For seven years in the 2010s, Melbourne was ranked as the most livable city in the world.1 A robust economy, barely scratched by the 2008 financial crisis,2 combined with an abundant nightlife and a strong arts sector to pull it out from under the shadow of Sydney, which was Australia’s premier city in terms of wealth and population during the twentieth century. Its theater, music, and visual arts cultures are exemplified in dozens of block-long murals tucked into urban laneways, bearing pictures of celebrities, caricatures of politicians, and giant graffiti-style kookaburras and kangaroos. These often-satirical paintings give the city a playful feel, becoming the ubiquitous Instagram backgrounds for visitors and new arrivals. As in most cases, success within the livable city algorithm translates into soaring rents and an urban geography increasingly segmented by class. Melbourne, like most Australian cities, has seen an enormous spike in housing prices: a decade ago only five neighborhoods had a median home price of one million Australian dollars ($740,000 USD) or more, now 121 neighborhoods do.3 This price jump, which created twenty-four times the number of million-dollar neighborhoods, has also contributed to inequality: the Melbourne homeless population climbed by 11 percent from 2011 to 2016.4 The coronavirus pandemic has only accelerated the rise in prices as more people take out low-interest mortgages for the most expensive homes possible after living through one of the world’s harshest lockdowns. Melbourne’s home prices went up by 20 percent just in the year after the coronavirus pandemic began, as new projects to replenish housing stock were stalled due to work restrictions.5
The biggest winners of the Melbourne property boom have been homeowners: older people who bought at the right time: when having a mortgage was just a way to get a roof over one’s head rather than a potential winning lottery ticket. The losers of the housing bull market are the poor, renters, recent immigrants, and young people. Many have been forced out of the inner suburbs due to high rents and the impossibility of buying. Others have been forced to navigate living in a share house during a pandemic and negotiating safety precautions with roommates or extended family.6 Even those with good jobs and steady incomes are excluded from homeownership. This is, in part, due to the gentrification of inner suburbs that are located within two kilometers of the central business district. Brick row houses with rusted iron balconies that once housed Italian factory workers and newly arrived Cypriot immigrants, in neighborhoods like Fitzroy and Brunswick, now sell for millions of dollars to well-to-do suburbanites hoping to move back into the city. For everyone else, the only option is a place in the sprawling outer suburbs, which are regarded as inconvenient, boring, and sometimes dangerous.
Like in many global cities, Melbourne has seen a status inversion of suburbs and the center city.7 Tract homes with abundant lawns that once lured the middle classes to the edges of cities no longer hold their luster. This is in part because of the growing economic and potentially racial diversity of suburbs, which are now neither homogeneously middle class nor majority white. In Melbourne, suburbanization is a mishmash of shopping centers and single-family homes: ranch houses from the postwar era owned by Anglo Australians stand side by side with new immigrant enclaves. “Milk bars” stocked with basic groceries and homemade meat pies are adjacent to halal butchers and banh mi takeaway shops. The Melbourne suburb of Clayton is a good example: less than 30 percent of the residents were born in Australia, and while a third of the neighborhood is Chinese, it also has significant numbers of Greek, Italian, Vietnamese, Indian, and Malaysian migrants.8 However, the new diversity of inhabitants has not increased the appeal of suburban life for many. Rather, outer suburbs have frequently faced a downward trajectory with flatlining home values while smaller houses in the inner city see a meteoric rise in price. As in many American cities, this is due in part to lack of investment in public transportation9 but also to a reconceptualization of outer suburbs as a place for recently arrived immigrants. In this sense, it mirrors the European understanding of economic and social prestige diminishing as the city extends toward the suburbs, often with a strong correlation with a decreasing proportion of white residents. In Australia, this does not mean an end to suburbanization—far from it—but it signals that the market for new homes built in the peripheries of cities is determined less by the tastes of the affluent, who seek to flee the melee of urban life, and more by those who simply cannot afford to live elsewhere.
This chapter explores how the concept of Yes in My Backyard activism has gone global. Much of this framing of housing affordability seems uniquely American: it responds to a particular kind of suburbia that the United States implemented in the 1950s and 1960s.10 It embodies the cultural backlash against suburbias of that era as not just a financial choice but a cultural one.11 YIMBYism frames new inclusivity on the foundation of past damages: environmentally intensive land use, racially divided neighborhoods, and economically inefficient property development. For density activists, suburbia followed a spatial logic—that created snarled traffic and lackluster residential-only neighborhoods—and it was driven by pernicious ideologies of white flight and hoarding of tax resources. These ideas are quintessentially American and respond to a history of land use that seems uniquely confined to the United States. So how does the concept of YIMBYism travel, and does it retain its same appeal?
This chapter shows how YIMBYism has been adopted as an activist strategy in the United Kingdom and Australia due to the axiomatic power of its name, the attempts of US organizers to create a global brand that brings together disparate groups under one motto, and similar global urban trends of the popularization of city centers due to increased public and private investment. Most of all, the chapter will show how the growth of the YIMBY framing in housing activism is dependent on its “broad tent” appeal that allows for many activists to cooperate despite holding viewpoints that are, at times, directly oppositional. As one Australian density proponent in Melbourne said during a meeting: “Density is a kind of rallying point and it gets people in the room.… Once they’re there they can sort public/private, townhouse/apartment, carpark or bike racks, and all the rest.… Our job is pushing them into that room together.”
The YIMBY name has been popularized on social media for a variety of purposes: as an organizational tool for local groups, a forum to skewer NIMBY sentiments, or sometimes just a place to share photos of attractive dense urban life. Sometimes this gives the feeling of YIMBY being a catch-all category that includes any conversation about housing or urbanism. The Persian-American Twitter user who runs YIMBY Tehran praised the way the term could instantly attract people to conversations that may have seemed too esoteric in the past. Organizers have begun to use the term outside of the Anglophone world, such as the Twitter group YIMBY Poland. A Polish YIMBY who lives in San Francisco and was inspired by density activism he saw there commented that even though Polish cities are not growing that quickly, they can still take some relevant lessons from the housing struggles in the United States. He also mentioned that in Poland, like so many other countries, skyrocketing urban housing markets in places like Warsaw and Krakow are increasing social and economic divisions between rural and urban citizens.
Sweden has also seen growing interest in YIMBYism despite a fairly robust social housing sector. A YIMBY organizer in Sweden for over ten years understood the utilitarianism of the strategy immediately: “I was walking around the city seeing all these stupid uses of space … and suddenly I saw this thing YIMBY that says exactly what I have been thinking. And I said, ‘Cool, here is someone who gets it.’ ” He also said that while many people in the United States may believe that European countries have already won the battle for density, that is often a misperception. Cities like Malmö (which has a population density in the center of just 2,200 per kilometer, compared with other European cities that have ten times that amount12) has modernist high-rises but lots of wasted space in between. The Swedish YIMBY, who did not wish his name to be shared because he also works in city planning, said, “If you look at the map you will see that the city is not dense. There are large apartment buildings and between [them] there are vast wastelands.” For some European YIMBYs, the movement presented a means to correct the mistakes of mid-century modernism that left large garden spaces (sometimes never planted) between residential areas or that separated housing from shopping. In this sense, it was a philosophy that allowed them to advocate for “filling in” the city. Unlike buildings in American cities, some of the anchoring structures that needed new development around them are hundreds of years old, but nonetheless the philosophy was viewed as comparable.
Global activists, most of whom are in the Anglophone world, endorsed YIMBYism not just because Not in My Backyard is a powerful pejorative in their own cultural contexts but also because they appreciated the optimism and pragmatism of the movement they saw in California and other places. Almost all of them viewed advocating for social housing alone as a losing battle because its benefits were not universal enough to build a large coalition. Additionally, they found design-centered debates too aesthetically focused without enough public policy decisions at stake. Instead, they concentrated on municipal laws. Using simple tools such as Facebook groups, blogs, and small meetings, these international groups formed small cliques of highly educated urbanists who, while they did not create a mass movement for housing, began quietly exerting influence on local councils to build more housing units, develop underutilized land, and put more money into public transit. As another Swedish activist said of the quiet campaign they mounted:
We don’t even have a formal organization. The only thing we have is a blog and a Facebook group.… We are focusing less on the NIMBYs and much more on the urban planning system, on the power. We know that they listen to us. They follow our blog. They are afraid of what we are gonna write.… We are more like a newspaper. We do have power. They prepare for what we are going to write. We know this because emails have leaked from public planning organizations that … talk about us as a stakeholder.
As in most iterations of YIMBY activism, internationally it functions not as a mass movement for housing justice but as a new layer of civic infrastructure that places itself between public opinion and planning authorities with a set of skills that translates policy to a larger audience. It seeks to arbitrate both public regulation and private development proposals. Simple online organizing reaches a small but influential group, and many municipalities find it difficult to ignore well-informed activists with professional backgrounds. As Daniel Oleksiuk, a lawyer and founder of Vancouver’s Abundant Housing organization said, “There used to be just one guy at public hearings in favor of development.” He emphasized that his group was helping Canadians understand density as an ecological asset in a city hemmed in by mountains rather than a capitulation to developers who would sully the city’s image as a haven for outdoor activities.
City governments, which often remain skeptical about YIMBYism as a disruptive political platform, nonetheless seek to mollify these groups by including them in the policy-making process as stakeholders, less they should antagonize them and have to endure them as adversaries. As in California, municipal governments in Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Australia fear the well-crafted meme made by someone who understands zoning and has plenty of time to show up to local council meetings. They also feel the very real pressure of expanding numbers of renters concerned with housing prices. Most of all, they are excited to work with activists who allow them to restart the urban growth machine,13 with regulated growth, rather than more radical groups who seek only to expand public housing or to block all growth because of gentrification fears.
British housing density groups are not where you would think they would be. As in the United States, most activists are not in the worst-off cities with no sidewalks, where strip malls make up the only commercial areas and houses are widely spaced on half-acre plots. There are no YIMBYs in Slough: the home of the original Office television mockumentary where employees sit in a faceless suburban office park all day. Rather, they are in cities that people frequently visit, where they are charmed by their “Europeanness” and bustling centers: Brighton (a capital of LGBTQ culture and a successfully rethought seaside resort), Bristol (a maritime town with no shortage of guidebook hype), and London, Oxford, and Cambridge. Yet, the very popularity of these cities is why housing activism seems so urgent there. For many, middle-class life is a fantasy that can only be lived at the very farthest reaches of the city in a state of outsiderness that estranges residents from the reasons why they came to successful metropolitan areas in the first place. Paul Erskine-Fox, a YIMBY activist in Bristol, shares this sentiment because he and his wife live much farther from the city center than they would have liked: “People feel like they have a relationship with the city because they work or socialize there.… They have an economic relationship with Bristol but they can’t have the [full] relationship with the city they want to.”
This state of being existed for low-income residents for decades as they were banished from downtowns to marginal neighborhoods on the urban periphery.14 However, it is a very new feeling for middle-class residents. As one British activist said, “People interested in density are often the ones who have done everything right … [such as] the university grads with knowledge-sector jobs, but the prices are so high now they feel like they’ve done something wrong with their lives.… They feel depressed about where they have to live and they think it’s their own fault.” Britain, unlike the United States, has long had a spatial stigma associated with housing on the outskirts of cities: those who cannot afford centrality endure not only long commutes, dreary suburban neighborhoods, and few recreational options but derision for their accents and broader cultural outlook. They are “nearby provincials,” as the author V. S. Pritchett mockingly put it: trapped in a suffocatingly quotidian life ripe for satire.15 More recently, the Booker prize–winning novel Shuggie Bain details the complete deterioration of a family that moves from Glasgow social housing to the disconnected and bleak periphery of the city.16 YIMBY activists are acutely aware of the diminished cultural cachet of suburban living in the United Kingdom compared with more expansive environments like the United States or Australia. This has led them to push for densification with even more ardor.
Erskine-Fox and others from UK YIMBY groups were impressed by the efforts of their American counterparts and the new framing for housing affordability. In particular, they were able to get people animated about zoning issues that previously evoked only groans and yawns. As Erskine-Fox put it, “Our message is, it’s time to get as many people as possible involved in the planning process.” To this end, he has created a mapping function on the Bristol YIMBY website that shows potential new housing projects and allows users to comment on their impact for the local community. Typical posts read like: “Summit Capital are proposing to re-develop this brownfield site with purpose-built student accommodation, whilst providing high-quality landscaped open space.…”17 The messaging with phrases like “brownfield” and “purpose-built” is not exactly populist—in fact it is mostly for people who already know a lot about city planning—but spatial mapping and infographic tools combined with forum comment sections creates an online communication infrastructure to discuss development before it happens. While this may sound trivial, it is a technique that many YIMBY groups expound in order to supplement more predetermined community consultation periods run by developers and local government.18 In this sense, they seek to make the planning process more deliberative but within a mostly preordained group that has the time and capacity to get involved with spatial issues at a high level of detail.19
Like in the United States, part of the function of YIMBY groups internationally has been to facilitate communication with neighbors who previously blocked new developments. YIMBY groups are third-party pro bono consultancies that moderate between community groups, local councils, and developers. However, they are not value neutral: they want new buildings to go somewhere, and they believe that “just saying no” should not be an option. “We are asking people to accept that we need to build more homes, and [we are] trying to get them to say where those homes should be built,” Erskine-Fox told me. John Myers, the co-founder of the London YIMBY group, summarized their mission in historical terms dating the struggle back to an article published by the preeminent urbanist Peter Hall in the mid-1970s,20 stating: “Since then, the situation has become drastically worse, and there have been literally hundreds or thousands of reform proposals and nothing has really gone anywhere.”
Sam Watling, a YIMBY organizer from the coastal city of Brighton, agreed with my assertion that his density battle was somewhat easier than that faced by a sprawling American city like Phoenix, Arizona, or Houston, Texas. Indeed, some of the neighborhoods that his group would like to become more compact already consist of row houses, which would be an admirable state of affairs for cities west of the Mississippi River, where most housing consists of detached single-family homes, often on large lots.21 Nor is densification a new idea in the United Kingdom. As early as 1936, George Orwell wrote of the double-edged sword of slum clearance efforts in The Road to Wigan Pier:
When you rebuild on a large scale, what you do in effect is to scoop out the center of the town and redistribute it on the outskirts. This is all very well in a way; you have got the people out of fetid alleys into places where they have room to breathe; but from the point of view of the people themselves, what you have done is to pick them up and dump them down five miles from their work. The simplest solution is flats. If people are going to live in large towns at all they must learn to live on top of one another.22
However, despite long familiarity with the necessity of apartment life in the United Kingdom, it still stirs up a sense of class anxiety: of a downward trajectory from house to apartment to council flat, despite Orwell’s homespun planning advice.
Despite the dissimilar housing typology, Watling felt that the idea of YIMBYism was a potent tool in the British and European context. We discussed a member of Parliament near Brighton who insisted on having a million new units of housing built in suburban London while rejecting the construction of two hundred new homes in his own district. Watling made clear that YIMBYism personalizes issues that are often an abstraction while adding a valuable moral component. “It’s my backyard not your backyard … and if a project isn’t going to work near where you live, there’s very little chance of any politician adopting it nationally.” Indeed, he and others in the United Kingdom found the siting of new homes to be both a personal sacrifice made for the broader community and a political compromise more politicians would have to make in the future. The problem is, as John Myers from the London YIMBY put it: “Two-thirds of the voters are homeowners and, as far as I know, we have the only government that has an expressed stated policy that home prices should continue to rise. Imagine that being the policy for food or clothing or any other basic need.” Activists for housing density, in short, are after a “buck stops here” philosophy with dwellings instead of poker chips, in which members of Parliament finally take responsibility for housing shortages in their own districts.
Much of this discontent also predates the current moment and goes back to the financialization of housing in the 1980s under the Thatcher government. Since Margaret Thatcher sold off council flats to existing tenants, leaving poorer residents more precarious,23 the expansion of homeownership made asset appreciation of broader interest to a country where renting became less widespread (it went from half the UK in 1979 to less than a third in 2000).24 For those not fortunate enough to become owners, the private rental market has become more expensive as the available stock of public housing has severely contracted. Compounding the problem, construction has dropped off significantly with a 44 percent decrease in new builds from 1980 until 2014.25 This has created a rift in the pro-business Conservative Party, in which Tory MPs are split on local control of new development in wealthy areas (to limit new neighbors) alongside maintaining a relationship with construction companies and property developers who are traditional party supporters and are desperate for growth.26
As YIMBY adherents point out, there is little appetite for moderating the rise in values or treating housing as a basic commodity, given the middle-class interest in home values. At the same time, the ability to buy is often limited to the previous generation, who obtained mortgages during the Thatcher era. Today, even college-educated workers with good earnings are getting squeezed, particularly in London. For the middle classes, this means that people of age thirty-five to forty-four are three and a half times more likely to rent (in 2017) as they were in 1993. For working-class British tenants, it can mean balancing on the precipice of homelessness.27
As in the United States, YIMBY activism in the United Kingdom has sometimes been a fraught mixture between exhorting the public to pay closer attention to urban planning dogma and, at times, challenging the power of the planning profession. On one hand, activists want to incentivize densification of postwar suburbs. On the other hand, they occasionally seek more construction on greenfield sites than the planning profession is comfortable with. Paul Erskine-Fox suggested that the roles might be somewhat reversed between the United Kingdom and the United States: he stated that while people are flocking to the center of cities, that’s not where all the new housing should go because of both logistics and consumer preference. He insisted that planners should incentivize densification while also heeding the market: “People still want larger family homes, and most upzoning attempts will not provide for this in crowded downtowns.” This rarely means building at the edge of the city but rather in some of its “missing middle” zones that have maintained their value. Yet, finding that land is extremely difficult, and one of the easiest methods is to locate underutilized state-owned land and argue for its development.
Housing activists complained of planning for planning’s sake: a kind of vengeful nanny state intent on regulating all changes no matter how minor. John Myers from London noted that there are many detached homes or semi-detached homes within the M25 London ring road and that just densifying these areas with townhouses could “literally more than double London’s housing capacity.” Despite significant public support, he maintained that the planning profession has not yet responded to this solution because of NIMBYism as well as inertia: “The constraint here is you literally can’t add another cubic or square foot to your house without permission from the government, except in extremely limited cases.” In this sense, many YIMBYs see their groups as a useful supplement to municipal planners who can deflect public pressure: “We want to create more ways for planners to achieve what they want,” said Myers.
Another point of contention is Britain’s many greenbelts that provide urban growth boundaries, as in Boulder, Colorado, where cities would otherwise have spilled over in the same kind of uncontrolled suburban sprawl that went on in the United States.28 While UK YIMBY groups appreciate the historical role of these planning mechanisms, they are skeptical that all land under protection really meets the criteria for high use value in the midst of the national housing crisis. Indeed, the National Housing Federation estimated that 8.4 million people in the United Kingdom were living in unaffordable, insecure, or unsuitable homes.29 Erskine-Fox, from Bristol, argued this was perhaps the most important issue in the United Kingdom:
We are trying to build more and more housing in high-density situations but, and this is my opinion, we need to have a review of the greenbelt.… We have a lot of green protected land to protect against urban sprawl … but there is a lot of land in the greenbelt that doesn’t fulfill the purpose and could be used for homes.
As in Colorado, skepticism about the greenbelt was based on unfair commutes for those laboring in Bristol and other cities but forced to travel over an hour by train or bus to reach the city’s center. Activists argued that the buffer of an urban growth boundary was no longer functional because of leapfrogging development that has transpired since the 1960s. Additionally, they found environmental benefits to be lacking in some cases because land set aside had not been successfully made into parkland but was simply off limits. Erskine-Fox chalked this up to NIMBYism in many cases: “A lot of the time, the greenbelt doesn’t serve that much of a purpose. Quite frankly, it’s often because people want a view of it out of their window, and they want to protect the greenbelt because they want to protect their home.” Many activists feel that careful consideration of growth boundaries could produce land for new housing while also respecting the general concept. They argue that this has not transpired because what was meant to be a general public good has in some places been used for private advantage by those who bought properties abutting the greenbelt.
The disagreement over the future of UK greenbelts, and particularly the metropolitan growth boundary in London which hugs the orbital M25 highway, is not welcome news to British town planners. Indeed, the intervention of the greenbelt was what conferred power onto the new profession in the early twentieth century.30 Challenging the sacrosanctity of this tool is akin to disputing the legitimacy of the entire field, which is exactly what some YIMBYs have in mind. Many of those interviewed felt that professional planners had become out of touch with major economic issues such as housing while concentrating on more niche issues. The activists saw their job as refocusing the profession.
One planner who is also a YIMBY supporter described the “rarefication of the field,” and “disinclination to experiment.” Sam Watling from Brighton called out planners as not necessarily being allies of the YIMBY movement as they frequently are in the United States: “Lots of planners are very skeptical about attempts to simplify the planning system and may oppose things for ideological reasons. They don’t want to have their professional power taken away.” He also insisted the point of contention was not just about flexibility regarding the greenbelt but about the desire of planners to operate with a blank canvas rather than to engage the messiness of urban densification: “We have fought some bitter battles with town planning agencies that favor new towns over any measure of bottom-up densification,” Watling said. In this sense, advocating for limited greenbelt development was not a betrayal of goals to increase density in existing neighborhoods but a compromise to build on terra nullius closer at hand rather than on the urban fringe.
British activists endorsed Yes in My Backyard as an umbrella term, but they also worried that it had become divisive because of the zeal of California YIMBYs. “We don’t necessarily want all the baggage that comes with it,” one London YIMBY supporter said. Yet, most endorsed the positive connotation of the slogan, viewing it as an important reframing of the “cannot” ethos of Not in My Backyard into a rallying cry of “yes, we must.” To some, this appeal was community-spirited and about not leaving anyone behind. The UK housing market has become more financialized and increasingly brutal for those without means. Since 1994, those in the bottom quintile of the working-age population who spend more than a third of their income on housing has increased from 39 percent to 47 percent (in 2018).31 Now that middle-class activists have taken up the battle for housing affordability, they often use the same language of individual property rights that was successfully deployed during the Thatcher years.
Unlike YIMBYs in the United States, whose talking points emphasize living together in mixed-income communities, some of the British groups have taken a more utilitarian approach that argues for upzoning as a means to maximize property value. As Watling put it in the context of Brighton: “It is basically bribing NIMBYs with their own land value voucher.” This more realistic version of densification is based on appeals not to the heart but to the wallet or, as Watling puts it: “We want to make sure that the benefits are concentrated enough that you can basically incentive local homeowners to upzone.”
“Bribing owners” is seen as a particularly canny strategy in London where housing prices have reached stratospheric heights. Within the financial capital, prices are based on the city’s connection to global financial markets rather than just its primacy in the United Kingdom.32 London housing is morphologically diverse, but building new high-rises is unpopular given the association with mid-century urban renewal and the creation of council estates with concentrated poverty. “When people think of density they think of towers, and we just don’t find that towers win a huge amount of support,” said John Myers of the London YIMBY group. Instead he proposed building above row houses to create extra units. This sort of “pop top” can be done structurally but it usually means completing extra stories in a different style: modern boxes that hover above their historic host dwelling in a juxtaposition that many people find parasitic. Myers summarized the public concern over aesthetics:
If you get two stories of concrete box on top of a Georgian, Edwardian, or a Victorian, everyone around you is gonna scream. So, there has to be some way to address the design concerns.… There’s just so much old building stock here even if you go further out. Getting people comfortable so that you can add more housing without making it look like something they’re not familiar with is really important.
London’s blessing and curse is money. “You can literally build a concrete box and you’ll make money out of it,” Myers commented to explain the well-founded hesitancy of some owners to modify existing neighborhoods. Despite quick and shabby additions, money also provides a strong density incentive to owners. This gives YIMBYs a sweet spot for negotiating with well-heeled homeowners who, in other financial environments, would be more hesitant. Retrofitting a townhouse with more units on the roof is appealing, given the tremendous value of each additional unit, which would not be as tempting in less exorbitantly priced property markets. The average price for a semi-detached or terrace house in a prime London neighborhood like Westminster, Chelsea, or Knightsbridge is between £1.5 million to £2.5 million; however, flats are also worth over £1 million,33 making the creation of new apartments an attractive option, particularly for long-term residents who may be homeowners but cash poor. Although this intervention is piecemeal and often only adds market-rate units to the housing supply, it still provides a convincing path forward for cities with high prices because, as Myers sees it, even wealthy homeowners want a windfall in order to cope with living in such an expensive city. As he puts it:
There is so much money to throw around in development that you can literally answer almost any concern you like with profit that will come from development. You can find situations that are win-win. We have a lot on our side to bring people on board: the heritage people, the design people … the parks people … there are just huge amounts.
The upside for YIMBYs in the United Kingdom is that the organizing work they do is less ideological and more logistical: it is frequently about making the numbers work for specific communities rather than getting those places on board with densification as a basic precept. As Myers commented when considering the US analogy: “The transport-oriented development debate has been won in this country already. We are really just at the point of solving the political constraints.”
The practicality of more intensive land use comes at a time of real economic suffering, in which the importance of getting into urban areas with better work opportunities is paramount. As in California, the British YIMBY movement has taken on existential worry about growing regionalism as well. Living in Bristol, Brighton, and London is not just a matter of feeling good in a thriving city but also making a living in a country increasingly riven with regional tensions. In 2017, the average person in Nottingham had a disposable after-tax income of only £12,445 (approximately $16,150 USD) while Londoners enjoyed average annual earnings of £46,288 ($60,150 USD).34 Not being able to access housing in better-off cities has meant that people are locked out of mobility, instead resigned to stay in de-industrialized towns with stagnant or falling wages.
With this decline, worsened by austerity following the 2008 economic crisis, a new kind of cultural animus has formed as part of the identity of failing cities and towns. Much sociological research has centered on how the feeling of being left behind relative to London—with its connections to Europe and the world—has added to a sense of nationalism fueling the successful Brexit referendum.35 Several YIMBY activists argued this was true, but understanding the phenomenon simply as pride for downtrodden municipalities did not get at the full picture. “People shut out of opportunity have often voted to leave the EU, and that hasn’t necessarily been part of the debate—which I want to make it,” Sam Watling stated. He insisted that it is not just people who do not earn enough but those who cannot get a foothold somewhere else in the country. For those invested in the project of YIMBYism, Brexit was not just a backlash against Europeanization but a cry for help from citizens with lessened mobility: those unable to take advantage of open borders in continental Europe but also incapable of renting a flat in London, Oxford, or anywhere else with higher wages.
Australia has been commended for internationalizing its economy in ways that allowed it to weather the financial crisis of 2008, but the country now faces an existential dilemma based on both trade and immigration. Australia’s finances are inextricably bound to China, not just as a major supplier of raw materials—mined in the vast center of the continent—but also through direct foreign investment, including wealthy Chinese real estate speculators snapping up properties in major cities.36 In 2015–16, the Australian government approved $47.3 billion AUD in Chinese investment, $32 billion of which was in real estate.37 This has created a sizable portion of the Australian real estate sector designed specifically for Chinese nationals, most notably high-density inner-city skyscrapers that tower above the late Victorian row houses that define Australian cities.
At the same time, the issue of suburban violence in areas with large migrant populations has exploded within Australian politics, particularly in Melbourne. The issue was largely manufactured as a campaign talking point in 2018 by the conservative Liberal Party to smear Victoria’s Labor government as soft on crime. News outlets widely reported a wave of violence perpetrated by “African gangs” in the outer Melbourne suburbs, leading to a hardening of views around refugee resettlement as well as a growing fear of the suburban periphery.38 While the crime stats remain mostly a fantasy, Australians—who have a much stricter immigration and refugee regime than the United States and Europe—are receptive to nativist flag-waving. For a country with so much space, xenophobia is most visible in the arena of urban housing, and there is a real sense of scarcity when it comes to sheltering those who are urban newcomers.
During the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, the right-wing nationalist politician Pauline Hanson commended the city of Melbourne for locking down only public housing projects on the edge of the city (and not nearby single-family homes) because the residents were “drug addicts” and “alcoholics” who had not bothered to learn English, adding: “they are from war torn countries … they know what it is like to be in tough conditions.”39 In Melbourne, these opinions are not just voiced by ultranationalists during plague times, but they simmer in more mundane periods and reflect how people see the city’s outer neighborhoods that host more public and low-income housing. This translates to anxiety over a future in which the city is composed of a wealthy Chinese center (downtown towers), an unaffordable Australian middle (gentrified inner suburbs), and a “dangerous” African/South Asian periphery (the exurban fringe), creating a telling pie chart of contemporary racial fears.
This section explores how YIMBYism has become an important framing for Australian housing activists, particularly millennials fighting to inhabit “missing middle” zones of cities nestled between skyscraper-packed central business districts and more sprawling outer suburbs. It shows how migration has played an oversized role in the conversation around housing shortages but also, potentially, offers a solution in furnishing new models of cohabitation based on density from European and East Asian cities. The ways migrants have used Australian cities—first Southern Europeans in the 1960s and later East Asians in the 1980s until today—have challenged the hegemonic logic of suburbanization as the realization of the “Australian Dream.”
In Melbourne, Southern European migrants often took over the iron-columned terrace homes of their Anglo forebears and embraced neighborhood street life and small markets in communities that exist to this day. While second-generation Greek and Italian migrants have often moved to single-family homes in more dispersed suburbs, the mixed commercial and residential infrastructure they created in the inner city is still enjoyed by new, often younger and more affluent residents. Similarly, heavily East Asian neighborhoods in Melbourne number in the dozens and forms of urbanism common to Chinese cities—such as apartment living and central produce and fish markets—abound. Indeed, Melbourne is one of the few wealthy cities to have a multi-block fish, meat, and vegetable market (Queen Victoria Market) in the very epicenter of the city, where locals have vociferously resisted redevelopment plans that do not keep its unique function as a purveyor of fresh food.40
YIMBY activism has become a means not just to petition for broader zoning laws that incorporate different land uses but also more welcoming cities that include people of different ethnic and economic backgrounds. Yet, at the same time, the promise of substantial new housing development bringing newcomers to central neighborhoods where immigrants already struggle with affordability creates a paradox. South European and Asian cities are increasingly valued as models for Australian urbanism, but the creation of those spaces threatens less-resourced immigrant communities with displacement.
Most Australian cities sprawl out into the vast landscape like their counterparts in Nevada and California. Despite the country’s British history, there has always been a desire to emulate American material success. While cities like Sydney and Adelaide began with row houses organized around high streets with shopping, they quickly lost most of their European-style density in the postwar period as the automobile became the main means of transportation and the landscape offered abundant space for suburban expansion. As more people moved off cattle stations and farms to work in manufacturing and clerical jobs, Australian cities constructed vast tracts of suburban freestanding homes, often stretching into fire-prone bushland.
In 1954 the chief urban planner of Los Angeles told a Melbourne audience that “our cities must be built around the necessity for the car,” and they wholeheartedly agreed with him.41 The subsidies that had previously served to fund trams and municipal rail were diverted to highway construction, even by Labor Party governments who represented more inner-city working-class constituents without automobiles.42 The eminent Australian urbanist Graeme Davison observed that by the late 1960s, the Labor Party leader and future prime minister Gough Whitlam “realized that the so-called ‘mortgage belt’ was where the party’s electoral future would be decided.” In this sense, the proliferation of ranch homes with swimming pools into the parched outskirts of Adelaide or the river floodplains of Brisbane modeled the American trend of suburbanization as a new frontier that conquered nature through human ingenuity.43
Outward growth was based not just on consumer desires and cheap lending rates but also on the Aussie/American shared sense of manifest destiny. As the architect and critic Robin Boyd wrote in his 1960 satire The Australian Ugliness—a thorough takedown of the country’s urban aesthetics and nouveau riche prosperity—suburbanization was a form of pioneering: “Less romantic than the first … since it involves factories and subdivisions instead of sheep, gold, and the limitless acreages of bush.”44 For Boyd, the landscape was already irrevocably marred in the 1960s with ill-planned housing mushrooming from every hilltop. As he wrote of Wollongong, near Sydney: “The suburbs’ stealthy crawl like dry rot eating into the forest edge … more trees being bulldozed from yellow clay of the housing developments, as if the estate-agents and builders are determined to make all the coast match the now-barren, windswept sands of Botany Bay.”45 Yet, housing in this era was still a middle-class right, and Boyd’s assessment of suburbs has always betrayed a hint of classism when it comes to the aesthetic critique. He deemed the pink lawn flamingos and plaster columns on brick bungalows in far-flung Sydney to be delusions of American prosperity: “The essence of Australian suburban life is unreality: frank and proud artificiality.… But it is the city’s bastion against the bush.” Suburbia was a defensive line against Australia’s existential enemy: its harsh natural environment. It also played into the foundational myth of successful conquest, in which Europeans subdued a fearsome terrain that was often hostile to their health and well-being.
The industrial labor force in the cities of the 1960s was becoming more diverse, with new immigrants from Greece, Italy, and Yugoslavia. Australia took in 214,304 from Greece alone between 1947 and 1972, referring to these immigrants as “New Australians,” a moniker never used for previous Anglo-Saxon or Irish migrants.46 Anglo-Australians living in first-generation suburbs were often newly middle-class homeowners who, like their American counterparts, sought ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods to match their recent prosperity. First-generation Anglo (and Irish) homeowners who migrated to the suburbs were frequently replaced by Southern European migrants who took over their terrace homes in central locations, leading to anxiety about the deterioration of the inner city into immigrant “ghettos” in the 1960s.
By the end of the 1960s, Australia had become a destination not only for Southern Europeans but also for Asians previously barred by the White Australia policy, a racist measure meant to halt the migration of Chinese immigrants in the early twentieth century that was not expunged from federal law until 1973. Both Southern European and Asian immigrants originally clustered in highly populated urban areas, and they often remade them into more thriving mixed-use neighborhoods. These districts, close to the commercial core, were soon filled with mom-and-pop restaurants, produce markets, variety stores, butchers, bakers, and delicatessens. This also had an impact on how people used downtowns. The center of Melbourne, uninhabited for a generation aside from government buildings and a dull stretch of office towers, saw a surge in cafés, starting with Italian espresso bars on Collins Street near the State Parliament, which led to it being dubbed “the Paris End” in the late 1950s. A generation later, Vietnamese and Chinese entrepreneurs added smaller-scale retail to central business districts, enlivening them for those wishing not only to work in the center but to live there full-time.
Immigrant patterns of land use—first Southern European and then Asian—helped to jump-start the process of inner-city gentrification, showing that central neighborhoods could once again be desirable. Graeme Davison observed how this completely realigned the Australian perception of space, creating bourgeois rather than working-class downtowns: “neighborhoods which were once ‘dense’ and ‘overcrowded’ now become ‘compact’ and ‘fine-grained,’ their unwelcome ‘promiscuity’ becomes an attractive ‘sociability,’ their threatening ‘cosmopolitanism’ a mature ‘sophistication.’ ”47 This also had much to do with the mellowing of ethnic prejudices as immigrant neighborhoods became more defined by first-generation Australians who opened businesses that combined their ancestral cultures with Australian characteristics: Italian bakeries with biscotti and lamington cake; Macedonian burek shops with heaps of sausage rolls for the midday rush of construction workers. These businesses often infused life into inner suburbs as well as the central business district, creating a cosmopolitan mélange that represented the “New Australia” to non-urbanites encountering widespread ethnic diversity for the first time.
In the sixty years since The Australian Ugliness was published, the outer suburbs have lost much of their appeal: the housing stock is older, new highways have not reduced traffic, and migration has challenged some white Australians’ views of what made suburbia appealing. Yet, by the early twenty-first century, the new popularity of central urban neighborhoods had created problems: new housing is not being built at a sufficient rate, particularly not higher-density apartment buildings. Those seeking density can only find it in a small number of high rises built for Chinese investors and students in the busiest downtown locations, while neighborhoods directly abutting these towers are nearly flat: filled with row houses and the occasional six-unit apartment complex (dubbed “six-packs”).48
Australians fetishize homeownership like their American counterparts. It is seen as a major step toward successful adulthood. Once, buying a fixer-upper in neglected urban neighborhoods was easy due to widespread economic growth and high wages, even for unskilled workers. Yet, by the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Australian cities were ascendant with new fortunes being made from real estate transactions.49 As in other developed countries, real estate increasingly makes up an outsized portion of the economy.50 Investment incentives, such as “negative gearing,” which allows those who own multiple homes to write off losses from additional properties on their place of residence, creates a market in which people with means are encouraged to buy several properties while those without are left stranded with homeownership as a distant dream. The increased financialization of homeownership has created a middle class obsessed with rising home values (most Australian newspapers, including Melbourne’s The Age, publish weekly real estate supplements that are one of their most widely read sections51). However, the increase in home values has also created anxiety among renters and those locked out of homeownership, creating fertile conditions for YIMBYism to attract Australian followers.
In 2017, the Australian real estate mogul Tim Gurner, a millennial, took his generation to task. He argued that Australia’s housing affordability crisis is due to young people’s failure to save their money: their future mortgage down payments are simply frittered away on “smashed avocado [toast] for $19 and four coffees at $4 each.”52 Aside from exhaustion with millionaires lecturing the middle class on thrift, aggrieved Australians were quick to point out that even forgoing tens of thousands of toasties would not produce the funds for a mortgage in big global cities.53 Worse yet, it is exactly this age group that has seen unprecedented casualization of their work and stagnant pay despite Australia’s robust economy and fortuitous geopolitical placement near rising China.
The existential anxiety of Melbourne’s housing market is not just a generational tussle over how much new housing to put up and where it should go. Melbourne’s downtown skyline is filled with steel pillars born aloft by cranes to make apartment towers with names like Prima Pearl, Eureka Tower, and Australia 108 (108 stories tall). Yet, few Melburnians are reassured that high-rises will help affordability because new units are often at the luxury end of the market and are clustered in the central business district, where taller height limits apply. Melbourne’s central business district is viewed by many as an area solely for Chinese buyers, creating a parallel housing market. Australians are generally unaccustomed to apartments and prefer to live outside of the densest areas of the city. Local newspapers have reported54 for years on the city’s downtown being awash with Asian capital and new foreign residents: often students taking advantage of their parents’ purchase while completing a degree. While many Australians are cognizant of their country’s increasing dependence on Chinese funds, they also resent intrusion into an already tight real estate market, especially when stories of empty investment properties abound.55 As in cities such as Vancouver, the families from abroad who live in downtowns are often not considered “real” residents, with commenters sometimes even questioning their kinship ties with terms like “astronaut families” and “parachute children”: xenophobic put-downs similar to “anchor baby.”56
While Australians have been accustomed to East Asian migration for two generations—with each major city containing multiple Chinese and Vietnamese neighborhoods—many previously viewed these immigrants as workers in low-wage jobs until the 1990s. The transition of Asian immigrants from an unseen labor force “behind the kitchen door” to front-and-center consumers of luxury goods (and the highest bidders at apartment auctions) has been shocking for older Australians. Billboards advertising real estate to Asian buyers have been defaced57 with signs saying “Australia is not Asia,” while “No Chinese Allowed” signs have been put up at Australian universities by neo-Nazi groups. The sense of white grievance is strong in rural areas but also in less-affluent suburbs. Indeed, the far-right Australian senator Pauline Hanson told Parliament in 1996 that “we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate”; yet she is from suburban Brisbane, not rural Queensland.58 Just like suburban Trump voters, many people on the edges of the city feel they have been pushed out by foreigners with money, who are assisted by the immigration policies of progressives who care more about letting in new people than about supporting struggling compatriots.
The larger migration trend in Australian cities is similar to the trajectory in the United States: as inner-city neighborhoods have gentrified, outer suburbs have become comparably cheaper and more diverse. While the Levittown ranch homes of Long Island are increasingly filled with Latino families, the 1960s bungalows of suburban Sydney and Melbourne are home to Sri Lankan, Sudanese, Vietnamese, and Afghan immigrants. Just between 2011 and 2016, the Melbourne suburb of Box Hill went from 26.7 percent people of Chinese ancestry to 35.4 percent.59 Box Hill is an example of an area where a wave of relatively wealthy migrants from mainland China have successfully increased density by attracting overseas capital and changing zoning laws to allow taller buildings. More common are exurban neighborhoods, like Dandenong, Broadmeadows, and Sunshine, in which deteriorating suburban homes from the 1970s are being sold or rented to lower-income residents who face long commute times. Outer neighborhoods have also become zones where it is easier to place new social housing projects, to give grants for subsidized housing, or to temporarily settle refugees. This has led to an identity crisis for some of the older residents who moved to Melbourne’s edges at the same time as diversity rose (or perhaps in response to the rise) within the city center in the 1970s and 1980s.
Outer suburbs are portrayed as both boring and violent. An article60 about Melbourne’s “ignored, discounted” western edges in the newspaper The Age was commented on by one reader who felt that “the only way to see the western suburbs is by flying over them, preferably at night.” Antipathy toward far-flung suburbs comes from urbanites who tsk-tsk the life of strip malls and drive-throughs and, more ominously, from nativists who see them as not white enough. Starting in 2017, a central issue in Melbourne politics has been a full-blown moral panic around immigrant crime in the more affordable outer suburbs, where Sudanese gangs supposedly roam with impunity, harassing and beating their Australian neighbors.61 Like the claim made by the US ambassador to the Netherlands that there are “no-go zones” in Dutch cities62 where politicians are burned alive, the issue of immigrant crime in Melbourne is largely a fantasy despite some real issues with assimilation and joblessness.63 Frequent alarmist headlines about African gangs prowling the streets of western Melbourne also ignore the very real concerns of immigrants themselves, who often live with little hope of upward mobility. Crime on the periphery of the city has racialized entire areas of Melbourne, such as the western suburb of Sunshine, leaving a permanent sense of stigma for new Australian residents who grow up there.64 As one popular preacher said of these areas: “I think they [parents] need to pack them up and send them back—let them experience 3 to 6 months of real life in a war torn country.… It will teach them respect—they’ll be begging their families to bring them back to Australia.”65 In this sense, the less dense edges of the city are viewed as places that are veering out of reach of the authorities as well as deviating from mainstream Australian culture.
Housing precarity in the United States and Australia can often become a moral judgment against nonowners. Those who rent are frequently assumed to be either unreliable sorts or those living in public housing towers. Tim Gurner’s jibe about avocado toast and millennials draws on the prevailing logic that those who cannot lock down a mortgage by their thirties have done something wrong. Melbourne has not reached the full-blown housing disaster of San Francisco, where tremendous rents have forced working people to sleep in caravans or commute for three hours. It is far more a crisis of the middle class that is increasingly shut out of homeownership. Yet, little is being done to correct the problem. New buildings for renters owned by a single owner/manager are so uncommon that they have a special name, “build-to-rent,” as if the concept were some kind of novel urban innovation that previous developers were unable to contemplate with the limited technologies of the past. However, as prices rise in Melbourne, the arithmetic is changing. Inner neighborhoods have started building almost 50 percent of their new homes as apartments, with increasing attention to small-footprint stores that can be reached without a car.66
Melbourne’s charismatic streets of terrace homes that formerly housed Southern European immigrants and originally had only a backyard privy have been entirely gentrified. Houses often cost between one and three million Australian dollars. This means that many urbanites have been pushed to less-wealthy and more nonwhite suburbs. One such place is the suburb of Footscray, a mix of commercial, residential, and light industrial buildings clustered around a large Vietnamese and Chinese produce market. The neighborhood is contained within the administrative district of Maribyrnong and separated from Melbourne’s central business district by a tributary of the city’s major river, the Yarra, and a two-kilometer jumble of highways, railroad tracks, and a container port. One has to either take the train one stop to the west of the major regional station or navigate snarled truck traffic coming from the cargo terminal and a mass of rail crossings by bike or car.
For over thirty years, Footscray has been a bastion of affordability for Vietnamese, Indian, and Chinese immigrants, who make up nearly 30 percent of the population. More recently, its convenient train access has led to significant gentrification by younger people, particularly artists and those working in culture industries. As one low-income artist told me, “It makes a lot of sense because it is one of the few places with affordable accommodation and large former factory spaces that are appealing to artists.” As in many places experiencing arts-based gentrification,67 the climate of concentrated creativity—with bungalow backyards housing sculpture workshops and suburban white picket fences displaying handmade ads for poetry readings—has drawn a plethora of younger renters. The largest population group is twenty-five- to twenty-nine-year-olds,68 and the youthful energy is palpable in the commercial main street where upstart galleries and performance spaces sit adjacent to discount laksa vendors and Filipino minimarts. At the same time, the proximity of this haven of affordability has not gone unnoticed by homebuyers. Just in the years 2017 and 2018, housing prices rose by over 20 percent in Footscray, sending the average cost of a three-bedroom home from $700,000 AUD to $940,000 AUD.69
Housing activists have mobilized in several ways to protect neighborhoods like Footscray both for their cultural amenities and for their affordability, but little can be done without expanding the existing housing stock. This includes providing newly built housing with affordability commitments from developers, protecting the numerous public housing sites in the suburb, and, potentially, expanding the stock of nonprofit state-financed social housing. On its face, this should be a fairly simple task, given the large number of garages, light manufacturing buildings, and underused parcels of land owned by the Victorian State Government. Yet, locals often feel that they have reached a saturation point when it comes to changes in the built environment, and they have resisted new development vociferously. Some of this has been promulgated by affordability activists themselves, who feel that new housing will exacerbate gentrification. Yet, densification activists have taken a different approach. They hope to retain Footscray’s relative affordability, cultural diversity, and arts economy all while welcoming new residents and green-lighting more construction—a delicate balance that many locals, who are skeptical of property developers as a whole, are hesitant to endorse.
Five years ago, residents with backgrounds in urban planning started a group in Footscray inspired by American YIMBYism called YIMaBY: “Yes, In Maribyrnong’s Backyard!” to address new construction. They eventually renamed it Housing AIM (Affordable, Inclusive, Maribyrnong) and started holding meetings, eventually attracting local council funding for community engagement events. Kate Breen, a co-founder, said that she was originally interested in making the group while reading online comments about new development. “People are recognizing that development is happening but not resulting in housing they can afford,” she said. This was creating a sense of anger, but simultaneously many people were stopping projects that could also have been beneficial.
Breen was inspired to start the group while reading Facebook posts about plans to open a boardinghouse in the neighborhood, all of which were against it. Yet, reading through the posts she saw comments such as “[W]rong location but aren’t we an inclusive community? Can’t these people live somewhere?” This, she decided, was an ideal opening for “YIMBY type goals even when people were still saying no.” As with many YIMBY groups, she felt that the average Australian clinging to housing affordability at the edge of the city was practicing wishful thinking, believing that development would never come to their backyards. YIMBYism, Breen believes, “needs to tell people that their neighborhoods will be developed. And they need to work out what a good outcome will be. Don’t go in [with] anti-development as your banner. Figure out what you want.… Building nothing is not an option.”
Housing AIM meetings were often held in a handsome central Maribyrnong office space over cups of tea and biscuits. There was a beguiling mix of urban planning jargon and affecting personal stories of single mums living in Footscray because of its affordability but now threatened by displacement. At one meeting, a woman said that her situation was even worse than that of social housing residents because she could not apply for state housing due to waiting times that can stretch for years, nor could she afford rent: “In some ways social housing residents … have won the lottery while single mothers, like me, are getting forced out,” she said. Other meetings, which were well attended primarily by women, focused on how being an affordable neighborhood in a city experiencing a housing crisis was actually a curse: “[There is the] idea that housing in Maribyrnong is relatively affordable and that makes it less of an issue.… In fact, that makes it more important to protect it because people in this neighborhood really need it and can’t afford to lose it,” one attendee said. Many who were involved in these groups saw affordable housing as the last thing they had left and, without it, their lives would become unbearably precarious. At one meeting, an older man said: “It’s important to communicate the essence of being on the precipice.… The moment a community is perceived as affordable in the current market is the end.… It won’t be affordable anymore.” Having lost well-paid work or experienced addiction, domestic violence, or separation, many low-income residents stated that their home, rented at below-market cost, was their only anchor in an increasingly unrecognizable and hostile city.
YIMBY groups in the Melbourne suburbs have taken a different approach than densification activists in other cities: they support new development as long as it has an affordability mandate. Thus, they are quite particular about what gets built. Much of this comes from working in a slightly different space than YIMBYs in London, San Francisco, or Boulder: they are protecting one of the city’s last proximate working-class neighborhoods rather than demanding access to a wealthier neighborhood. Footscray housing activists have also moved to support novel public housing schemes that bring together disparate partners. They were instrumental in securing community support for eight locations on a Maribyrnong four-lane highway that will host fifty-eight movable small homes.70 This project was widely objected to because the units will be made available to those experiencing homelessness—a classic NIMBY consternation. The small homes that the unhoused people will be given are subsidized through a special below-market contract called a “peppercorn lease,” in this case an agreement between the state highway authority (VicRoads) and a nonprofit housing provider (Launch Housing). The agreement is not permanent because, for the time being, the state is merely lending the land for affordable housing in anticipation of taking it back for future road widening. Despite its temporary use, the project was ill regarded by neighbors who disliked the idea of low-income formerly homeless residents. Fear of those who had been homeless created significant backlash. As one resident put it in a guest editorial: “We believe that housing a large number of people in such close proximity, in such tiny spaces has potential to create and amplify social issues.”71
Much of the work that Housing AIM did was to smooth the way for the project, explaining the need for housing for the economically vulnerable (particularly given that many facing homelessness in Victoria are older women who have suffered domestic violence72). After facing much skepticism, Breen said, “We were able to generate a bit of a community groundswell … more people to publicly put their hand up and go to council processes and to say, ‘I’m actually here to support affordable housing and here is why.’ We didn’t have any ‘buts.’ ” People got on board because the nonprofit organization shared the stories of those facing housing precarity, and local residents began to understand the extent of the crisis: they saw people like themselves. As one person working in the homelessness sector (not for the partner organization) said, “It’s good that people are becoming more sympathetic and learning more about the crisis.… At the same time they also know how limited resources are.… They know this will be the ‘model’ homeless … the grandmas and such.” That said, the project utilizes an easily replicated formula for quickly adding new housing stock: building on public land that is not being used. Researchers at the University of Melbourne have confirmed that many of these spaces are already available in prime locations. As in California, this land is frequently co-located with transit, delivering a double win of more housing and better access to mass transit. Indeed, using this “lazy land” could help to narrow the gap between Melbourne’s plan to build 4,700 affordable housing units between 2017 and 2022 and the estimated need for 164,000 more homes.73
Melbourne’s urban density activists have focused on traditionally vulnerable populations such as those with precarious housing, refugees, and aboriginal people, but they also are increasingly concerned with young people. “A lot of people my age are pretty much one gig away from not being able to make rent, and they are very worried about ever getting to settle somewhere permanently without getting priced out,” an early twenties Footscray artist told me. Kate Breen confirmed that “for young people, homeownership is looking increasingly unlikely in any middle-ring suburb of an Australian city.” Footscray, which is six kilometers from the city center, is one of the last nearby suburbs with good transit options with a weekly rent of under $400 AUD. However, Breen added that rents have not yet gotten to the level of unaffordability as American cities, which is exactly the concern. When Australia’s millennial and Generation Z renters are suddenly confronted with a crisis of overall affordability and not just the impossibility of homeownership, then housing will truly become a matter of middle-class existential fear.
At a public forum sponsored by Housing AIM, in which Footscray residents told harrowing stories of their experiences with homelessness, Kate Breen passed out heavy stock paper with a cut-on-the-dotted-line drawing of a coffin. The coffin had a small window in its center and said: #everybodyshome. It came with an array of cut-out pets and furniture that people could fill their “home” with. The event mixed individuals describing their economic insecurity in the heart of one of the world’s wealthiest cities with architects dissecting new housing proposals and teaching the audience what to look for when it comes to affordability mandates from local councils’ negotiations with builders. For many young and low-income Australians, including those who attended the meeting, the development of new affordable housing is not coming fast enough. Their situation feels like the macabre joke of the meeting’s conversational prop: a coffin waiting for them. Most of the speakers at the event emphasized their middle-classness until they were deprived of housing, and then they told heart-wrenching stories about their lives disintegrating, including one woman recounting her first night sleeping rough on a bench just two blocks from the home she had shared with an abusive partner.
Melbourne-based YIMBYs celebrate two facts that are often lamented: people still work overwhelmingly in the downtown and must commute to the center, and homeownership is decreasing. Most people are still credulous about urban density for those very reasons. Homeownership is the backbone of Australian middle-classness and the downtown is a place where people are forced to drive into during the chaos of rush hour traffic that they have little affinity for. Yet, for YIMBYs, the central business district maintains cohesion and a more vertical urban form while renting increases mobility and gives voice, on development issues, to those with different priorities than homeowners protecting their investments. More and more, it seems that a bit of generational stigma may be a useful organizing tool for avocado-toast eaters and working-class suburbanites to come together and develop a political identity based on renting. Like the United States—where many are increasingly willing to question the regressive home mortgage interest deduction tax credit that favors homeowners with no relief for the renting poor—Australia may be having a moment in which the supposed sacredness of homeownership is being rethought. YIMBYism plays an increasingly visible role in this conversation by giving people an alternative image of what urban life could look like beyond the patchwork of suburbs strung together by highways that currently defines Australian cities.
In YIMBY circles, the avocado toast insult was a turning point. By twinning lifestyle and lack of homeownership, it provided an easily subverted symbol. Indeed, many dedicated YIMBY activists have added an avocado emoji to their Twitter handles to show just where they stand on the debate. Lifestyle shaming was a particularly galvanizing taunt because cafés that serve avocado toast are emblematic of what densification activists want to see in their cities: “third places” where people can meet, work, and relax away from their shared or small apartments.74 The sociability of coffee shops and brunch restaurants may not cut across class lines but, for YIMBYs, they are a much better start than single-family homes with gates and private backyards. In Australia, this shift has been particularly important because the service economy of cafés, bars, tourism, and performance spaces has grown exponentially in the past twenty years: by 2018 three out of four Australian workers worked in the service sector.75 While “flat white urbanism”76 has been disparaged by some as a hipster—and sometimes greenwashing—facade for real estate developers to use in order to encourage growth, many YIMBYs are content with it as an alluring piece of coffee-focused propaganda to get people out of car-dependent low-density suburbs.
There are dedicated YIMBY groups in Melbourne and Brisbane as well as affiliated housing organizations that support densification and new development in other Australian cities. Many of these groups also have environmental concerns. Cities like Adelaide and Melbourne have sprawled so far that they have endangered agricultural supply chains by taking over farmland, leaving entire regions without food sovereignty in the event of crises such as droughts (which are frequent).77 What’s more, out-of-control suburbanization has been a major risk factor for wildfires.78 Despite the warnings of fire management officials, Australian cities have built out into the bush, where homes are threatened by intensive blazes such as those of 2019–2020 that destroyed over 16 million acres of land and hundreds of homes across the country.79
In Brisbane, the architect and urban consultant Natalie Rayment started the group Queensland YIMBY to encourage more development in her city. Brisbane has no shortage of growth, in her opinion, but a dearth of smart development. The city is semi-tropical, located around several bends in the eponymous river. It grew exponentially during the 1980s, often into low-lying areas at risk of flooding.80 While the downtown has been filled in with office towers, the city remains dispersed. The region’s characteristic house from one hundred years ago is “The Queenslander:” a Victorian cottage on stilts with a weather-beaten rusted roof of corrugated iron. This type of housing respected the challenging heat and flood-prone environment, while new construction has been less sensitive. Brisbane’s horizontal growth has rolled out in every direction with single-family homes in suburbs reaching up and down Moreton Bay on the Coral Sea to the western hills of Flinders Peak. While the city continues to grow steadily with 50,000 new residents annually (with a population of 2.5 million in 2019),81 few of those residents are moving to inner suburbs. Most settle for long commutes from sprawling satellite cities.
Rayment is encouraged by the Queensland State Government’s belated recognition of density as a key challenge but feels that there are still a lot of cultural stumbling blocks. “Lots of people support the YIMBY philosophy until they don’t,” she said. Apartments mean lower property values to many Queenslanders, as well an imported lifestyle at odds with what they see as comfortable living. As in other Australian cities, the apartment is regarded as a form of housing stock primarily for immigrants and unsuitable for the native born. As a Brisbane architect told me, “I keep trying to convince clients to subdivide their lots and build townhouses, but they won’t do it despite the profit potential because they can’t imagine not living in a ‘real home.’ … So when you introduce the idea of apartments ‘stacked up on top of each other’ … they just don’t see that as a place to live.”
Rayment, in her work as a YIMBY organizer, has attempted to make new development of apartments more palatable to people who grew up in single-family homes. Yet, she finds that task immensely difficult. In her advocacy work, she stresses that getting people comfortable even with small two- or three-story apartment buildings can be a challenge. “People go to the nth degree” when it comes to this issue, she said: “they want 3D shadow renderings even on short buildings.” While many people do not live surrounded by traditional “timber ’n’ tin” Queenslander houses, they are still skeptical of demolishing single-family homes to create density in ways that YIMBYs favor.
Despite the fact that Brisbane has seen an economic boon from tourism in the nearby Gold Coast and the internationalization of property markets, many people hold on to their sense that more housing will fundamentally challenge people’s sense of community and their ability to raise their families. As one resident told a local newspaper in reference to a new apartment building: “The current plan of 49 units with access via the very short dead-end Nuttall St into an already very congested Lytton Rd beggars belief. Do we have to wait until a child is injured (at the nearby school crossing) or worse?”82 Yet, despite this near hysteria, the site is a vacant lot in a mixed commercial and residential area in the heart of the city: the Bulimba neighborhood that juts into the Brisbane River like a mini-peninsula. This viewpoint also envisions a future of car use alone despite the fact that Bulimba has a rapid ferry service eight blocks from the development site as well as a bus stop with four routes just a block away. The objection is akin to a Brooklynite arguing that fifty apartments is something that should only be built in Manhattan.
Rayment and other density advocates in Brisbane are not surprised by opposition, even to modest proposals for more development. Oftentimes those fighting against apartments are the beneficiaries of living in the city’s sweet spot between the Brisbane central business district and the outer suburbs farther from the river. People who live in neighborhoods like West End, Milton, and Albion have houses with driveways, but they also have access to city buses. They can easily reach the downtown and its charismatic river walk jammed with tourists, or they can enjoy the quiet of sparsely populated neighborhoods. When it comes to sharing their space with others, they show little interest. “One of the big issues is getting people behind density that is not high-rises,” Rayment said. Her group advocates to local councils to approve small apartment buildings and duplexes in desirable “missing middle” neighborhoods, but it is these buildings that people have the most issues with. “Let high-rises happen but leave the rest the hell alone,” is what Rayment said of Brisburnians. She reiterated that many see apartments as something for foreign buyers and feel that this type of dwelling should be confined to the heart of the city.
It is relatively common in Australian cities to believe that the central business district can be built up ad infinitum but vernacular attempts to increase density—which do not involve construction cranes—are more destructive. Part of this thinking comes from the divide between the downtown as a purely work and entertainment space and inner suburbs as neighborhoods where each house has a history. Although the central business district was indeed a mixed-use district before World War II, it lost that feeling with a period of urban renewal that closely aligns with the American experience (1950s to 1980s). Many believe that if new immigrants or anyone else wants to do the “peculiar thing” of moving to the downtown, let them, and build as many high-rises as they want. However, if they complain about the lack of inner-suburban housing stock, they are out of line. The Brisbane architect Greg Vann explained this to me as a particularly interesting paradox because many suburbanites feel left behind, with much of the Queensland tax revenue going to fund transportation, leisure spaces, and infrastructure exclusively in inner-city Brisbane. In this sense, business districts with skyscrapers or former industrial areas are seen as sacrifice areas where abundant amounts of housing can be located, but once suburban taxpayers are asked to fund the transport, parks, and other amenities that make these neighborhoods viable they balk. Part of this is also a class issue: newly built apartments in the center are not cheap (they are the lowest rate of any major Australian city but still cost $500 AUD/week in rent for a two-bedroom apartment).83 Those living in the outer suburbs are frequently indignant that they will have to help pay for inner-city improvements they will not live near and will seldom visit.
Fractured municipal governance, like in Melbourne, has also been a challenge. Local councils control building approval and—in lieu of more-centralized city government—they are more likely to capitulate to NIMBYistic demands. As soon as an application is advertised, communities can lodge an objection and go to court for about a thousand dollars. Rayment is convinced that much of this comes from a kind of initial shock rather than careful contemplation of the plans. “People get spooked by giant announcement signs,” she notes, and the mandatory public announcements with architectural renderings serve as a rallying point for property owners. As in the United States, local governance is good for those who seek to stop development and affordable housing. It is also, often, a tug-of-war between more-centralized regional government, of the state of Queensland, seeking to enact a plan to build up housing stock and local municipalities that fight to stop construction or displace it elsewhere. Cities like Brisbane are particularly fraught examples because they must answer calls to address affordability but also need to prepare for the more existential threats of climate change, most notably sea rise and bushfires. Adhering to the status quo of suburban development is not only irresponsible but dangerous, as new homes are built in urban floodplains, coastal areas exposed to sea rise, or the exurban periphery where nearby bushland makes fires a growing threat. Densification, as unpalatable as it is to many residents, may be the only way for the city to consolidate risk.
The international diffusion of YIMBY groups may have more to do with an opportune moment to address housing affordability than a truly transnational network of activists. While groups in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States attend some of the same conferences and share materials and strategies online, they address fundamentally local issues, supporting individual projects. All of those involved abroad spoke about not just the simplicity of the idea of collective responsibility for the broader “backyard” but also the San Francisco origins of the movement. The Bay Area connection gave ideas about density a new flair of tech-oriented practicality but also communicated the urgency of the issue. All of the international organizers said that San Francisco’s housing crisis was much more pressing than their own and, seeing things go so wrong there, lent a sense of immediacy to their organizational efforts. “All you need to do is mention San Francisco and people listen,” a Melbourne participant said.
At the same time, other longtime affordability activists found the movement to be too name-based and sometimes imbued with the same kind of tech “solutionism” that Silicon Valley app engineers use when designing tools to address social problems.84 “I really think it’s all in the name, and that’s the big problem,” a housing activist who has worked on maintaining and expanding social housing in London said. She did not believe that YIMBYs were the naive “dupes”85 of the real estate industry, just that “they’ve made a good slogan, … taken hold of some pretty commonsense ideas, gotten their brand around, … and what’s next? I just don’t see what is next and I’m not sure they do either.” However, YIMBYs abroad and in the United States defended both their lack of ideological guidelines for members and their loose mission, most often describing their supporters as renters and younger people rather than those struggling financially. Reframing densification as a means to create urban happiness focuses on mobility and lifestyle rather than class, wagering that these issues may seem more inclusive.
Indeed, many densification activists abroad have strategically avoided a class-based framing because of past failures to mobilize people around preserving social housing or extending housing subsidies. “More housing for poor people or cheaper housing for poor people never really worked.… Margaret Thatcher knew that and that’s how she won so big with council house privatization,” an activist from Manchester told me. Yet, densification activists often feel that they can sneak in a progressive policy that helps the most precarious first while discussing design and zoning. In Melbourne’s Footscray neighborhood this was certainly the case, and it was generally truer of international YIMBY groups than American chapters. Perhaps this is not just because Americans tend to trust the free markets more but also because British, Australian, and Swedish cities have more social housing, which has fared better in terms of providing safe, comfortable lodging than in the United States.
While international YIMBY groups are still far too small to begin thinking about running their own candidates for office or using housing as part of a larger political platform, they do seek to prod local governments into action. In this sense, the movement—despite what it sometimes claims—is a means not to disempower “high-handed” urban planners but rather to redirect their regulatory efforts. Instead of blocking construction with zoning, the groups hope that planners will take a more active role in shaping the carrying capacity of each neighborhood. While they seek to represent renters, they also want to put pressure on state governments to fund new mass transit. In countries like the United States and Australia, regional trains and urban trams and buses have been ignored for generations, but new interest from more-affluent young urbanites has created intense pressure on elected officials. In 2018, the premier (governor) of Victoria ran and won on a platform of creating new rail lines in Melbourne as his key reelection issue, committing the city to finally build a circle line that connects outer suburbs to each other as well as to the center. Likewise, in the United Kingdom, much of the rail system has been renationalized to acknowledge the mass subsidies provided by the state and to lower consumer costs. The relationship between density activists and the state is complex, but overall, YIMBY groups hope to interject their own priorities into institutions either as policy or through elected members in order to keep their goals alive and well for years to come.
In many international cities, housing affordability has also become the means to measure the competence of the state to address complex issues. Activists see themselves as standing by to see if market-based solutions will yield results and are prepared for more radical means if they are disappointed. “For now, I say go the developer route, but who knows? One day we may have the army building homes for bushfires or something else,” one Melbourne activist told me, in reference to the devastating 2019–2020 fires. Creating more dense housing at affordable rental or mortgage prices seems to be a threshold responsibility for governments solving twenty-first-century problems. Indeed, because the issue is so perennial, many fret that if it cannot be addressed, then governments have no chance of tackling more existential urban issues such as water scarcity, higher temperatures, or rising sea levels. Yet, many YIMBYs feel that if they can get a jump start on densification now, as a means to expand the housing stock and control prices, this infrastructure will help to solve future problems: especially environmental threats posed by climate change that may necessitate a contraction of existing cities in order to maintain habitability.