The Wonderful Propaganda of More Neighbors

Friendship ended with NIMBY. Now YIMBY is my best friend.

On June 24, 1960, Joel Dvorman’s quiet suburban backyard in Anaheim became ground zero for America’s war with communism.

Dvorman, I imagine, had set out fruit juice and tiny crust-less sandwiches as he waited for members of the Orange County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union to arrive. They were there to plot how to oppose, and ultimately shut down, the rabidly anti-communist un-American activities committees which had tormented leftists, actors, and trade unionists across the country.¹

While the committees were falling out of fashion — then-President Harry S. Truman had recently called them the “most un-American thing in the country today” — they still had their fans. Some of them were Dvorman’s neighbors.

This was an entire residential development, zoned for single family homes, defined by “a sensible tax picture and a community climate, both political and civic, favorable to industry and its employees,” as a newspaper noted at the time. That last bit was euphemistic: This was a non-union neighborhood. The defense contractors who employed many of Dvorman’s neighbors wanted employees who weren’t in the control of the red unions.

“I was very upset to find this thing going on in our neighborhood,” a local man declared. The ACLU meeting in their pristinely white suburb, he wrote to a local paper, was akin to a German-American Bund holding court down the block. (Dvorman, it’s worth noting, was Jewish.)

The suburbanites began to organize against Dvorman and the ACLU infiltration of their hitherto apolitical utopia. They held meetings, signed petitions, and went door-to-door with a recall petition to oust Dvorman from the local school board, onto which he was elected. This was neighorhood watch on amphetamines.

“It was the duty of all Americans to recognize the . . . threat to our heritage, to expose it and to combat it with every weapon at our command,” a local anti-communist organizer said.

So effective was their agitating, based on nothing more than rampant suspicion, that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI dispatched a team to investigate Dvorman. (They shut down the investigation a year later, without evidence that he was a dangerous radical.)

Dvorman was, successfully, removed from his school board seat in a recall election. Then, he was demoted from his job in the school bureaucracy. Then, he died of a heart attack at the age of 36. Not remotely interested in stopping to appreciate the destruction they had caused, the local homeowners pushed on. Soon they established the Orange County School of Anti-Communism. They became enthusiastic fans of anti-Communist preacher-cum-radio host Carl McIntire. They joined the Pacific chapter of the John Birch Society and became the spine of the entire organization.

Author Lisa McGirr argues that the very structure of suburbia precipitated this paranoid turn.

The John Birch Society, oriented toward educating citizens to its brand of virulent anticommunism, was perfectly suited to mobilize middle-class suburban neighborhoods like those in Orange County. Concerned men and women, in turn, were attracted to the society because it enabled them to meet in their own homes and neighborhoods with like-minded people and to feel they were doing something to “fight communism.”²

Just as the un-American activities committees were being shut down in the state capitals, suburban communities were the new hotbeds of conservative grassroots activism — study groups, film screenings, and lecture series were everywhere.

Here in Orange County, one activist proclaimed, “a sleeping giant is awakening. Men and women of all walks of life are pledging a fight to victory for God and America.”

Notwithstanding this pocket of paranoia, America was about to head into an era of unprecedented social liberalism. As the hippies, yippies, beats, homos, libbers, druggies, dodgers, and radicals came to define the cutting edge of the liberal-left on university campuses and downtown cafes, a diametrically opposite political culture took hold in the suburbs. As much as they could, the Birchers — and other parallel movements — hoped to capture the anxiety endemic in these bedroom communities.

Anaheim’s suburban obsession soon infected nearby Los Angeles, writes urban theorist Mike Davis:

With the density rebellion of the early 1970s brewing in the back-ground, the principal promise of [Los Angeles City Planning Director Calvin] Hamilton’s new masterplan was wide-spread down-zoning to preserve the integrity of single-family residential areas. Where the old plan allowed a Manhattan density of 10 to 1 (or ten million future inhabitants), the new plan, accepting locally defined standards for development, proposed to reduce density to 4.5 to 1 by rolling back ‘excessive’ zoning for apartments and commerce.³

This trend happened, in different ways and to different degrees, all across North America. Whether it was in opposition to the local commies, an attempt to keep out Black people and immigrants, or just a quest to inflate property values — cities across North America didn’t just prioritize detached, spread-out single-family homes, they effectively banned everything else.

Voters demanded a say not just in how their cities were governed, but in who was allowed to move next door. A community activist class mobilized not to help and improve but to veto and reject — not in my backyard became their rallying cry.

Urbanists found tiny joys in pockets of lush urbanism, struggled in vein to eke out tiny victories for more cooperative living, or simply gave in and moved to Europe.

And then, over the past year, something incredible happened. It all changed. NIMBY is out, YIMBY is in.

Over the matter of literal months, huge swaths of North America (and Oceania) have dove head-first into a radical reimagining of it means to be a community. We haven’t even begun to comprehend how radically things have changed in a drastically short period of time.

And it might be a sign that there is a way out of our current problem of political polarization.

So this week, on Bug-eyed and Shameless, some good news for a change.

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In 2019, the United States was already in the midst a cooling-down on urbanization.

After a century of steady growth, urbanization had ever-so-slightly receded between 2010 and 2020. Americans were primarily heading to mid-size cities and the suburbs. The shifts were slow and gradual.

Then, the pandemic made everything go haywire: The rate of exodus from the major cities more than doubled, with people scattering to mid-tier cities, suburbs, small towns, and rural areas in nearly equal measure. The trends continued into 20222. People moved, en masse, to Florida — but also to Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Idaho, and, basically, everywhere but Wyoming.

People raced to infer a political message at the heard of this great crossing of the savannah — a rejection of COVID lockdowns? A thirst for the great outdoors? The impact of telework? A rejection of the rising unaffordability of the big urban centers? It was, of course, all of the above and a lot more.

Whatever the reason, when they did move they discovered something quite unsettling: Nobody had been building any housing.

The United States reached peak housing production in 1972 and has been declining ever since. Up For Growth, a housing advocacy organization, estimates that somewhere around 80% of housing markets were either producing insufficient quantities of housing or were trending towards insufficiency. They found that the bad areas were, largely, getting worse. The country is missing somewhere in the ballpark of three million homes.

There’s no limit on open land, of course. But in America, 75% of residential land is zoned exclusively for detached single-family homes. A litany of municipal regulations, from parking minimums to heritage designations, are designed to put strict limits on how much new development can be done in cities and towns.

So cities were handcuffed by restrictive zoning policies and weaponized consultation regulations enacted by “slow-growth” advocates who wielded environmental protection as a way to keep their lush neighborhoods unadulterated by more people. While the suburbs had been built to keep out Black people and Jews, and fortified to guard against communist infiltration, their NIMBY attitude had come to define municipal politics nearly everywhere but the dense inner-city. It left developers with just three options to address influxes of new residents: Either build towers and high-rises in the few city blocks where such building is permitted, try and win over residents’ required support for such new developments in their neighorhoods, or simply build new single-family homes. The third option was, unsurprisingly, the most popular. The housing boom of the mid-00s, which celebrated expensive and big semi-detached homes, only supercharged that trend.

Up north, Canada was stuck in an even worse situation, albeit for some different reasons. (And, for the sake of brevity, some of the same ones.) Rock-bottom vacancy rates, sky-rocketing home prices, widespread single-family zoning, and a housing deficit of about 1.4 million — it spelled looming social and economic ruin if cities and governments didn’t get their act together.

And, by and large, nobody cared.

The solution was plainly obvious: Axe the exclusionary zoning, and allow more homes to be built on a single lot. Instead of a detached home with a driveway and a garage, why not allow a four-unit apartment building? Particularly around transit stations: Build apartment blocks!

And yet those solutions proved unpopular and political impractical. California, frontline of the housing crisis, repeatedly voted down a bill that would axe the single-family housing requirements. Similar efforts were either stymied by resistance or edited to uselessness in North Carolina, Nebraska, Maryland, Colorado. Other places, like Gainesville, Florida, enacted the radical reform — only to see it quickly repealed. Tiny Lafayette, California, became both a crucible for YIMBY activism and NIMBY backlash.

Canada’s national housing plans — as you may have heard me needling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about earlier this month (Dispatch #94) — produced just a paltry rump of homes over five years. Plans to cajole cities into upzoning went nowhere.

Success stories were so rare that they merited national attention.

In Oregon, law-makers banned single-family zoning in 2019 — meaning that small towns would have to, by right, allow duplexes; while bigger settlements would need to permit fourplexes without a variance from the city. In one fell swoop, the state doubled and quadrupled the number of people who could live on any given lot. Then they kept going. They released a model housing code, speeding up approvals. They banned parking minimums, so that new developments needn’t plan for cars. The change was not immediate, but within two years permits were growing for multi-unit homes.

Similar measures were put in place in Montana in 2021 — launching the so-called Montana Miracle.

But these steps forward were just not replicated elsewhere. At least not immediately. And it’s no secret why: People want more housing, just not near them. If lawmakers wanted to legalize more homes, they would need to do so efficiently, and quietly. At least that’s how the thinking went.

Nearly two-thirds of New Hampshirites told a pollster in 2021 that the state needed more affordable housing. Asked if the state should relax planning and zoning rules to get there, support shrunk to below 25%.

YouGov got at the same issue a different way: They asked Americans whether they support a particular type of development in general, and whether they supported that same development in their area.

So 90% supported the construction of single-family housing, and 81% supported that construction near them. It’s a similar split for playgrounds, hospitals, libraries, public parks, grocery stores, so on. And then we get to the other stuff. More than 80% of people want more psychiatric hospitals, homeless shelters, public restrooms, low-income housing, drug rehabilitation centers — but only about 60% want it near them.

When YouGov split out the results to political affiliation and housing status, it unsurprisingly found that Republicans and home-owners were considerably more skeptical of dense housing and social services in their community, over renters and Democrats.

And this polling is, of course, hypothetical. We know from ample experience that people tend to find ways to oppose things in their backyard that they, notionally, support — I always use the example of the neighborhood in Toronto which fought against the construction of a new park by insisting it would replace “a vital community parking lot.”

Things were already pretty bleak going into 2023. Then the 15 minute city hysteria took over.

Informed by a wicker basket full of other conspiracy theories and a general feeling that something bigger is going on, right-wing influencers became fixated on the idea that the World Economic Forum was using the guise of convenient urbanism to lock people into open-air prisons. (Dispatch #42) Kooky as it was, the theory’s adherents showed up at city council meetings the world-over to express their displeasure at any measures which might promote urbanism.

So this is where we were just over a year ago. A critical housing shortage driven by mounting immigration, internal migration, and a conspiracy to protect the status quo. A push to liberalize that popped up in a minority of jurisdictions, and which succeeded in only a minority of those. And a mounting local backlash that threatened any further gain.

And then, as I’ve said, something changed.

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Stuck in the snow, on front lawns across Minneapolis, were royal blue signs: “end the shortage: more homes now.”

Other signs, from inscrutably-named groups like Minneapolis for Everyone, warned that plans at city hall to upzone the city would mean “developers win! NEIGHBORHOODS LOSE!”

But these blue squares came from a refreshingly simple and direct pressure group: Neighbors for More Neighbors. It is a grassroots movement that recognized, better late than never, that the debate over housing was being dominated by a single pressure group: Home owners for the status quo. Nobody was advocating for people who didn’t live there — yet.

Municipal democracy can often happen on an absolutely tiny scale — just a few dozen people can determine the outcome of a public consultation meeting, affecting city policy that will impact millions. It is easy to motivate people into showing up to oppose plans to build big towers, or to save some beloved-but-decrepit building. It is much harder to convince them to show up and endorse some project being spearheaded by a big developer.

But with this mantra, “more neighbors,” the group started motivating people to come out and do exactly that — even just a half-dozen people at a time. By the time Minneapolis was voting on a plan to end this single-family zoning, automatically allowing three units per lot, a line snaked through the council chamber of those eager to voice their support. The council vote was 12 to 1 in favor of the rezoning plan.

The activists set their sights on neighboring St. Paul — and, last year, they won that fight too.

By 2019, the New York Times editorial board was singing More Neighbors’ praises. But their success showed that media buzz doesn’t mean much if you don’t have people on the ground, doing the work.

Certainly, a bunch of urbanist wonks and community advocates are a force to be reckoned with. But real, effective, political power comes from the forging of unlikely coalitions.

Toronto, one of the hottest housing markets in North America, resisted any kind of zoning reform for years. As the housing crisis deepened in Canada’s biggest city, More Neighbors Toronto attracted hundreds of volunteers and quickly became the go-to voice for improved development — and were soon a coveted endorsement in city council races. Toronto ended exclusionary zoning in 2022 and mayor Olivia Chow, still in her first year in the job, has been pushing an even more ambitious agenda.

British Columbia, home to equally-unaffordable Vancouver, has taken a massive leap in the right direction. Pushed by the progressive New Democratic Party, over the objections of all their political opponents, they are taking cues from smart Indigenous nations in the province, who have led the way on ensuring that dense, affordable, abundant, environmentally-friendly housing is in ample supply for their communities.

In Austin, progressives and urbanists teamed up with libertarians and pro-business conservatives to plot their own push for zoning reform: And they won. Austin legalized denser zoning late last year.

In Missoula, a coalition of faith groups, community activists, environmentalists, feminist organizations, and property developers got together to push a radical rezoning of the city last month.

Just this month, Dallas Neighbors for Housing have been showing up to council sessions to push the city to legalize more housing — as has a local realtor group, who has funded research to help the push.

In San Francisco, where progress is slower but happening, it’s tech employees who are driving donations to YIMBY pressure groups. (Much to the chagrin of some anti-development leftists.)

National networks have popped up to enable the proliferation of this work. One, the Grounded Solutions Network, has taken millions from Mackenzie Scott. (Ex-wife of Jeff Bezos.) The Welcoming Neighbors Network, meanwhile, is a project of the Hopewell Fund — a left-leaning dark money organization. There is, as we can see, a wide and deep-pocket conspiracy: To build homes.

Pan across the United States, zooming in on all these local fights, and you’ll see that the housing crisis has made strange bedfellows. In Montana, in particular, it has been Republicans leading the charge — and finding that they are more popular when they pursue real, tangible, non-brain-worm issues.

In Canada, the issue has becoming the defining question of national politics. Last year, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre — elected to his party leadership with a reactionary and populist message — honed in on housing as a particular concern. Appealing both to those who loath the bureaucratic “gatekeepers” and youth struggling to afford rising prices, he pitched a hard-edge plan to force cities to up-zone, threatening to withhold federal infrastructure money if they refuse.

As a direct response, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau drafted his own plan. Ottawa has now put CAD$4 billion on the table for governments which kill exclusionary zoning and get shovels in the ground on duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes. While Trudeau and Poilievre may be trashing each others’ plans, they are fundamentally two different ways to arrive at the same goal — it’s a level of agreement they don’t share on many files.

In a sign that this issue is a winner everywhere, New Zealand’s own effort in zoning reform was a popular, bipartisan effort.

At a time of intense political polarization, that kind of cross-ideological cooperation is a rarer and rarer thing. What makes this consensus even more exceptional is that it has emerged around a policy solution that, even a few years ago, was quite radical. It has been enabled, however, by language and objectives that cut through all the bullshit that has come to define modern politics.

Agitating for more neighbors is both woke and unwoke, liberal and conservative, progressive and reactionary, ecological and abundance-driven.

It’s worth recognizing, too, that exclusionary zoning has its roots in both paranoia and racism. In turn, those anti-housing policies have engendered more paranoia and racism. It has turned the suburbs and cities into radically different political entities, fundamentally at odds with each other. While upzoning will not solve the housing crisis overnight, nor will it abolish suburbs in the long-run, it will build actual communities instead of decentralized subdivisions. That has got to have a positive long-term effect on social cohesion.

Reasonable people can disagree on the specifics, of course. Some community activists worry that YIMBY rhetoric could precipitate sped-up gentrification. Homeowners who have used their homes to plan for retirement worry about crashing housing prices. City planners fear relaxing planning laws could see unsafe homes built.

But overcoming and managing those reservations is the work of good local activism, effective communication, and actual dialog.

It should be lost on no one that this wildly successful campaign, with all of its local idiosyncrasies and color, has happened largely off-line and in-person.

It’s worth learning some lessons from.

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That’s it for this dispatch.

It’s been nearly two weeks since my last dispatch — my apologies for the radio silence! Between overcoming jet lag, catching some kind of persistent bug, and trying to hit a variety of deadlines, finishing this dispatch was an uphill climb.

Earlier this week, I wrote a short thing for Splinter on how Canada’s anti-climate backlash is a cautionary tale for the rest of the Western world. Worth reading!

I’ll be back with some interesting new content before you know it.

1. While the most famous committee was, obviously, in the U.S. House of Representatives, local committees operated across the country.

2. Suburban Warriors, Lisa McGirr

3. City of Quartz, Mike Davis