YIMBY Movement Is Not the Answer to Housing Crisis, Grassroots Activists Say

The full version of this article appears in Truthout

There is a battle raging in U.S. cities around land and who controls it. It is fought with zoning laws and red lines. Its battlefields are neighborhood associations and local elections. Across the country, racist reactionaries square off against capitalist developers in a struggle to determine the future of the housing market. In these types of battles, whoever wins, tenants lose, according to housing organizers working to halt the damage wrought by both developers and racist politicians.

The U.S.’s housing crisis began long before COVID eviction moratoria brought the problem into the spotlight. Median rent in the United States has increased 70 percent since 1995, even as real wages remained static. This lack of affordable housing kept millions of people one crisis away from losing their homes. Before the pandemic began, almost half of all tenants in the United States were cost-burdened, meaning they paid over 30 percent of their income towards rent. One in four Americans paid over 50 percent.

“There’s basically no city in America where you make minimum wage and work 40 hours a week and afford the median rent on an apartment,” says Max Besbris, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison…

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