When Gillian Pressman ’08 was working at a nonprofit in the late 2010s, she lived in a 400-square-foot studio apartment. “By San Francisco standards, I had it good,” she says.
On Pressman’s four-block walk to the subway, she would pass at least five homeless groups in tents as well as people sleeping in the train station. “You couldn’t escape it,” she recalls.
The problem got personal when she asked a date where he lived. “He was dodgy,” she remembers. He then acknowledged he had a job but was living in his car. He’d shower at his gym.
“You wouldn’t have known he was homeless,” she says.
Pressman, then in a job providing mental health and sex education in schools, wanted to learn more. She attended a one-day introduction to YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard), a movement that advocates for a mix of regulatory relaxations across the nation to encourage more housing construction. The event was sponsored by YIMBY Action, the major umbrella organization, and showed her “San Francisco was one of the hardest places to build housing.”
In 2019, Pressman began volunteering for YIMBY Action and later that year joined full time as director of development. In 2022, she became managing director, coordinating operations, fundraising, and strategy. Pressman left her position in December but remains involved as a YIMBY Action board member.
“We need to shift our mindset,” says Pressman, who moved last year from Norfolk, Virginia, to Washington, D.C. “Allowing housing in your neighborhood is what we do for a good society.”
Recent studies point to an ever-tightening housing market. Zillow last year estimated that the U.S. housing shortage grew to a record 4.7 million units. In a report titled “Priced Out: When a good job isn’t enough,” the National Housing Conference said even dentists and civil engineers could not afford typically priced houses in some cities.
By most accounts, the YIMBY acronym — aiming to counter the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) mindset — dates to the 1980s. But the movement began gathering strength in the 2010s, particularly in California, which ranks among the states with the largest housing shortages. There, “the grassroots movement is really pushing it,” Pressman says. Of YIMBY Action’s 83 local chapters, 20 are in California.
Activists scored a major victory last year when the state revised the California Environmental Quality Act to provide exemptions to high-density housing projects not lying in environmentally sensitive areas, streamline the approval process, and reduce the litigation timeline.
Affordable-housing advocates also won in November with the elections of governors Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Both governors said they would expedite the review and permitting processes for new housing, and Mamdani vowed to freeze rents for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments.
Some municipalities have made dramatic gains. In Falls Church, Virginia, outside Washington, the number of housing units has jumped 46% since 2020. Residents are happy, Mayor Letty Hardi says: 94% described life in Falls Church as “good or great” in a survey last year.
“We always end up having people vote for good things to happen because they have seen the results,” she says.
But construction projects in two nearby suburbs, Arlington and Alexandria, have been tangled in lawsuits. And in Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont last year vetoed a bill seeking to expand housing, saying it hamstrung municipalities.
Carl Gershenson is the managing director of Princeton’s Eviction Lab, which studies the nation’s housing crisis. He says YIMBY advocates “have been successful in getting political bodies to embrace policies that should increase the housing stock.” However, the increase hasn’t been substantial. “You would never expect policy reforms to create sufficient housing in a matter of a few years,” he says.
Princetonians are lobbying for YIMBY goals in a variety of locations and positions.
Jessica Sarriot *18 is co-executive director of VOICE — Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement. She sees “status quo bias” as a major challenge: Local politicians who become state legislators often give deference to municipalities, particularly on land-use issues.
Sarriot supports a YIMBY offshoot called YIGBY, or Yes In God’s Back Yard, which permits faith organizations to build housing on their properties. YIGBY bills were introduced in the U.S. Senate and House in September. Virginia legislators tabled a similar bill, but Sarriot is working to revive it this year.
“If I didn’t think we could win,” she says, “I wouldn’t be doing this.”
Joshua Seawell *22 serves as head of policy at Inclusive Abundance, engaging federal lawmakers on issues such as housing and energy. The organization follows the abundance philosophy, championed by political commentator Ezra Klein, which believes society has adequate resources to solve its toughest problems.
“With all the focus on deportations or Palestine or Trump’s appointments, it’s hard to get floor time for other things of importance,” says Seawell, who is based in Los Angeles.
In a big win for YIMBY, the Senate last year tucked the provisions of the ROAD to Housing Act, including initiatives to increase housing supply and affordability, into its version of the National Defense Authorization Act. The House, however, deleted the housing language in December. Seawell hopes Congress can reach a compromise this year.
YIMBY leaders say the movement draws bipartisan support. “We have socialist members and libertarian members,” Pressman says.
The recent election winners are Democrats, but Montana’s Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte has won passage of a series of housing reforms, known as “the Montana Miracle.” Sarah Rogers ’94 also sees a range of philosophies among the members of D9 Neighbors for Housing, an organization she helped revive to lobby for new housing in San Francisco’s District 9.
“We want more neighbors,” says Rogers, who works as a chief operating officer for an investment fund. “More neighbors makes for a better and more resilient community.”
The YIMBY playbook goes beyond new buildings. Smaller strategies include:
• Less parking. Montana substantially reduced parking requirements for housing. “They add a ton of expense and take up a lot of space,” Pressman says.
• More accessory dwelling units (ADUs), once known as in-law suites. These account for one in five new units in California. Norfolk recently joined the list of cities easing restrictions on ADUs.
• Fewer stairways. Cities such as New York and Seattle now require only one stairway in six-story buildings, freeing space for more units. A Pew Charitable Trusts study last year found no increased safety risk, but the International Association of Fire Fighters and the Metropolitan Fire Chiefs Association say “lives will be endangered” in single-stairway buildings.
YIMBY groups also support major construction projects, and not just subsidized housing. “We have to build housing at all levels,” including luxury condos, says Pressman, now head of development for Inclusive Abundance.
That creates a domino effect in moves, and “it only takes a few chains in the sequence to open new housing options for lower-income people,” says Zack Subin, associate research director for Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation.
“By making housing more affordable,” he says, “you stop the flow into homelessness.”
In 2023, the Urban Institute saw “no statistically significant evidence that additional lower-cost units became available or less expensive in the years following reforms.” But a
2023 article in the Journal of Urban Economics and a Pew study last year found an increase in availability of affordable housing.
Low-income residents don’t always side with YIMBY. Norfolk’s City Council in March overwhelmingly approved a 154-unit apartment complex over the objections of the neighborhood’s civic league president, Jamie Pickens, who complained it would deepen pockets of poverty.
The revisions to California’s law also drew opposition from environmental groups. But Subin, who did postdoctoral work at what is now known as Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute, says YIMBY’s objectives help reduce car use and carbon emissions.
“Our job,” Pressman says, “is not convincing NIMBYs; our job is convincing people who are ‘yes’ to get more active. You can be one person who decides to show up and totally shift the atmosphere in the room.”
Philip Walzer ’81 is a retired journalist and magazine editor in Norfolk, Virginia.
No responses yet