As American cities face an unprecedented crisis of housing affordability, many commentators have divided housing stock generationally: between baby-boomer homeowners (born from 1945 to 1965) and millennial renters (born between 1980 and 2000). With this categorization come tropes of how the members of each generation manage their finances and plans for the future. According to one narrative, “diligent” baby boomers bought a home, started a family, and worked the same job until retirement,1 while struggling (or potentially dilettante) millennials do shift work, date into their thirties, and live in shared apartments. Housing, in particular, has become a bellwether of the future prospects of millennials. Economic and cultural reasons for millennials’ struggle to become homeowners imply the magnitude of the changes on family, conceptions of self and work, and even how cities are organized. The disparaging view of millennials’ failure to “grow up” is resented within the generation, fueling a counter-narrative that emphasizes how baby boomers are responsible for economic reforms that depressed wages,2 as well as more specific changes in urban planning policy that limited the number of new homes built in urban centers, driving up property values and decreasing affordability.
Millennials are less likely to age into the suburbs than the boomer generation3 and they less frequently own their own homes as they approach middle age.4 At the same time, urban real estate markets in desirable American cities with high-paying jobs have become increasingly unaffordable. As discussed in chapter 1, San Francisco, the city known for alternative communities of the baby-boomer generation living hand to mouth in the 1960s, is now one of the world’s most expensive cities.5 Owning a home and living with one’s nuclear family are the sine qua non of middle-class adulthood in the United States. The trope of millennial Peter (or Petra) Pan—addicted to personal pleasure at the expense of stability and long-term planning—is directed toward those who cannot buy a home or who return to live with their parents. Younger adults counter this by arguing that the world created by their parents often precludes these sources of stability:6 social and economic changes embraced during the Reagan/Thatcher era made work more contingent, stripped away the social safety net, necessitated more (and costlier) higher education for middle-class jobs, and turned buying a home into an investment vehicle rather than an asset primarily for its use value.
The greatest points of contention over housing include how many apartment buildings to build, where they should go, and how tall they should be. The demand for more housing has been greeted by homeowners with trepidation: they worry that rapid construction of apartment buildings will lower home prices and destroy the character of communities.7 On a more fundamental level, many homeowners who grew up in the postwar suburbs still prefer the model of entirely residential neighborhoods accessed by car, despite criticism of elitism and ecological harm. Anti-growth activists, who are often members of the boomer generation, have used the considerable power of neighborhood groups and homeowners’ associations, aided by the spatial and jurisdictional sprawl of American suburbs,8 to create powerful lobbies that prevent more zoning for density, enforce height limits, curtail higher occupancy, and veto projects based on “community character.” Millennials, hungry for new housing to go on the market, accuse neighborhood groups of NIMBYism. They insist that NIMBYs have it all—high equity from homeownership in desirable downtown or inner-suburb neighborhoods—and also accuse NIMBYs of refusing to let in younger buyers and renters, forcing them ever farther to the edges of cities.
YIMBY activists argue for higher density, better public transit, and a general relaxation of zoning laws that neighborhood groups fight to protect. They insist that they are not just motivated by lifestyle reasons to make a home in the inner city, pointing to compelling data that asserts urban housing markets bestow access to well-paying jobs that are increasingly unavailable in nonurban areas or declining cities.9 Being able to live in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, or Seattle is less about being in a cultural scene for these activists, as it may have been for baby boomers, who often associated cities with distinct countercultures, and more about proximity to resources needed for financial mobility.10 The argument is backed up by macro-level observations of how culture itself has become an important economic factor in successful cities, often sorting “winner” cities from “loser” cities.11
This chapter examines the contestation between pro-growth housing activists (self-styled YIMBYs) and neighborhood groups (sometimes known as NIMBYs by detractors): two factions that face off at zoning meetings, community dialogues, local elections, and even in court. It expands the previous chapter’s focus on San Francisco to consider the dozens of YIMBY groups that have sprung up in American cities since 2014 when SF BARF was founded. Indeed, most of those I encountered at YIMBY meetings while writing this book were millennials or younger and, of the sixty-five activists interviewed, 80 percent were under age forty. This chapter explores how generational cohort affects the movement and pits it against homeowners who are often older. Bringing homeowners into the conversation, this chapter supplements the opinions of density activists with those of older homeowners who participate in neighborhood groups in Texas, Colorado, California, Massachusetts, and New York. Last, it shows how older homeowners often use the framing of gentrification to resist new development in their neighborhoods, sometimes partnering with anti-gentrification groups and often forming a coalition of wealthier older (and often white) homeowners in prosperous urban neighborhoods and struggling urbanites, who are primarily Black and Latino, in adjacent economically mixed neighborhoods.
All those interviewed for this book worried about the erosion of the middle class, but many simultaneously were quick to describe the political battle using age groupings—boomer/millennial—rather than a class frame.12 Often, the constraints precluding homeownership are economically based, but arguments about housing are fought using a generational framing: something potentially more palatable in the United States where universal middle-classness is a cherished fantasy frequently drawn upon in political debates.13 This framing has been beneficial to those lobbying for renters and apartment-dwellers without conjuring up racial and class stigma, but it is also a detriment because the debate has shifted from those entirely excluded from housing (the homeless, public housing residents, and people in danger of eviction) to more middle-class populations struggling with rent or locked out of homeownership.
Pro-growth activists often see homeowners’ associations and neighborhood groups as possessing a monopoly on municipal power, frequently shutting out the opinions of renters. While much of the debate around YIMBYism has been specific and technical—dealing with zoning intricacies by activists who are also often architects—it has hit a generational note that catalyzes the perceived gap between boomer and millennial values (as well as assets) when it comes to how American cities should look and feel. The problem of affordable housing is also dependent on how each generation experienced the city growing up, what their ideal city looks like, and what normative role of family and community they assign to the home. In this sense, YIMBYism is both an economically grounded social movement of middle-class professionals, in that it responds to precarity and lack of housing supply, and an emotionally constructed movement14 that argues for cities as a solution to a plethora of problems, from mitigating environmental harm to nurturing a more cosmopolitan outlook in an era of ascendant nativism. This chapter deconstructs these viewpoints from the perspectives of boomer and millennial activists to show how their different visions of the future American city will impact the housing affordability crisis.
The postwar American city has been dubbed a collection of suburbs rather than the mononuclear configuration of the past.15 Suburbanization was heavily subsidized by federal highway grants and mortgage loans to assist (white) veterans returning from the Second World War. The question of whether suburbanization was a cultural choice—based on the primacy of the nuclear family, private property, and a middle ground between city and nature—or a purely economic calculus is still hotly contested.16 The relationship between suburbanization and urban unrest is clearer. While the first wave of sprawling development may have been a response to financial incentives given by the state, a second wave occurred after urban insurrections and violence in 1968: following the death of Martin Luther King Jr.,17 the increasing ghettoization of urban Black neighborhoods,18 and the militarized occupation of those neighborhoods by federal troops. The experience of urban violence and racial anxiety was a key generational childhood event19 for baby boomers, whether in Newark, Detroit, or Los Angeles. For African Americans, the urban unrest showed the state’s reneging on the promises of the civil rights movement as well as its military response to what was quickly dubbed “internal colonialism” and likened to the failing war in Vietnam.20 Suburbia, while always containing a subtext of domestic tranquility and inflexible gender roles,21 went from an economic choice (based on affordable housing during the home shortages of the late 1940s) to an increasingly cultural and political enclavement as a source of safety away from American cities in crisis.22
The first widespread usage of NIMBYism refers to postwar suburban communities where individual homeowners banded together to prevent undesirable land uses such as industry23 and, frequently, necessary infrastructure like waste incinerators, water treatment plants, and garbage dumps, often leading to more formalized zoning regulations. NIMBYism was always a way to denote how wealthier communities are better positioned to mobilize against changes that could potentially harm their home investment or general well-being. However, it also bears a distinctly racial connotation in the American context. Before the mass suburbanization of the 1960s, urban neighborhoods had been racially demarcated through the practice of redlining, in which banks refused to provide mortgages to qualifying African Americans (and, at times, Jews and Catholics) within certain “white only” boundaries, often with tacit municipal support.24 Wealthy communities also used “restrictive covenants” (bylaws of new subdivisions preventing ownership based on race and ethnicity) to keep out those who were considered “unsavory.”25 In doing so, these suburbs frequently set up their own minor local governments in the process, which determined a number of regulations having to do with the appearance of homes and yards. Yet, after the 1960s, homeowners relied on distance and home price to sort middle-class white homeowners in the suburbs from nonwhite renters in inner cities. At the same time, this allowed new suburban communities to use their property taxes for their exclusive benefit, ending redistributive elements of the prior system that existed when the American city was less fractured.26 This historical legacy is exactly why American inequality is not as regional as one might think (between the coasts and the Rustbelt) but also very much a product of resource hoarding between cities such as Bridgeport, Connecticut, with an average per capita annual income of $24,000 (2019), and Westport (a ten-minute drive away in the same county), where the same figure is $114,000 per year.27
The quest to maintain suburban home values by keeping out certain environmentally problematic uses became known as NIMBYism, but it also applied to homeowners in first-generation American suburbs (such as Long Island, New York) who blocked construction of apartment buildings where lower-income (and often nonwhite) people might live. NIMBYism is closely related to the American legal framework of property rights that supports the single-family home as a source of stability and investment in community. This rationale is often used to defend the enormously expensive mortgage deduction that gives tax write-offs to homeowners, rather than renters, which costs the federal government over $100 billion a year28 and is the definition of regressive taxation. The primacy of the home as a protected and sacrosanct space has also given birth to uniquely American safety measures,29 like Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, which allows homeowners to defend their property with lethal force (and was famously used to exonerate the killer of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teenager who was shot in an Orlando gated community in 2012). In short, NIMBYism is frequently used as an epithet in urban planning circles, and it is closely tied to state policies that support suburbanism as a lifestyle as well as a philosophy of individual rights over collective community benefits.30
Baby boomers grew up in a world of rapidly changing housing economics with expanded ownership and construction during their childhoods,31 making the investment far more than a place to lay their heads but also an asset to borrow against, use for retirement, or pass down to future generations. As boomers grew to adulthood, owning a place of their own became an important way to buttress against risk32 as the social safety net was eroded, particularly given the high cost of medical treatment in the United States. A second mortgage could make the difference between sickness-induced bankruptcy or staying solvent. Buying a home became a means to entrepreneurship on the most basic level: by making long-sighted predictions about real estate markets or acquiring a second home. Homeowners interested in maintaining or increasing the value of their investment could actively monitor their neighborhoods by joining community groups that did everything from cleanup activities to programming for community building to hiring armed guards to patrol suburban streets. As one boomer described her neighborhood group in Texas: “We are like the smallest level of government, but unlike regular city politics, we all have something to lose when it comes to decision making: the value of our homes.”
While the baby boomers were famously stifled by suburban life—and particularly the patriarchal assumptions of the work/living divide of an office-bound husband and a stay-at-home wife—they were also deeply influenced by the architectural form of the suburbs. While many in the boomer generation briefly took up residence in cities for college and young adulthood, they often returned to the suburbs when they had families of their own.33 The ideal of a well-maintained front (public-facing) yard and a recreational backyard set in a bucolic location—but within commuting distance to suburban office-parks or downtown skyscrapers—was still the middle-class model of a city when the millennial generation were young children in the 1990s. In this sense, the spatial divide between commercial and residential uses is familiar and often essential to older homeowners, and there can often be a visceral response to mixed-use zoning that brings “noisy” shops, restaurants, and markets to bedroom communities in an attempt to limit car use and cluster local services.
Urban sociologists have shown that the onset of the most recent period of gentrification was often experienced most forcefully by millennials: as this generation came of age, American cities became safer and more desirable for new economic opportunities driven by information technology and the dot-com boom in the 1990s.34 As Saskia Sassen35 has pointed out: more outsourcing, online communication, and multinational supply chains have, in many cases, increased the centrality of large cities in the developed world as “command and control centers.” This has given millennials a new sense of the economic primacy of urban spaces as well as a less easily measured, but nonetheless important, cultural pull to urban life.36 As one informant put it: “We are the Sex and the City generation … the city was cool and glamorous again … [but] our parents … still were stuck in the Panic in Needle Park mentality.” Yet, much of this urban boosterism of the millennial generation is not really about the city itself but about the nearby suburbs that exist in a state of development limbo: they are connected to downtowns with public transit and already have thriving commercial districts, but morphologically they are still single-family homes. This is where the generational fight about appropriate levels of density has mainly occurred.
In many ways, millennials’ approach to urban life is neither special nor a product of their generational outlook: walkability was a key concern of the quintessential urbanist Jane Jacobs in her fight against highways in Manhattan in the 1960s;37 mixed-use residential-commercial development has been expounded by every major urban planning school in the United States since the early 1980s; and the restoration of dormant manufacturing buildings into chic cafés and small businesses is a long-accepted strategy of adaptive reuse advocated by historic preservationists. However, millennials frequently maintain that it was their age group who successfully took these ideas from theory to practice, with the help of postindustrial urban economics that favored the service sector over large floor plans, intensive investment, and numerous employees.38 It has also been during the lifespan of this generation that the anti-gentrification movement has gained the most momentum, providing a common vernacular that extends far beyond urban activism to discuss spatial justice and what egalitarian neighborhood change should look like.39
Many YIMBY activists are concerned with aging cities’ failing infrastructure, downtowns depopulated by urban renewal, and a dearth of apartments. In this sense, they believe in the constant presence of young people to rejuvenate neighborhoods, keep a stable population, supply dynamic cultural life, and perhaps most importantly, provide a tax base. As in other facets of YIMBY activism, this viewpoint often mixes building typologies with age and class demographics—in this case the need to keep city centers “youthful,” which they do not see as the same thing as gentrified.40 As one YIMBY urban planner, a Coloradan in his thirties, said:
It’s frustrating to be in a neighborhood where you can see the skyscrapers hovering above you that are all offices and all around are just two-story houses, and the way the [place] is zoned means that apartments basically can’t be built and everyone is gonna leave the offices, get in their car, and drive an hour through an endless traffic jam.
One of the key arguments that is used to support the twinning of millennial politics and urban planning priorities is that this generation has made social choices that fit more naturally into city life, specifically delaying marriage, cohabitating, renting, and eschewing car ownership.41 These choices have also been affected by economic constraints, most dramatically the lost earnings for younger workers after the 2008 economic crisis.42 In 2016, the American cohort of thirty-two-year-olds had 34 percent less wealth than expected, while older age groups had largely rebounded from the 2008 crisis.43 For this reason, priorities of urban planners that increase mass transit, environmental protection, or investment in infrastructure are not framed just as a generational issue, in the sense that they are investments in the near future, but also that they follow the distinct preferences of millennials, which are sometimes at odds with the previous generation. A YIMBY activist living in Oakland, California, put the generational conflict this way:
We feel more ownership of American cities than our parents.… [W]hat happened in the sixties onward was because their generation abandoned living in urban areas, or at least middle-class whites did, and we have a totally different mindset based on embracing the urban and creating racially diverse spaces, not locking ourselves up in the suburbs where everyone is white.
Often, then, the defense of cities was derived from lifestyle preferences (walkability, entertainment, and bustle) as well as from moral commitments, of which both racial diversity and reducing one’s environmental footprint were major aspects.44 While anti-gentrification social movements often explain this commitment as a correction of the baby boomers’ initial involvement in civil rights and environmentalism before these struggles were unsatisfactorily concluded with institutionalization or diminished support, YIMBYs are focused on less radical public policy fixes such as zoning and transportation-oriented development. While some millennial activists in groups such as Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, and Standing Rock (climate change) as well as Black Lives Matter criticize the withdrawal from politics of baby boomers as they aged out of the civil rights movement, YIMBYs are far more interested in finding expert-driven solutions than in seeking mass membership. They approach neighborhood diversity and ecological goals with a data-driven and code-reform process that eschews many fundamentals of movement building in order to quickly pivot into the role of activist/government intermediary.45
With the popularization of American cities as places to thrive both socially and economically in the 1990s came increasing pressure on urban housing stock. Millennials often choose between trying to afford rents in expensive downtowns or relocating to gentrifying neighborhoods abutting urban centers. Out of this dynamic, the YIMBY movement was born in San Francisco, as shown in the previous chapter, as a way to lobby planning commissions and city councils to build more housing in desirable central neighborhoods. YIMBYs see their constituents as white middle-class millennials, while anti-gentrification groups are composed of working-class people of color and their allies. However, YIMBYs feel that by mobilizing millennials to build in wealthy neighborhoods they will prevent further gentrification, creating a win-win for the two groups. A San Francisco YIMBY said:
Over the past twenty years all new development has been in low-income neighborhoods. It’s not an accident … they can’t mobilize the political pressure to stop it. That means that wealthy people in their sixties living in Berkeley can be left alone … and they still have this image of themselves as radical hippies even though their homes are worth $2 million and they won’t let anyone else live there.… What we want is more homes in the already middle-class places so that younger people won’t be faced with the choice to be a gentrifier or not coming to the city at all.
YIMBY activists are frustrated by the baby-boomer generation’s refusal to allow apartment buildings in desirable areas with existing public transit, as one put it: “it’s not all public policy, it’s really just a particular group of older people unwilling to share their neighborhoods with others.” One of their main actions is to speak out at monthly urban planning meetings in favor of any plan to build new housing. YIMBYs maintain that in many growing cities, homeowners’ associations and neighborhood groups have put pressure on city councils to stop the construction of duplexes and accessory dwelling units (so-called granny flats, built above garages, that are a low-impact way to increase density). They consider these the most minimal changes needed, and the failure to enact them shows an ideological stubbornness among existing homeowners, who may express concern over the crisis of affordable housing but are unwilling to compromise their own comfort and privilege.
YIMBYs began showing up to zoning meetings in cities such as Denver, Seattle, and San Francisco, quickly realizing that zoning meetings were only attended by older people speaking out against development plans, which opened a new vulnerability in the structure of urban planning policy for pro-growth YIMBY groups.46 “We saw this space totally dominated by a single and nonrepresentative group,” a Texas YIMBY told me. “We thought, ‘Hey, we live in these politicians’ districts too,’ and they need to see this is not how we think, and there are a hell of a lot more of us.” This approach made zoning meetings the epicenter of the debate over urban growth, with density as the main topic, often dividing existing (older) owners and younger renters. Within these spaces, their confrontations were often acrimonious and dug into the meaning of progressivism in urban areas: boomer homeowners declared neighborhood composition, and the social ties that go with it, sacrosanct; while millennial YIMBYs advocated for managed change that proactively increases population and density with socioeconomic goals in mind (rather than unmanaged gentrification).
As the YIMBY movement spread to dozens of cities, it took on new meaning beyond just housing affordability: it acted as a gateway to local politics for millennials. It often came with the explicit goal of unseating established politicians who, the thinking went, could not understand the housing crisis or any of the other priorities of those under forty years old. In this sense, YIMBYism has become a form of demographic revolt among the urban (largely white) middle class, based on the technicalities of urban planning codes, but embodying the many frustrations of an age cohort deeply affected by the 2008 financial crisis. It uses struggles within the field of housing affordability to argue for broader changes and greater social movement participation, especially by those with a high level of education in technocratic fields of administrative interest.47 It is a highly bonded activist group composed of people with similar backgrounds, many of whom hope to offer expert advice. Although one tactic is to show up at zoning meetings and loudly protest, it is not because YIMBYs necessarily believe they are a mass movement not being heard but because they are a selective group with highly informed opinions.48
With fewer assets and worse job prospects than their parents had when they were approaching middle age,49 millennial YIMBY activists have used housing as a wedge issue to motivate a deeper engagement with local politics. As one California YIMBY said:
We know that our members read the New York Times and care about national politics. The issue is that they live in blue [Democratic Party] cities where they think a supposedly progressive government will take care of them. What we are trying to do is activate them … show them that’s not true.… [T]hey need to get involved or no one will take care of them, and they might get driven out of the city altogether.
YIMBYs used zoning and housing as a way to discuss larger issues of generational wealth dispersal, sometimes conflating class status and generation.50 One YIMBY activist from Texas said: “we think renters versus owners is good politics to get millennials in the door.… The way you get them to stay is [showing] that homeownership, or lack of, is just one way that their lives are gonna look very different from their parents.” An older generation of participants in neighborhood groups frequently viewed this groundswell with bewilderment, especially because many of the debates took place within progressive politics. A homeowner in Boulder, Colorado, said: “The YIMBY viewpoint is pretty out of touch when it comes to what it takes to make a good city.… It’s not respectful of all the things that go into making community … and the necessity of keeping that community a certain size so the bonds hold together.” The same informant also said that YIMBYism was a weak political platform: “I get that they’re pissed off about housing but where do they go from there?”
YIMBYism is a distinctly middle-class social movement often composed of professionals who feel that their expertise (frequently in city planning and architecture) has been eroded by NIMBY groups, whose arguments are primarily emotional (the unchanging nature of their communities). YIMBYs start from universalist arguments about cities and then select specific zoning cases to participate in. NIMBYism, on the other hand, is often hyper-local, with activists sometimes scaling up in order to counter arguments of their own self-interest.51 However, YIMBYs also use emotional framings based on creating vibrant urban spaces that would be more inclusive. They could not localize these issues geographically, so they often use a generational framing in order to give the argument more resonance and connect it with the travails of millennials facing precarity. This puts forward a specific group of complainants who could replace the geographically bounded credibility of NIMBYs and assert their legitimacy as stakeholders even when they live miles from specific developments under question.
While NIMBYs were brought together through geography and homeownership, YIMBY groups created a broad coalition of interests, from housing activists to real estate developers, often with the express understanding that these partnerships would be temporary: only to endorse a single project with a pre-negotiated percentage of affordable housing units. In this sense, YIMBY groups see themselves serving in a bridge role connecting other activists, municipal officials, and real estate developers in a capacity that sometimes mirrors the paid facilitation work that some YIMBYs participate in during their working lives as city planners. The mobility of YIMBY activists speaks both to their middle-classness (they are not bound by neighborhoods and family obligations but able to chase opportunities at great distances) and to their broader point that “newcomer” status cannot be used as a constant slur within the world of urban activism. “It used to be that you had to be ‘from here’ to run for office,” one YIMBY in her early twenties told me, explaining that this often led to a web of nepotism and corruption and adding, “There is nothing wrong with choosing a place, moving there … getting involved. In fact, you would think people would be happy about that.”
“When you think about it, suburbia is really just a blip on the radar as far as history is concerned,” Laura Foote, the prominent San Francisco YIMBY, told me. By some measure, the rapidity of America’s suburbanization is actually a good thing: the most dramatic changes happened from 1945 until 2000, approximately, and the logic of dispersed development—while ubiquitous across the landscape—is still potentially reversible. While boomers are habituated to suburbs, many millennials say they would like to return to a world of main streets and towns organized around condensed shopping and business districts. Many boomers are also returning to urban centers in order to retire in more pedestrian-friendly spaces as their mobility declines. However, YIMBYs feel that the boomer generation has been permanently affected by their suburban childhood, closing off the potential to make substantial changes in the layout and height of cities needed to accommodate more housing. Some boomer informants confirmed this, such as a retired lawyer from Berkeley: “I like cities, but the ones with trees and parks.… I don’t want to live in an apartment, … and I don’t want to live with an apartment building over me.” He went further to say he dislikes YIMBYs because he disapproves of their aggressive tactics and worries their efforts will displace people rather than providing more affordable housing. “I’m fine with what we have now.… It’s a sort of small city of neighborhoods, not a bunch of big buildings.… I don’t want to live in Tokyo.” Many others emphasized that a suburban childhood had taught them that the scale of the neighborhood is two stories maximum, and places with higher density than that quickly became impersonal and foreboding with a commensurate loss of community contact and beneficial organizing.
Many YIMBYs disagree, arguing that walkability and proximity are the key criteria for building bonds between neighbors, particularly people from different backgrounds. “We’ve lost something more than just vast tracts of land through suburbanization,” a YIMBY urban planner from Massachusetts stated. “There’s also been a systematic destruction of community spaces where people come together.” For her, density created more tightly woven social bonds, the loss of which increased distrust and loneliness.52 She even went a step further, saying that the boomers’ retreat to suburbia was one of the reasons that allowed them to ignore inequality and support anti-immigrant politicians such as Donald Trump: “I mean, with a more urban mindset and interactions with people different from you … I don’t think some of this stuff would have happened.” While many young people also hold conservative political beliefs, most YIMBYs see city life as an expression of a certain kind of progressive politics and a belief in cosmopolitan values such as tolerance, diversity, and dialogue. Critics maintain that it is an easy way to express the cultural veneer of progressive politics while gaining enviable quality-of-life benefits,53 but it is also indicative of how the YIMBY movement combines the more nebulous cultural arguments of new social movements that focus on lifestyle with concrete political and economic demands rooted in precise spaces and moments of political contestation.54 This belief is also a rebuttal to the devolved government and localism embraced by the boomer generation during the Reagan era: the YIMBY belief in regional thinking that reconjoins suburbs into a metropolitan area is a means to distribute risk across communities that fractured away from each other during successive waves of suburbanization.
YIMBY groups seek changes in zoning laws to build taller apartment buildings, but they also support more aggressive methods such as “suing the suburbs,” discussed in chapter 1. “Suing the suburbs” draws on class-based animus of wealthy neighborhoods that refuse to “do their share” to help solve the Silicon Valley housing crisis. However, the strategy is far from radical and still very much within the bounds of market-driven urban growth.55 This reflects a larger trend among YIMBY groups, who focus their attention on the ownership age-divide rather than on issues of class that have kept multiple generations of poor urbanites out of housing markets.56 This is a combination of strategic opportunity (powerful generational framing); social movement niche (technocratic rather than radical); and political placement (center-left, rather than jostling for influence on the increasingly crowded left). One community organizer from Los Angeles, who mostly disagreed with YIMBYs but is also a millennial, commented that Los Angeles YIMBY groups hope to derive authority from broadcasting an image of practical centrism: “They want to be everything to everybody, and that is what worries me because I think it’s slippery.… There are times when they are agreeing publicly (with anti-gentrification messages), but are they really?”
YIMBY groups are dedicated to two strategies popular in urban planning circles: (1) retrofitting suburbs to make them denser and more walkable, for example, through additional growth and more small stores; and (2) making inner-city buildings bigger and taller (as already discussed). However, within the many YIMBY groups in the United States, there are differences in opinion about the end goal of urban planning activism: many simply want to control the crisis in affordable housing, while others, who often describe themselves as libertarian-leaning, would like to disempower urban planning authorities by reducing oversight and red tape. This anti-regulatory zeal has a long history in conservative American politics but is seldom evoked in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Denver, known for their progressive politics. As one critic of YIMBYism, from the anti-gentrification sphere, put it: “YIMBYs are a hotbed for libertarian thinking and market-driven solutions.… It’s a mask you can put on if you’re a developer, a small-government type, or even a Republican living in ‘enemy territory.’ ” However, there is little evidence that any but a very small minority of YIMBYs see upzoning density requirements in cities as a first step in eliminating urban planning regulation, and many support stringent environmental protections at odds with libertarian principles.
While the critique of YIMBY urban policy from the left is often directed at the involvement of real estate developers or brokers, the animating issue within the movement is the perceived capitulation of the boomer generation in addressing economic issues. In this sense, YIMBYs see their main foes as people who are otherwise political allies, particularly in national politics, but who refuse to allow more housing construction. “The people we are fighting are not country club types. They are actually the seventy-year-olds with an Obama sign in their front yard,” a YIMBY sympathizer from Colorado told me. The critique of NIMBYism was that it was embraced by people who had been progressives in their youth but, once they became homeowners, were motivated to protect their assets’ value.57 For YIMBYs, the center-left of American politics has shifted in favor of people who are economic elites, and for that reason the Democratic Party and its supporters are insufficiently committed to issues such as housing, minimum wage, and job precarity because they have little experience of it. Yet, the viewpoint also dangerously repositions class, and housing precarity, as a universal generational experience,58 rather than one suffered particularly by those with lower socioeconomic status. This is compounded by the fact that most of the YIMBY activists I interviewed are concerned about maintaining middle-classness but are also comparatively well-off professionals, indeed not a single person interviewed did not have a university education, and many graduated from prestigious schools and worked in urbanism, tech, or communications.
YIMBYs often straddled problematic political territory in this sense because they criticized mainstream Democrats while embracing an essentially market-based solution of more home construction (very much in contrast to housing justice advocates). “We really have an establishment versus insurgent issue here,” a San Francisco YIMBY said:
It’s groups that normally see eye to eye—educated older hippie types and educated younger millennials, all of whom are basically white—who are fighting over the same neighborhoods and the right to be there. When the NIMBYs told us “find somewhere else,” which basically means “don’t move to this city,’ we realized that there was a major divide.
While YIMBYs were consternated that boomers could not imagine a pleasant but vertical city (with many posting on Twitter about the potential “Hong Kong-ization” of San Francisco, with a forest of high-rises towering over formerly quiet streets), the struggle is also more basic. It is about which generation wields local political power.59 Many YIMBYs feel their organizations are a metaphor for a wider handover in political power that must occur nationally, especially around the time of the 2016 national election when most political party leaders were in their seventies. Ironically, while YIMBY groups are not afraid to use generational politics to galvanize supporters, their major policy interventions are far more conservative than calls from the newly energized socialist left—for community land trusts and more social housing.60 One city planner who was of the boomer generation but supported the majority of densification proposals associated with YIMBYism said: “The whole framing is sort of a ruse.… The real issue that people care about is owners versus renters, and that’s class … and frequently race.… The generational thing is sort of important but I think it’s mostly a way to get younger people to care.” In this sense, the generational framing can be categorized using the literature on political opportunity structure in social movements61 for its pragmatism and goal-oriented usage, while simultaneously obscuring underlying issues to do with longer socioeconomic processes: namely, the hollowing out of the American middle class.62
YIMBYs acknowledged that while they found many neighborhood groups, and especially homeowners associations, to be NIMBYish—hoping they could solve urban problems by banishing them elsewhere—they learned from their organizing methods. “We wanted something for renters like they have for homeowners,” one activist stated. In general, there was a respect for community organizing as a place-based phenomenon,63 but the challenge was in uprooting the policy doxa of protecting home values above all else and displacing homeowners as a main community voice. “We tend to think of mobility as a good thing, but in this case it’s not,” a twenty-three-year-old YIMBY supporter told me. She maintained that millennials who had moved from city to city in search of work after the 2008 economic crisis and from neighborhood to neighborhood looking for better housing value had missed out on the opportunity to make their voices heard. Creating better structures to represent millennial interests through YIMBYism was seen as a means to give voice to an age demographic as well as to a certain group within the housing market that would become a permanent voice even if individual members moved away.
The narrative of intergenerational conflict over urban space can often sound like a misdiagnosis of the housing affordability crisis. Class is perhaps the biggest determinant of whether someone faces housing insecurity: baby boomers, who are more robustly middle class, are less affected by soaring prices than millennials who are still recovering from the financial crisis of 2008.64 The battle to maintain middle-classness65 is one of the reasons that generational argument has reached a fever pitch, with boomers accusing the millennial generation of fecklessness66 while millennials point to macro-structural disadvantages they have faced, which they feel baby boomers have had a hand in creating.67 Class is certainly undervalued in the YIMBY framing of the American housing crisis, which pays undue attention to generational problems alone,68 making the conflict seem more spatial than macroeconomic. However, at the same time, much of this narrative comes from tangible experiences of generational conflict in planning meetings and community reviews of new architecture, where YIMBY activists see older homeowners veto new projects one after another. Because so many millennial YIMBY activists have training in architecture, design, and urban planning, the local government’s rebuffing of attempts to create denser neighborhoods was particularly irksome because it went against professional consensus and threatened their position both as renters and as members of a knowledge field.
Both sides of the debate around densification play on a sense of middle-class authenticity when it comes to making their claims using a generational framing. Homeowners, who are frequently baby boomers, insist that they bought into a neighborhood thinking it would be a certain way;69 they worked hard to pay off their mortgage; and now outsiders want to change the rules and upend what their communities look and feel like. At the same time, YIMBY movement participants, who are primarily millennials, maintain that they too are good middle-class citizens who have “played by the rules” and still cannot afford rents (or homeownership) in desirable cities. Both movements fight over middle-class respectability and often unconsciously channel arguments about the virtuosity of hard work and deservedness.70 At the same time, they also both court anti-gentrification activists in poorer neighborhoods, insisting that their approach to housing will offer better opportunities to avoid displacement. This mobilization of middle-class alliance is often looked at askance by those fighting to protect public housing or organizing in low-income communities. As an African American YIMBY organizer in Los Angeles commented: people in low-income communities of color have “had bad experiences with both groups of organizers,” some saying “no” to development and some saying “yes.” While he felt that more people in working-class South Los Angeles should be saying “yes” to new apartments, he could see why resisting and keeping the slowly eroding status quo (of gentrification without growth) were easier for people to wrap their heads around.
Neighborhood groups and YIMBY activists have battled each other in hyper-local spaces where age can be a more salient factor than class. The places where the movement for more density is most active are middle-class or wealthy neighborhoods, decreasing the visibility of those trying to maintain middle-class status because their suffering is relative to those in the highest economic bracket rather than, as in poorer neighborhoods, those clinging to their livelihoods, homes, and independence. At the same time, age and generation were emphasized because they were a powerful means to provide moral authority over which decisions were best for a neighborhood,71 with neighborhood groups advocating that their members’ time in a certain location was the most important factor while YIMBYs saw this source of credibility as potentially disqualifying because those with long-term attachments were unwilling to see any changes as positive.
When two generations have radically different experiences, a generational cleavage can result, and this is what has been occurring in American cities for several decades. It has come into play at the level of urban policy (how much public transit to fund and how much new density to endorse) as well as of public opinion (what height of buildings is livable and how much commuting is desirable). Real generational differences exist between boomers and millennials, many of which stem from fundamental visions of the city, formed in childhood, over the safety of cities and the appeal of bustling, dense metropolitan spaces. The larger question is whether a distinctly urban identity becomes something that defines the millennial generation culturally and how it will be expressed in political and economic priorities.
A modified version of this chapter was published as Max Holleran, “Millennial ‘YIMBYs’ and Boomer ‘NIMBYs’: Generational Views on Housing Affordability in the United States,” Sociological Review 69, no. 4 (2021): 846–61, https://