Much has been written about the history of Not in My Backyard thinking in urban planning and urban history. Many would argue that the term has become hollow from overuse. However, as a cultural sociologist interested in how people draw on urban forms to discuss contemporary politics, I am not one of those people. I believe that the epithet NIMBY still carries a stinging resonance for those whom it is directed at. That was a major reason that I was drawn to the housing movement of YIMBYism, organized as a rebuke to homeowners who fought against growth in their neighborhoods. This book began in 2016 with a media analysis of the proliferation of the word “YIMBY” in an attempt to determine what people meant by it and how it helped them shape new kinds of activism. I quickly discovered that the prodigious amount of information available on social media, newspapers, city council minutes, and blogs was useful but did not fully express why the movement has grown so quickly or why participants found it so different from housing affordability campaigns of the past. For this reason, the book draws on four varieties of data that are set in conversation with each other to understand what contemporary density activism is and the legacies of land use that it responds to: I use social media data and online conversations about development, ethnographic observation of activist meetings, archival research on municipal history, and—most of all—sixty-five in-depth interviews with YIMBY activists in sixteen cities spread over five countries.
The book examines the Yes in My Backyard movement as a distinctly middle-class urban social movement that has formed dozens of independent groups in the United States in the past ten years. Broadly, these groups fight for housing affordability in the same way that other urban activists have for decades. However, unlike anti-gentrification groups, they are determinedly pro-growth and they are less interested in preserving, or creating, public housing. I show how YIMBY groups became vocal advocates for compact metropolises and mixed-use (residential and commercial) development using data from over five dozen interviews with housing activists in US, British, Canadian, Swedish, and Australian cities. The interviews were conducted from 2017 to 2020, using YIMBY organization websites, Facebook pages, newspaper articles, in-person and online meetings, and Twitter accounts for recruitment. The informants were from a variety of housing groups focused on renters, and they embodied an ideological range from socialist to libertarian. For the most part, YIMBYs were highly educated professionals, and the vast majority interviewed for the project were millennials (born between 1980 and 2000). Those who were not millennials stated that the issue of housing is often framed as a generational divide because of the importance of dramatizing what the future city should look like. Of the YIMBY participants interviewed, 29 percent had formal training in urban planning or architecture. Every YIMBY activist interviewed had attended university and many had graduate degrees, confirming a general lack of class diversity within the movement.
Members of YIMBY groups were recruited using a snowball sampling methodology: asking interviewees to recruit further participants. However, I attempted to control for sampling that emphasized agreement and friendship among group members by having participants suggest someone they had encountered with very different views from their own. This often included people that they had disagreed with online within housing affordability discussions specific to their city or neighborhood. I also sought to broaden the study away from the cities that are the focus of chapters (Austin, Boulder, San Francisco, and Melbourne) by speaking with YIMBYs in other cities in order to strip away some of the place-specific factors that informants often concentrated on. These interviews frequently lasted for over an hour and used a semi-structured technique that covered key issues such as the participants’ stance on affordable housing, zoning reform, and activist tactics, while leaving space for them to bring up their own favorite topics. Often this created some fortuitous surprises, such as when many of my UK informants were excited to talk about the history and future of the London greenbelt and conflicts between housing activists and environmentalists without knowing that this was a major interest of mine and the focus of chapter 3 on Boulder, Colorado.
Another means of understanding local development pressures outside of the YIMBY narrative was a smaller sample of homeowners and anti-growth activists whom I interviewed in five American cities (Austin, Boston, Denver, San Francisco, and New York). This sample of twenty-one members of neighborhood groups who oppose new housing construction was useful in reconstructing recent debates over specific proposed apartment buildings as well as teasing out some of the online rancor that developed around issues that YIMBY groups were active in. These participants were recruited, in the five American cities, by contacting people from websites of homeowners’ associations or anti-growth groups, via Twitter or from community meetings. Most often, interviewees coalesced around specific permitting processes (zoning approval) or local referendums on growth.
Neighborhood groups have a long history in the United States, where they often start as social networks organized by email list servers to create a greater sense of community. However, they frequently take up activist causes, using their membership to appeal to the local planning board or city council. These groups most frequently are formed to protect home values or environmental quality, or to limit traffic. Some of these groups also may sponsor a neighborhood watch that patrols local streets and liaisons with the police. This smaller subset of activists interviewed for this book were always homeowners and most were over the age of fifty. The majority subscribed to the generational view of housing density: saying they saw larger buildings as out of character with their communities. They worried apartments could potentially bring new residents who did not “share the neighborhood’s values” or were not “invested in the upkeep of their properties.” For all interviews, original names are used, given that many of the activists are identifiable and have very active social media profiles. In the cases in which informants did not want to be named, they are simply referred to in general terms rather than using a pseudonym.
YIMBY activism is quite a new phenomenon: at less than ten years old, it is an example of a rapidly growing social movement propelled by social media. Its catapulting from digital spaces to local organizing in multiple American cities and then to several (mostly) Anglophone countries shows the speed of online organizing. However, in every location where groups were formed, densification activists responded to local conditions, particularly laws and municipal practices that made the construction of multifamily dwellings more difficult than building single-family homes. In order to capture the historical trends that were being reacted to, I drew on secondary sources as well as archival data from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. To assemble this data I enlisted research assistants to comb through planning board and city council reports, internal municipal documents on growth and housing, and newspaper accounts of construction controversies. Archival sources were utilized the most systematically to explain the construction of Boulder’s greenbelt and to illustrate the no-growth trend in that city that began in the late 1960s. Chapter 3 not only uses hundreds of archival documents to show the long history of aversion to population growth, but it also draws on numerous oral history accounts of how this sentiment was codified into local laws.
YIMBYism got its start in the San Francisco Bay Area. It responds to the influence of the tech industry in that region, while many of the activists in local chapters work in the same sector. Many seek to mitigate the influence of their employers (on property markets), while drawing on social media marketing practices to popularize their activist cause. Organizing occurs through Facebook groups, and debates are held on Twitter, Reddit, and other platforms. For this book, I examined more than 2,000 individual posts (and their responses) related to the YIMBY movement while also collecting 238 articles from local and national journalism sources on density activism. Using a team of research assistants, I coded tweets based on their theme (community opposition to apartments, missing-middle densification, parking, transit, and gentrification).
I also used online data as a means to recruit interview subjects. Reviewing members’ substantial online presences before speaking with them was a useful tool to hone my questions and to get a base sense of their opinions on crucial topics. It also allowed me to track conflicting ideologies within the movement—such as how much affordable housing should be contained within new construction ventures—in real time and to follow disputes. Most of all, this gave me the ability to track developments in the United States over a three-year period while I taught sociology classes in Melbourne, Australia. Being “away from the action” was a logistical challenge that made scheduling my interviews during frequent trips to the United States tricky, but it also gave me the quintessential experience of YIMBY activism: as an ongoing war over policy details fleshed out on Twitter. At first this seemed ethereal to me. Yet, as I came to know many of those involved in online debate on a daily basis, it enriched my data as well as converted me from an ethnographer bent on being present in physical space to one who recognizes intense depth in the intricate arguments people have about urban spaces on social media. The complementary relationship between interviews and social media data allowed me to track controversies as they arose and to use a longitudinal approach to the development of the activist groups that better conveys how they matured.
Given the international scope of this project and the presence of so many density activists scattered across the United States, it was not possible to create a multi-sited ethnography that would do justice to each location. Rather, I attended meetings in the United States, but the majority of the participant observation used in the study took place in Melbourne where I went to activist and council meetings from 2017 until 2020. I participated in these meetings as an observer but also sometimes offered my opinions as an urbanist or as an apartment renter, or both. While some Australians in these groups experienced more acute housing insecurity, many were the modal YIMBY: white, middle class, under forty years old, well educated, and opinionated about urban planning. I am all of those things too and my status as a stereotypical YIMBY made me fit in well. That said, fitting in is not always a good thing and I attempted to constantly interrogate my sympathy for densification with the viewpoints of anti-growth activists.
One helpful aspect of my ethnographic dynamic is that I am not Australian, giving me a modicum of outsider status. Given my accent and fairly recent arrival in the country, I could ask very basic questions about land use and the cultural relationship with single-family homes from a range of people. Being (and playing) the curious outsider, allowed me to ask people fundamental questions about aboriginal land rights, the expansion of cities into greenfield territory, and fire management that have become somewhat taboo in the Australian context and immediately draw-upon contentious political agendas. By mobilizing my newness in the country, I was able to ask informants to explain things that most people are presumed to already have an opinion on and often avoid in order to minimize conflict.
Through attending meetings in many different districts in Melbourne, I was able to see how those concerned about housing interacted with local councils and how they made use of Victoria’s abundant mechanisms to participate in urban policy from an early stage. Like in the United States, Melbourne is characterized by an immense fracturing of jurisdictions with thirty-one inner-city neighborhoods having their own councils. This added to a diversity of approaches within the broader region that was on display in meetings with local activists. Unlike the United States, the state of Victoria is still the major source of urban regulation and financing, making it the ultimate arbiter of affordable housing policy. Meeting with state officials working in planning and government allowed me to measure the effectiveness of density activists by observing the extent to which their ideas informed new policy.
Last, I was drawn into Australian YIMBYism (in Brisbane and Melbourne) through my role as an urban policy scholar who is able to comment on proposed projects. This was at first uncomfortable because it put me in the same shoes as those I was studying: offering unsolicited advice about growth in cities. Unlike my informants, I did not give impassioned speeches at council meetings and planning boards, but between 2017 and 2020, I did offer my perspective in private: effectively mirroring the influence work that YIMBYs take part in. The attempts of density activists to model their activism on think tanks or shadow government agencies is interesting for those of us who study social movements and are used to “bodies in the streets” rather than “boots in the boardroom.” Yet, it also points to two growing trends: activism that engages in deep education on complex processes (climate change, supply chains, water supply, etc.) and the meme-ification of issues into bite-sized digital morsels that can be shared. One trend is deeply earnest and shows the need to command an audience’s sustained attention; the other is snarky and lightning quick. Watching YIMBYs offer both of these sources of information simultaneously was fascinating in real time. Sometimes it seemed that there was a hoped-for target audience of people who wanted to become experts in transportation planning, sustainable design, or zoning; other times there seemed to be an admission that contemporary activism depends on online provocation. In both instances, I sought to engage in open-minded conversation with my interlocutors, and by the end, I had learned tremendously from them.