowd was still heavily white, male, and young—a criticism that could be applied to nearly every urbanism-adjacent movement. But creating a big tent, inclusive of the voices and priorities of Americans across race and class lines, was clearly on the minds of many attendees.

I saw a movement that made space for internal differences of opinion. A speaker from AirBnB, in a panel on managing short-term rentals, was met with a mix of tough questioning and support during Q&A. There were some tense exchanges about rent control. Any large movement is going to need to be able to hash out these issues in productive ways, and not prescribe one approach from the top down for advocates working in very different communities and contexts.

3. The Biggest Omission

YIMBY’s greatest weakness as a movement is a hyper focus on policy change, usually in the realm of zoning and land-use regulation. It makes sense: zoning is an obvious barrier to the production of housing in high-cost places, and it’s one that’s easy for grassroots activists to understand and to get to work on. But at times, I got a sense that those working in the weeds of zoning reform might be missing the broader picture of what else has to happen to secure a YIMBY future.

At some point, YIMBY is going to be successful enough as a movement to legalize housing that it will need to pivot to being a movement to give communities the capacity to build housing. This means a lot more than zoning change. It means understanding the barriers to development, especially incremental development within the existing neighborhoods, close to job centers and urban amenities, where housing is most needed. These barriers include:

  • The availability of financing.

  • The effect of interest rates and market cycles on housing starts.

  • The availability of skilled labor necessary for construction.

  • The presence in the community of developers with the necessary resources, skill sets, and motivation to build.

I didn’t see zero discussion of any of those topics, but I saw less breadth and depth than I wanted.

An ironic observation: YIMBYs are almost constantly derided in their communities as “developer shills.” Yet the perspective most strikingly scarce at YIMBYTown was that of the people who actually develop and build housing.

I heard from a couple longtime YIMBY advocates that developers are hesitant to be deeply involved with the movement or to sponsor YIMBY organizations or events. That tracks, honestly. Small-scale developers don’t have the money or time to give. And large-scale developers are often precisely those entities that have found a comfortable and viable niche in the policy status quo and are not deeply invested in change.

At the same time, the biggest developer YIMBYs I know are small-scale and incremental developers, because they are the ones getting absolutely pummeled by policies like parking mandates and discretionary review. They are staunch advocates of reforms that will allow them to do what they do. They just aren’t the loudest voices within a movement that, sometimes, can feel like a bunch of people who came up as grassroots activists listening mostly to each other.

I attended a YIMBYTown session on supporting small-scale developers that was kind of a strange object lesson in missing the point. I don’t mean that as an attack on the organizers of the session, who had a lot of valuable knowledge to share: it’s just that that knowledge seemed really skewed toward the advocacy side of things—how to show up in support of housing.

When I talk to actual small infill developers, they rarely mention more grassroots advocacy for their projects as a critical need. They need regulatory tripwires out of the way. They need as-of-right permitting. They need flexible sources of capital, that don’t require them to put their families’ solvency on the line. They need connections, a network of people who know how to do what they do.

YIMBY, Strong Towns, and CNU Should Talk More

This May, the Strong Towns National Gathering and the annual Congress For the New Urbanism will be held back-to-back in Cincinnati, Ohio. I strongly encourage committed YIMBYs to attend the Gathering and CNU. I think there’s a lot of useful cross-pollination that could occur between these movements.

CNU is not a movement that began with activists. It began with developers and architects. The goal, always, was to build. And specifically, to build the kinds of beloved places that America’s planning status quo has made needlessly scarce and expensive.

There’s a lot of online squabbling between YIMBY true believers and New Urbanist true believers, often because they have different core priorities and assumptions. (Seth Zeren’s Substack column “When New Urbanists and YIMBYs Fight” is a great look into how and why this plays out in unnecessary conflict.) Is your goal to secure abundant housing, and building resilient, beautiful communities is a means to that end? Or is your goal to build resilient, beautiful communities, and abundant housing will be a side effect?

The reality is that these are two missions that are closely aligned, and probably in agreement on 80% to 90% of the required policy agenda. A lot of good can come from more intellectual exchange—including, I dare say, a YIMBYism that is even more effective at getting homes built.

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Daniel Herriges
Daniel Herriges

Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.

Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.

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