Millennial ‘YIMBYs’ and boomer ‘NIMBYs’: Generational views on housing affordability in the United States

Introduction

As American cities face an unprecedented crisis of housing affordability, many commentators have divided housing stock generationally: between baby boomer homeowners (born from 1945 to 1965) and millennial renters (born between 1980 and 2000). With this categorisation comes tropes of how each generation manages their finances and plans for the future. According to a narrative popular in the American media, ‘diligent’ baby boomers bought a home, started a family, and worked the same job until retirement (Sasse, 2017), while struggling (or potentially dilettante) millennials do shift work, date into their thirties, and live in shared apartments. Housing, in particular, has become a bellwether of the future prospects of millennials. Both economic and cultural reasons for millennials’ struggle to become homeowners imply the magnitude of the changes on family, conceptions of self and work, and, even, how cities are organised. The disparaging view of millennials’ failure to ‘grow up’ is resented within the generation, fuelling a counter-narrative that emphasises how the baby boom generation is responsible for economic reforms that have depressed wages (Milkman, 2017), as well as more specific changes in urban planning policy that have limited the number of new homes built in urban centres, driving up property values and decreasing affordability.

The category of housing has become particularly fraught in expensive American cities: millennials are less likely to age-into the suburbs than the boomer generation (Okulicz-Kozaryn & Valente, 2018) and they less frequently own their own homes as they approach middle age (Choi et al., 2018). At the same time, urban real estate markets in desirable American cities, with high paying jobs, have become increasingly unaffordable. San Francisco, the city known for alternative communities of the baby boomer generation living hand-to-mouth in the 1960s, is now one of the world’s most expensive cities with a median market-rate apartment rental costing nearly US$3700 per month (Brinklow, 2019). Owning a home and living with one’s nuclear family are the sine qua non of middle-class adulthood in the United States. The trope of millennial Peter (or Petra) Pan – addicted to personal pleasure at the expense of stability and long-term planning – is directed toward those who cannot buy a home or who return to live with their parents. Younger adults counter this by arguing that the world created by their parents often precludes these sources of stability (Kalleberg, 2011): social and economic changes embraced during the Reagan/Thatcher era made work more contingent, stripped away the social safety net, necessitated more (and costlier) higher education for middle-class jobs, and made buying a home an investment vehicle rather than an asset primarily for use-value.

One of the greatest points of contention over housing is: how many apartment buildings to build, where they should go, and how tall they should be. ‘Infilling’ cities with denser housing fits with the cafe lifestyle and walkability that many millennials endorse because their generation is more urban than boomers (Okulicz-Kozaryn & Valente, 2018). It also, potentially, fulfils social and environmental goals (Fainstein, 2011) making mass transit more viable and strengthening community bonds (Klinenberg, 2018). Ideally, new housing helps to address urban inequality by stemming gentrification through providing alternative markets: preventing the intense competition for space that urban sociologists see at much of the origin of gentrification disputes (Molotch & Logan, 1987). Additionally, new urban construction projects could de-emphasise suburban development, regarded by many millennials as socially deadening, environmentally inefficient, and an engine of racial exclusion (Low, 2004; Wilson, 1990).

The demand for more housing has been greeted by homeowners with trepidation: they worry that rapid construction of apartment buildings will lower home prices and destroy the character of communities (Eranti, 2017). On a more fundamental level, many homeowners who grew up in the postwar suburbs still like the model of entirely residential neighbourhoods accessed by car, despite criticism of elitism and ecological harm. Anti-growth activists, who are often members of the boomer generation in this study, have used the considerable power of neighbourhood groups and homeowners’ associations, aided by the spatial and jurisdictional sprawl of American suburbs (Schragger, 2016), to create powerful lobbies that prevent more zoning for density, enforce height limits, curtail higher occupancy, and veto projects based on ‘community character’. Millennials, hungry for new housing to go on the market, accuse neighbourhood groups of NIMBYism (Not in My Backyard), profiting from homeownership in desirable downtown or inner-suburb neighbourhoods while refusing to let younger buyers and renters ‘in’, forcing them ever farther to the edges of cities.

Increasingly, housing activists, many of whom are millennials in this study, have banded together to form opposition groups dubbed Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY), to argue for higher density, better public transit, and a general relaxation of zoning laws that neighbourhood groups fight to protect. They insist that they are not just motivated by lifestyle reasons to make a home in the inner city, pointing to compelling data that assert urban housing markets bestow access to well-paying jobs that are increasingly unavailable in non-urban areas or declining cities (Ganong & Shoag, 2017). Being able to live in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, or Seattle is less about being in a cultural scene for these activists, as it may have been for the baby boom generation who often associated cities with distinct countercultures, and more about proximity to resources needed for financial mobility (Moretti, 2013).

This article examines the development of new residential housing in American cities as the terrain of contestation between pro-growth housing activists (self-styled YIMBYs) and neighbourhood groups (sometimes known as NIMBYs by detractors): two factions that face off at zoning meetings, community dialogues, local elections, and even in court. It examines why this debate over urban space is so frequently framed using generations despite the fact that homeownership is determined by class for millennials and all other generations. In particular, it notes that informants in this study, across all ages, worried about the erosion of the middle class, but simultaneously were quick to describe the political battle using age groupings – boomer/millennial – rather than a class frame (Woodman & Wyn, 2015). The constraints precluding homeownership are economically based, but arguments about housing are fought using a generational framing: something potentially more palatable in the United States where universal middleclass-ness is a cherished fantasy frequently drawn upon in political debates (Williams, 2017). This has been beneficial to those lobbying for renters and apartment-dwellers as a strategic frame: it follows the neoliberal paradigm of minimising class in discussions of inequality (Tyler, 2015). In doing so, it shifts the debate from those entirely excluded from market-based housing (the homeless, public housing residents, and those in danger of eviction) to more middle-class populations struggling with rent or locked out of homeownership. This article thus examines how middle-class activism, largely based in the professions of design and city planning, tends to prioritise spatial arguments rendering urban residents’ class positions as a secondary concern and undermining attempts to achieve Right to the City and spatial justice goals (Soja, 2010).

Drawing on work in urban sociology, this article shows how pro-growth activists see homeowners’ associations and neighbourhood groups as possessing a monopoly on municipal power, often shutting out the opinions of renters. While much of the debate around YIMBYism has been highly specific and technical – dealing with zoning intricacies by activists who are also often architects – it has hit a generational note that catalyses the perceived gap between boomer and millennial values (as well as assets) when it comes to how American cities should look and feel. The problem of affordable housing is also dependent on how each generation experienced the city growing up; what their ideal city looks like in their own minds and in media representations; and the normative role of family and community they assign to the home. In this sense, YIMBYism is both an economically grounded social movement of middle-class professionals, in that it responds to precarity and lack of housing supply, as well as an emotionally constructed movement (Martin, 2015) that argues for cities as a solution to a plethora of problems from environmental harm to nurturing a more cosmopolitan outlook in the era of Trump nativism. In the following sections, these viewpoints are deconstructed from the perspectives of boomer and millennial activists to show how their different visions of the future American city will impact the housing affordability crisis.

Methods

This article is a segment of a larger study that examines the Yes in My Backyard movement as a distinctly middle-class urban social movement that has formed dozens of independent groups in the United States in the past 10 years. Broadly, these groups fight for affordable housing in the same way that other housing activists have for decades but, unlike anti-gentrification groups, they are determinedly pro-growth and they are less interested in preserving, or creating, public housing. Using data from 31 in-depth interviews with housing activists from five American cities (Austin, Boston, Denver, San Francisco and New York), I show how YIMBY groups became vocal advocates for compact cities and mixed-use (residential and commercial) development. The interviews were conducted in 2017 and 2018, using YIMBY organisation websites, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts for recruitment. The informants were from a variety of housing groups – some described themselves as pro-growth with members who are developers or real estate brokers; all were focused on renters – and they embodied an ideological range, from socialist to libertarian. For the most part, YIMBYs were highly educated professionals and the vast majority interviewed for this article were millennials (ages 24–35). Participants were asked a range of questions about their activism and views on urban densification, particularly how their efforts differ from anti-gentrification groups. Those who were not millennials stated that the issue of housing is often framed as a generational divide because of the importance of dramatising what the future city should look like. Of the YIMBY participants interviewed, 40% had formal training in urban planning or architecture. Every YIMBY activist interviewed had attended university and many had graduate degrees, confirming a general lack of class diversity within the movement.

The second group sampled for this article comprised 17 members of neighbourhood groups who oppose new housing construction. These participants were recruited, in the five American cities, by contacting people from websites of homeowners’ associations or anti-growth groups, via Twitter or from community meetings. Most often, interviewees coalesced around specific permitting processes (zoning approval) or local referendums on growth: such as ballot initiatives 300 and 301 in Boulder, Colorado, which attempted to localise planning approval in order to stop the construction of new buildings. Neighbourhood groups have a long history in the United States, where they often start as social networks organised by email list-serve to create a greater sense of community; however they often take up activist causes using their membership to appeal to the local planning board or city council. These groups most frequently are formed to protect home values (McCabe, 2016), environmental quality, or to limit traffic. Some of these groups also may sponsor a neighbourhood watch that patrol local streets and liaise with the police. These activists were always homeowners, and most were over the age of 50. Most subscribed to the generational view of housing density: saying they saw larger buildings as out of character with their communities and that they could potentially bring new residents who did not ‘share the neighbourhood’s values’ or were not ‘invested in the upkeep of their properties’. For both groups of informants, names have been changed to pseudonyms.

The boomer ‘burb’: NIMBYism and suburbia

The quest to maintain suburban home values by keeping out certain environmentally problematic uses is known as NIMBYism, but it also applied to homeowners in first generation American suburbs (such as Long Island, New York) who blocked construction of apartment buildings where lower income (and often people of colour) might live. NIMBYism is closely related to the American legal framework of property rights that supports the single-family home as a source of stability and investment in community. This rationale is often used to defend the enormously expensive mortgage deduction tax break that gives write-offs to homeowners, rather than renters, and costs the federal government US$100 billion in revenue annually (McCabe, 2016). The primacy of the home as a protected and sacrosanct space has also given birth to uniquely American safety measures (Low, 2004), like Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, which allows for homeowners to defend their property with lethal force (and was famously used to exonerate the killer of Trayvon Martin: the unarmed teenager who was shot in an Orlando gated community in 2012). In short, NIMBYism is frequently used as an epithet in urban planning circles and it is closely tied to state policies that support suburbanism as a lifestyle.

Baby boomers grew up in a world of rapidly changing housing economics with expanded ownership and construction during their childhoods (McCabe, 2016), making the investment far more than a place for one to lay one’s head but also an asset to borrow against, use for retirement, or as a major inheritance. As boomers grew to adulthood, owning a place of one’s own became an important way to buttress against risk (Beck, 1992) as the social safety net was eroded, particularly given the high cost of medical treatment in the US. A second mortgage could make the difference between sickness-induced bankruptcy or staying afloat. Buying a home became a means to entrepreneurship on the most basic level: by making longsighted predictions about real estate markets or acquiring a second home. Homeowners interested in maintaining or increasing the value of their investment could actively monitor their neighbourhoods by joining neighbourhood groups that did everything from clean-up activities, to programming for community-building, to hiring armed guards to patrol suburban streets. As one boomer in the study described their neighbourhood group in Texas: ‘we are like the smallest level of government but, unlike regular city politics, we all have something to lose when it comes to decision-making: the value of our homes’.

While the baby boomers were famously stifled by suburbia – and particularly the patriarchal assumptions of the work/living divide of an office-bound husband and a stay-at-home wife – they were also deeply influenced by the architectural form of the suburbs. While many in the boomer generation briefly took up residence in cities for college and young adulthood, they often returned to the suburbs when they had families of their own (Conn, 2014). The ideal of a well-maintained front (public-facing) yard and a recreational backyard set in a bucolic location – but close enough to suburban office-parks or downtown skyscrapers for commuting – was still very much the middle-class model of a city when the millennial generation were young children in the 1990s. The spatially dispersed American city has often been praised in Jeffersonian terms (Soja, 2010): making up a larger urban unit from knit-together villages but each piece keeping a distinct (often socioeconomic or ethnic/racial) identity. The concept of Not in My Backyard is further complicated by its use in environmental disputes: the moniker has frequently transcended the individual home to be used as a rallying cry for communities undertaking grassroots organising against ecologically problematic land uses (Eranti, 2017). In this sense, it defends suburbanisation while condemning the more intensive development of both full urbanisation or industry.

Urban sociologists have shown that the onset of the most recent period of gentrification was often experienced most forcefully by millennials: as this generation came of age, American cities became safer and more desirable for new economic opportunities driven by information technology and the ‘dot.com’ boom in the 1990s (Zukin, 2009). As Saskia Sassen (1994) has pointed out, more outsourcing, online communication and multinational supply chains have, in many cases, increased the centrality of large cities in the developed world as ‘command and control centres’. This has given millennials a new sense of the economic primacy of urban spaces as well as a less-easily-measured, but nonetheless important, cultural pull to urban life (Zukin, 2009). As one informant put it: ‘We are the Sex and the City generation . . . the city was cool and glamorous again . . . but for our parents . . . they still were stuck in the Panic in Needle Park mentality.’ The increasing economic polarisation of the American economy in the early 21st century has also played out regionally and between cities and rural areas (Kalleberg, 2011). Increasingly, younger workers must not only move to urban areas but to the ‘right’ kind of cities with post-industrial economies based in finance, real estate, biomedical and technology sectors (Sassen, 1994).

Growth and how urban should the city be?

In many ways, millennials’ approach to urban life is neither special nor a product of their generational outlook: walkability was a key concern of the quintessential urbanist Jane Jacobs in her fight against highways in Manhattan in the 1960s (Jacobs, 1991); mixed-use residential-commercial development has been expounded by every major urban planning school in the US since the early 1980s; and the restoration of dormant manufacturing buildings into chic cafes and small businesses is a long-accepted strategy of adaptive reuse advocated for by historic preservationists. However, millennials frequently maintain that it was their age group who successfully took these ideas from theory to practice with the help of post-industrial urban economics that favoured the service sector over large floor plans, intensive investment and numerous employees (Florida, 2017). Many YIMBY activists are also concerned with ageing cities’ failing infrastructure, downtowns depopulated by urban renewal, and a dearth of apartments. As one YIMBY urban planner, in his thirties from Colorado, said:

It’s frustrating to be in a neighbourhood where you can see the skyscrapers hovering above you that are all offices and all around are just two-storey houses and the way the [place] is zoned means that apartments basically can’t be built and everyone is gonna leave the offices, get in their car, and drive an hour through an endless traffic jam.

One of the key arguments used to support the twinning of millennial politics and urban planning priorities is that the generation has made social choices that fit more naturally into city life, specifically: marriage delay, cohabitation, renting and declining car ownership (Choi et al., 2018). These choices have also been affected by economic constraints – most dramatically, the lost earnings for younger workers after the 2008 crisis (Fry, 2018). For this reason, priorities of urban planners that increase mass transit, environmental protection, or investment in infrastructure are not just framed as a generational issue, in the sense that they are investments in the near future, but also that they follow the distinct preferences of millennials that are, sometimes, at odds with the previous generation. A YIMBY activist living in Oakland, California put the generational conflict this way:

We feel more ownership of American cities than our parents . . . what happened in the 60s onward was because their generation abandoned living in urban areas, or at least middle-class whites did, and we have a totally different mindset based on embracing the urban and creating racially diverse spaces, not locking ourselves up in the suburbs where everyone is white.

Often, then, the defence of cities was both derived from lifestyle preferences (walkability, entertainment and bustle) as well as moral commitments of which racial diversity was a major aspect, as was reducing one’s environmental footprint (Owen, 2010).

With the popularisation of American cities as places to thrive both socially and economically in the 1990s, came increasing pressure on urban housing stock. Millennials often choose between trying to afford rents in expensive downtowns or relocating to gentrifying neighbourhoods abutting urban centres. Out of this dynamic, the YIMBY movement was born (approximately 10 years ago) as a way to lobby planning commissions and city councils to build more housing in desirable central neighbourhoods. In this sense, the goal of YIMBY groups is distinctly different from anti-gentrification groups: while the latter prioritise the maintenance of public housing and rent-controlled units (both of which are frequently privatised/deregulated and released to the private market) in poorer neighbourhoods (Madden & Marcuse, 2016), YIMBYs advocate for new construction at any price point in, primarily, wealthy neighbourhoods. Each local YIMBY group differs in what percentage affordable housing needs to be included in new buildings but most feel that even if the amount is zero, new apartment buildings help take pressure off booming real estate markets. YIMBYs often see their constituents as white middle-class millennials, while anti-gentrification groups are composed of working-class people of colour and their allies. However, YIMBYs maintain that by mobilising millennials to build in wealthy neighbourhoods they will prevent further gentrification, creating a win-win for both groups. A San Francisco YIMBY said:

Over the past 20 years, all new development has been in low income neighbourhoods. It’s not an accident . . . they can’t mobilise the political pressure to stop it. That means that wealthy people in their 60s living in Berkeley can be left alone . . . and they still have this image of themselves as radical hippies even though their homes are worth $2 million and they won’t let anyone else live there. . . . What we want is more homes in the already middle-class places so that younger people won’t be faced with the choice to be a gentrifier or not coming to the city at all.

Accordingly, housing economists maintain that the benefit of more housing in already affluent areas will probably not stem the tide of gentrification alone (Madden & Marcuse, 2016) but this has become a central rallying point for the YIMBY movement, who view new growth as their core issue.

YIMBY activists are frustrated by the baby boomer generation’s refusal to allow for apartment buildings in desirable areas with existing public transit; as one put it: ‘it’s not all public policy, it’s really just a particular group of older people unwilling to share their neighbourhoods with others’. One of their main actions is to speak out at monthly urban planning meetings in favour of any proposal to build new housing. YIMBYs maintain that in many growing cities homeowners’ associations and neighbourhood groups have put pressure on city councils to stop the construction of duplexes and accessory dwelling units (so-called ‘granny flats’ above garages that are a low-impact way to increase density). They consider these the most minimal changes needed and the failure to enact them shows an ideological stubbornness amongst existing homeowners, who may express concern over the crisis of affordable housing but are unwilling to compromise their own comfort and privilege.

YIMBYs, who often have trained in urban planning, began showing up to zoning meetings in cities such as Denver, Seattle and San Francisco with major supply and affordability problems. All of those interviewed said that when they first began this tactic they realised that zoning meetings were only attended by older people speaking out against development plans, providing a new vulnerability in the structure of urban planning policy for pro-growth YIMBY groups (Martin, 2015). ‘We saw this space totally dominated by a single and non-representative group’, a Texas YIMBY told me. ‘We thought: hey, we live in these politicians’ districts too and they need to see this is not how we think and there are a hell of a lot more of us.’ This approach made zoning meetings the epicentre of the debate over urban growth with density as the main topic, often dividing existing (older) owners and younger renters. It also highlights the YIMBY movement’s trust in established political processes and their belief that city planning commissions and municipal councils will ultimately take up their viewpoint. Unlike more radical anti-gentrification groups, who frequently use street protests, YIMBYs see pressuring city government as their key strategy. They do not distrust urban political machines: they just want to see older leadership overhauled with a millennial cohort. This gets at the nature of democratic trust amongst NIMBYs, YIMBYs and anti-gentrification groups: NIMBYs and YIMBYs have different ideas of state management based on competing urban planning philosophies, whereas anti-gentrification groups are more likely to have little trust in city government because of a history of municipal interventions as a form of symbolic violence (Lees, 2008).

As the YIMBY movement spread to dozens of cities it took on new meaning beyond just housing affordability: it acted as a gateway to local politics for millennials. It often came with the explicit goal of unseating established politicians who, the thinking went, could not understand the housing crisis or any of the other priorities of those under 40 years old. In this sense, YIMBYism has become a form of demographic revolt amongst the urban (largely white) middle-class, based on the technicalities of urban planning codes, but embodying the many frustrations of an age cohort deeply affected by the 2008 crisis. It uses struggles within the field of housing affordability to argue for broader changes and greater social movement participation, especially by those with a high level of education in technocratic fields of administrative interest (Martin, 2015). It also capitalises on the biographical availability of educated but often underemployed millennials (Milkman, 2017), who both have free time to devote to activism but are also frustrated with their lack of commitments stereotypically emblematic of middle-class adulthood (family formation, full-time employment and homeownership). With fewer assets and worse job prospects than their parents had when they were approaching middle age (Kalleberg, 2011), these activists have used housing as a political wedge issue to motivate a deeper engagement with local politics. As one California YIMBY said:

We know that our members read the New York Times and care about national politics. The issue is that they live in blue [Democratic Party] cities where they think a supposedly progressive government will take care of them. What we are trying to do is activate them . . . show them that’s not true . . . they need to get involved or no one will take care of them and they might get driven out of the city altogether.

YIMBYs used zoning and housing as a way to discuss larger issues of generational wealth dispersal, sometimes conflating class status and generation (France & Roberts, 2015). One YIMBY activist from Texas said: ‘we think renters versus owners is good politics to get millennials in the door . . . the way you get them to stay is that homeownership, or lack of, is just one way that their lives are gonna look very different from their parents’. An older generation of participants in neighbourhood groups frequently viewed this groundswell with bewilderment, especially because many of the debates were within progressive politics. A homeowner in Boulder, Colorado said: ‘the YIMBY viewpoint is pretty out of touch when it comes to what it takes to make a good city . . . it’s not respectful of all the things that go into making community . . . and the necessity of keeping that community a certain size so the bonds hold together’. The same informant also said that YIMBYism was a weak political platform: ‘I get that they’re pissed off about housing but where do they go from there?’

YIMBYism is a distinctly middle-class social movement often composed of professionals who feel that their expertise (frequently in city planning and architecture) has been eroded by NIMBY groups whose arguments they characterise as primarily emotional (the unchanging nature of their communities). YIMBYs start from universalist arguments about cities and then select specific zoning cases to participate in. NIMBYism, on the other hand, is often hyper-local with activists sometimes scaling up in order to counter arguments of their own self-interest (Halebsky, 2006). However, YIMBYs also use emotional framings based on creating vibrant urban spaces that would be more inclusive. They cannot localise these issues geographically, so they often use a generational framing in order to give the argument more resonance and connect it with the travails of millennials facing precarity. This puts forward a specific group of complainants who replace the geographically bounded credibility of NIMBYs and claim to be legitimate stakeholders even when they live miles from specific developments under question. While NIMBYs are brought together through geography and homeownership, YIMBY groups create a broad coalition of interests from housing activists to real estate developers, often with the express understanding that these partnerships will be temporary: only to endorse a single project with a pre-negotiated percentage of affordable housing units. In this sense, YIMBY groups see themselves serving in a bridge role connecting other activists, municipal officials and real estate developers in a capacity that sometimes mirrors the paid facilitation work that some YIMBYs participate in during their working lives as city planners (Eyerman & Jamison, 1991).

Generational politics at the neighbourhood level

‘When you think about it, suburbia is really just a blip on the radar as far as history is concerned’, a leading YIMBY activist from San Francisco told me. By some measure, the rapidity of America’s suburbanisation is actually a good thing: the most dramatic changes happened from 1945 until 2000, approximately, and the logic of dispersed development – while ubiquitous across the landscape – is still potentially reversible. While many boomers are habituated to suburbs, millennials often say they would like to return to a world of main streets and towns organised around condensed shopping and business districts. Boomers are also returning to urban centres in order to retire in more pedestrian-friendly spaces as their mobility declines. However, YIMBYs feel that the boomer generation has been permanently affected by their suburban childhood, closing off the potential to make substantial changes in the layout and height of cities needed to accommodate more housing. Some boomer informants confirmed this, such as Mark, a retired lawyer from Berkeley: ‘I like cities but the ones with trees and parks . . . I don’t want to live in an apartment . . . and I don’t want to live with an apartment building over me.’ Mark went further to say he dislikes YIMBYism because he disapproves of their aggressive tactics and worries their efforts will displace people rather than providing more affordable housing. ‘I’m fine with what we have now . . . it’s a sort of small city of neighbourhoods not a bunch of big buildings . . . I don’t want to live in Tokyo.’ Mark and many others emphasised that the scale of a successful neighbourhood is two storeys maximum and places with higher density than that quickly became impersonal and foreboding with a commensurate loss of community contact and beneficial organising. In this sense, those maligned as NIMBYs often saw their geographic specificity as an essential component to successful grassroots politics (Eranti, 2017), which detractors put in jeopardy.

Many YIMBYs disagree, arguing that walkability and proximity are the key criteria for building bonds between neighbours, particularly people from different backgrounds. ‘We’ve lost something more than just vast tracts of land through suburbanisation’, Jennifer, a YIMBY and urban planner from Massachusetts, states. ‘There’s also been a systematic destruction of community spaces where people come together.’ For Jennifer, density created more tightly woven social bonds, the loss of which increased distrust and loneliness (Klinenberg, 2018). She even went a step further saying that the boomers’ retreat to suburbia was one of the reasons that allowed them to ignore inequality and support anti-immigrant politicians: ‘I mean with a more urban mindset and interactions with people different from you . . . I don’t think some of this stuff would have happened.’ While many young people also hold conservative political beliefs, Jennifer and most other YIMBYs saw city life as an expression of a certain kind of progressive politics and a belief in cosmopolitan values such as tolerance, diversity and dialogue. Critics maintain that it is an easy and under-committed way to express the cultural veneer of progressive politics while gaining enviable quality of life benefits (Anderson, 2011), but it is also indicative of how the YIMBY movement combines the more nebulous cultural arguments of new social movements that focus on lifestyle with concrete political and economic demands rooted in precise spaces and moments of political contestation (Martin, 2015).

YIMBY groups seek changes in zoning laws to build taller apartment buildings, but they also support more aggressive methods such as ‘suing the suburbs’. This tactic was developed by San Francisco YIMBY groups to pressure wealthy Silicon Valley municipalities to add more housing and conform to California State law that mandates minimum density requirements. It is in part a recognition that housing affordability has affected not just municipalities but entire regions, like the Bay Area. Unlike anti-gentrification groups, YIMBYs insist that wealthy cities, such as Lafayette (40 kilometres from San Francisco), should build condos and townhouses that are within reach for the middle class but do not necessarily have to meet the definition of affordability for low-income renters. Thus, ‘suing the suburbs’ draws on a class-based animus of wealthy neighbourhoods that refuse to ‘do their share’ to help solve the Silicon Valley housing crisis. However, the solution is far from radical and still very much within the bounds of market-driven urban growth (Molotch & Logan, 1987). This reflects a larger trend amongst YIMBY groups, who focus their attention on the ownership age-divide rather than on issues of class that have kept multiple generations of poor urbanites out of housing markets (Wilson, 1990). The generational framing potentially not only makes the issue more palatable to Americans uncomfortable discussing class but may also prioritise solutions that have an inborn bias toward middle-class potential homebuyers rather than those who will continuously rent or live in social housing.

YIMBY groups are dedicated to two strategies popular in urban planning circles: (1) retrofitting suburbs to make them denser and more walkable, e.g. through additional growth and more small stores; and (2) making inner-city buildings bigger and taller (as already discussed). However, within the many YIMBY groups in the US, there are differences in opinion about the end-goal of urban planning activism: many simply want to control the crisis in affordable housing while others, who often describe themselves as libertarian-leaning, would like to disempower urban planning authorities by reducing oversight and red-tape. This anti-regulatory zeal has a long history in conservative American politics but is seldom invoked in cities like Seattle, San Francisco and Denver, known for their progressive politics. As one critic of YIMBYism, from the anti-gentrification sphere, put it: ‘YIMBYs are a hotbed for libertarian thinking and market-driven solutions. . . . It’s a mask you can put on if you’re a developer, a small government type, or, even, a Republican living in “enemy territory”.’ However, there is little evidence that any but a very small minority of YIMBYs see up-zoning density requirements in cities as a first step in eliminating urban planning regulation and many support stringent environmental protections at odds with libertarian principles. Yet, these groups are generally focused on market-based solutions, dismissing state coordination of rent-control or expansion of social housing as appealing but impractical given the last 50 years of federal retrenchment on urban problems (Cohen, 2019). The fear of an overall liberalisation of the planning process is particularly salient for neighbourhood groups because their own local activism is often an attempt to continuously validate and empower the process of design review (Eranti, 2017) against the forces of urban growth and real estate capital.

The critique of YIMBY urban policy from the left is often directed at the involvement of real estate developers or brokers, but the animating issue within the movement is the perceived capitulation of the boomer generation to address economic issues. In this sense, they see their main foes as people who are otherwise political allies, particularly in national politics, but who refuse to allow for more housing construction. ‘The people we are fighting are not country club types . . . they are actually the 70-year-olds with an Obama sign in their front-yard’, a YIMBY sympathiser from Colorado told me. The critique of NIMBYism was that it was embraced by people who had been progressives in their youth but, once they became homeowners, they were motivated by protection of their asset’s value (McCabe. 2016). For YIMBYs, the centre-left of American politics has shifted in favour of people who are economic elites and, for that reason, the Democratic Party and its supporters are insufficiently committed to issues such as housing, minimum wage and job precarity because they have little experience of it. Yet, the viewpoint also dangerously repositions class, and housing precarity, as a universal generational experience (France & Roberts, 2015), rather than one suffered particularly by those with lower socioeconomic status. This was compounded by the fact that most of the YIMBY activists interviewed are concerned about maintaining middle-classness but are also comparatively well-off professionals; indeed not a single person interviewed lacked a university education and many graduated from prestigious schools and worked in urbanism, tech, or communications. The hesitance to discuss class on its own terms (Tyler, 2015) as an object of analysis within urban development shows a realpolitik approach that utilises generational framings as a less contentious means to discuss inequality. However, combined with a penchant for technical language that emphasises the physical aspects of ‘spatial justice’ alone (Soja, 2010), these framing tools potentially obfuscate important class differences within the affordable housing movement.

YIMBYs often straddled problematic political territory in this sense because they both criticised mainstream Democrats, while embracing an essentially market-based solution of more home construction (very much in contrast to housing justice advocates). ‘We really have an establishment versus insurgent issue here’, a San Francisco YIMBY said:

It’s groups that normally see eye-to-eye, educated older hippie types and educated younger millennials – all of whom are basically white, who are fighting over the same neighbourhoods and the right to be there. When the NIMBYs told us ‘find somewhere else’, which basically means ‘don’t move to this city’, we realised that there was a major divide.

While YIMBYs were consternated that boomers could not imagine a pleasant but vertical city (with many posting on Twitter about the ‘Hong Kong-isation’ of San Francisco with a forest of high-rises towering over formerly quiet streets), the struggle is also more basic. It is about which generation wields local political power (Conn, 2014). Many YIMBYs feel their organisations are a metaphor for a wider handover in political power that must occur nationally, especially around the time of the 2016 national election when most political party leaders were in their seventies. Ironically, while YIMBY groups are not afraid to use generational politics to galvanise supporters, their major policy interventions are far more conservative than calls from the newly energised socialist left – for community land trusts and more social housing. One city planner who was of the boomer generation but supported the majority of densification proposals associated with YIMBYism said: ‘the whole framing is sort of a ruse . . . the real issue that people care about is owners versus renters and that’s class . . . and frequently race . . . the generational thing is sort of important but I think it’s mostly a way to get younger people to care’. In this sense, the generational framing can be categorised using the literature on political opportunity structure in social movements (Martin, 2015), for its pragmatism and goal-oriented usage, while simultaneously obscuring underlying issues to do with longer socioeconomic processes: namely the hollowing-out of the American middle class (Williams, 2017).

YIMBYs in this study acknowledged that while they found many neighbourhood groups, and especially homeowners’ associations, to be NIMBYish – hoping they could solve urban problems by banishing them elsewhere – they learned from their organising methods. ‘We wanted something for renters like they have for homeowners’, one activist stated. In general, there was a respect for community organising as a place-based phenomenon (Brown-Saracino, 2010) but the challenge was uprooting the policy doxa of protecting home values above all else and displacing homeowners as a main community voice. ‘We tend to think of mobility as a good thing but in this case it’s not’, a 23-year-old YIMBY supporter told me. She maintained that millennials who had moved from city to city in search of work after the 2008 crisis and from neighbourhood to neighbourhood looking for better housing value had missed out on the opportunity to make their voices heard. Creating better structures to represent millennial interests through YIMBYism was seen as a means to give voice to an age demographic as well as a certain group within the housing market that would become a permanent voting block even if individual members moved away.

Conclusion: Generational conflict and maintaining middle-class identity

The narrative of intergenerational conflict over urban space can often sound like a misdiagnosis of the housing affordability crisis for activist participants involved in the struggle. Class is perhaps the biggest determinant of whether someone faces housing insecurity: baby boomers, who are more robustly middle class, are less affected by soaring prices than millennials still recovering from the crisis of 2008 (Fry, 2018). The battle to maintain middleclass-ness is one of the reasons that the generational argument has reached a fever pitch, with boomers accusing the millennial generation of fecklessness (Sasse, 2017) while millennials point to the macro-structural disadvantages they have faced, which they feel baby boomers have had a hand in creating (Milkman, 2017). Class is certainly undervalued in the YIMBY framing of the American housing crisis which pays undue attention to generational problems alone (France & Roberts, 2015), making the conflict seem more spatial than macroeconomic. However, at the same time, much of this narrative comes from tangible experiences of generational conflict in planning meetings and community reviews of new architecture, where YIMBY activists saw older homeowners veto new projects one-after-another. Because so many millennial YIMBY activists have training in architecture, design and urban planning, the local government rebuffing of attempts to create denser neighbourhoods was particularly irksome because it went against professional consensus and threatened their position both as renters and as members of a knowledge field (Fainstein, 2011).

Neighbourhood groups and YIMBY activists have battled each other in hyper-local spaces where age can be a more salient factor than class. The places where the movement for more density is most active are middle-class or wealthy neighbourhoods, decreasing the visibility of those trying to maintain middle-class status because their suffering is relative to those in the highest economic bracket rather than, as in poorer neighbourhoods, those clinging to their livelihoods, homes and independence. At the same time, age and generation were focused on because they were a powerful means to provide moral authority over what decisions were best for a neighbourhood (Brown-Saracino, 2010), with neighbourhood groups advocating that their members’ time in a certain location was the most important factor while YIMBYs saw this source of credibility as potentially disqualifying because those with long-term attachments were unwilling to see any changes as positive.

Much has been written about the generational experience of urban space, from oral histories that dramatise the extent of change, to planning policy that charts the vast shifts in best practices for development (Schragger, 2016); however not enough sociological studies have explained how historically situated experiences of space inform politics (Cohen, 2019). When two generations have radically different experiences this can produce a generational cleavage, and this is what has been occurring in American cities for several decades. It has come into play at the level of urban policy – how much public transit to fund and how much new density to endorse – as well as in public opinion: what height of buildings is liveable and how much commuting is desirable. Yet, the framing can also be a weak substitute for discussing issues more entangled with increasingly polarised class divisions in American cities rather than age. The ‘middleclassing’ (Tyler, 2015) of the housing affordability crisis may do harm to fully understand its impact, especially on the most vulnerable.