Are YIMBYs Normalizing Fascism?

Recapping YIMBYTown 2025, the most optimistic place in America

There are few places on planet earth where people will burst into applause for a “land value tax.” Yet hundreds of people cheered loudly at YIMBYTown this past weekend when keynote speaker

Daryl Fairweather, PhD

, Redfin’s chief economist, discussed such thrilling topics as Prop 13 reform, climate-safe retrofitting incentives, and state preemption of local land use regulating authority.

(If you don’t know what some or all of these things are, that’s ok—it reinforces my point that the “yes in my backyard” pro-housing YIMBY crowd is a funky bunch.)

Such began 2025’s annual YIMBY convening, bringing together more than 1,000 (!!) housing advocates from across the country to New Haven, CT. Attendees shared ideas, strategized for the future, and ate an abundance of Connecticut-style pizza.

But YIMBYTown wasn’t just a gathering of nerds. Beneath the wonkery and burnt crusts were deeper questions about the movement’s future, chief among them how to solve fundamental problems while navigating politics across the ideological spectrum.

Can a movement include Republicans without normalizing fascism?

Though the majority of YIMBY activists lean left, the conference also included right wing perspectives. The libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation and the center-right Mercatus Institute co-hosted a happy hour with YIMBY Law. Kelly Armstrong, the self described “very conservative” governor of North Dakota, delivered a keynote.

Yet the event largely ignored federal politics, I’d say for the better.

Local and state laws largely control the zoning rules and other regulations that artificially constrict housing development. Solving those problems will require primarily local and state reforms. Several panels discussed ways federal programs might affect local budgets or undermine specific types of housing development, such as subsidized low-income projects. Those changes just weren’t a primary focus.

Party politics also received little attention aside from nods to the bipartisan support on which state housing legislation often depends. In states as different as California, Texas, Arkansas, and Massachusetts, major statewide YIMBY legal reforms have relied on support from Democrats and Republicans alike to pass.¹ Everyone tacitly accepted that different organizations in different states and regions will build different political coalitions.²

The YIMBYTown approach to politics contrasts with the Abundance Conference, a recent gathering of technocrats and politicians in Washington, D.C. that seemed near-obsessively absorbed with national bipartisanship. I’m glad there’s budding bipartisan support for policies like permit streamlining for electricity transmission pipelines, but concepts that some conference attendees have supported like “deportation abundance” pose a real threat to the better proposals’ legitimacy.

Abundance as currently constituted isn’t so much a movement as a bundle of (generally productive) ideas for improving governments’ ability to do things and evaluate policy tools.³ However, those ideas—and the rhetoric surrounding them about state capacity—can be easily co-opted to serve zero sum worldviews motivated by xenophobia and political repression to create powerful state apparatuses.

Unlike the Abundance idea bundle, YIMBYism is an actual political movement, uniting a broad range of ideologies under a shared set of values. Nobody talked about how desperately we need to deport people—those are potential future neighbors! (And immigrants also make up an essential part of the housing construction workforce.) Attendees were there to help build positive-sum cities with enough housing of all kinds that everyone can afford to have a home.

YIMBY also has authentic grassroots support that Abundance has not yet developed. More than half the YIMBYTown attendees were volunteer activists, people who spend their free time doing the legwork to support YIMBY legislation in their own cities and states. Volunteers came from more than 40 states, even other countries, to learn together about building better communities.

Even the volunteers are nerds, though

Though many attendees were volunteers, the YIMBYTown crowd really is a bunch of dorks. I say this with love as I too am a dork!

During a presentation about Cambridge, Massachusetts’s recent successful effort to allow apartments citywide, one of the biggest applause lines came when the presenter described how the city eliminated Floor Area Ratios.⁴ Another breakout audience ooh’ed and ah’ed at proposals to address homelessness by streamlining office-to-single-room-occupancy conversions, essentially dorm-style living. At a plenary roundtable about America’s flailing insurance markets, the speakers got claps when they talked about strategies to lower insurance risk premiums.

Many rooms on obscure topics were completely at capacity. For example, almost 200 people packed into a room to learn about building code reform—YIMBYs mean it when we say we like high density.

A conference packed to the brim with people invested in nitty gritty solutions to hard problems is a weird and beautiful thing in today’s America.

A break from fangirling

If you can’t tell, I had a pretty good time at YIMBYTown. I still have some suggestions for improvement.

For starters, the conference focused so much on “lessons learned” from different parts of the country and world that it barely discussed the actual organizing strategies that led to all those wins. There were panels about pro-housing achievements in every region of the United States: Montana, Connecticut, Boston, the Twin Cities, Atlanta, Austin, Texas writ large (both on a panel and a plenary roundtable), Cambridge, Massachusetts, California, Florida, Arkansas, Maryland, D.C.; one discussed “YIMBY Wins From Around the World,” another dug into Melbourne and Vancouver.

The sheer volume of panels about what is going on in individual cities and states crowded out more concrete discussions about the mechanics of organizing: public communications, media relations, lobbying electeds, fundraising. A single panel covered how to start a local YIMBY chapter; everything else was about policy or look backs. Maybe the emphasis on successes reflects the movement growing up; I think it was an oversight in an otherwise very well organized event.

The other challenge would be obvious to anyone in attendance, and will be more vexing to fix: YIMBYTown is still a bro-down. I’d guess the ratio of men to women was 2:1; a friend of mine and fellow attendee guesses 3:1, maybe 4:1. Ouch.

However you slice it, YIMBY’s most active volunteer base remains disproportionately male. Interestingly, many of the professional YIMBY organizations are majority women and women led; for example, leaders like

Sonja Trauss

kickstarted the modern movement and Felicity Maxwell at Texans for Homes heads up arguably the most politically successful statewide org. Conference speakers were pretty evenly split. The volunteer base—and the highest profile online poasters—have yet to catch up.

Future conference organizers could help address the imbalance by setting clear goals from the start for non-male attendance and explicitly dedicating time and resources to promoting the event to predominately female partner organizations.

More powerfully, future YIMBYTowns could dedicate just as much space to discuss organizing and community building as policy. As YIMBY Action Executive Director

Laura Foote

, another influential woman in YIMBY leadership and also a Substacker, wrote to me when I sent her a draft of this section (lightly edited for clarity):

Are we celebrating and emphasizing how important the work is that gets identified as ‘women's work’ but is genuinely critical for the success of this movement? Or are we celebrating the work that gets coded as men’s work? The feeling in the volunteer base, which I think sometimes the professionalization seems to reinforce, is that policy work is fun. And policy work is fun. But fundamentally what makes the YIMBY movement powerful is that we are building up and giving voice to a constituency. And that work of making people feel like they should speak up, the work of relationship building, of having one-on-ones and drawing signs and celebrating one another when we show up” is often led by women!

Of course, many women lead crucial policy work as well. But that work is just one part of the movement’s strategy. Building a more inclusive base may require holding more discussions about a wider range of topics.

America’s most optimistic advocates

Despite its opportunities to keep improving, YIMBYTown felt like a giant celebration. Ten years ago, the proto-YIMBY movement consisted of some volunteers in scattered cities around the country ranting at city council meetings and a handful of bloggers and researchers. This year’s conference showcased a movement that has grown far beyond its humble origins, with political achievements to share from every part of the country, even far-reaching corners of the globe.

YIMBYism itself celebrates humanity, one of the few frameworks that binds different ideologies together around shared values. According to YIMBY thought, the world can be positive sum. Our communities are worthy of life, so we should let them grow to help more people live in them. We want to welcome new neighbors.

Fascism is in many ways the opposite. Zero sum, paranoid, afraid. Shrinking from the world, from ourselves.

YIMBYs can’t beat fascism alone. But America can’t beat fascism without YIMBYism. America needs growing communities. America needs opportunity. America needs optimism. And the heart of optimism is to welcome change with open arms and say “yes.”

Other notes with more miscellaneous learnings and reflections:

1. For example, California’s recently passed SB 79, a bill legalizing 5-7 story buildings within a half mile of major transit stops, received support and opposition from Republicans and Democrats respectively in approximately equal proportion. Learn more here.

2. This year’s YIMBYTown contrasts to last year’s conference in Austin, where my friend Luca Gattoni Celli describes real tension over how the movement engages with Republicans, who were more present at the event. Location matters—the Austin conference really did include more Republican speakers, which I imagine were easier to get to come to Texas than the farther away Northeast.

3. I recommend reading Ned Resinoff’s excellent Abundance Conference recap, When is a Tent Too Big?, to learn more about what went down there.

4. Floor Area Ratios, called FARs in planning lingo, are obscure rules capping the square footage a building can have in relation to the square footage of the lot it’s on. For example, a 10,000 square foot lot with a FAR of 1 means a developer could build a one-story building covering the entire lot, a two story building covering half the lot, a four story building covering a quarter of the lot, and so on.