Building The YIMBY Faction

Positive-Sum Culture in Pursuit of Broader Prosperity

At Modern Power we believe some things: 

1. Our governing institutions are not delivering for most Americans.

2. This is true federally, with Democrat vs. Republican battles taking center stage.

3. This is also true in a state like California where Democrats have full control. 

4. Periodically factional fights within the major parties are necessary to define a new agenda that can deliver broad prosperity.

5. In the California Democratic Party, we see a new faction emerging that has the power to redefine the party and lead to a healthier, more abundant set of policy outcomes. 

6. We call this the YIMBY Faction, and the spirit of YIMBY goes well beyond housing. 

YIMBYism

Team Yes is the future.

Yes In My Backyard, or YIMBY, is the seed of a new force in politics. It stands at the heart of a movement that fights selfishness in our public policy. Read narrowly, YIMBYism is about housing. But its underlying ethos is much broader than that. 

Democrats agree the government can and should be a force for good in California and elsewhere. And increasingly, we’re seeing agreement that Yes – to growth, abundance, possibility – is the future.

YIMBY, Narrowly

Before defining YIMBY broadly, let’s talk about it narrowly. YIMBYism, or “Yes In My Backyard,” started as a pro-housing movement with a handful of rabble-rousers like Sonja Trauss, Laura Foote, and Brian Hanlon showing up at local planning commission meetings to advocate for more housing. 

Their opponents at these meetings were “NIMBYs” (Not In My Backyard), who had a laundry list of reasons to oppose development — traffic, parking, construction noise, neighborhood character, shadows. 

Over the past 10 years in California, the housing YIMBY movement has gained steam, leading to statewide reforms that allow, among other changes, accessory dwelling units (ADUs), duplexes, and fourplexes in places that previously only allowed single family homes. Because housing is at the root of so much dysfunction in California — homelessness, rent burden and poverty, long commutes and attendant climate pollution, sprawl and increased wildfire risk — the housing flavor of YIMBY is still the tentpole of the movement. 

But YIMBY is much broader than just housing. 

YIMBY, Broadly

At its core, YIMBY is about what de Tocqueville called “self interest, rightly understood.” It is about folks who have access to a resource deciding not to protect it and make it scarce, but instead opening it up to a broader community. It is about battling selfishness in our public policy, and believing in a positive-sum, abundant view of the future. 

As we discussed here (8 min), narrow interests naturally form to get what they want from public policy to the detriment of the broader interest. Squint, and narrow interests look like NIMBYs.  Progressive proceduralism gives NIMBYs endless veto points, where they can stand athwart history and yell, “Stop! Not here. Serve the broad interest somewhere else.” 

YIMBYism exists across many policy domains:

A small business YIMBY is a small business owner that shows up to help streamline the business permitting process even after their own store is up and running. They are the foil to the ice cream store owner that uses CEQA to keep a competitor’s shop from opening up. 

A higher ed YIMBY is someone who went to a highly-selective school but organizes fellow alumni to urge their school to 10x their admissions, because a great university should open up access as broadly as possible, not create artificial scarcity to drive up the signal of the brand. 

A healthcare YIMBY is a doctor who organizes fellow doctors to push back against the restrictions put on both foreign doctors practicing in the US and nurse practitioners practicing up to their skill level.

A corporate YIMBY is a CEO who puts corporate money into solving public problems that affect their community, broadly construed, vs. only advocating narrowly for the company’s financial self-interest.  

A clean energy YIMBY works to replace fossil fuels with solar, wind, and nuclear power, and fights local and regional governments that set up blockades to the development of these clean, modern technologies. 

Dream Hoarders and the Responsibility of “Elites”

While the hardest-core version of YIMBYism is directly going against one’s own narrow economic and/or status self-interest, this is not a necessary condition for taking up the YIMBY banner. And in many cases it’s not plausible that someone will advocate for a change that is deeply harmful to their self-interest, especially when they’re just getting by. We understand why an oil & gas worker with a $50 per hour job and union benefits is not persuaded by the argument that they should get on board with phasing out fossil fuels so they can get a non-unionized $20 per hour solar job instead.  

The responsibility for YIMBYism should start at the socioeconomic top of society, the folks Richard Reeves calls Dream Hoarders (72 min). Dream Hoarders have done very well playing by the rules of society over the past few decades. While most Dream Hoarders don’t actively work to sustain rules that block others from rising in American society, they don’t actively work to change them either. We imagine many Modern Power readers fall in this camp. 

Building The YIMBY Faction

One place where the socioeconomic top of society is overrepresented is the startup tech ecosystem. More than a trillion dollars of wealth has been created here in the last decade of tech IPOs. That wealth flows not just to the founders but also to rank-and-file employees. 

Many in this cohort are millennials and Gen Z. While their earnings allow them to be “Bay Area middle class” and pursue the hallmarks of the American Dream — a house, good schools for their kids, etc. — there are many fellow Californians, especially fellow millennials and Gen Zers, who are very far away from that dream. 

Folks from the startup ecosystem have come up in a generally optimistic and positive-sum culture. There is a certain YIMBY spirit in the way that folks like Paul Graham and Elad Gil shared their knowledge of startups rather than hoard it.  Their interest was broad rather than narrow: as the startup ecosystem grew, so too did their standing. 

What if we lived in a more YIMBY world, where access was a bit less gated, and opportunity a bit more abundant? What incurable disease could have been cured by a kid who happened to grow up in the wrong zip code? What leader could have remade our politics if only their parents had been able to get a foothold into one of our big cities? What climate suffering could have been averted if only we had built green infrastructure more aggressively? 

Being a YIMBY is being an anti-Hoarder. It is more than just agreeing in spirit with YIMBY public policy goals — it is actively putting time and/or money to help advance them. 

Together, we need to explore new approaches to building Modern Power, embracing a YIMBY spirit in pursuit of abundant policy outcomes. Hence this newsletter. 

So: subscribe!

And share this article with other YIMBYs who want to build political power.