The Only Force Stronger Than Polarization? Rising Home Prices

For days before his State of the Union address last week, there were whispers that Joe Biden would make a major push to expand the nation’s housing supply—a possibility that worried the yes-in-my-backyard activists who push for more construction in communities across the country. Political polarization in the United States has grown so dire that getting the president on your side can backfire. The morning of the speech, the White House rolled out some modest proposals, but fortunately for the activists, Biden himself offered only brief, mild comments on the subject, which were inevitably overwhelmed by commentary on more contentious issues.

“Many YIMBYs breathed a sigh of relief that Biden didn’t polarize the issue,” Brian Hanlon, the CEO of the advocacy group California YIMBY, told me, referencing political-science research indicating that if a president takes a strong, public stand on an issue, people from the other party are less likely to back it.

A lot of causes—including immigration reform, vaccination, Ukraine funding, and most recently in vitro fertilization—have supporters across the ideological spectrum but nevertheless have become mired in red-blue polarization, blocking what could be bipartisan legislation to address major issues facing Americans. In Congress, lawmakers regularly work together across the aisle, but on one condition: The issue in question can’t be too politically salient—that is, the type of issue that voters really care about. This is why Congress can pass laws about subsidizing semiconductors but not laws addressing immigration.

For groups that want to get their priorities enacted, the question is how to gain enough attention without getting caught up in the polarization vortex. And no movement is walking this tightrope more precariously than the YIMBYs—who typically favor easing restrictions on housing development.

Their movement was born in San Francisco, a city where the last Republican elected official left office in 2014 after serving on the Bay Area Rapid Transit Board of Directors. But as the housing-affordability crisis spread to cities and states across the nation, so too has the network of activists, lawyers, elected officials, and policy wonks. That movement has now taken root not just in liberal enclaves such as San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, but also in Salt Lake City and Whitefish, Montana.

Over time, YIMBY tactics have shifted from lobbying city councils and town zoning boards one by one to pushing governors and legislatures to ease zoning rules and other housing-supply constraints across entire states. Henry Honorof, the director of a loose national coalition of pro-housing groups, told me that no state has passed pro-housing legislation without bipartisan support. Even in solidly blue California, Democratic YIMBYs need Republican converts. Helpfully, making housing more affordable appeals to equity-minded leftists, while deregulating the private market appeals to property-rights-loving conservatives.

The greatest fear of many pro-housing advocates is that their issue will be caught in the cross fire of the presidential election. It has happened before.

In 2020, then-President Donald Trump tried to activate NIMBYism in the electorate. In an August 2020 Wall Street Journal op-ed co-authored with his secretary of housing and urban development, Trump warned that the “left wants to take [the] American dream away from you” by pushing for “high-density housing.” He escalated these attacks on Twitter, on the campaign trail, and even, obliquely, on the debate stage. Yet Republicans and Democrats did not sort themselves into NIMBY and YIMBY camps, at least in part because news outlets and voters were so focused on COVID-19 that housing policy got little attention.

[Jessica Trounstine: What Trump misunderstands about suburban voters]

Over the past four years, as the affordability crisis has worsened, the YIMBYs have gained ground. In conservative Montana, an anti-California message spurred lawmakers into passing pro-development bills; in Washington State, ambitious proposals were passed in the name of affordability and racial equity. But members face pressure on both sides to abandon ship. How long can they hold on?

One reason the YIMBY movement has remained bipartisan is that it’s decentralized. But the gang gets together periodically for a national conference amusingly called “YIMBYtown”—the rare place where you might find socialists, centrist economists, and Trump-supporting elected officials all in the same room, working toward the same goal. But when I attended this year’s event, in Austin, Texas, some cracks in the coalition were showing.

The most explosive moment came at a panel about housing affordability in Texas. On stage was Brennan Griffin, an official at the progressive nonprofit Texas Appleseed. He was flanked by conservatives: On one side sat Judge Glock, a director at the conservative Manhattan Institute who has called for clearing homeless encampments; on the other was Cody Vasut, a Republican state representative who also works as the director of litigation at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Early in the panel, the heckling started: “Why should we believe that any of these people in here care about affordable housing in Austin?” a protester named Cynthia Vasquez asked. She and a handful of others started walking through the event room, handing out flyers that accused the moderator and one of the panelists of “criminalizing unhoused people” and faulted four local progressive city-council members for associating with conservatives. They were met with some derision as mumbles of “Oh, boy” and “There you go” filtered through the room.

[Reihan Salam: Why YIMBY righteousness backfires]

When I spoke with the protesters, they cited concerns that included rising property taxes for low-income homeowners if development pressure increased in East Austin and the lack of affordable-housing mandates in the recent upzoning proposals supported by local YIMBYs. But they were also clearly galled by the mere fact that the conference was claiming to work on housing affordability while joining with conservatives.

The protesters themselves would certainly not consider themselves YIMBYs, but a handful of conference participants were visibly affected by their display. Just as Trump in 2020 was threatening the coalition from the right, the protest in Austin pointed to perhaps the greater threat: The coalition could fall apart starting from the left. During the question-and-answer period that followed the protest, one audience member asked panelists to discuss the concerns about displacement that low-income residents of many communities express. “The people who are screaming and hollering, they’ve got real fears,” Denzel Burnside, the executive director of the North Carolina advocacy group WakeUP Wake County, said—to applause from much of the crowd.

After the conference, Dan Reed, the regional policy director for the D.C. urbanist group Greater Greater Washington, published a brief blog post expressing misgivings about the prominent role played by Montana’s Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, and urging fellow housing advocates to do better. Even as YIMBYs were notching up wins in Montana, Reed noted, state lawmakers expelled a trans colleague from the floor. By highlighting conservatives such as Gianforte, Reed argued, the movement “feeds the perception” that it’s for “white libertarian bros.”

And yet, when I talked with Burnside immediately after the disrupted panel, he expressed no misgivings about joining with conservatives on housing policy. “I’m in the South, red state,” he said. “This can be a bipartisan issue.” For a former minister who has worked to enact progressive policy change in conservative states, compromise is a way of life. “I’m always trying to find the ecumenical, theological, philosophical position of welcoming the neighbor,” Burnside explained. “Even if that neighbor does not look like me. Even if that neighbor doesn’t think like I think … I got my patch, you got your patch, but in order for us to become a whole carpet we gotta find some places that we weave in the middle.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: Colorado’s ingenious idea for solving the housing crisis]

One thing that helps bind an ideologically diverse pro-housing movement is that everyone in a community suffers when housing prices soar. Checking Zillow is a nonpartisan activity. The other thing keeping the coalition together is that, well, it’s barely a coalition at all. YIMBYs work in the context of their own states and cities. No national group dictates the bills they support or the messages they send.

Burnside’s group in North Carolina is part of a burgeoning national federation called the Welcoming Neighbors Network, a group that has deliberately tried to maintain a low profile while connecting local independent groups with research, organizing, and policy assistance as needed. Honorof, the director of the network, told me that “everywhere that we have our members are in coalition with those on the right and those on the left, there’s a very explicit understanding that we’re not talking about anything else.”

This approach is possible only because two things can be true at once: Housing is important, and housing isn’t everything.

Christian Solorio is a 34-year-old progressive former state representative in Arizona who works as an architect by day and serves on the board of two pro-housing organizations in his state in his free time. As we sat together in Austin, he was waiting for updates about the state Senate vote for the Arizona Starter Homes Act, a bill that would prevent cities with populations exceeding 70,000 from requiring large lot sizes and large square footage, and from imposing other regulations that push houses to be more expensive.

The bill has received bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition. It passed the House with 15 Democrats and 18 Republicans voting for it, while 13 Democrats and 13 Republicans voted against it. The Senate was similarly divided. Solario recounted that the bill’s passage in the House coincided with a heated partisan debate over an anti-immigration bill that Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs has already promised to veto. How did Democratic legislators go from arguing about the most divisive border-state issue to crossing the aisle and voting with their opponents on a Republican-led pro-housing bill? Because that’s how politics works.

That doesn’t mean the bill will become law. Hobbs told reporters she’s still considering whether or not to sign the Arizona Starter Homes Act, noting that she prefers legislation with support from local jurisdictions, and this bill has been opposed by the local-government lobby. Either way, the political price is low. In a state as divided as Arizona, where the last gubernatorial election was between Hobbs and the right-wing firebrand Kari Lake, no one’s switching their votes over zoning policy.

Not even die-hard YIMBYs. “I’m a Democrat; I voted for the governor,” Solorio told me. “ And if she ended up being the biggest NIMBY in our state, I’d still vote for her reelection because zoning, even though I’m one of the biggest zoning-reform advocates in the state … still doesn’t rise high enough for me to flip my vote.”