The Cruel Inhumanity of the “YIMBY” Movement

(Editor’s note: this June 21 essay appeared in the all aspect repoft, written by Christopher LeGras click here. Even as residents are told we need more density, which makes no sense in the Palisades because people couldn’t evacuate safely during the Palisades Fire. Palisades resident are treated like pariahs because we want our single family homes back, surrounded by vegetation, but are told no because grass burns and trees are fire traps.  No it was lack of water that caused homes to burn. LeGras’ piece is brilliant in its anaylsis.) 

BY CHRISTOPHER LEGRAS

A large and ever-expanding body of research demonstrates what anyone with a reasonable functional frontal cortex knows instinctively: Human beings benefit in myriad ways – physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually – from spending time in nature. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2021, at the height of pandemic lock downs (or more accurately, lock-ins), “Spending time in the woods — a practice the Japanese call ‘forest bathing’ — is strongly linked to lower blood pressure, heart rate and stress hormones and decreased anxiety, depression and fatigue.” Getting out into nature on a regular basis can even reduce people’s risk of cancer. Similarly, living in a neighborhood with open spaces, trees, gardens, and yards, has benefits over living in dense, congested, largely nature-free urban cores.

It’s not just the exercise. When we’re in a forest, up in the mountains, walking along the beach, or walking down a quiet, tree lined street, we’re engaging in versions of activities that every living creature in history did all day, every day, until relatively recently. We’re doing what we evolved to do for the first 300,000 years of our existence on this planet. We are quite literally in our natural element. No wonder we feel good.

Of course, most people don’t need peer-reviewed studies to reach these conclusions. Hiking or jogging in the forest or hills, walking in the park, spending time in local open spaces, and so forth are part of our weekly routines. For many of us that hour or two on the trail is a highlight of our days. Our brains slow down, our anxiety eases, our stress levels drop.

These inarguable realities of human existence point to a central, and fatal, flaw with the so-called YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) approach to housing and community development. The YIMBY movement, which unfortunately has captured public policy in city halls and statehouses nationwide, is premised on the notion that the solution to the country’s housing affordability crisis is to pack Americans into dense urban cores comprised of large apartment buildings that lack so much as setbacks for trees and other greenery. We’ll be lucky to have a small balcony with a view of the buildings across the street.

We definitely won’t have cars, because another YIMBY obsession is the elimination of private automobiles. Not only will we live in those steel, cement, and glass labyrinths, we won’t have the ability (aka freedom) to travel to our favorite trailhead, surf break, or picnic spot. We’ll rely on mass transit, bicycles, and our own two feet in what YIMBYs call “15 minute neighborhoods,” places in which all of life’s essential needs are, theoretically, accessible within a quarter hour walk, bicycle ride, or transit trip (a lucky few will be able to afford a $40 or $50 round trip to the trail in a Waymo several days a week). Another word for “15 minute city” is “Khruschevka.” In the 1950s and 60s under Premiere Nikita Khruschev, the Soviet Union built millions of five to ten story apartment blocs in centrally planned microneighborhoods in which necessities were within — wait for it — walking distance. The more things change, and sich.

There’s something anti-humanistic, even anti-human, about the YIMBYs. An individual’s or family’s choice of where to live is one of the most important decisions they will ever make. Where we live affects everything. Almost everyone has had the experience while house or apartment hunting when we walked into a place and fell in love. The pull of home is magnetic, even gravitational. It can be downright illogical. I was talking with a friend a few days ago who described house hunting with his wife and then toddler son. They felt the neighborhood in which they were living was becoming unsafe. So they looked all across L.A. in a variety of other places. They ended up falling in love with a house three blocks from the condo in which they lived at the time.

The YIMBYs grind beautiful, life-changing moments like these through an economic theory so reductive it makes the Inflation Acceleration Reduction Act seem Nobel worthy. The YIMBYs argue that housing is expensive because there’s not enough of it. Ergo, build more, and prices will drop. Doesn’t matter what you build, supply is supply. Moreover, since single family houses are racist, carbon-spewing vestiges of the past, we should build nothing but dense, transit-dependent apartment buildings.

I addressed the economic illiteracy of this “theory,” such as it is, in a recent post. I wrote:

[T]here’s no such thing as “the housing market.” There are many different housing markets. That’s not semantics: The 22-year-old single recent college grad renting her first grownup apartment is in an entirely different market from the 30-something married couple with a new baby who are looking for their starter home. The heir to a $100 million fortune looking for a Bel Air estate is not competing with the small business owner shopping for a townhouse in Pacoima. And so forth. YIMBYism obliterates these myriad differences, on the demonstrably false assumption that “housing is housing.”

That post focused on the empirical economic flaws with the YIMBY approach to housing. Here I want to explore the approach’s subjective shortcomings. If their economics assume that homes — not “houses,” not “apartments,” not “housing,” but homes — are fungible, then it must also be true that the people who live in them are equally interchangeable. The former assumption is absolutely central to the YIMBY theory: The 3,500 square foot detached house in the suburbs can be swapped for the 2,000 square foot three bedroom apartment in a downtown high rise, with virtually no meaningful impact on quality of life. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to live in an apartment. It doesn’t matter that you love your home. It doesn’t matter because housing is housing is housing. Doesn’t matter who actually lives in it or wants to.

This proposition is, of course, insane. It calls to mind Virginia Woolf’s famous critique of Edwardian literature, with its obsession with describing the physical world: “They have given us a house in the hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.”

Without this assumption, and pardoning the pun, the entire YIMBY edifice crumbles. For the YIMBY Utopia to become reality, 38.9 million Californians all must live in more or less identical circumstances: Small apartments in dense urban cores with no cars and no green space except designated public parks. 38.9 million people of every conceivable background, identity, and income level, with their own dreams and aspirations, crammed into soulless, indistinguishable shoeboxes.

Which is where YIMBYism metastasizes from illogical to menacing. There is something deeply dehumanizing about the whole apparatus, a noxious stench of authoritarianism. Obviously, the tens of millions of Californians who don’t live in dense urban cores – that is, the vast majority – are not going to suddenly decide to sell their houses, townhouses, duplexes, and so forth in order to move to the city. They want to live the way they’ve chosen to live. That’s why they chose it. Millions of people work very hard to afford to live where they chose. To YIMBYs, none of that matters. Those millions of dreams are mere inconveniences, to be literally bulldozed aside on the road to the smart city future.

YIMBYism is inescapably racist

And more. YIMBYism requires some pretty ugly erasures. There are approximately 6.5 million Latino homeowners in California, 4.4 million Asian homeowners, and 1.3 million Black homeowners in California. Over the last five years Latinos have been the biggest cohort of first time homebuyers. Yet YIMBYs insist that suburbs, and especially single family homes, continue to be legacies of racism and exclusion. While posturing as “progressives,” they erase the existence of 12.2 million non-White households, which including children equals some 25 million people, for the sin of not conforming to a political ideology. Let the implications sink in for a moment. What is more racist than that kind of erasure? Given the movement’s self-admitted Whiteness, there’s also an unmistakable whiff of the White Man’s Burden.

While non-White homeownership lags White homeownership, with the exception of Asians, Latinos and Blacks are catching up. Yet instead of making it easier for millions more people to achieve the dream of homeownership, YIMBYs are busy yanking up the proverbial rope ladder. Their argument goes something like this: Suburbs and single family homes are the products of historic racist practices like redlining, restrictive covenants, sunset laws, and collective exclusion. As a direct result, tens of millions of non-White Americans were prevented from buying homes in desirable suburbs over many generations. Therefore, those homes and suburbs must be destroyed.

Seriously. It’s that simplistic. If everyone can’t have nice things, no one can have nice things. Ironically, they’re taking this stand at the exact moment in history when non-Whites are becoming the dominant groups of homebuyers and homeowners. Yet perversely, the YIMBYs have seized the mantle of inclusivity. In one way they have a point: They want everyone to be equally miserable.

Again, just saying….

This is typical of the increasing number of apartment buildings in Santa Monica.

Unsurprisingly, there is growing resistance to the movement. Santa Monica, California, offers a cautionary tale. The city embraced YIMBY-style density a quarter of a century ago. What was once a small, sleepy beachside downtown known for funky local businesses and mid-century bungalows has morphed into a mini Manhattan. In the city core, soulless four and five story “stack and pack” apartment buildings — most of which are indistinguishable from one another — have replaced the bungalows and small apartments Americans got to know in TV shows like Three’s Company. Franchises and chains on the ground floor of mixed use buildings have replaced the mom and pop shops.

The result? Santa Monica has an overall residential vacancy rate of at least 10%, and significantly higher downtown. That’s well above the 5%-7% that economists consider healthy. According to one independent analysis the real vacancy rated could be as high as 20% or even 25%. Most of the newer buildings are offering months of free rent, gym memberships, even cash gift cards to entice would-be residents. It isn’t working. According to one estimate, the downtown vacancy rate could be as high as 20%. Resident turnover is also extremely high.

If dense, treeless, car-free downtown living doesn’t work mere steps from the Pacific Ocean, Santa Monica Beach, and the Santa Monica Pier, what hope does it have elsewhere?

It’s not too late. While YIMBYism already has done tremendous harm in many places already, there’s still time for policymakers to reverse course. Not only are single family and small multifamily neighborhoods healthier and more livable, a growing body of research shows they’re also more affordable.

We’ve tried the YIMBY experiment, and it has failed. It buckles under the unsustainable weight of its economic incoherence, lack of humanity, and racism. It’s time for public policy to support and encourage development of the kinds of neighborhoods people actually want to live in, including easy access to the natural spaces that are critical to our health and well-being.