YIMBYs Hit a Milestone in California. What’s Next?

The YIMBYs are celebrating.

Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB 79, a bill that promotes denser housing development near the state’s busiest transit stations. The bill was one of the year’s highest priorities for the state’s Yes In My Backyard movement, which emerged in California a little over a decade ago in response to the Not In My Backyard dynamics that characterized so much local land-use politics. It was the third time they’d tried to get a bill like this through the legislature.

“I wasn’t sure how it was going to go,” says state Sen. Scott Wiener, who co-authored the bill. “It was a tough fight.”

Wiener was the sponsor of two failed earlier bills, SB 827 in 2018 and SB 50 in 2020, which were also intended to promote transit-oriented development and supersede local regulations on housing. All three bills are aimed at reducing the cost of housing by making it easier to build in high-demand areas, promoting transit usage by clustering people near transit stops, and mitigating climate change and environmental damage by limiting suburban sprawl and giving people the option to live without a car. Skeptics have questioned whether allowing mostly market-rate development in high-demand places will do anything to make housing more affordable for most people. And opponents of the bills have said they interfere with local residents’ and elected officials’ ability to determine the shape of their communities.

Both earlier bills failed to pass. But they pushed the debate about the state’s role in addressing the housing affordability crisis to center stage.

“It caused a political explosion, but a very healthy explosion,” Wiener says. “It really forced the conversation up and down the state about what we mean when we say we want more housing.”

The failure to pass SB 50, the more ambitious of the two earlier bills, which would have upzoned near job clusters as well as transit nodes, didn’t deter the YIMBY movement. But it did inspire them to change tactics. Over the ensuing years, Wiener and other state legislators passed a series of smaller bills aimed at narrower aspects of housing policy: allowing homeowners to build accessory dwelling units, limiting parking requirements in new developments, making lots of small changes to permitting and review processes with the goal of expediting construction, and so on. Each of those bills passed with a slightly different coalition of supporters.

“Part of what we learned in the process of getting SB 827 and SB 50 shot down was that we were actually trying to do too much at once, both as a matter of policy but also as a matter of politics,” says Matt Lewis, communications director for California YIMBY, an advocacy group. “We can have nice things. You just need the patience and the strategy to realize you can’t do them all at once.”

Earlier this year, the state made changes to the California Environmental Quality Act, a landmark law that YIMBYs said had become a major obstacle to housing development. With that reform and SB 79 approved in one year, YIMBYs are taking a victory lap. One YIMBY advocate is calling it “the end of the first phase of YIMBYism.” The YIMBY approach has caught on in lots of other states too, with state legislatures controlled by both major parties passing bills that limit local zoning controls in an effort to increase housing supply.

So what’s next for California’s YIMBYs? “To be determined,” says Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat who is reportedly planning to run for the congressional seat currently held by Nancy Pelosi. Lewis says there are smaller items on the agenda, including adjustments to previous bills to make them work better. His group is also planning to target building code-related barriers to housing construction, along with fees that cities charge which make housing more expensive. But SB 79 was “the whale,” Lewis says.

It almost didn’t pass, and even after it did, Newsom didn’t sign it immediately. Cities big and small spoke up in opposition to the law, including Los Angeles, where one city councilmember said it reflected the state legislature “hijacking local planning, stripping away neighborhood voices, ignoring safety and infrastructure, and handing the keys to corporate developers.” L.A. Mayor Karen Bass opposed it as well. The bill included a number of carve-outs for communities that have existing housing plans which match the densities included in the bill, but many other communities are reportedly still “scrambling” to understand how it will affect them.

In some areas there’s been a strong backlash to YIMBY efforts, including the Bay Area. Residents of Fairfax, Calif., are organizing a recall of their mayor and vice mayor over a housing project that was permitted in the small Bay Area city. San Francisco voters recalled Joel Engardio, a district supervisor, over his support for a project that converted a highway into a park — but the recall effort also reportedly gained support from people who were upset about his backing of a plan to upzone parts of the city.

Wiener, for one, isn’t worried that a backlash will stop the movement’s progress. He says he learned a lot about political strategy over the years of trying to get the transit-oriented housing bill passed, talking with his colleagues “member by member,” learning about their districts and drawing out what the likely impacts would be. But over the same period, there’s also been a bigger political shift. More officials are acknowledging the connections between a variety of challenges, including the high cost of housing, the financial crisis in public transit, and the risks of building new developments in wildfire-prone areas.

“There’s always going to be political fights and some backlash,” Wiener says. “But I think, overall, people understand that putting more housing near public transit makes a lot of sense.”