Why I stopped being a YIMBY

The YIMBY movement has lost its way becoming just another planning-led and illiberal group that believes its vision, a Young Fogey version of Le Corbusier’s cities in the sky, should be imposed

It was one of those AI-generated images that finally broke me. A brown stone street of eight storey mansion houses through which ran a street along which a tram runs. Just one tram. Obviously no buses, delivery vans, taxis, motorcycles, and, heaven forfend, cars. This image is accompanied by the message:

“Imagine bold new extensions of towns and cities built around tram stops that allow our economy to thrive and homes to become affordable”

Everything in this urban vision, except the cramped little flats in those massive blocks, is public realm. There are no gardens, no private balconies, just a carefully manicured and, no doubt, heavily policed so children don’t do anything bad like play among them, rows of trees in a grassy strip interspersed with bushes.

I stopped being a YIMBY because the advocates of building new homes don’t want to allow the building of homes according to what people want but rather according to their grandiose vision of future urbanism. What we get is a twee version of Le Corbusier’s planned urban communities where, rather than brutalist modernism we get a world filled with dull pastiche of Maida Vale mansion blocks. 

The thing about Le Corbusier is that, like most socialist planners, he absolutely believed that he knew better than ordinary workers and families what form of living was good for them. “The materials of city planning are sky, space, trees, steel and cement” said the great architect as he set out his influential zonal approach to planning that, like almost all of his commentary on architecture, ignored the people who would live in his cities. Le Corbusier was, in many respects the urbanist most close to the society Yevgeny Zamyatin created in ‘We’, a soulless, inhuman and unremittingly public place with no role for your or my creativity of living, only a space where men live according to the principles defined by the urbanist elite.

When the YIMBY movement started, it did so in response to the terrible economic and social impact of housing costs. YIMBYs started with realising that the reason the rent was too damned high wasn’t capitalism, wasn’t a lack of planning, wasn’t immigration. The housing crisis is a crisis created by government - local and national - regulation of land supply and land use. This crisis of supply was made worse by the belief that because limiting supply made land expensive, there was lots of value to ‘capture’ so as to indulge the vanity of politicians and the flowering of excuses for not building from those protecting the artificially high values of their land.

At first YIMBYs were consistent in seeing that the way to resolve the housing crisis was to increase the supply of land for development. Depending on where you lived there were different priorities - stopping single family zoning, scrapping urban growth boundaries, removing expectations of planning gain and making the permit process faster and more predictable. The feature of all these campaigns was that the way to ameliorate - hopefully end - the housing crisis was to reduce regulation and do less planning. Everywhere the cry was ‘build more houses’.

The problem, however, is that YIMBYs were young(-ish), ideologically left wing and living a childless life in big cities. The simple truth about housing supply (if you increase the supply of land for building, the market will meet need and housing costs will become affordable) wasn’t good enough. Voices began to say it was more complicated and, as criticisms of YIMBYism arose, the YIMBYs backed away from their simple recognition that supply and demand is real and does largely determine values. The new urbanism stopped being about how you dropped house prices and reduced rents by building houses and began to embrace elements of trendy urbanism: a shift to talk about affordable homes not simply homes per se; an obsession with urban densification; and the embrace of environmentalism especially in the form of public transport. As a result YIMBYs stopped simply campaigning for more land supply and more homes, and instead began to talk about planned urban environments, agglomeration theory and using development to make public transport systems economically viable.

Accompanying this plan-led approach, the YIMBYs, even in the USA, adopted the idea that very dense European cities represent the ideal living environment and that new development should be designed to pastiche such places. Ideas such as ‘street votes’ were presented as a way of making suburbs more dense while ‘gentle density’ (a world of 5-7 storey blocks) became the mantra for new urban development. Crucially the YIMBYs echoing Le Corbusier, wanted to turn back the tide on suburban mixed use development to have a zonal system akin to 1950s London where commuters crowd onto public transport to work in mono-centric cities characterised by mythic Parisian density.

Anyone, YIMBY or not, who questions this ideology is now dismissed as either some sort of libertarian nutter for wanting a genuinely free housing market or else that cars are a bad thing, that people should be forced to use public transport and that suburban development is the worst kind of development, horrible ‘sprawl’. People kick back by telling the critic about their visit to one or other European city - Prague, Luxembourg, Amsterdam - and how perfect it was in every way. Or else they make sweeping statements about how suburbia - a place built with families and private life in mind not work or elite entertainment - somehow ‘atomises’ society. At the bottom of all this sneer are two things: the old idea that suburbs are bad places and the belief that without the involvement of the state nothing can be built. “How many people can afford to "build houses on land they own"” read one response - I don’t know the answer except to say a whole load more than can afford to build houses under a system where you need expensive permissions from the government to build.

From a liberating force for good the YIMBY movement has gradually been colonised by planners, urbanists, socialists and fans of rent controls to the point where its arguments are little different to the systems it wants to replace. In the UK we are expected to be all excited about unspecified and vague proposals for planning from the Labour Party despite their strategy being largely one of allowing the state to seize land, huge taxes on development to fund things that aren't houses, and centrally enforced plans for new towns. We may get more houses than under the current system (for the record I doubt this) but only at enormous public expense and with a less free, less open housing market than is the case now. Real planning reform isn’t about giving councils the power to compulsory purchase housing land so as to dodge its real value. Real planning reform isn’t about increasing taxes on development to fund infrastructure that isn’t housing. And real planning reform isn’t about getting communities to create plans because those communities are likely not to want the new homes in the first place.

The YIMBY movement has lost its way becoming just another statist, planning-led and illiberal group that believes its vision, a Young Fogey version of Le Corbusier’s cities in the sky, should be imposed on society. A dense, garden-free, child-hating place of shuttling peons from cramped flats to pokey offices in crowded public transport. All built believing that somehow this helps the planet and, by some magical serendipity, boosts the economy. 

For a fleeting few years the YIMBYs heralded a freeing up of housing development where the government did not dictate what people could do with land they owned, where a more free housing market could be allowed to meet need. And where expensive state-owned housing wasn’t needed because most people on average earnings could afford to buy and everyone can afford their rent. That dream has gone as YIMBYs take second best preferring a different but just as regulated planning system to making building houses just another mostly free market.