One of the central conflicts of YIMBYism is representational: to whom does the city belong, and who can speak for it? Support for new urban development is often split between old-timers and newcomers: the former are the custodians of each city’s unique culture, and the latter are ignorant of the stories collected in particular places. Urban sociology has shown that not only do longtime residents draw on their own social networks1 in order to solidify positions of power over decision making—such as seats on the city council and planning board—but they also make use of a more abstract sense of authenticity2 through mobilizing their knowledge of place. They know what store used to be on the corner; they remember the store owner’s Labrador; they might even recall the name of the dog. They have weathered urban decline and growth and, in the process, have become personal repositories of local history.
American suburbanization in the second half of the twentieth century gave more cachet to people who embodied urban authenticity: newcomers from suburban “no places”3 appreciated urbanites with an intricate network of place-based friendships and the colorful stories that come with them. In contrast, in the early part of the twentieth century, connections to neighborhoods were maligned as too ethnically based and associated with anti-modern gemeinschaft: the bonds of kinship, religion, and place that kept people from forming a broader worldview.4 Today, old-timers are celebrated as living legends who withstood harder times when cities were more rundown and dangerous but simultaneously more romantic. Their networks are appreciated for providing solidarity and sometimes even life-saving support, in the case of floods, heat waves, and other disasters.5
However, the priorities of old-timers and newcomers are often opposed. Long-term residents are frequently comfortable with the status quo, especially when it comes to housing. They are often homeowners or enjoy relatively low rents. In working-class neighborhoods, newcomers are regarded as a possible kick-starter of gentrification as well as a broader cultural disruption. In more-affluent neighborhoods, an increased number of residents is linked to overcrowded schools or shortages of parking. Even if newcomers are from just the next town over, they may not appreciate the specific local culture of where they have moved, or they may seek to change their new town into the place they came from. Most direly, they can arrive in sufficient numbers to wrestle power away from long-term residents.6
Due to this fear, old-timers have often codified their priorities into local urban planning ordinances, such as minimum lot sizes for building single-family homes, density limits, and bans on nonfamilial cohabitation.7 These laws protect the current look and feel of the city, but critics argue that they leave planners little leeway to prepare for new residents by tasking them only with the unenviable duty of simply preserving the “embalmed city.”8 This critique is very much the YIMBY viewpoint, even when it comes to cities that are generally considered success stories within the larger, more desultory story of twentieth-century American urban development. Density activists maintain that even innovative cities that have grown and prospered have often done so begrudgingly, with more than a hint of animus toward new arrivals.
Austin, Texas, has become an American “it” city: a place on the lips of both suit-wearing venture capitalists and nineteen-year-old aspiring guitarists in leather leggings. In terms of urbanism, the most popular neighborhoods are not the ones that look like a city: they are the bungalows that have withstood the onslaught of growth that Austin has gone through in the past twenty years. Most are residential, but quite a few have commercial functions just behind the facade of a peaceful bungalow. The most famous is Rainey Street, where speakeasy-style bourbon bars fill out what were once working-class homes, with patrons spilling out into the former backyards to smoke cigarettes. The street has been a historic district since 1985, protecting two blocks of one-and-a-half-story former homes from the onslaught of towers that have been erected around it.9 In other neighborhoods, the gracefully neglected bungalows with beer bottles on the porch and funky sculptures in the front yard have become symbols of Austin’s counterculture appeal. That draw has now been transformed into a gold rush of relocated tech companies and the well-heeled employees that come with them. Austin has grown to a city with a metro area of over two million people, with nearly 400,000 added between 2010 and 2017, making it the fastest-growing US city during the period.10
Austin began the process of amending its outdated urban master plan starting with a report in 2012 called “Imagine Austin.”11 The goal of this report was to tweak land use development in order to allow higher density, more apartments, and better connectivity between neighborhoods of single-family homes. The city started a process known as CodeNEXT that was supported by residents who were searching for housing, rent burdened, or seeking a denser city that was more walkable. There was stark opposition as well, from groups like the Austin Neighborhoods Council, which objected to the process as a giveaway to developers that would overcrowd the city and diminish its character: one member even referred to the plan in front of the city’s zoning board, saying, “This is not Calcutta.”12 While the plan would have allowed growth only in busy corridors (mostly large avenues with shops), neighborhood groups opposed it vehemently, with one no-growth activist stating, “They [the city] have utter contempt for single family neighborhoods.”13
In August of 2018, the Austin City Council scrapped the CodeNEXT plan, leaving America’s fastest-growing city with no smart growth strategy, no orchestrated plan to improve density, and continued reliance on automobile-based mobility for the foreseeable future. Councilman and affordable housing activist Greg Casar remarked on the ongoing failure: “Every day we wait, we’re failing current residents and generations to come.”14 Indeed, Austin, like many cities deemed successful for their economic performance and culture life, has ignored densification and comprehensive planning, because of pressure from homeowners as well as the magnitude of the task of reversing decades of policy that encouraged sprawl and highway construction.15
This chapter explores the rapid growth of Austin from what many perceived as an oversized college town, known for “keeping it weird,”16 to a bustling tech hub beloved as a cultural producer and festival destination. Through examining the fight over housing densification and public transit in Austin, it analyzes how new housing movements deal with urban authenticity.17 Unlike cities east of the Mississippi River with nineteenth-century cores, much of Austin’s beloved charm is in the form of human capital rather than historic structures. The urban sociologist Sharon Zukin has argued that authenticity in cities is often located in things, not people,18 but in Austin it is still very much the characters—the “psychedelic cowboys” and cowgirls from a previous era—that animate the city. The “weirdos” of Austin who give texture and flair to the city’s nightlife are frequently considered the real patrimony of the Lone Star capital and not any specific physical structure. Yet, they are in jeopardy of disappearing: priced out as the city grows. In few other cities is housing affordability discussed as a wrenching cultural displacement as in Austin. The oppositional nature between “old Austin” and those who have flocked there in recent years has bedeviled the housing debate: focusing on issues of aesthetic self-presentation. The question of who can represent Austin has made the story into one of counterculture versus condo-owning “normies” rather than interrogating the class differences that allow some to buy property and others to languish in a merciless rental market.
As in other cities with accelerating housing costs, Austin has become a focus of densification activism. YIMBY groups in the city ask the questions: who gets to claim cultural authority, and does this position entitle them to make development decisions that affect all residents? Is it fair for cities to “belong” exclusively to their current residents and for those people to carry greater legitimacy in decisions over issues of growth? These questions have been answered with an emphatic “no” from the YIMBY movement, who argue that cities must be open to all and their planning policies should reflect a commitment to providing new housing. At the same time, this demand may threaten not only to dilute local culture but to diminish the size of marginalized communities who are forced out by those with more money and mobility. Austin has been a particularly troubling example of not just gentrification but an overall drop in African American residents,19 drawing up painful pre–World War II memories, when the city was racially divided through redlining. Behind Austin’s story of creative-class success is one of extreme housing precarity—both of historically marginalized Black and Latino residents but also of the newcomer service workers whose barbacking, Uber driving, prep cooking, and sound-checking allow the entertainment economy to function.
Austin has become a darling of new urbanist thinking, based on its economic mix. For people like the “creative cities” guru Richard Florida, this mix is indicative of the future American economy.20 While many Texas cities survive on oil and gas and other “dirty” industries, Austin thrives on tourism, cultural production (largely music), university research, and an influx of new tech companies. The city of nearly one million (with another million in the suburbs) is buoyed by the University of Texas at Austin, one of the biggest and wealthiest public research universities in the country. Before its current status as a fast-growing “it” city, the college-town feel of Austin in the 1970s was captured in the films of Richard Linklater (most notably Dazed and Confused [1993]) and has been described by others as having an ethos of “slacker chic,” or what has long been described as its charmingly “weird” vibe.21
The enduring commitment to weirdness—whether in the form of a front lawn spray-painted with polka dots or of a giant freestanding backyard structure of scavenged scrap metal dubbed the Cathedral of Junk—has made the city a notable outlier in conservative Texas. However, since the early 2000s, Austin has experienced meteoric population growth as its music scene, home to the major music festivals SXSW and Austin City Limits, became increasingly monetized.22 More importantly, a thriving tech sector emerged from previous investments in computing, starting in the 1960s when IBM and Texas Instruments made Austin their home. The model of cultural and intellectual production in Austin is a particularly attractive growth pathway in Texas because the low environmental impact of these industries stands in stark contrast to the chemical and oil businesses that many cities struggle to rein in when they are located near residential neighborhoods. This has made Austin a statewide ethical leader when it comes to green development.23 It is not a frontrunner, however, in freeing itself from car traffic.
To the contrary, Austin and nearby San Antonio have sprawled the most of fast-growing American cities. Austin became 5 percent less dense between 2010 and 2016 as its population exploded,24 giving credence to YIMBY fears that just because cities have high-tech economies and progressive city leaders, they will not necessarily heed the urban planning wisdom of investing in densification or transportation. In fact, many will be stuck with the status quo of sprawl because of zoning restrictions or, more simply, a lack of imaginative solutions. Even under the best of circumstances, when cities want to densify, it often means starting a public transit system from scratch, convincing chain stores to move into smaller-footprint urban shops with little parking, and cajoling developers to build smaller apartments with fewer car spaces where no precedent exists.
The struggle to accommodate new renters has been formidable in Austin. In the urban cultural imagination, the quintessential home is a bungalow, not an apartment or even a duplex. Like many cities deemed to be on top of the creative cities index for their lively entertainment scenes and postindustrial economies,25 Austin struggles with housing affordability and competition. The increasingly expensive housing market has sparked a wider conversation about protecting urban culture, giving rise to the most recognized slogan on the subject, “Keep Austin Weird,” coined in 2000 by a local radio DJ who was lamenting both the influx of newcomers and the demise of the Austin “cowboy hippie” spirit.26 The slogan, which is now emblazoned on beer koozies and baseball hats for sale at Austin gift shops, points to the city’s unique status as an island of progressives in a sea of red voters. Yet, some also view it as an exclusionary means to uncritically protect the past at the expense of preparing for the future.
Despite the coolness factor, Austin is still one of the most sprawling medium-sized cities in the United States, even with its thriving downtown packed with bars, music halls, and government office buildings.27 New housing towers have been erected only in a small specially zoned sector of Austin’s central business district in a pattern familiar to many cities, in which one area is selected for extreme density28 while adjoining neighborhoods of single-family homes remain unmolested by upzoning thanks to their intensive lobbying. Weirdness is still a valuable commodity in the city, but many worry that it has been mistranslated not just in its marketization but as a form of nostalgia that simply perpetuates a status quo of single-family homes, very little public transit, and few apartment buildings (constructed mostly to serve college students). Housing density activists often feel that the phrase “keep Austin weird” is misused as a cudgel to talk down proposals for new growth, however modest and well designed. As one pro-density sympathizer said: “There’s an unacceptable level of irony when you get a sixty-year-old lawyer with a multimillion-dollar house shouting about how the new apartment building down the street is gonna take away [all the] weirdness.… I mean, how are we gonna replenish our stock of weirdos?” Or as another YIMBY supporter put it on Facebook when asked why YIMBYism was important to them: “I think neighborhood character is enhanced by having more characters in my neighborhood.”
YIMBYs argue that weirdness cannot preclude growth. They observe that Austin is not and never was a jumbo-sized college town. It is the state capital. It even has the biggest state capitol building in the country, right in the middle of the city, in case anyone needed reminding. As Stephanie Trinh, a YIMBY supporter and policy advisor to Austin City Council member Greg Casar, told me: “When you say, ‘Keep Austin weird,’ I also think it’s interesting how it’s this big idea of a country town with rundown bungalows … not a state capital and a huge research university.… It’s kind of hard to know what past people want to go back to.” Activists for housing growth in Austin believe that some of the debates over culture are red herrings that detract from the more basic NIMBY dynamics at play.
Those in favor of densification see a need for filling in low-population areas, slimming roads, investing in public transit, and changing zoning laws. They lament Austin’s car dependence and observe that while the city has become a capital of cultural activities, it still has surface-level parking lots downtown, lending a sprawling vacant feeling to some parts of the central business district that should be bustling. As one YIMBY activist told me, despite his appreciation for Austin: “The urban framework is artificial and scattered. Sometimes it seems to be just set up for nightlife.” Advocates for density maintain that new housing must be built immediately, and unlike in the past, it should be located near the famous Sixth Street stretch of bars and office buildings to lessen commutes as well as to stop drunk driving (by locating housing near entertainment). Density activists commend Austin for its environmentalist pedigree. Through years of struggle, Austinites created well-loved nature trails and saved a local spring from development. However, YIMBYs insist that the city cannot rest on its laurels or ignore the fact that it is still an essentially sprawling postwar western city; it cannot simply add green space and bike lanes but must also subtract low-density suburban tract housing, underused strip malls, and motorways that cut through the city center. In this sense, YIMBYism is a wake-up call to the city’s transportation planners when it comes to urban form.
Kevin McLaughlin, a member of Austin’s major YIMBY affiliated group AURA (formerly standing for Austinites for Urban Rail before dispensing with its acronymic origin), summarized the pressure between newcomers and “original” Austinites for the Austin American Statesman newspaper in 2018: “Our national discourse right now is focused on building a wall to shut people out of the opportunities that America has.… We should not use our zoning laws to build an invisible wall around Austin.”29 Echoing San Francisco YIMBYs, McLaughlin underscores how AURA’s brand of activism is focused on reconceptualizing the right to the city30 and showing how successful places have a responsibility to accept newcomers. While he uses the more dramatic example of international migration and the sanctuary city movement (which Austin is a part of), he would expand protection to newcomers who have less financial means than the rest of the United States. Rather than framing housing as a problem of access based on money, YIMBYs instead tend to focus on more politically neutral age categories and newcomer/old-timer status. They draw on Austin’s long history as a refuge for Texans who do not fit into the rest of the state: progressives, artists, LGBTQ people, and others. The true test of tolerance, argue YIMBYs, is whether Austinites can be as welcoming with the benefits of economic success as they were when the town was a beat-up hippie haven.
The sense that housing is tied to the future demography of a city is a frequent YIMBY talking point. In Austin, it gets at urban culture as well as economic diversity. Many anti-gentrification activists say it plainly: the people who can afford to buy houses in Austin are economically productive but culturally boring. They are doctors, bankers, and brokers, not poets, painters, and performance artists. YIMBY activists push back on the idea that all newcomers are well off, and they argue that tolerance must be expressed for an evolving urban form. They maintain that Austinites must learn to accept accessory dwelling units in backyards as well as duplexes and apartment buildings if there is any hope of transforming neighborhoods of bungalows to the denser living arrangements needed to host a projected city population of 1.5 million.31 For YIMBYs, creating a diverse housing stock is often a design metaphor for creating diverse cities. Using architecture instead of social groups can help neutralize some prototypical NIMBY fears around economic and racial diversity in neighborhoods. At the same time, arguing these issues in the wonky design-speak of urban planners can have the negative effect of muting the human costs of limited affordable housing, since the abstract terms don’t fully get at the trauma of housing insecurity, rent burden, and eviction.
In Austin, YIMBYs point out that weirdness and other forms of old-timer authenticity are often NIMBYistic categories that protect those who are already in a space. They argue that cultural authenticity, even when associated with the down-at-the-heels dive bar, couch-in-the-front-yard life of “old” Austin, is not actually synonymous with lack of capital. At minimum, owners have the value of their house, in contrast to renters, but they might be more prosperous than their bohemian aesthetic indicates. This reverses the common narrative of rich techies from California coming to live in soulless condo developments that will obliterate Austin’s charm. YIMBYs are quick to add that many younger renters are working unglamorous service-sector jobs and that small changes in rent prices are particularly onerous for them.
Densification advocates in Austin believe that the city should focus on universal standards of smart urban growth, like public transit and mixed-use urban development, in order to give opportunities for small businesses to thrive in newly built stores that have residential apartments above them, remaking the landscape of strip-malls and highways that dominate Austin and every other Texas city. By focusing on meta planning problems that affect most urbanites, they hope to universalize their mission. However, in a city like Austin, still struggling with segregationist housing policies enacted nearly a hundred years go, this framing is hard to take on.
The YIMBY instigation to “build, baby, build” in order to mitigate soaring housing prices is a delicate issue in Austin, a city that is both racially divided and losing its African American residents at one of the highest rates in the United States.32 Exactly where new growth goes is of the utmost importance: if it truly fills underused or vacant land, it will be helpful; but if it instead takes advantage of low costs in the predominantly Latino and Black East Austin, it will accelerate a process of gentrification already running at top speed.33 YIMBYs endorse development as a general concept, but they also use their organizations as vetting agencies to assess good and bad growth in the private sector and to weigh in on planning laws. While YIMBYs are often well-educated professionals advocating for middle-class constituents, they frequently have to organize their efforts around public ballot initiatives. This provides an opportunity to educate people about the social and environmental benefits of living closer together, but it also poses a challenge to their ability to convey complicated urban planning ideas to a broad public and, ultimately, to live with the public’s decision on those issues.
Despite Austin’s fame as an entrepreneurial paradise with a vibrant cultural sector, it is still a deeply segregated city. When it first created its comprehensive plan in 1928, a key goal was to end the de facto integration of some central neighborhoods that had become racially mixed. This was accomplished by denying municipal services to African American enclaves and then selling that land for redevelopment.34 The new growth neighborhoods, early suburbs that expanded the size of the city, were protected by restrictive covenants that prevented sale to Black and Latino families. In 1939, then congressman Lyndon Johnson opened the Santa Rita Courts35 as the first federally funded housing project and received a grant from a New Deal program within the Department of the Interior. It was entirely allocated to Mexican American families. At the time, this seemed like a magnanimous gesture from a city still identified with the racism of Southern Democratic politics. The effect, like many other planning decisions in Austin, was to concentrate Latino and Black families into the city’s East Side, an area that was impoverished, ignored by most public services, and beset with environmentally degrading land uses.36 More egregious was the systematic disempowerment of Black and Latino communities in municipal decision-making through a city council system that elected at-large delegates rather than using a ward system: a decision so successful at reducing minority voters’ electoral power that no Black council member was elected until 1971 and no Latino until 1975.37
Today, Austin is still a city that is economically and physically divided by Interstate 35, which splits the prosperous West Side from the working-class, and largely Latino, East Side. As a group of researchers led by the sociologist Javier Auyero observe in their book Invisible in Austin, behind an economic boom there is extreme inequality. Low-wage workers are pushed further into marginalization by the gig economy: their piecemeal labor is sometimes not enough to pay the bills, even with multiple jobs. High housing costs in Austin have fallen disproportionately on the poor, given that renters have experienced a larger surge in monthly payments than those holding a mortgage.38 This burden has only been intensified with the influx of nonminority residents who move to East Austin seeking lower rents, creating more housing competition. The East Side’s Latino character and iconic restaurants and bars are appreciated for their genuine food, low prices, and charming straightforwardness. Gentrification of the East Side is proceeding at a gallop because of its central location and inexpensive land prices. However, this is precisely the kind of urban densification that YIMBYs say they would like to avoid and have been accused of encouraging by their opponents.
YIMBY urbanists often use the East Side of Austin as an example of the entrenched NIMBY attitude of the city. They point to redlining and racial exclusion of the city’s past as a trend that is carried into the present by NIMBYs who seek to block apartment buildings and lower-income tenants from their neighborhoods (while turning a blind eye to the same type of growth in low-income areas). “Not in My Backyard” may mean environmental protection, preservation of community character, and control over congestion today, YIMBYs assert, but it has a pernicious racist legacy that forever stains it. In particular, the 1968 Fair Housing Act banned neighborhood segregation but encouraged other less-explicit forms of exclusion through home prices,39 using economic segregation as a proxy for racial segregation—a practice that worked, given the large and continuing wealth gap between African Americans and whites. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has recently shown, even after many Black communities were included in homeownership after 1968, it was often done on the basis of “predatory inclusion”: creating mortgages that were in increased danger of foreclosure for first-time Black homeowners. All of these factors have created an extremely fraught relationship between African American communities and homeownership, and distrust for state intervention.40 YIMBYs affirm this assessment and tend to blame entrenched NIMBYism for a continued segregationist mentality in Austin. “It’s easier to talk about the buildings than the people,” one housing activist told me.41 Yet, their pro-growth stance has been anything but welcome in Austin’s shrinking Black community.
Growth on the East Side of Austin is often easier to accomplish than densification of existing downtown real estate. Some housing is in dismal condition, and few objections are raised when a demolition permit is requested. Rental rates are higher, making it easier to displace people who may have lived in a neighborhood for years but do not have the power accrued from owning a home. Worse yet, many of the teardown projects in East Austin add little or no density to the neighborhood. Tommy Ates, a member of the transit and housing group AURA, who generally supports more housing and is also African American (but not originally from Austin), feels that the city has concentrated on East Austin development because it is “easier than having to deal with rich neighborhood groups.” Ates narrated the long and abusive history of urban development in Austin’s African American community ending with the comprehensive plan of 2010, which he says “bulldozed community groups” in order to build new apartments on Austin’s East Side. Ates fervently hopes the city will change its urban planning laws to allow for new apartments, but he also recognizes that in historically black neighborhoods, there will be little effort to make sure that existing community members can live in those homes:
African Americans are mostly suspicious of development because of getting screwed over in the past. Elderly residents don’t want change, although if you pressed them on it, they would say the current code has destroyed the community. Some see what’s happening with their kids and the lack of affordability, but they are mostly on the side of preservationists who have never done anything for them and won’t start now.
Ates explained that, in his opinion, historic preservation is a two-edged sword in Austin: it is frequently used not to protect vulnerable and cherished buildings but to maintain the racial and economic status quo of prosperous neighborhoods. He is particularly displeased that some recent planning decisions deprioritized housing in favor of preservation, even if the structures to be protected were not beautiful in any classical sense. In particular, he pointed out the Rosewood Courts housing project, a New Deal–era housing complex for African American Austinites. Despite their pathbreaking legacy, the apartments are graceless, squat brick buildings, yet they are historically protected. Because of Rosewood Courts’ heritage status, there is no plan to create more public housing on the site, creating a grim irony for low-income Black residents getting priced out of Austin.42 Ates sees precedents like these as part of the reason why Austin’s African American population is declining, as in other cities with housing affordability crises like Portland and Seattle:43 “People don’t care about the decline in African American population.… It’s not malicious, it’s just uninformed.”
For activists like Tommy Ates, history is important—but not at the expense of serving Austin’s present Black population, which is leaving the city at an alarming rate. NIMBY thinking is pronounced in cities like Austin, where planning decisions have often devolved to the most local level possible: neighborhood plan contact teams (NPCTs) that evaluate and advise on development proposals, but whose members are mostly homeowners.44 While the goal is to draw on the nuanced expertise and experiences of actual residents, the unfortunate outcome can be to create an immovable power block.
Many YIMBYs appreciate genuine historic structures as integral visual set pieces in the street-level drama of urban life. Like Jane Jacobs, they celebrate the vernacular density achieved by row houses and small shops, but they also see some preservationist zoning being used as a cudgel to beat back change.45 In particular, they do not support the creation of entire historic districts, which exist in Austin and make changes difficult because a single home remodeling could alter the neighborhood “feel.” Instead, they argue that the protection of historic structures must be made on the basis of the merits of each structure rather than a blanket prohibition on change. This has mostly put them at odds with residents of wealthy neighborhoods filled with nineteenth-century mansions but, at times, also with preservation efforts—such as the Rosewood Courts—that seek to protect ethnic or racial enclaves or vernacular local history.
Those concerned with housing affordability in Austin have far more to fear than preservationists seeking to protect several hundred historic homes: the greater threat comes from displacement brought on by large-scale land developers for both commercial and residential uses. When the tech company Oracle built a riverside campus on the border of East Austin for over one thousand employees, it destroyed low-income housing in order to make office space and new dwellings for its own workers.46 Like many developers in Austin, the company was quick to build in an area that would be ill equipped to mobilize against development. Susan Somers, a board member of AURA, said that after the ribbon cutting for the new Oracle campus:
The CEO was totally tone-deaf, in my opinion. He was just like, “People want to be in Austin and we built this in Austin and this was a prairie before.” We were just like, “No, this was a low-income apartment complex, bro.” He doesn’t care. He’s like, “My workers are coming in here.”
Somers and others worried that without guidance from groups like theirs, housing and new offices would come to the wrong places in Austin. In particular, they felt that Austin would refrain from infilling the downtown, opting instead to build suburban office parks, which are already numerous, or would build in low-income neighborhoods in East Austin. Particularly galling to them was that many low-income neighborhoods in Austin, and elsewhere, already have higher density because of smaller houses and more intergenerational or nontraditional habitation.47 Stephanie Trinh, the policy advisor to an Austin city councilman, described this paradox in terms of neighborhood political power: “There is already higher density because low-income people live in denser housing and so there’s Riverside Apartments; it is already apartments and they are knocking them down and building another apartment. You don’t find the NIMBYs in there because it’s already low income. People who are renters have no political power, so they were able to do that.”
YIMBYs operating in the atmosphere of a characteristically racially divided American city, with white residents on one side of the “tracks” (or highway in this case) and minorities on the other, are well aware of the difficulty of their position. They hope to spark new development in the central city but to avoid neighborhoods that have been previously disadvantaged by urban planning policy. Tommy Ates summed up the feeling in the African American community as bleak: “There has always been a feeling in the Black community that they didn’t want us, and now there is a feeling that the segregationists won.” Some of the YIMBYs I interviewed found that the politics of housing in formerly segregated communities was too fraught an issue to handle, without appropriation, for a group that skews white and middle class. Encroaching on communities of color should be avoided at all costs, they maintain, including supporting housing rights groups in Black and Latino neighborhoods, for fear of inadvertently turning allyship to agenda-setting.
Anti-gentrification groups in Austin have consistently come together in order to protect neighborhoods’ existing racial composition, in contrast to YIMBY groups. In Austin, the group Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation defended a Mexican-American section of East Austin immediately adjacent to the downtown nightlife district by building over one hundred units of affordable housing and Texas’s first community land trust.48 Yet, these efforts on behalf of existing communities often make YIMBYs uncomfortable for three reasons: the idea of a “never changing” demographic goes against their ideas of growth and evolution of urban spaces; they believe that nonprofit or public housing initiatives will never attain scale to tackle affordability; and their membership is largely white and not attuned to the priorities of communities of color. Stanley M. Johnson, an African American YIMBY from Los Angeles who tweets with the handle “Stanley The Black YIMBY,” acknowledged that his name choice was a reflection of the YIMBY movement’s diversity issues. However, he believes this reticence needs to change in places where African American residents are being priced out, because more housing—negotiated at specific affordability price points—will benefit them and not just newcomers. This, he admits, will require a lot more Black people to engage in the movement and to come to African American neighborhoods and ask people what they would like to see. He conceded that this will be very difficult: it will involve Black density activists not just speaking to African American communities about saying “no” but asking what level of change can be tolerated. As he put it, it will take a holistic approach: “Let’s put money aside for a second; let’s not look at prices at all. If everything remains equal, from a practical standpoint, how will your neighborhood live? How will it feel?” Those are the questions that he believes the YIMBY movement should ask people but often cannot because it involves some level of compromise and dilution of the existing community, which white activists find very difficult to discuss.
As Somers said of Austin YIMBYs: “We don’t want to inhabit or take up the space of people who are advocating for themselves. It’s very delicate.” In this sense, YIMBYism is housing activism within the “white” center city, while anti-gentrification groups work in neighborhoods of color often at the boundaries of the downtown. YIMBYs see their value added as a dam to keep back gentrification by insisting that more housing be built in the wealthiest central places. Yet, as seen in San Francisco’s Mission District, they often cannot help but also weigh in on issues in gentrifying areas. Despite admonitions for restraint, YIMBYs frequently find themselves taking action in neighborhoods that are undergoing gentrification, and in those contexts their supply-side approach to housing politics gets complicated quickly. The bifurcation of the two groups, which ostensibly have similar goals, bespeaks the racial divide in American cities, where being an ally can be so fraught that some shy away from it.
The Austin YIMBY group AURA was founded in 2013 to advocate for rail transit, and it quickly embraced a number of other causes, particularly housing affordability. Like many YIMBY organizations, it is part grassroots activist group and part policy think tank and provides consulting services on transportation and planning measures. While not a business, the approach to activism is strategic and high-level rather than base-building. AURA searches for political opportunities to push for mass transit and urban density through well-aimed mailing lists, guest editorials, and city government consultation periods rather than general door-knocking. Mass membership is less important than informed membership, although one of the major goals of the group is to educate people about what a new city of higher density and fewer cars could look like. This is a particularly difficult task in Texas, where private property and having a backyard and ample parking are sacrosanct. Showing alternatives to the past also puts YIMBY activists in the uncomfortable position of forsaking the style of urbanism (or in many cases, suburbanism) that came before them, making them an Oedipal force of sorts: denouncing the cities of their parents and grandparents as failures.
In Austin, as in many American cities, getting people back into the downtown serves three distinct purposes: it lessens traffic and creates walkability; its denser spaces create a new kind of community that allows for smaller-footprint businesses and more social life; and—overlooked but tremendously important—it recaptures taxpayers into municipalities rather than suburban districts. The New Urbanist dogma of the 1980s and 1990s was successful in reinventing shopping and entertainment districts, but in order to increase revenue streams, people must actually move back into the city center. AURA member Tommy Ates sees this not just as a way to rejuvenate downtowns that seem hollowed out and unfriendly but as a bid for the very survival of urban governments, which have bled tax dollars to the suburbs since the 1960s: “We have a static zoning code, and that doesn’t make a dynamic city. There is an ethical responsibility and a financial responsibility to accommodate more people.”
Indeed, YIMBY activists are highly practical in that—while the groups often advocate for more transit, bike lanes, and parks—they do not hold out for hard-to-access federal grants but instead argue that they will expand the tax base. This occurred with the back-to-the-city trend that began in the 1980s,49 but YIMBYs see this as only a rudimentary start to a change that will be seismic: America, they argue, will go from a suburban country to an urban one in the coming decades. New arrivals to cities are also potential members of nascent political coalition: they will be disproportionately younger and more precarious people who are not homeowners. YIMBYs hope these newcomers will be more likely to approve considerable changes in the built environment, as they will have little vested interest in the existing framework.
The technicalities of where new development should go in central Austin is a major sticking point, not just due to the rapid gentrification of East Austin already discussed, but also because of the penchant for building suburban office parks that make some attempt to be mixed-use development while also being entirely car reliant. One of AURA’s first battles was to reduce the number of parking spaces that developers would have to provide. They also sought to eliminate some existing parking: a sacrilegious idea in a city that is both growing in population and extremely limited in public transportation access. In 2015, under intense pressure from neighborhood groups, the city of Austin decided to transform on-street parking to permit spaces designated for residents only. AURA argued that this would effectively subsidize parking for private use and deleteriously impact local businesses. YIMBYs are often anti-parking militants, and they believe that developers will not build structured parking into their buildings unless mandated to, leading to fewer (or no) cars per unit. Going even farther, they argue that if the city eliminates spaces, more people will think twice about driving for every activity. They take up the concept that on-street meter-less parking has historically been a municipal giveaway to car companies and drivers coming at the expense of pedestrians and public transit.50
The strategy of ripping out on-street parking often appears like putting the cart before the horse (to use another transport metaphor) for critics who assert that people will not be able to ride transit that does not exist yet. However, YIMBYs stress that Austin is already at a density that should allow for more pedestrians and bikes but that recalcitrant city agencies have not applied the New Urbanist lessons from other cities. Indeed, the suburban mindset is so baked into Austin that many urban neighborhoods lack sidewalks, resulting in high rates of pedestrian fatalities. One particularly tragic example was the death of William Dennis White, killed walking to the hospital to visit his brother, who had been hit by a drunk driver while taking his dog for a stroll only a mile from where White was struck.51
AURA has supported a number of new projects that remove parking and make streets smaller, including a plan to radically shrink Guadalupe, the major pedestrian street that runs in front of the University of Texas. Its brand of urbanism relies on the idea that big cities need small streets in order to make walking inviting and to lessen the sensation of always being on the edge of a roaring and dangerous stream of high-speed steel projectiles. AURA activists find this a hard sell in a place designed around car usage. YIMBYs decry suburbanism as a disorder that limits people’s ability to realize practicable solutions because of objections to making neighborhoods too “city-like.” Tommy Ates described the attachment to single-family homes, parking, and commuting as all part of why “you can’t operate a city on a small-town mentality. They are trying here and it’s killing the city.” However, to illustrate the extent of transformation needed, he drew on his own family experience: “Urbanity can be scary, and people want the comfort of suburban neighborhoods. My parents would be the same way”—showing that while YIMBYs trumpet the prudence of their ideas, they recognize them as unsettling enough that they may not be able to convince their own parents.
While walking and biking are often touted as easy solutions to car-dependent cities, many places, including Austin, need more complex mass transit plans to truly get the population moving. In western states, the construction of mass transit is often dependent on state bonds that are routinely defeated by conservative voters who are unwaveringly against tax increases. Texas cities will also be dramatically influenced by rising temperatures caused by climate change, making air-conditioned travel a necessity for much of the year. This is a particular problem in Austin, one of the hottest cities in the United States: summer heat is already over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for as many as ninety days a year, making walking and biking all but impossible.
AURA, founded as a transportation advocacy group, has urged the city to create viable public transit, but this has proven a difficult task. In 2014, the group opposed several plans to expand a commuter rail line, arguing that the new routes would not serve a large enough population to make them viable, that tickets were too expensive, and that expansion of bus routes would be quicker and cheaper.52 Much of its concern was that the state and local political process had drawn out for so long—and through so many backroom meetings—that priorities such as connecting a proposed new medical school were taking precedence over serving the transit needs of existing residents.
Opposing a rail plan was a risky step for a young activist group set up to campaign for alternative transport, but members maintained that the plan offered was “worse than nothing”53 and the public, desperate for any expansion of Austin’s historically neglected mass transit system, should not accept it. The expansion was ultimately unsuccessful in no small part because AURA convinced pro-transit voters to join with tax-conscious conservatives to bring it down. It then helped pass an ambitious transit bill that connects more populated areas in the 2020 election, making it Austin’s first major mass transit infrastructure to be approved in a quarter century. The battle for better mass transit, in true Texas fashion, is still fierce: after the success of the 2020 transit bill, the state has attempted to include widening Interstate 35 to twenty lanes in central Austin as part of “Project Connect” along with rapid bus service and new rail lines: the exact opposite of current planning advice to growing cities.54
AURA fulfills a key YIMBY function of a hybrid activist group that combines advocacy with expertise, vetting detailed plans and producing reports that break down complex issues for the public. The political action committee (Let’s Go Austin) that supported the rail tried to brand AURA as nothing more than recalcitrant progressives no better than the Tea Party.55 Despite the bad press, the activists hung on to their belief that a better plan could be forged.
The activists also took issue with the rail project’s large stable of real estate backers and publicly decried the involvement of companies whose properties stood to make a profit from enhanced transit access, arguing that light rail should be added to neighborhoods that already have the population to warrant it. In doing so, they showed that while YIMBY groups are generally pro-growth and feel compelled to work with real estate developers, there are limits to their cooperation. Finally, AURA’s policy analysis was highly attuned to the economic efficiency of light rail expansion, tailoring it to Texas, where taxpayers’ rights arguments are a forceful means to gain attention and command respect from a diverse swath of the political spectrum. However, this approach can be two-sided for densification advocates. On one hand, they argue for market-based forces in real estate to be unleashed, allowing more residential construction. On the other hand, they champion growth in the hearts of existing cities where the infrastructure needed to welcome new residents is extensive, costly, and only viable with significant municipal coordination.
A favorite YIMBY theme to sway the unconvinced is the idea of the missing middle. Cities, according to the theme, have done a pretty good job at getting people back into downtowns with new apartment towers and leisure areas packed with smart restaurants, galleries, and even sports arenas. The problem is what to do with the vast areas that lie between the suburbs and the center of town. These neighborhoods range from postindustrial to gentrifying to low-income to historic to places that look pretty much like any other single-family-home suburb. In eastern cities that developed before World War II, there may be miles of neighborhoods with row houses, triple-deckers, and walk-up apartments, but in many western and Sunbelt cities, the downtown of towers gives way directly to bungalows on large lots. In Austin, 80 percent of the city is zoned only for single-family homes and the minimum lot size is 5,750 square feet.56 YIMBYs seek to transform these neighborhoods through new zoning that allows for a mix of houses, apartments, and townhouses. In some ways, they hope to make Sunbelt cities more like East Coast cities that evolved without zoning but with natural density based on pre-car mobility. This will, of course, involve knocking down existing houses, raising rooflines that cast shadows, and putting more people into schools and other public services.
The missing middle is not just a critique of the dichotomy between skyscraper-packed downtowns and suburbs with massive minimum lot sizes; it is an indictment of how cities have become polarized economically. In Austin, smart-growth groups that argue for density—such as Evolve Austin, which is sympathetic to YIMBY causes—have argued that housing affordability is a basic issue of equity because the city is losing its middle-class workers and creating less economically diverse neighborhoods. AURA, in supporting the fated CodeNEXT plan, used testimony from ICU nurses at a council meeting to highlight how, without density, critical elements of the workforce would depart.57 Even at the level of business advocacy, there is a fear that lack of affordable housing in the center of the city will cause Austin to lose the competitive advantage that has propelled it forward in the past two decades. Drew Scheberle of the Austin Chamber of Commerce said: “The competitive advantage we had with downtown Chicago, if you can believe it, is gone.… It’s not a good thing, and it’s a self-created problem.”58 Letting the middle class live within access to all the benefits that thriving downtowns promise is an issue not just of fairness but of canny business thinking: in a service-based economy like Austin, bartenders, club promoters, and chefs make the city run.59
Austin is a good example of how even in a meteorically growing city, the development tends to rapidly metastasize outward into low-density suburbs, with only a small area of vertical growth in the very center (or what some describe as an urban density sacrifice zone in chapter 5, dealing with Australian cities). Only the downtown area near the state capitol and corridors of development in South Congress and the riverfront have raised up substantial apartment buildings. Otherwise, growth has been of huge tracts of homes, many of them the stereotypical three-bedroom McMansions, spreading out in every direction but particularly north toward the satellite city of Round Rock. This expansion of the city has created long commutes in order to find spaces that are suitable for a family. Susan Somers, an early member of the activist group AURA, described how her family struggled to stay in the center of the city where new development was aimed primarily at those with very deep pockets who can buy condos, or at students willing to live in badly maintained apartments that turn into noisy house parties every weekend: “It’s frustrating … my family’s basically coming to the realization, like, as far as buying a home, unless something significant changes, our option would be to move way out.” This move would disconnect Somers’s children from their friends and school, increase her commute, and mean giving up a more vibrant urban neighborhood for a suburban one with fewer businesses and less entertainment and street life. While many Austinites would have previously endorsed the compromise of more square footage in their home and a backyard instead of the bustle of more central neighborhoods, the tide seems to be shifting with millennials. This may be in part to the new influx of people in Austin who come from other parts of the United States, some with more condensed neighborhoods and less emphasis on detached single-family houses.
YIMBY activism in Texas is an uphill battle due to abundant space, which in the past has provided generously sized houses at a cheaper price point than the rest of the United States. Apartment living may be acceptable for college students, but it bears the stigma of low-income life: a choice made by those without many options. Even renting is considered by older and wealthier Austin residents to be somewhat financially irresponsible, given that one cannot accrue value in or modify one’s home. Some see it as the choice that people who have been fiscally undisciplined make, despite the fact that it is an increasingly common one for millennials locked out of expensive housing markets in places like Austin. As AURA activist Susan Somers put it: “There is pervasive anti-renter rhetoric in Austin, but you know, we’re a majority renter city. I’m a mom of two girls and we rent, and—to listen to some of these people—it’s almost like I’m like a child abuser or something.” Yet, not only is renting the only option for many but it can also be broadly beneficial: renters have economic mobility to choose new jobs in other locations, they can weather changes in family composition more easily, and they can use their saved assets to pursue other investment options. Many argue that if cities had more renters, the separation between personal equity and neighborhood decision making would provide for more reasonable growth without fears of home devaluation.60
When I met another AURA activist, Eric Goff, for lunch in a downtown Austin restaurant, he stood out among the suits as the quintessential mascot for Austin. Big, with hair in a ponytail and a long scraggly beard, Goff was wearing a tie-dyed shirt that had lines of color and paint drips. Despite his appearance, Goff rebuffs some of the conventional slow-growth ideas of those who live by the “Keep Austin weird” motto. He chafes at the complacency of many Austinites who focus on state politics and believe that their island of blue progressivism will enact sensible growth policies: “They figure that Democrats will take care of them and they don’t have to really do anything,” Goff told me of the typical Austinite. He smells a fair amount of hypocrisy in Austin’s bid to control population by limiting home construction in desirable areas:
Have you heard the “Don’t move here” thing? So, it comes from these “Don’t move” online discussions about growth, or you see a t-shirt that says, “Don’t move here.” It’s so crazy that we’re … a sanctuary city that says, “Please, refugees and immigrants, come to America, but don’t come here come from somewhere other than here.”
In this sense, Goff channels the most popular YIMBY criticism of NIMBY politics: it is just as common among “bleeding heart” liberals as it is with people who wear MAGA hats and care deeply about border security. The desperate scramble to protect home values reveals a kind of left-wing double standard in which empathy is something saved for those who live far away and with whom one does not have to share parking, schools, and hospitals.
Filling in the missing middle inherently means building in neighborhoods with the highest levels of opposition and blessed with abundant resources: neighborhoods with tree-lined streets where residents have garages but could also walk to a nearby café if they choose. Goff laments that in Austin, people who live in neighborhoods like Hyde Park, one of the city’s oldest and most stately, are unwilling to embrace new growth even if it only occurs on high-traffic corridors and merely replaces commercial buildings. For too long, he tells me, Austin city government has proposed New Urbanist mixed-use development, but only at the outer fringe of the city. “It’s the devil’s bargain: we’ll build this new thing but it’s a separate new city.” Rather than retrofitting the city where transit is available, this creates new fringe neighborhoods with pedestrian access within them but with little connectivity to the rest of the city.
YIMBYs believe that blocking the infill of prosperous inner-city neighborhoods leads to two negative outcomes: gentrification and suburban sprawl. In East Austin, with its central location but segregated population, the influx of white newcomers is met with considerable concern. As AURA member Tommy Ates put it: “Before, you couldn’t get a pizza delivered in East Austin, and now there is huge housing pressure.” YIMBYs largely blame homeowners in affluent neighborhoods for this situation: their desire to maintain their neighborhood makeup and home values has come at the expense of affordable housing. In this sense, YIMBYs are far more sympathetic to developers who are trying to build new housing rather than homeowners who are protecting the existing housing stock. Ates commented that there’s a certain pragmatism in this stance and it demystifies the myth of the evil developer: “The biggest voices in the room are the single-family homeowners who hate the greedy developers but don’t mind $2 million homes. When you drill down enough, these people will admit that it’s all about saving home values.” In fact, many YIMBYs in Austin run into a double bind: their pro-growth stance makes housing activists wary of their solutions, which bring in developers, while homeowners dislike them for the same reasons. In some cities this has put wealthy homeowners and poor people in gentrifying neighborhoods on the same side: opposing growth. Yet, the reality is that when both kinds of neighborhoods say “no” to development, one will have to lose in order to increase the housing supply. Almost inevitably, it is the neighborhood with fewer resources.
Austin YIMBYs, like many in the rest of the country, support all new housing as a pressure valve to ease the affordability crisis. This often means green-lighting expensive new apartments first, while projects for lower-income tenants with more rent-controlled units languish in the development stage or go unbuilt. This is what the urban theorist and planner Ananya Roy calls the “All housing matters” fallacy of YIMBY activism:61 like “All lives matter,” which replies to Black Lives Matter with a truism that belittles the urgency of addressing police violence, building market-rate housing diverts important investment from prioritizing not-for-profit housing solutions for the most marginalized. The major divide between “Build more of everything” and “Public housing first” gets at much of the tension between YIMBYs and anti-gentrification activists, but it does not resolve the big questions. First, many YIMBYs agree that public housing, rent control, and even community land trusts should be emphasized, and those in the most need should be the first served. On the other hand, anti-gentrification activists, despite much bluster, do not see private housing markets going away anytime soon and still feel the need to engage in new developments to guarantee some level of affordability. The dichotomized atmosphere between the two movements is quite apparent in cities like Austin. One can usually identify the two groups by their stance on developers: anti-gentrification activists will often reply with some half-kidding version of “Property is theft,” while YIMBYs will range between “necessary evil” and “Let’s find the good ones.” Both groups have been very busy savaging each other online while the status quo has changed little.
For people like Tommy Ates, the driving force in urban development needs to be the construction of apartments and a stop to the single-family homes that characterize Austin: “Everyone sounds sympathetic on the issue of affordable housing, but never at the expense of single-family homes.… What we need is conversion of those homes, and that’s not happening.” This will involve a visible change in many neighborhoods: an influx of people and the construction of new buildings will be disruptive. At the same time, those in East Austin who want to stem gentrification are skeptical of the “trickle down” housing approach in which a handful of new apartments appear in posh places. They believe these attempts will be too little too late to stop massive gentrification and displacement.
Missing-middle policy, in terms of planning high-density cities, is an important tactic that prepares sought-after cities to house a growing population. Yet, politically it is a disaster. New Urbanist programs that rebuilt downtowns depopulated by urban renewal in the 1990s could easily convert industrial spaces, build on parking lots, and knock down some of the ugliest and most soulless office towers to be replaced by somewhat less visually offensive glass apartment towers. This kind of development filled in the “hole” of the urban “donut” and counteracted suburbanization, which expands the city past the donut’s edges altogether. Yet, missing-middle growth deals with the substance of the sweet pastry itself: mixing up the ingredients of the already established center city and disrupting the donut. YIMBYs argue that many are dissatisfied with how inner suburban neighborhoods look, especially in western cities. Knocking down tire shops and strip malls to replace them with thoughtful new mixed-use developments should be easy, YIMBYs argue, even if a few admired ranch homes have to go in the process. Yet, the opposition they receive from drivers, homeowners, and those concerned about maintaining the aesthetics of the past—even if that past is the kitsch Americana of drive-through culture62—is significant. What’s more, they propose legal fixes that empower both the state and developers to build more: a very tough sell in cities where the power of the real estate industry is viewed as a cause of the housing affordability crisis, not as a solution.
Austin has established itself as an island of anti-Texas-ness that also happens to be the state capital. While the rest of the state has megachurches, Austin has a Pagan Pride Day. While open carry law allows University of Texas students to bring firearms to class, student protestors in Austin are more likely to be seen with sex toys strapped to their backpacks and buttons advocating “Cocks Not Glocks.” The state is known for rustic dry-rub barbeque, but Austin is noted for being the birthplace of the upscale supermarket Whole Foods. Yet, Austin’s urban layout is not significantly different from other sprawling Texas cities that have grown quickly in the twenty-first century with near total dependence on the automobile.
Starting during the presidency of the quintessential Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson, federal programs supported highway grants, propped up borrowing for suburban mortgages, and gave tax breaks to office parks strewn off distant highway exits. This enabled suburban economies to flourish while many cities have languished. Austin’s rise to both cultural and economic prominence is often narrated as an unequivocal success story, but densification activists see it otherwise. They yearn to break through the single-family-home status quo, and they believe an influx of rent-strained newcomers may be the wedge that makes major change possible. At the same time, Austin’s growth—and its rising home prices—threaten to deepen racial inequality through displacement and also through increased stratification between asset-blessed homeowners (who are more likely to be white) and rent-cursed tenants (who are more likely to be Black or Latino). While YIMBYism does not fully account for racial disparities among renters, it has no problem mobilizing the perceived racism of NIMBY urbanism of the last seventy years as a rallying call for change.