Harry Zehner analyzes the discourse and politics of the YIMBY-NIMBY divide and argues that socialists should reject this binary entirely.
Read By: Aliyah
Introduction
In June, at the American Institute of Architects Conference, former President Barack Obama named “bipartisan resistance” to local affordable housing development — in his words, “NIMBY attitudes” — as the major roadblock to lowering housing costs across the country. In New York City, mayor Eric Adams recently rolled out his affordable housing blueprint, which one local paper called his attempt to “tear down the NIMBY wall.” In the blueprint, Adams blames a “shortage of housing options” for the constantly rising cost of rent (despite the evidence that there are, for instance, many times more vacant units in New York City than homeless people). In a not so subtle nod to the crowd known as “YIMBYs” (and crucially, to housing mega-developers), Adams recently vowed: “We are going to turn New York into a ‘City of Yes’ — yes in my backyard, yes on my block, yes in my neighborhood.” In the past he’s promised to “roll out the red carpet for developers,” claiming that “what oil is to Texas, real estate is to New York.”
Obama’s comments and Adams’ plans come amidst a wave of renewed attention on the cost of housing in America. In recent months, rents have risen dramatically, particularly in metropolises like New York City. The organization I organize with (Brooklyn Eviction Defense) has received dozens of requests for assistance due to massive rent hikes — which are in most cases tantamount to eviction. Videos and stories are circulating of prospective tenants waiting for hours with dozens of others just to view an apartment. Violent homeless sweeps — ordered by cop mayors like Eric Adams — are devastating unhoused communities. And the media — from the New York Times to Vox to Tucker Carlson (who has accused Democrats of plotting to “abolish the suburbs”) — has increasingly accepted and perpetuated the framing of housing affordability as a battle between YIMBYs (yes-in-my-backyard) and NIMBYs (not-in-my-backyard).
This framing squarely centers attention on housing supply as the driving force of the housing affordability crisis. The focus on housing supply constricts the horizons of our collective imagination. It’s a classic ruling class ideological trick, to position a fundamentally liberal position — like the idea that working within the market to increase housing supply will fix the “housing crisis” — as the left wing horizon of action. Our task as socialists, as tenants and tenant organizers, as popular educators, is to push beyond the bounds of what ruling class politicians and intellectuals deem acceptable and into the socialist horizon: a world where every person has full control of where and how they live.
In so doing we must confront the ideological advances of the ruling class. As the great Stuart Hall constantly reminded us, our struggle is “the struggle to command the common sense of the age in order to educate and transform it, to make common sense, the ordinary everyday thoughts of the majority of the population, move in a socialist rather than a reactionary direction … ” So while crafting our revolutionary horizon, we must also struggle against the myths, ideologies and stories that the ruling class tells.
Unmasking The YIMBYs
The housing supply debate is framed by two groups. On one side there are the YIMBYs, who argue that we should be building more housing in order to alleviate perceived constraints on the supply of housing. Then there are the NIMBYs (a pejorative term crafted by YIMBY activists), who fight against new housing developments, particularly low-income, affordable developments slated to be built in rich, white suburbs.
YIMBYs are generally posed as the left-liberal alternative to the exclusionary politics of NIMBYs, who YIMBYs view as the ultimate barrier to a just and affordable housing market. NIMBYism is strongly linked to residents’ fears that an infusion of racially diverse, low-income residents will disrupt their way of life and perhaps more importantly, lower their property values.
NIMBYism is undoubtedly a real issue. White homeowners in affluent suburbs (and affluent neighborhoods in cities like New York and San Francisco) have long fought against integration with poor, black and brown communities. From reconstruction to the heyday of the civil rights movement to the present day, these suburbanites have organized themselves ferociously against integration. In 2020, the McCloskey’s — the couple who became famous for waving guns at a Black Lives Matter march in the summer of 2020 — embodied this ethos by warning at the 2020 Republican National Convention that the Democratic agenda was “ending single-family home zoning,” in order to “bring crime, lawlessness and low-quality apartments into thriving suburban neighborhoods.”
So the solution, as proposed by the YIMBYs, lies along a very simple binary: more housing = lower rents, less housing = higher rents. This probably makes sense to most people at first glance (it is, after all, the same basic law of supply and demand we are taught as gospel in our high school economics classes). But there is a lot more to this story — especially if, as socialists, we wish to craft a path forward which centers the working-class tenants most affected by the capitalist housing system.
Despite their progressive airs, if we dig deeper, YIMBYs are little more than free market fundamentalists. The logic underlying YIMBYism is a tenth grade economics students’ understanding of supply and demand. In their fantasy, more housing creates more supply which will meet demand and therefore lower prices across the board. Take for instance, this passage from the brain trust at the conservative Manhattan Institute:
New York City’s housing crisis has gone on for so long, it’s easy to forget how straightforwardly it could all be solved. Rapidly rising market rents aren’t a force of nature. When prices rise, we understand that supply hasn’t kept up with demand. When supply fails to catch up to demand over the long term, it often indicates the government’s heavy hand is standing in the way.
In reality, housing markets do not operate according to basic laws of supply and demand. And in persistently focusing our attention on supply and demand (in other words, the market), ruling class intellectuals intentionally obfuscate the true source of the housing crisis: the class structure in which the landlord & developer class systematically exploit the tenant class.
The singular “housing market” is a fiction. It’s more helpful to think of housing as a series of interrelated markets. Increased supply at the top of the market, in luxury housing (which is not coincidentally where developers are most likely to build when given free reign to develop), does little to reduce demand for housing at the bottom of the market, where it is most desperately needed.
The self-sorting of residents into their most optimally priced housing, which would be a precondition for luxury housing to trickle-down to poorer residents, simply does not happen in practice. People do not move very frequently, for a variety of reasons, and empty luxury apartments are almost guaranteed to be used as investment vehicles for the mega-rich instead of sorting downwards to the bottom of the market. Even if we accept that a small number of luxury housing units do eventually filter through to low-income tenants, that process takes years, if not decades. Working class tenants cannot wait that long.
During Mayor De Blasio’s tenure in New York City, despite historically significant levels of funding for “affordable” housing development, the pressing needs at the very low end of the market were not met. While certainly more progressive and less nakedly developer-friendly than his predecessor, Mayor Bloomberg, De Blasio still relied on supply-side theories to support his program. He believed that more development at the top of the market, in luxury and market-rate housing, would create downward pressure on the lower-end of the market. Instead, vacancy rates at the top of the market continued to rise (in large part due to increases in second homes, investment units, Airbnbs and other projects of the uber-rich) while the bottom of the market continued to be squeezed. During his tenure, the overall number of available rental units increased, but it did nothing to alleviate rent pressures on the mass of working class tenants who needed (and still need!) relief.
Recent analyses have demonstrated that the most expensive neighborhoods in New York City are the neighborhoods which have built the most housing in the past decade. Take the borough of Queens, for example. As Andrew Berman writes:
In rapidly gentrifying Queens, which had the sharpest rise in housing prices, two of the most affordable neighborhoods were also the borough’s most extensively landmarked, with little new construction — Jackson Heights and Sunnyside. By contrast, the borough’s highest prices could be found in Hunter’s Point, the section of Long Island City which has among the city’s highest concentration of new housing construction.
These policies and their results are nothing new in New York City. Despite decades of supply-side, developer friendly planning practices, the City’s own planners have admitted that there is no intrinsic correlation between increased supply and lowered housing prices. Amanda Burden, Mayor Bloomberg’s Planning Commissioner, conceded as much towards the end of her stint:
I had believed that if we kept building in that manner and increasing our housing supply … that prices would go down. We had every year almost 30,000 permits for housing, and we built a tremendous amount of housing, including affordable housing, either through incentives or through government funds. And the price of housing didn’t go down at all.
While politicians like Mayor Adams will continue to argue that we should loosen regulations and hand over power to his developer friends in order to alleviate supply issues, it’s a complete fantasy to imagine that profit-motivated developers will build housing for the bottom of the market.
The problem is clearly not of supply, but supply for whom. Let’s be clear: socialists want to build more housing! But we also must understand that YIMBYism ensures that the market will build for the rich and the gentrifiers. We want something else — we want to build beautiful, safe, sustainable housing for the working masses.
YIMBYism as Reaganomics
At its core, YIMBYism is Reaganite trickle-down economics cloaked in progressive rhetoric. Giving developers the power to build whatever they want (read: luxury housing) and praying that those units will eventually support a healthy and affordable low-income housing market is just as fantastical a notion as giving massive tax cuts to corporations and hoping that the benefits will trickle-down to workers.
YIMBYism also mirrors Reaganomics in that it is supported by large capitalists who spy an opportunity in crisis. In California, for instance, groups like California YIMBY have worked hand in hand with Big Tech to advance deregulatory bills like SB 727. Tech giants like Google and Facebook have bankrolled leading proponents of YIMBYism, including the author of SB 727, San Francisco’s state senator Scott Wiener.
YIMBYism is a close sibling to policies like inclusionary zoning, Section 8 vouchers and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, all of which have been advanced as housing solutions by Democratic leaders in rapidly gentrifying cities and are built on the logic that private market subsidies and incentives will produce affordable low-income housing. In reality, all of these policies take power away from the working class communities they are supposedly meant to serve and hand that power to corrupt developers and exploitative landlords.
Inclusionary zoning, for instance, claims to be a progressive force in the housing market. It works by mandating that developers building market-rate housing ensure that a percentage of their units — usually between 5% and 20% — are “affordable.” On its face, it sounds good, just like YIMBYism sounds logical before you scratch the surface. Think about it a bit more, and you realize that inclusionary zoning is a plan to flood the market with at least 4 times the amount of luxury units — which no city needs more of — than affordable units. It is a plan that must create a massive amount of luxury units in areas already being gentrified, all in the supposed interest of creating more affordable neighborhoods. Inclusionary zoning’s implicit logic is that the only way to produce affordable housing is through state subsidies for private development. It is a strategy that further empowers developers within the political economy of the housing market, and completely (and intentionally) ignores the possibility of state-run social housing projects like mass scale low-rent public housing.
These are the kind of contradictions we face when we rely on the market to produce and control housing. The market has never been designed to solve the “housing question.” It is designed to give landlords, (mostly white) homeowners and developers — in other words, the visible manifestations of private property relations — as much latitude as possible to profit off of working class communities. Any exceptions to this trend — like rent control or public housing construction — are the result of working class tenant organizing and responsive crisis management by the state, not liberal democratic progress.
The regressive nature of YIMBYism is most exposed when mostly white, affluent YIMBYs push for developments in poor neighborhoods of color and meet opposition from working class community organizers. In California in 2020, for instance, SB 727, which was designed to free up developers to build more housing, was opposed fiercely by working class communities of color because they feared (correctly!) that it would spur on gentrification in already rapidly gentrifying cities like San Francisco. When YIMBYites gathered in Roxbury, MA, for their “YIMBYtown” conference, they were faced with community organized protests against displacement and gentrification.
The community battles against YIMBY development also highlight the role of the police in urban development politics. As low-income, Black and brown neighborhoods are primed for market rate development, police departments step up their harassment and enforcement of petty crimes. The violent arm of the state — prisons, policing, courts — are always at the vanguard of this displacement. For instance, there is an unarguable connection between the NYPD’s violent sweeps of homeless encampments and the mayor’s plans to pursue an aggressively pro-development agenda. In San Francisco, the birthplace of YIMBYism, policing has been similarly tied to market-rate development projects. As McElroy and Szeto write:
Broken windows theory, an alibi for police crackdowns on petty crime, is central to processes of urban devalorization and revalorization … decreases in “crime” in low-income and POC neighborhoods incentivize migration by high-income and college-educated households. Thus, by ridding areas of “criminal activity,” they become more marketable. By analyzing EDC and San Francisco police data, the AEMP (Anti-Eviction Mapping Project) has found that neighborhoods experiencing the highest rates of eviction now are the same ones in which “Quality of Life” infractions have been issued over the last decade.
The police are tasked with clearing out and invisibilizing undesirable populations before luxury developers move in. Within the contours of racial capitalism, private property must necessarily be protected and expanded by the legalized (and legitimized) violence of the state.
These battles between working class community organizers and YIMBYites flip the imagined binary of progressive YIMBYism and conservative NIMBYism on its head. This is the kind of contradiction we should embrace and explore, dialectically, as it will lead us to the socialist answer.
YIMBYism as Ideology
Framing YIMBYism and NIMBYism as two dueling sides of the housing discussion, as the left and right of housing discourse, forecloses the horizons of a socialist housing movement. This framing is Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism in action, the “pervasive atmosphere” of late capitalist ideology which tells us the two alternatives are capitalism or more capitalism.
As a brief exercise, take this 2021 article, titled “How a senator’s vampire politics hurt real estate — and NYC: Socialist Jabari Brisport fuels myth that new housing pushes up rents.” Published in The Real Deal, a popular New York City real estate paper, the author argues against state senator Brisport’s opposition to a new (80% market rate) development in his district. Brisport objected to the development on the grounds that market rate development was “bleeding out black folks from the community.” The author argues to the contrary, writing that Brisport’s “opposition is counterproductive to the goal of lowering housing costs because it rallies opposition to the primary solution, which is more housing.” The author goes on to cite a number of studies to “prove” his point (which can be disputed in their own right by other studies, like this and this, and by other research cited throughout this piece) — but critically, he never broadens the horizon of the discussion beyond the two options that he acknowledges. Those two options are:
- a) A private developer builds a large, 80% market rate development
- b) Nothing gets built due to “misguided activists” like Brisport
This is the fundamental rhetorical strategy of the YIMBYs. Nowhere in the article does the author mention the possibility of a third option, something like:
- c) The state builds permanently de-commodified, resident-controlled housing for the existing residents of the neighborhood
The idea of a housing system not structured by market forces cannot be allowed to enter the discussion, because in doing so it would open the possibility of analyzing the contradiction which is unquestionably central to the “housing crisis”: the structural exploitation of tenants by landlords.
Despite what YIMBYs and liberals would like you to believe, YIMBYism and NIMBYism are not dueling ideologies positioned on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Rather, they are two ideologies which fundamentally believe in capitalism — two ideologies which embrace what Fisher calls a “free market business ontology.” They both believe that housing should be maintained as a commodity, that homes should be bought, sold and built by speculative investors, and that rents should go up and down according to landlords’ whims. NIMBYs are just more naked about protecting their own interests.
We Fight For Working Class Control
A socialist housing movement needs to reject both YIMBYism and NIMBYism and embrace a rhetoric and practice which values working class community control over housing development at any cost. The “housing question” is fundamentally a question of class struggle, between tenants and the developer-landlord-homeowner class. A struggle for power — who holds it and over what — must be emphasized over the struggle for housing supply.
Gentrification, unaffordability, unsafe housing — these are issues of power, control and class struggle. Developers, landlords, mega-financial institutions (like BlackRock, the trillion dollar hedge fund which is the world’s largest landlord) and bought-off politicians are currently in control of housing, from the point of production to the point of consumption. They target neighborhoods for gentrification through upzonings and coordinated rent hikes, while working class tenants suffer through displacement.
As socialists, we must fight not just for more and better housing (which is often needed!) but for community-controlled, permanently decommodified housing. Reforms like rent control are also worth fighting for, as they do marginally defang the vampiric forces of gentrification. Private property must be challenged head on as the exclusionary and racist apparatus that it is. Forged as a concept in the long (and ongoing!) processes of settler-colonization, indigenous genocide and chattel slavery, private property is at its core a legalized tool of class oppression.
Our demands should ultimately be for the abolition of private property, rent and tenancy (my understanding of a tenant, as shaped by the organization I organize with, Brooklyn Eviction Defense, is anyone that does not control their housing or anyone else’s housing).
Nascent movements like PHIMBY (Public Housing in My Backyard) have emerged to challenge the free market determinism of YIMBYism from the left. In fact, PHIMBY first emerged in 2020 in opposition to California’s SB 727, the same bill mentioned earlier in this article as a flashpoint of activism against YIMBYism in California. We should embrace these calls for more public housing as an important demand of the communist tenant movement.
Our task is, as always, to organize a mass tenant movement. Without a mass movement of tenants — organized militantly into tenant unions, block councils and citywide formations — we are toothless. We are nothing without organization. As always, it is critical that we take on this task with sharp and coherent ideological fundamentals. The YIMBY-NIMBY binary must be rejected, and with it the understanding that housing problems begin and end within the market. In a practical sense, this means we should focus our organizing energies on levers of control — like preventing evictions and building strong tenant associations.
The central contradiction in the housing market is the class structure: landlords over tenants, developers over neighborhoods, and so on. We can keep squabbling about supply and demand, but until we wrestle power away from the developers, landlords, financial institutions and politicians — until the tenants take control of our housing and in so doing, abolish the category of tenancy altogether — the exploitative dynamics undergirding the housing market will maintain intact.
