YIMBYism started as a single-issue movement. It's time to think bigger.

New research shows that voters who like cities back denser housing. To make cities more likeable, YIMBYs need to act more like a party.

GrowSF ties housing abundance to a broader issue palette.

Activists who come together around a policy objective face a recurring strategic question: whether to operate as a single-issue group, or to coalesce with others in the hopes of forging a durable, cross-issue coalition.

The signal advantage of one-issue groups is that they can work with almost any legislator. By not taking stances on peripheral issues, they avoid making enemies. On the other hand, groups that forge stable cross-issue coalitions can wield additional influence by developing electorally visible brands and (if their candidates win) by shaping agendas and whipping votes within the legislature. The paradigmatic example of such a cross-issue group is, of course, the political party.

The “Yes in my Backyard” prohousing movement has scored a remarkable string of legislative wins while behaving as a single-issue group. Speaking of property rights and deregulation to Republican lawmakers, and of racial equity and climate change to Democrats, YIMBYs have pushed through major, bipartisan bills both in red states like Montana, Arizona, and Florida, and in blue states like California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.

Even so, a few YIMBYs have begun striking out in more party-like directions. In San Francisco, YIMBYism has spawned both a conventional interest group (SF YIMBY) and a cross-issue, campaign-oriented group (GrowSF) that publishes an influential voter guide and backs slates of candidates aligned with its “livable cities” vision. For GrowSF, housing abundance rides together with public safety, clean streets, rigorous public schools, better transportation, and a friendlier business climate.

Robert Saldin and Steven Teles have made the case for a more party-like YIMBYism. They argue that by bundling housing, energy, transportation, health care, and scientific progress into an abundance platform, politicians can signal to the mass public that they’ll fight for consumers, and also rope in the business interests that would benefit from a more open economy.

A more basic point, however, has received too little attention: The public’s willingness to support the core YIMBY objective of greater housing density may be quite sensitive to the government’s success or failure in other domains of municipal governance. An obvious example is transportation: If mass transit is convenient and comfortable, people are less likely to be concerned about whether a proposed housing development would cause street parking to become more congested. But the point goes much further. It’s probably not a coincidence that the YIMBY movement emerged after a generation-long decline in urban crime. Young people seeking economic and cultural amenities flocked to newly safe cities, and they became YIMBYs as further influxes of young people drove rents out of reach.

In a new working paper one of us co-authored with David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, we examine the relationship between voters’ support for building more apartments and their feelings toward big cities. We asked a nationally representative sample of respondents whether “[c]ities should have to allow 5-story apartment buildings to be built along major streets and in commercial areas.” Contrary to the standard NIMBY explanation for housing politics, we found that people who live in cities (and who’d therefore be more exposed to the new development) are much more supportive of making cities allow dense housing than are suburban and rural respondents. And contrary to the “homevoter” explanation for housing politics, we found that within cities, homeowners are actually more supportive of dense apartment development than renters. Earlier in the same survey, respondents were asked how they feel about big cities, on a scale from “very cold” to “very warm.” It turns out that the large difference between urban and non-urban respondents’ support for making cities allow more apartment buildings is almost entirely explained by affect toward big cities. People who feel good about big cities want existing cities to become more canonically city-like.

Building on work by Alex Sahn, we also studied public comments on actual housing development projects in San Francisco. People who live on dense blocks in the city—and who thereby reveal a taste for density—comment more positively on development proposals than people who live on sparser blocks, controlling for the block’s distance from a proposed project and idiosyncratic features of each project.

These results imply that durable public support for land-use liberalization in urban areas may depend on increasing the demand for city living, or at least positive affect toward cities. Where do such sentiments come from? There is ample evidence that people form strong, lifelong preferences during their late teens and early twenties. (What’s your all-time favorite album or movie?) In the working paper, we find that Americans who came of age prior to the post-WWII suburban boom have very positive feelings toward cities, while the people who became young adults in the late 1960s to the 1980s, as riots and crime emptied out our urban cores, are most negative.

Making cities into broadly appealing places is essential to building support for more production of dense housing. If nonurbanites come to see big cities as culturally alien, they may sour on policies that would grow cities or make the suburbs more city-like.

This research supports the common-sense idea that making cities into broadly appealing places is essential to building support for more production of dense housing. Public safety, economic opportunity and cultural amenities are probably all important. Conversely, if nonurbanites come to see big cities as culturally alien places, they may sour on cities and by extension on policies that would grow cities or make the suburbs more city-like.

In addition to nurturing a larger and more committed next generation of YIMBYs, the project of conjoining YIMBYism to an urban quality-of-life agenda has other very attractive properties. It offers something to voters disgruntled about construction noise or new buildings that change the look and feel of their community: “You may not like all the buildings, but you’ll love the great schools, safe streets, fast transit, and thriving business that we’ll deliver.” It also promises real benefits to the nation writ large. By opening up big cities to new residents and drawing them in with high quality of life, it will spur innovation, economic growth and tax revenue that benefit Americans wherever they may live.

Becoming more party-like does entail risks. Trying to win elections also means you may lose, and pushing a broader agenda can alienate potential friends. In some contexts, it is not the right strategy. In New York City, the recent City of Yes zoning reforms were backed by groups that could never agree on other urban policy issues.

Still, the present time is ripe for YIMBYs to branch out. As Saldin and Teles observe, the national Democratic and Republican parties are riven by internal conflicts and struggle to connect with a distrusting populace. There is space inside both parties for factional conflict. Equally important, state and local governments have been experimenting with new ways to regulate candidates’ access to the ballot and to reduce the salience of major-party labels, often by combining formally nonpartisan elections with ranked-choice voting.

A downside of nonpartisan elections is that they leave many ordinary, low-information voters at sea about what the candidates stand for. In other work, we have argued that state and local governments should authorize any group that demonstrates broad public support to make ballot-printed candidate endorsements in formally nonpartisan elections. This reform would help low-information voters connect their choices to the important issues in state and local politics, and it would incentivize the formation of local cross-issue factions within or even across the Democratic and Republican Parties. A broader YIMBY platform should include electoral reforms that make it easier for cross-issue factions to communicate their platforms and endorsements to the public.

Given the nature of public opinion about housing development, the structure of our politics, and the openings created by electoral reforms, it’s time for YIMBYs to party.

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Chris Elmendorf is Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis. David Schleicher is Walter E. Meyer Professor of Property and Urban Law at Yale University.