Is the YIMBY Movement Failing?

Housing affordability remains one of America’s biggest challenges.  This has been a long-brewing crisis, rooted in decades of underbuilding that worsened after the 2008 recession. One might expect that the “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement—which pushes cities to remove restrictions on new housing—would be a political winner. And indeed, YIMBYs have had some victories over the last decade. But the successes are incremental, falling short of the broad deregulation needed to meet demand. Even many of the political leaders that push YIMBY platforms will simultaneously counter themselves with vaguely anti-housing stances. It seems that the movement has struggled to find political allies – seen as too market-oriented for the left and too urbanist for the right.

Zohran Mamdani, the frontrunner in New York City’s 2025 mayoral race, is an example of someone who doesn’t quite fit the YIMBY message – and who may be perilous to the movement if they ever become associated. His platform is on one hand all about affordability, echoing the YIMBY language on parking minimums and his calls to expand zoned capacity, especially in wealthier neighborhoods.

But Mamdani is a democratic socialist who rants about “greedy landlords” while preferring state-led solutions. He calls for 200,000 new public housing units, despite NYCHA’s troubled management track record compared to private landlords. This “PHIMBY” (public housing in my backyard) stance reflects a broader critique: that the private market cannot deliver affordable housing quickly enough, so government must build instead. Advocates often cite Vienna’s 20th-century public housing boom as proof-of-concept.

Yet as researcher Patrick Duffy notes, Vienna’s success also relied on aggressive land-use liberalization, with the majority of units ultimately delivered by the private market. The city opened up former industrial land for housing—exactly the kind of pro-growth move that progressive activists blocked when a major Brooklyn redevelopment was proposed in 2020.

Mamdani also backs a rent freeze, despite decades of evidence that rent control constrains supply and drives up costs over time. Policies like these discourage landlords from reinvesting in properties, worsening conditions for tenants. 

And Mamdani’s larger social sensibilities—soft-on crime, tolerant of homeless vagrancy, and generally “woke”—have increasingly proven off-putting to Americans, namely working-class ones of all races. The breakdown in public order that results from his preferred policies is what causes people to become NIMBY in the first place. 

But a lot of high-profile YIMBY political leaders resemble Mamdan—even if they’re not as extreme. This can be said of Scott Wiener (author of California’s “upzoning” bills); Mayor Jacob Frey (who spearheaded Minneapolis’ rezoning); and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu— all of whom call for things like inclusionary zoning to complement their housing reforms. Grassroots-level YIMBY activists also frequently embody this idiosyncratic mix of pro-market ideology, statism, and strong-bordering-on-extreme social leftism.  

This causes the movement to bend over backwards in appealing to the left – after all they are quite leftist themselves. Sometimes their support of policies like rent control are “grand bargains” that they believe will bring the Mamdani types onboard. But their boldest efforts, such as California SB 827 (which would have upzoned transit corridors), collapsed under opposition from progressive activists, including some members of the Democratic Socialists of America. The conciliatory strategy doesn’t seem to produce much real deregulation.

The right, meanwhile, is no friendlier. While some Republicans embrace YIMBY reforms, the party’s populist wing has cast YIMBYs as would-be social engineers trying to force dense, urban lifestyles on unwilling Americans. At the 2020 GOP convention, the infamous St. Louis couple who brandished guns at protesters were trotted out as symbols of resistance to zoning reform. Efforts in Virginia to eliminate exclusive single-family zoning drew similar GOP outrage.

Conservatives have also targeted institutional investors in housing, arguing that Wall Street landlords crowd out middle-class buyers. But YIMBYs correctly view such investor money as instrumental in bringing about new housing. 

Still, not all is bleak. Montana passed sweeping pro-housing reforms recently, deregulating parking mandates, duplex construction, and single-stair apartment buildings. And New York City’s “City of Yes” rezoning promises substantial new capacity. Maybe YIMBYism can advance when framed effectively.

But the broader problem remains: the movement has no natural political home. Progressives distrust markets, conservatives distrust density, and both sides find reasons to stall reform. 

YIMBYs, to break through, have long couched their positions using leftist slogans around economic and environmental justice. This makes sense on its face given that they’re operating in heavily-Democratic cities. But it’s tough to say how popular such language even still is as the nation—especially its youth—has taken a sharp rightward shift recently.

The answer may be to take a more populist appeal by showing less disdain for right-wing social positions. “Law-and-order” and “urbanism” are fundamentally intertwined, since cities don’t work without it. Showing more skepticism about open immigration would for YIMBYs be logically consistent, since such growth puts a strain on housing. And the environmentalist language against “sprawl” and other presumed forms of over-consumption does not gel with the concept of abundant housing.   

Or YIMBYs could avoid social issues altogether and just talk housing, noting how the shortage is creating a nation of renters. Above all, political advancement requires holding leaders of both parties accountable for their anti-housing stances.

But for now, housing remains caught in a partisan no-man’s land. Until YIMBYs find an identity beyond left or right, their victories will remain limited—and America’s housing crisis will grind on.

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