A year and a half ago, the hottest piece of housing legislation in Congress was the YIMBY Act, a small but worthwhile initiative sponsored by Sens. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and Todd Young, R-Ind. As the lawmakers told me at the time, the bill was purposely narrow in scope: basically just a questionnaire for towns and cities asking what they were doing to build more housing.1
At the time, I asked Young if there was any chance his Republican colleagues would back something more aggressive that actually ties money to localities changing their zoning rules. He said it wasn’t likely, telling me: “I think Republicans have, during my lifetime, emphasized the importance of respecting local authorities and local prerogatives.”
It turns out Young was underestimating his colleagues. Between recent developments on Capitol Hill and a historic suite of reforms in California, Republicans and Democrats have shown they are capable of making dramatic bipartisan progress on housing.
Capitol Hill gets serious
The YIMBY Act never passed Congress. But earlier this month, amid the ongoing government shutdown, the Senate overwhelmingly approved the Road to Housing Act, a sprawling collection of measures that includes some carrots and sticks tied to local government zoning decisions.2
First, there’s the Build Now Act, written by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and John Kennedy, R-La., which would tie a modest amount of Community Development Block Grant funding to how fast cities and towns facing a shortage build housing. Places that add homes fast would get a boost, while ones that are too slow would get a cut.
The ROAD to Housing Act also includes an “innovation fund” that would provide competitive grants that could be used on all sorts of local improvements in cities and towns that do a good job expanding housing. There’s also the “Build More Housing Near Transit Act,” which would give local governments a better rating when applying for transportation funding if their zoning allows more development.
The dollar figures here aren’t necessarily massive — the innovation fund, for instance, is only authorized at $200 million a year over five years. But conceptually, this is all a big leap. Advocates are optimistic the bill will pass the House of Representatives because it’s attached to the must-pass annual defense authorization bill, though it remains to be seen whether the House will include it in its version.
At a time of unprecedented division, how are the YIMBYs still notching wins?
First, it validates the movement’s long-term strategy of remaining nonpartisan. Allying with progressives in blue states and free marketers in red states has allowed it to do the same in D.C. Second, concerns about housing have reached a boiling point where lawmakers from both parties want to be seen as doing something about it, and they are reaching for what practical tools they can. Finally, discourse matters: If you repeat your ideas often and loudly enough, the right politician at the right time may be listening.
One big factor is simply that Warren became the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. The progressive favorite has been YIMBY-friendly since at least 2018, when she proposed a $10 billion competitive grant program to encourage local zoning reforms and found enthusiastic partners on the issue from the Republican side.
Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., had previously introduced an early version of The Road to Housing Act which consisted mostly of traditionally conservative proposals. And then there was Kennedy, who spent a March committee hearing reciting YIMBY chapter and verse about the evils of restrictive zoning, floated the idea of tying federal funding to loosening development rules. The witness he used as a sounding board was famed Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, a favorite of the pro-housing movement, who eventually went on to advise Kennedy’s office on the Build Now Act.
What’s interesting about Warren and Kennedy is neither of them fits a political profile where you would automatically assume they would want to wage war on bad zoning rules. After all, plenty of progressives are skeptical of deregulation and prefer to focus on issues like private equity firms buying up homes. Kennedy is a fairly traditional conservative you could imagine preferring to defer to local authorities. (Or even, possibly, echoing Donald Trump’s circa-2020 rhetoric about Democrats trying to destroy the suburbs.)
But through some combination of reading and osmosis, both apparently decided it was a good idea to attack bad zoning. The fact that said idea lacks an obvious partisan valence created space for that to happen.
Gavin Newsom’s “Abundant Mindset”
The politics in California were more dramatic: Governor Gavin Newsom defied wealthy donors, the Los Angeles political elite, and environmental groups to come out hard for two important pieces of housing legislation.
On Oct. 10, the governor signed SB 79, a years-in-the-making piece of bipartisan legislation that would overrule local zoning to allow the construction of apartments near major transit stops statewide. In doing so, he pushed aside howls of protest from his fellow Democrats in Los Angeles, where locals complained that the changes would encroach on many single-family neighborhoods, especially on its wealthy and donor-heavy West Side. (This was sort of the point.)
The Los Angeles City Council voted to symbolically oppose the legislation, while Mayor Karen Bass urged Newsom to veto it, claiming the legislation “risks significant unintended consequences for many of Los Angeles’ diverse communities.” He put his pen on the bill anyway.
This was the year’s second big pro-housing move from the governor. During the summer, Newsom excited and surprised YIMBYs by throwing his full weight behind two bills reforming the state’s landmark conservation statute. Under the first, AB 130, the California Environmental Quality Act can no longer be used to stop new housing from being built in most urban areas. Activists had been confident in their chances of passing a version of the law, but, by demanding it be included in the state budget, Newsom turbocharged the effort.
The bill would not “have been as strong without the governor’s support,” Brian Hanlon, president of California YIMBY, told me.
A second bill Newsom decided to champion, SB 131, will limit environmental review of other key projects, like high-speed rail and advanced manufacturing plants. That one drew the full wrath of California’s environmental establishment: A group of more than 100 organizations released a letter to the governor calling it “the worst anti-environmental bill in California in recent memory.” Again, he brushed off the complaints.
Newsom found religion via the newest YIMBY spiritual text: Abundance. Earlier this year, Newsom welcomed Ezra Klein to his podcast to talk about his book, co-written with The Argument contributor Derek Thompson. During it, Klein called out the state’s stifling bureaucracy and inability to build, asking “Why can’t I go say to the Texans or Floridians, ‘no no no, you just have to do our policies from California?’”
While signing the two CEQA reform bills that ultimately passed, he gave Klein a shout-out, thanking him for his “abundant mindset” while declaring that NIMBYs were “now being replaced” by the YIMBY movement.
Hanlon said he could only speculate on exactly why the governor decided to tie himself so tightly to the bills, but that it seemed he had essentially encountered the right idea at the right moment. As a politician with obvious national ambitions, Newsom needed to show he was tackling California’s hard-earned reputation for dysfunction and that he could stand for something besides opposition to Trump.
“Derek and Ezra wrote a really compelling airport book. And I mean that in a complimentary way,” Hanlon said. “And I think that, combined with everything else going on, really created the political incentives and discursive media environment where the governor was guaranteed to get a ton of really awesome press and show himself a leader of this nascent abundance movement, and [he] went big on CEQA reform.”
I don’t want to overstate the role of pure discourse in any of these legislative developments. In Washington, The Road to Housing Act has benefited from flying under the radar, but it has still required delicate negotiations between members. In California, CEQA reforms required an all-out lobbying blitz by YIMBY groups.
Moving SB 79 took a herculean effort in which supporters managed to pass the bills out of their relevant committees despite opposition from their chairs, which is more or less unprecedented in California. The bill’s future remained unclear as late as September, when advocates reached a deal with the building trades to drop their opposition in return for rules requiring union workers on some larger developments.
When I asked State Sen. Scott Wiener, the force behind SB 79, about his lessons from the bill, he talked at length about the difficult work of coalition building: “It’s being willing to talk to anyone, even people you think are hostile, because you never know when you’re going to be able to find common ground with someone.”
It’s also about being willing to just keep posting.
The idea was to equip local activists with more information they could use to press for change and create a national map of housing reforms.
It touches on topics as diverse as manufactured home regulations, federal housing vouchers, rules on home appraisals, model zoning codes, and limiting federal environmental review on affordable housing projects.
The contrast of the success of the YIMBY movement with the repeated failures of the intersectional left is hard not to notice. One builds coalitions and is willing to work with anyone whether they're on the left or right. The other demands 100% adherence to the entire left-wing project. It's no surprise movements that succeed do so by being as bipartisan as possible and appealing to people in very different ways. Demanding that the only way someone can agree with you on, say, supporting clean energy is to agree with you on every issue under the sun is a great way to alienate them.
I find it interesting that the "official" YIMBY movement has maintained a nonpartisan reputation and really has pull on both sides of the aisle, because the grassroots YIMBY movement seems to be comprised mostly of young, urban, well-educated, liberal nerds. A lot of the most popular YIMBY content creators will snark about how McMansions and cars suck and how Europe is so much better than the US. This is the kind of thing that would be designed in a lab to alienate MAGA Republicans, and yet it hasn't tainted efforts to build coalitions with Republican politicians when legislation is being pushed.