The Place Where Civic Life Still Feels Fun—And What It Teaches Us About YIMBYtowning Our Politics
If there were a real city called YIMBYtown, you would probably expect it to be a rapidly growing one. After all, the YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) movement exists to reform the land-use and zoning rules that caused the country’s housing shortage. In cities like San Francisco, where a powerful NIMBY (”Not in My Backyard”) faction has resisted housing production for decades, population growth has been sluggish. A YIMBY town, by contrast, would probably see brisk growth—along with less homelessness and a booming local economy.
So it’s fitting that the YIMBYtown conference garners more attendees with each passing year. The 2022 YIMBYtown in Portland, Oregon, was the biggest year on record—until the 2024 gathering in Austin, Texas, brought in more than 400 attendees. This year, over 1,000 people descended on New Haven, Connecticut.
There’s always a fair amount to celebrate at YIMBYtown, and this year was no exception. It was the first since New York City enacted its comprehensive land-use-reform plan, City of Yes. Just days before the conference, the California legislature passed a major bill to spur more homebuilding in transit-rich areas. Those two high-profile wins from the past year show how YIMBY organizations have achieved a remarkable amount during an otherwise dark period for reform-minded activism.
The Scrappy Roots of the YIMBY Movement
A visit to YIMBYtown tells you why the movement has been so successful. The lessons it offers may even point the way to a broader democratic renewal. Progressive groups and policymakers should study YIMBY strategy as they work to strengthen civil society and other bulwarks against NIMBYism and other regressive policies.
They can start with the movement’s DIY roots and ethos. Like the YIMBY movement itself, YIMBYtown has gotten more professionalized as its ranks have grown; this year’s conference, partially backed by Yale University, took place in a wood-paneled downtown New Haven hotel and featured legendary climate activist Bill McKibben as a keynote.
But the polish belied a certain fundamental scrappiness. YIMBYtown 2025, like all previous iterations, was hosted by a small, local YIMBY organization—in this case, DesegregateCT, which has all of two full-time staff members. DesegregateCT’s director Pete Harrison, alongside Karen DuBois-Walton of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, sported “Co-Mayor, YIMBYtown” sashes as they darted from room to room, making sure the events were going smoothly.
This scrappiness is one of the YIMBY movement’s greatest strengths. Even after notching local and state-level wins nationwide—and attracting influential national allies—YIMBY remains powered by local activists and volunteers. Larger, more professionalized groups such as my former employer California YIMBY still draw much of their influence from the unpaid grassroots YIMBYs who knock on doors, call representatives, and speak at public meetings.
Because the YIMBY movement can’t pay all its foot soldiers, it needs to offer them something else: Community and purpose. It offers the chance to make their neighborhoods more vibrant, inclusive, and affordable. But that’s only part of the bargain. Attend YIMBYtown—or one of the many local happy hours—and you’ll notice that being a YIMBY is also a lot of fun. YIMBYism is a movement, but it’s also a social club for nerds who love cities.
Joy as Infrastructure
The social club factor may seem like a frivolous fringe benefit, but it’s what keeps people mobilized and draws new members in. Happy hours and pizza nights are a key source of movement power.
This isn’t a new idea: Many 19th- and 20th-century movements were yoked together through similar social bonds. For example, “red saloons“—bars that catered to a socialist clientele—were an important part of the labor movement’s infrastructure in Gilded Age Chicago. And as political scientist Theda Skocpol extensively documented in her book, Diminished Democracy, the decline of membership-based social organizations has contributed to the overall decay of mass democratic politics.
Happy hours and pizza nights are a key source of movement power.
This decay forms the unacknowledged backdrop to many internecine fights over the Democratic Party’s future. Progressives and moderates have different policy and communications visions, but their arguments are often nearly identical in structure. Both think the party needs a new policy agenda and a different way to sell it, yet neither really emphasizes building civic institutions that turn passive voters into active party members.
Here, Democratic power brokers in Washington could learn something from grassroots YIMBY organizations. Many of those power brokers have embraced “abundance,” which began as an effort to apply YIMBY policy thinking to other, non-housing policy domains. But they’ve paid less attention to how YIMBYs have turned those ideas into real-world wins.
YIMBYism’s success is more evidence that a polling-calibrated policy platform is no guarantee of victory, and a technical or radical-sounding one is no guarantee of defeat. Proposals like “upzone single-family neighborhoods” or “reform building codes that require multiple staircases in most apartment buildings” are not exactly designed to please affluent homeowners—the country’s most politically engaged voters.
Yet YIMBYs have won repeatedly while advancing policies that conventional wisdom deems politically toxic or too abstruse to generate grassroots energy. That is largely thanks to the volunteers—many of whom had their first exposure to organized YIMBY politics at a local happy hour—who have taken time out of their weekends and evenings to speak at public hearings, knock on doors, write to their local papers, and even descend on their state legislatures to lobby their representatives in person.
While local conditions can explain some of the wins, a consistent theme is that YIMBY groups have a knack for hosting fun social gatherings where they can, and often do, persuade skeptics and convert sympathizers into activists. YIMBYtown is a case in point. The next one will probably be the biggest YIMBYtown yet.
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