The Biggest Myth About the YIMBY Movement

The Atlantic

14-07-2025

Over the past year, the conversation about housing affordability went national. Unfortunately, it brought with it all the contentiousness of a local-zoning-board meeting. The Democratic YIMBY ('yes in my backyard') movement argues for reducing restrictions on building in order to increase the number of homes and lower housing prices. This has inspired a furious backlash within the liberal coalition. These critics paint the YIMBY vision as a centrist, pro-business scheme that betrays progressive values. Some of the loudest complaints have come from anti-monopoly advocates, who warn that the abundance agenda is a stalking horse for libertarianism. The fight has been framed in a way that is almost perfectly designed to split the Democratic coalition.
But this fight shouldn't even be happening. Antitrust policy and housing abundance are natural allies. Although the pro-housing movement does want to remove a specific set of regulations, this ambition is best understood in the populist, trust-busting mold: as an attack aimed at breaking up a powerful group's capture of the regulatory regime. There is nothing centrist about that. In fact, NIMBY activists and their allies are the ones engaged in a fundamentally conservative project: helping a landowning elite hoard wealth by preserving an unfair status quo. As a progressive YIMBY advocate myself (and a former city-council candidate in Seattle), I have witnessed this dynamic directly.
This is more than a mere debate about words. The failure to build homes fuels the cost-of-living crisis, worsens climate outcomes, reinforces geographic segregation, and drives migration of people and political power from blue states to red ones—just as the GOP has veered into authoritarianism. It also fuels the nation's record-high homelessness numbers. Research shows that low housing supply, not drug use or poverty, is the strongest predictor of regional homelessness. People who claim to be progressives but resist efforts to solve the housing problem are hurting their own stated values—and risking their descent into political irrelevance.
How did a project revolving around expanding access to affordable housing come to be seen by some on the left as centrist, even conservative? It's partly a matter of historical contingency. The front line of the housing fight has long been in the San Francisco Bay Area, where an old guard of otherwise lefty landowners happens to be the group resisting change. There, the YIMBY movement has allied with a younger, less hippy-coded generation of techies. This has created a misleading impression that NIMBYs are inherently to the left of YIMBYs. If the tech boom had instead started in, say, Dallas, the political tenor of the debate would likely look quite different.
The fact that someone who is otherwise on the political left opposes a reform doesn't make their opposition itself progressive. A recent successful legislative change to exempt most new-housing development from the California Environmental Quality Act is a great example. The law has been used to block housing production in California's cities. Yet YIMBY reformers had to overcome pushback from labor-union leaders, who should have recognized that more housing would help their workers. These unions opposed the law's reform because their ability to file frivolous CEQA suits gave them bargaining leverage over builders. Whether reasonable or not, their decision makes it clear that 'opposition from the left' can have less to do with progressive values than with narrow self-interest.
Adding to the confusion over where the push for housing abundance falls on the political spectrum is the fact YIMBYs often talk about the need to cut 'red tape,' such as restrictive zoning and procedural rules, to make building homes easier. This rhetoric, along with the movement's focus on supply, can, to some ears, evoke Reagan-era trickle-down economics. Many on the left naturally bristle at this kind of language. 'YIMBY policies satisfied elite consensus, promising workforce housing for tech-sector donors while scratching a deregulatory itch that libertarians had long been trying to reach,' Michael Friedrich wrote last year in The New Republic.
But abundance liberals aren't fighting against regulation per se. They're fighting against a specific set of regulations that rich people exploit to rig the housing market against people of more modest means. Their aim is to eliminate these specific tools, not to deregulate in general.
Progressive anti-monopoly advocates, for their part, accuse YIMBYs of ignoring the problem of corporate power. Because these critics see corporations as the primary villains in American economic life, they're suspicious of any movement that focuses its energies elsewhere. For example, in a review of Abundance, the discourse-defining book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the anti-monopolist Sandeep Vaheesan laments the lack of attention to 'anti-monopoly policies that would rein in the power of the affluent' and criticizes the authors' supposed 'deference to private capital and hostility to public governance.'
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In reality, the pro-housing movement aims to unrig the housing market, expand access, bring down prices for consumers, and redistribute power and wealth from the rich to everyone else. In antitrust terms, YIMBYs seek to break the housing cartel's chokehold on supply by using political power to restore market competition. Anti-monopoly thinkers should, if anything, be leading the housing fight, not opposing it.
The basic insight of antitrust law is that powerful actors will, if left to their own devices, manipulate markets to kill off competition and enrich themselves. One of the most common ways they do this is by restricting supply to keep prices artificially high. When the global oil cartel OPEC cuts oil production, for example, prices at the pump spike. And when wealthy homeowners use local zoning and other land-use laws to block the addition of apartments, townhomes, and subsidized housing in desirable neighborhoods—in other words, to prevent new competition from entering the housing market—they do the same thing: create artificial scarcity, thereby propping up their property values.
Anti-monopolists are not wrong that corporate power tends to be behind the deformations in the modern American economy. And in some cases, corporate wrongdoers really might be part of the housing problem; this is why the Department of Justice and state attorneys general are currently suing the algorithmic price-setting company RealPage for colluding with landlords to raise rents. In general, however, it's landowners who've rigged this particular market, not through private collusion, which is illegal, but through 'regulatory capture,' which is when private groups shape government policy to serve their own economic aims.
Sometimes working together, sometimes working separately, NIMBYs have manipulated a web of local laws and requirements—such as exclusionary zoning, minimum lot sizes, and parking minimums—to reduce production of homes. As with any production cap, the result is higher prices for new residents and higher profits for incumbents, and a transfer of wealth and power from buyers and renters to existing owners.
Because the First Amendment protects private citizens' right to advocate for government policy, the courts can't stop homeowners from using their power in this way. The only remedy is political pushback.
In Northern California, the legacy faction of the left is the problem. But in places as varied as Connecticut and Ohio, or Charlotte and Portland, the housing movement is largely led by progressives.
I work in the housing movement in Washington State. This past legislative session, my job was to put together a coalition of nonprofits to push for perhaps the nation's most ambitious rollback of off-street-parking requirements. I worked alongside progressive sponsors in the state Senate and House. The bill that ultimately passed swept away thousands of local rules that had throttled housing-supply growth.
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A similar coalition also helped pass other pro-housing reforms to land-use law in Washington (for example, allowing denser development near public transit). These changes won't solve our state's housing crisis on their own, but they are real, material wins. A few GOP-friendly real-estate-industry groups joined in support, but the backbone of the coalition was progressive: big labor, statewide and local environmental groups, tenants'-rights advocates, and justice-focused nonprofits. Almost all of the same groups have also backed a cap on egregious rent gouging, stricter climate standards for new buildings, and more funding for public and nonprofit housing—hardly a libertarian wish list.
This is what a populist antitrust effort in housing looks like: undoing regulatory capture, breaking up economic gatekeeping, and creating a fairer market. And yet, in a spectacular act of projection, NIMBYs accuse housing advocates of conservatism even as they defend the interests of wealthy landowners protecting their cultural and economic turf. This smear campaign is meant to freeze blue-state efforts to help people struggling to afford a place to live. And if the broader left fails to recognize this NIMBY misinformation for what it is, it might work.