Guide to the Bay Area YIMBY Movement

Empires Sometimes Arise From Anarchy

We’ve done it: My first official Substack post! Thank you to all who have given me the honor of your attention by subscribing before I’ve even posted anything. Free or paid, I hope you get your money’s worth.

This post is a snapshot of the fastest growing political movement in the country. It is the first in a three-part series. The next will review the YIMBY movement in California, and the final post will explore the YIMBY movement nationally. Most of the organizations listed didn’t exist ten years ago. Ten years from now, the list may be very different.

Whether you’re looking for a place to plug in or simply trying to make sense of the evolving landscape, consider this your map to the frontier of the pro-housing movement.

Background for the Uninitiated

For ten years, the YIMBY movement has exploded across California and increasingly the United States at large.

YIMBYism, standing for “yes in my backyard,” argues that making housing more affordable requires building large amounts of new housing. People who support YIMBYism, so-called YIMBYs, believe that new housing should be allowed throughout cities, even in their own neighborhoods.

To increase production, YIMBYs want to change local, state, and federal regulations to make housing easier to build in existing cities. The movement began in San Francisco largely in reaction to NIMBYism, “not in my backyard” opposition to new housing. People oppose housing for many reasons, some of them summarized in this informative article, I Will Do Anything to End Homelessness Except Build More Homes.

For the last century, cities and states have created complex layers of rules that make building new homes more and more difficult. For example, local “zoning” rules ban apartments in 85% of the Bay Area’s residential land. Where apartments are allowed, they may have to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees per unit. Getting a project from proposal to the start of development in San Francisco takes almost four years on average, and building the thing takes even longer. The process adds enormous costs.

These and many other barriers have successfully limited homebuilding in California to less than half the rate that occurred in the 1960s, 70s, or 80s. As a result, YIMBYs argue, home prices in California and across the country have risen for decades, entrenching segregation, pushing people into homelessness, and displacing many from the region entirely.

To change the status quo, YIMBYs engage politically. They speak at city council meetings, write letters to elected officials, and organize their communities to support new homes. Many YIMBYs support other policies to promote housing affordability as well, such as public subsidized housing and protections for tenants, but they all unite around the need for more housing production.

As housing and transportation prodigy Darrell Owens covered in a 2022 Substack post, the YIMBY movement encompasses many ideologies across both the traditional left and right of the political spectrum. Some lean more socialist, others more free market. The movement consists of a wide range of organizations and ideological frameworks forming an unusual coalition around a single issue, legalizing housing. It’s a niche in the broader housing movement, which includes groups with a range of opinions on new housing production (a topic for another post).

Here, I explore the spectrum of YIMBY organizations working specifically in the Bay Area today. I’ll probably have to do a “movement in review” retrospective every few years forevermore. But for now, I hope to provide a guide to new entrants, longtime advocates, politicians, reporters, and future historians about what the YIMBY movement looks like in the Bay Area.

YIMBY Action and its Chapters

YIMBY Action is a national organization with professional staff who help organize volunteer-led chapters around the country. But it was founded in the Bay Area in 2017 and has its highest density (hehe) of chapters here.¹

Though they share an umbrella organization and a love for housing, YIMBY Action chapters all have different histories and approaches. For example, Peninsula for Everyone (P4E) existed as an independent volunteer group before YIMBY Action.² P4E primarily organizes in San Mateo County, the Bay Area’s highest-cost suburbs. They’ve had recent wins redeveloping Redwood City’s downtown, upzoning along transit corridors in the City of San Mateo, and promoting affordable homes on city-owned parking lots in downtown Menlo Park (often in partnership with other local organizations). The chapter has good relationships with tenant-serving organizations because of its focus on both housing production and tenant protections.

SF YIMBY, the largest of the Bay Area YIMBY chapters, has a reputation for focusing more exclusively on housing production (though the chapter also has supported various tenant protections efforts). They have several neighborhood-level affiliated YA chapters: Southside Forward, Northern Neighbors, and Grow the Richmond. In its early days, SF YIMBY’s unambiguous support for housing of all types brought them into conflict with some tenant-serving groups, who sometimes oppose for-profit market-rate housing. SF YIMBY has found more areas of alignment with other SF housing organizations in recent years over support for homeless navigation centers, permanent supportive housing, and funding for affordable homes. And the chapter has had increasing electoral success citywide, recently leading successful efforts to elect a YIMBY-aligned majority to the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors and to pursue major citywide rezonings for denser housing.

Most other YIMBY Action groups fall somewhere in between P4E and SF YIMBY in terms of their focus, reputation, and relationships with other housing organizations. You can see a full map of YA chapters here. Some shout outs include East Bay YIMBY, South Bay YIMBY, Mountain View YIMBY, and Santa Rosa YIMBY.

Regional Pro-Housing Orgs

Some Bay Area YIMBY groups cover regions or issues rather than specific jurisdictions.

Largest among them is East Bay for Everyone, an independent volunteer-led organization founded in 2016 that focuses on Alameda and Contra Costa counties. East Bay for Everyone focuses more on tenant protections than most other YIMBY groups. They also have led statewide advocacy efforts for “social housing”—government owned and operated mixed income housing, which YA also supports but doesn’t prioritize as much in their messaging.³ For a 100% volunteer group, East Bay for Everyone punches far above their weight, even co-sponsoring state legislation related to social housing. That said, East Bay for Everyone unambiguously also supports market-rate housing production, so they fall in the YIMBY tent.

The Housing Action Coalition started in 1999 with a focus on the Bay Area and most of their staff still live there. They were founded as a spinoff of SPUR (covered later in this post) to be a kind of housing developer advocacy trade group, with a professional staff and a membership consisting of large portions of the development industry. Outside the Bay Area, they’ve had a growing impact passing state legislation and advocating in parts of Southern California. Among various campaigns, they’ve recently teamed up with pro bono lawyers to sue cities around the Bay Area for failing to comply with state housing laws.

YIMBY Action also has regional chapters that focus on issues rather than any one jurisdiction. Urban Environmentalists focuses on the intersection of housing and environmentalism. They’re so large they have their own chapters in SF and Chicago. Though they focus more on enviro issues, their top policy priorities—legalize housing, fix incentives, streamline permitting, increase housing stability, and fund affordable housing—map 1:1 onto YIMBY Action’s priorities. Which also align with protecting the environment!

Non-Affiliated YIMBY-Aligned Organizations

Some groups largely agree with YIMBYism but are not formally affiliated with an umbrella YIMBY organization like YIMBY Action. Those include my own volunteer organization, Inclusive Lafayette, and our offshoots like Inclusive Orinda and Diablo Valley for Everyone. These small groups struggle with entrenched opposition that can make identifying directly with the YIMBY brand a political liability. Save Lafayette, our anti-housing rival, dominated the city for decades fighting every proposal for a duplex or apartment building that threatens the “semi-rural” character they exist to defend (nevermind that Lafayette has a Bay Area Rapid Transit stop in its center and is located a 25 minute drive from San Francisco).

Groups like Inclusive Lafayette change political dynamics in their communities and meaningfully increase support for housing by illustrating that NIMBYs don’t run the entire show. By organizing housing supporters, Inclusive Lafayette has successfully convinced Lafayette’s leaders to dedicate a publicly owned parking lot to low-income housing and increase zoned densities to allow taller buildings for the first time in the town’s history, among several victories over the last four years.

Other local non-affiliated groups like Palo Alto Forward, Livable Sunnyvale, Menlo Together, and One San Mateo have followed similar pathways. All regularly support market-rate housing in high-cost suburbs, though sometimes less dogmatically than formal YIMBY groups, and they operate independently.

The names can get downright confusing. Livable Sunnyvale supports housing; Livable California is a leading statewide anti-housing group. Palo Alto Forward is very strongly pro-housing; Menlo Forward, a new group, formed last year to block a large new development in their city (though some of their members are actively supporting controversial housing proposals elsewhere, so they’re not anti-housing overall like Livable California).

Orgs in YIMBY Orbit

Various organizations align with YIMBY priorities to some extent but operate in different organizing spaces. Most of these organizations have professional staff that oversee day-to-day operations, as opposed to the volunteer-led models of the hyperlocal groups, East Bay for Everyone, or YIMBY Action chapters.

SPUR (the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association) focuses on the nine counties across the Bay Area, especially San Francisco. Part think tank, part advocacy organization, they provide pro-housing technical expertise. Along with housing, they work on transportation, sustainability, general economic issues, and governance reform. SPUR existed long before YIMBYism had a name, with roots in the San Francisco Housing Association—an organization founded after the 1906 earthquake. The group underwent several name changes over the decades before becoming SPUR in 1977. They’ve spawned some of the Bay Area’s most impactful housing organizations, including the precursor to Greenbelt Alliance, “Citizens for Regional Recreation and Parks,” in 1958, and the Housing Action Coalition in 1999.

Greenbelt Alliance carries the pro-housing torch for the Bay Area’s environmental movement. Long before most other enviro groups, Greenbelt Alliance realized protecting open space from sprawl development and encouraging sustainable car-free lifestyles requires allowing infill housing in existing cities. Their advocacy focuses on a combination of promoting infill housing of all types and fighting sprawl elsewhere, closely aligned with most of the urbanist YIMBY movement.

Some Bay Area business groups support YIMBY policies, such as the Bay Area Council (BAC). Formed in 1945, BAC has in the last decade become a strong supporter of housing development of all kinds. Though they sometimes takes different approaches than YIMBY groups over funding for affordable housing and urbanist priorities like public transit, they endorse both market-rate and affordable housing projects. Due to its business ties, the Bay Area Council trends more small-c conservative than some other parts of the YIMBY movement on issues like taxation. It’s a big tent!

A handful of housing organizations focus on specific counties or sub-regions of the Bay Area, with varying degrees of YIMBY alignment. Generation Housing in the North Bay and the Housing Leadership Council of San Mateo County (where I work professionally) often support market-rate housing, bringing them closer to YIMBYism. Generation Housing started in 2017 in response to massive Santa Rosa fires that displaced thousands of residents in the region, which illustrated how bad the region’s housing shortage had become. The Housing Leadership Council began in 2002 largely in response to challenges faced by the deed-restricted government-subsidized housing development community in San Mateo County, the wealthiest of the Bay Area suburbs. Both orgs support all types of housing, with a primary focus on deed-restricted affordable homes.

Other groups track less closely to YIMBYism but still sometimes align. East Bay Housing Organizations (EBHO) works in the bigger cities of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties and does direct tenant organizing. Silicon Valley at Home (SV@Home) works across Santa Clara County and is more staff driven. Both EBHO and SV@Home sometimes align with YIMBY orgs on policy, but they tend to focus much more exclusively on tenant protections and affordable housing production.

All the county or sub-regional housing advocacy organizations work with the Nonprofit Housing Association of Northern California (NPH), a regional trade group for affordable housing developers. NPH membership consists almost entirely of 100% deed-restricted government subsidized low-income housing developers, so they focus almost exclusively on that housing. But the zoning and permitting challenges that low-income housing developers face often align closely with those of market-rate developers, so NPH regularly supports YIMBY-aligned policies.

In Conclusion

Though it is a national movement, the ultimate success or failure of YIMBYism may well be realized in the Bay Area, the most unaffordable metro area in the continental United States. If the Bay Area can overcome the myriad barriers to new housing, it would reduce housing prices nationwide, increase economic mobility, and promote more sustainable living options in thriving cities. If the Bay area can achieve housing abundance, maybe the rest of the country can too.

Thank you to Laura Foote, Executive Director of YIMBY Action, for reviewing this piece and providing invaluable feedback.

Want me to cover a topic about the housing movement at large or the YIMBY movement specifically? Drop me a line at jeremyl@substack.com or post a comment.

1. YIMBY Action actually grew out of SF BARF in 2014, a history I’ll get into in the next part of this series, “Guide to the California YIMBY Movement.” SF BARF’s founder, Sonja Trauss, leads YIMBY Law, an organization that now focuses primarily on litigation and legal advocacy around the state.

2. I personally volunteer with Peninsula for Everyone in San Mateo County, where I also work to promote housing affordability in the Bay Area’s most expensive burbs.

3. Social housing means different things to different people. I’m using the term to refer to a strategy whereby the government partners with developers to build housing on land it owns, then rents a portion of that housing at market rates to provide subsidy for renting the rest at lower prices to lower-income tenants.