In August of 2020, a woman in a white suit jacket and a man in a blue blazer sat soberly in their Missouri living room speaking virtually to the Republican National Convention in support of President Donald Trump’s reelection. “What you saw happen to us could just have easily have happened to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods around our country,” the woman, Patricia McCloskey, said. Her husband, Mark McCloskey, continued recounting how an “out-of-control mob” of “Marxist” “revolutionary” activists surrounded their home while they protected it with firearms. Patricia McCloskey then added a surprising urban planning non sequitur:
They’re not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single-family home zoning. This forced rezoning would bring crime, lawlessness, and low-quality apartments into now thriving suburban neighborhoods.1
The activists marching outside of the McCloskeys’ Saint Louis mansion were taking part in a Black Lives Matter protest, but the couple used their national spotlight to denounce higher-density development. For YIMBY activists, this was shocking but not surprising. It tied together what they have been saying for nearly ten years: NIMBY objections to building apartments are connected to racial fears, unwillingness to share resources, and an ugly history of equating lower-income urbanites with crime and lawlessness. This is particularly true in Saint Louis, one of America’s most racially and economically divided cities, with an ugly history of suburbanization as an answer to growing inequality.2 The McCloskeys’ rabid defense of their house—a seventeen-room Italian palazzo revival3—illustrates the disturbing link between those who support “stand your ground” laws and single-family-home zoning.
The McCloskeys’ beliefs are emblematic of what YIMBYs say they are up against when it comes to changing zoning codes, densifying neighborhoods, and expanding the stock of affordable housing in American cities. This is not to say that the McCloskeys represent the mainstream, but they are closer to other more moderate defenders of low-density suburbia than one would think upon first glance. Like other NIMBYs, the McCloskeys resort to calling those in favor of multifamily housing radical sans-culottes intent on destroying all norms of private property. In reality, ending single-family zoning is largely in line with the interests of real estate developers, store owners, and many others. The barriers to creating more compact cities are not just technical; they are ideological and deeply ingrained at that.
In the summer of 2020, advocates for density had a far more existential crisis on their hands: the stigmatization of density due to the still-raging coronavirus.4 Cities once again were riven with fear. Some Americans were worried that protest movements would bring crime and disorder, but they were in the minority.5 The majority were apprehensive about sharing cities with others for epidemiological reasons. A new kind of NIMBYism has arisen not because of crowded schools, traffic, and lack of parking but due to fears of human proximity spreading the deadly microbes that cause COVID-19. These fears were also present in other places besides the United States where people were navigating new urban fears. One candidate in Melbourne’s 2020 council elections wrote in her main pitch to voters: “The coronavirus pandemic has proven beyond doubt that high rise and dense populations are not safe and not healthy … despite residents’ opposition and evidence in support of low density living, free standing homes, trees and vegetation keep disappearing.”6 If, as YIMBYs are fond of saying, density is destiny then newly upzoned cities are potentially in trouble.
Little actual science backs up new concerns around housing density and the spread of the coronavirus.7 Naturally, someone living in Idaho with few neighbors will be safer than an apartment dweller in downtown Boston, but the majority of Americans live in suburbs, not rural ranches. They still need to buy groceries, see the doctor, and, if they cannot work from home, go to their jobs, making contamination risk more evenly distributed between cities and suburbs.8 What’s more, wealthy and highly populated cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver are often the places that have the best disease tracking infrastructure and local healthcare systems. However, this has not stopped many from proclaiming an “end to the city” or a rebirth of suburban life.9 Some of this is undoubtedly true: people working from home want larger spaces, backyards, and distance from their neighbors during a pandemic.10 These desires also mesh with ongoing trends of flexible work hours, casualization of the workforce, and telecommuting.11 However, for density activists, the COVID-19 pandemic has not been a colossal setback but a new opportunity.
The loneliness of housebound people “sheltering in place” during the coronavirus pandemic reinforced the need to create stimulating, attractive, and supportive neighborhoods. As people were locked into their homes and their immediate neighborhoods for months, the quality of those environments came under renewed scrutiny.12 Many cities began to expand their bike paths and exercise areas.13 In cities like Melbourne, where residents were confined to one-hour walks within five kilometers of their homes for nearly three months during a second outbreak of the virus, citizens petitioned for more cycling infrastructure14 as well as increased recreational spaces in exurban areas. As YIMBYs have long argued, in most cities it is precisely the wealthy neighborhoods (where homeowners are most reticent about adding new residents) that have the best parks and other recreational opportunities in close proximity. New sprawling suburbs are often ill equipped for alternative transit and underendowed with communal green spaces. These disparities became even more glaring during the coronavirus pandemic when people were locked into the areas surrounding their homes without the broader set of resources of the city as a whole.
On a more sociological level, the coronavirus pandemic has called into question ideas about cohabiting space and neighborliness.15 Many YIMBYs push the notion that density is not just about creating affordability but about reviving a lost ethos of shared space, community connections, and mutual aid. While these values may be a bit quixotic when attached to the simple construction of new apartments, the pandemic has shown the need for them: from getting groceries for elderly residents, to distributing homemade facemasks, or even the solidarity of applauding medical workers from a balcony at 7:00 p.m. YIMBYs may have lofty goals for cities that seem idealistic, and frankly rather bourgeois—when most people are just trying to make rent or hold on to their mortgage—but they also are fundamentally optimistic about urbanites’ ability to collectively solve problems rather than run away to a bunker in Montana when things get tough. There is also some hope that the coronavirus crisis will produce larger outlays of funding from the federal government that, given the political will, can be directed into socially purposeful economic stimulus such as a green jobs program, mass transit infrastructure, or the construction of subsidized high-density housing.
The epidemiological and financial crises of COVID-19 have also refocused attention on housing affordability. The fallout from the pandemic may produce a mortgage default crisis like the one precipitated by the 2008 financial crash. Indeed, 20 percent of renters in Los Angeles struggled to pay on time during the pandemic,16 and at one point in early 2021, 19 percent of renters nationally were behind on payments.17 Unlike in the 2008 crisis, it will be much harder for fiscal conservatives to blame those with precarious housing for their misfortune by claiming that they reached beyond their means. The newly vulnerable will include everyone who worked in the tourism and hospitality industries: thousands of former flight attendants, waiters, and museum workers will face eviction. If they seize the moment, they will be able to form a block of endangered residents who concretely demonstrate that the housing crisis has jumped scales from largely affecting the poor to now jeopardizing the middle class (a classic YIMBY talking point). With adequate organizing, the newly housing precarious (but formerly middle class) may further add to the ranks of YIMBY activists, potentially pushing for similar goals of more housing construction. However, in this schema, the role of subsidized and even public housing may be far greater than density activists campaigned for in the past if private markets deteriorate.18
For years, housing activists of both the anti-gentrification and the YIMBY variety tried to dramatize how rising rents were pricing out working-class people. San Francisco was the prototypical example: while tech workers streamed in, janitors, waiters, cops, and schoolteachers were forced out. Workers who ran the basic services of the Bay Area still performed their jobs, but they were severed from the neighborhoods they provided for, compelled to become “super-commuters” as the region’s center and periphery became segmented by class.19 Now, with the experience of the pandemic, a new language has been deployed to describe what they do and its social importance: they are essential workers.
Providing more affordable housing to essential workers can be a first step in recognizing their labor, rather than just clapping, congratulating them at the checkout counter, and writing gushing editorials. Nurses, supermarket workers, ambulance drivers, and many others must be able to live in the communities they serve—not because it enables them to still go to work when there is an emergency but because it recognizes them as indispensable members of the community who cannot be asked to perform some of the most taxing jobs while also struggling to afford housing, often far away from their job sites.20 Obviously, affordable housing is only one aspect of treating these workers with the respect they deserve. Increasing wages would be both more effective and long overdue. However, co-locating essential workers close to their workplaces would say a lot about what kind of cities we want to live in, and it would be a small but important step in dismantling the class divisions that have emerged within urban spaces. The concept of the essential worker also dramatizes arguments about neighborhood economic diversity that housing activists have been making for decades: in order to share a collective future, people of different incomes must live close enough together to recognize that they are part of a shared community.
Throughout this book, I have argued that urban density activism is providing a new template for the broader fight to create affordable housing in American cities. It has also been suggested that YIMBY groups are promoting a new framing within the housing debate: concentrating on supply-side mechanisms, working with (not against) developers, and emphasizing the rights of middle-class newcomers to wealthy cities. These activists contend that middle-class urbanites should pressure wealthier neighborhoods to accept new residents while allowing working-class neighborhoods to maintain autonomous organizations that preserve low-income communities and safeguard them against gentrification. They uphold the legitimacy of their separate cause insisting that different socioeconomic spheres of the city can also have separate forms of activism. They also believe that American cities have reached a stage of inequality that has hollowed out the middle class, making their lives more similar to working-class precarity despite steady incomes, college degrees, and intergenerational wealth transfers.
YIMBYism, while born in San Francisco, has attained global reach. It has had political successes as well as significant backlash, not just from those in expensive homes afraid of “radicals” seeking to “abolish the suburbs,” but much more substantiated attacks from communities of color and grassroots activist groups. Municipal YIMBY groups have been accused of activist astroturfing, misrepresenting the major issue as one of construction alone, and interloping into low-income communities. They have been labeled as a Trojan horse for developers who endanger the environment and challenge historic preservation. At the same time, YIMBYism has been extremely successful in making density into a mainstream issue no longer communicated in architecture schools alone. Through canny slogans and wry memes, ideas like “build more of everything” and “the missing middle” have gone from the hinterlands of wonky urbanist thought to the center of debates about municipal progress. They have spurred immediate action on the part of new allies like In God’s Backyard: a group of churches building affordable housing on their property. While this activism has succeeded in educating a large audience about city planning through community meetings, online forums, and local politics, it is still very much a technocratic insider’s game for the highly educated. Yet, this specialization has brought impressive legislative successes such as the long-awaited jettisoning of single-family zoning in some American cities,—most notably Minneapolis, which became the first city to entirely eliminate it in 2019.
In the preceding chapters, I have suggested that YIMBY activism is meeting a certain ideological and rhetorical demand that was previously underserved. Members are dissatisfied with income inequality in cities, but for the most part, they pursue capitalist solutions to the housing crisis. They see a state role for transit, coordination of growth, and managing environmental resources, but they eschew the idea that local or state government will become large-scale landlords or developers. Depending on whom one asks, YIMBYs are either underambitious in their vision of decommodifying the housing market or clear-eyed about what is possible in the current moment of lackluster governance at the state and national level.
Given the challenges of housing affordability exacerbated by the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, gross inequality, and damage from hurricanes, wildfires, and other climate-change-related events, the moderation of the YIMBY movement may prove to be its greatest vulnerability. At a moment when housing policy should be rethought in order to deal with incomparable threats, the centrist free-market approach of simply allowing upzoning and more building permits may be useful but inconsequential. More troublingly, this strategy may miss out on using a political opportunity21 that would allow far more long-sighted control of the built environment, restructuring the ability of state and federal government to take advantage of a crisis to buttress climate change risks and decommodifying housing. Indeed, given the level of national trauma associated with imperiled housing—from mass dislocations of fires like the Camp Fire in California (2018) or Hurricane Maria (2017) in Puerto Rico—Americans may be ready to rethink zoning, single-family homes, and even private ownership if it means gaining more security. In this sense, YIMBYs, while not necessarily opposed to pioneering housing solutions, could be forfeiting the moral authority and political will of the moment to create measures like community land trusts, co-ops, and public housing. Given their internal conflicts between market-based and regulatory impulses, they may also have trouble summoning the will to call for a strong state role in mandating density, including using eminent domain, tearing down exurban areas, and building new social housing.
The densification of American cities has been promoted as a means to make housing affordable and to allow more people to live in successful neighborhoods. It stresses that places with good transit, beautiful streets filled with interesting architecture, and abundant parks are hard to come by and must remain open to new residents. The subtext is that cities should stop building greenfield suburbia because these areas expand the city beyond reasonable boundaries, overtaxing municipal services and necessitating lengthy commutes for the “privilege” of living in boring and often shoddily built subdivisions. Given enough accrued political power, densification activists would make the creation of new sprawl extremely difficult, and they would attempt to pack in more housing for all except the most far-flung neighborhoods. Many would like to see cities shrink down from their existing boundaries in order to concentrate growth on places with mass transit and some agglomerated services (stores, hospitals, schools, and entertainment facilities). However, cities may need to reduce their size for more pressing reasons.
Cities that have stretched out along coastlines or crept up mountainsides are in grave danger of becoming victims of climate change. Each year the California wildfire season lasts longer into autumn and incinerates more land, often very close to cities. In 2019, record-breaking conflagrations destroyed homes in central Los Angeles, even reaching the doorstep of the Getty Museum.22 In 2020, those fires became still worse, carpeting the entire American West in smoke and soot. Urban areas near forests that have experienced more drought and higher temperatures must rethink their development pattern. No more can they allow homes to be built up mountaintops with “fingers” of forest between them. Similarly, coastal cities like Miami, Baltimore, and New Orleans, face ever more fearsome storms that bring destructive flood waters due to rising sea levels. These cities, and many more, must rethink their designation of floodplains as well as consider how many times residents should be allowed to rebuild their beachfront houses with federal and state financial assistance. Already, insurance companies are stepping in where the government has failed to respond, supplying an actuarial assessment of climate change while many American politicians dither and deny.23 The concept of managed retreat is gaining traction to protect cities from the ocean24 but it may also have the positive effect of spurring densification.
As cities face the idea of downsizing, for both economic and environmental reasons—such as in Detroit—the prospect of increased regional inequality grows. What if the Sunbelt, which attracted so many people in the past half century, starts to rapidly depopulate due to higher temperatures, drought, and flooding? Where will these people be rehoused, and will it provoke a new form of regionalism in which wealthier cities effectively close their doors to American climate refugees? In Paolo Bacigalupi’s dystopian novel The Water Knife, western states mobilize militias to fight each other over the water rights of the Colorado River while turning away impoverished and thirsty Texans fleeing from their overheated cities. The science fiction story contains more than a kernel of truth as cities face very different climate futures and the possibility of expansion and contraction of entire regions has entered the popular conversation.25 This future also gets at the heart of saying “yes” to the city: will urbanites in more temperate places have the solidarity necessary to let in millions of new residents, or will they invent derisive regional monikers and tell them to beat it?26
At the same time as climate change forecasts have led to widespread pessimism about the future of American cities and the possibilities of sharing scarce resources, some activists see this moment as potentially transformative. By viewing resources as finite and bound by geographic realities rather than arbitrary political borders, policymakers may have to finally grapple with long-deferred regional issues. Housing will, of course, be on the top of that list. YIMBY activists hope that the climate crisis will finally create regional plans for providing housing that promote non-carbon-based mobility, higher-density housing, and mixed-use neighborhoods. The so-called twenty-minute city, in which people live within twenty-minute commutes using alternative or mass transit, is a true possibility with more condensed urban footprints.27 At the same time, it will take government intervention that minimizes the role of private developers and potentially provokes the ire of cost-cutting libertarians as well as small-government conservatives concerned with overreach. This new reality will fracture the existing coalition of density activists attracted to the YIMBY movement, but it may add new allies from larger environmentalist groups.
While YIMBY activism has, until now, focused on middle-classness (and its imperiled status in the New Gilded Age),28 its future may have to move on from the creation of successful neighborhoods to the promotion of a decarbonized planet. The technocratic solutions offered by YIMBYism that focus on public-private options led by for-profit developers is underwhelmingly ambitious in an era of such rapid and alarming changes to the environment and American governance. However, this does not mean that the movement’s future is in jeopardy. Far from it. Instead, teaching people how to live together—efficiently, compromising between self-interest and community well-being, and striving to create realistic urban policy—is more important than ever. Density activists use the neighborhood and city as a social and political laboratory for broader changes, activating the previously complacent to speak up. If they continue to do so, they may indeed build a political coalition around urban planning issues. This new party will be wonky and detail oriented. It will be less grassroots and more technocratic. Yet, it also might reintroduce an appreciation for expertise into debates about urban policy rather than raw emotion and simply saying “no.”