A Georgist’s reflections on YIMBYtown

Georgism is where YIMBYism should go next.

This article was originally published on Progress and Poverty Institute.

A couple weeks back, I attended the YIMBYTown conference, where nearly a thousand advocates, policymakers, researchers, and others convened to discuss pro-housing and pro-transit reforms. One panel I attended summarized the state of the movement: We’re Winning the Housing Fight but Losing the Transportation Fight. Why? The panelists suggested there are many reasons for this, but a big one is that housing supply can be increased by just legalizing housing, whereas public transit needs public money. As I sat there, one thought rang through my Georgist brain:

Land Value Tax would solve this.

Yet LVT didn’t come up in that panel. Nor did congestion pricing or demand-based pricing of parking. And this was a common pattern throughout the conference. What gives?

A souvenir card from YIMBYTown.

Hold on. What the heck is YIMBY?

For those unfamiliar with the acronym YIMBY, it’s short for “Yes, In My Backyard.” It refers to the people, organizations, and movement(s) supporting new housing, transportation, (green) energy, or other infrastructure, even (but sometimes especially!) if it is in their own neighborhood. It’s a name and movement born in response to the NIMBYs who say “Not In My Backyard!” to new infrastructure in their neighborhood.

Why do YIMBYs want new stuff in their backyard? Here’s my pitch as a YIMBY:

Housing is more expensive than ever for homeowners and renters alike. Americans spend more on transportation than people in other industrialized countries. Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation. All of these crises are driven by the fact that the US has simply not built and funded the housing, transportation, and energy infrastructure that would meet demand. We have not built enough homes. We’re defunding our public transit agencies, which move people far more efficiently than the cars Americans are overwhelmingly dependent on. The Trump administration is canceling hundreds of millions of dollars for building offshore wind projects. So YIMBYs like myself want to build and fund more homes, public transit, and energy infrastructure to bring down the costs in those and other areas.

The purpose of YIMBYTown, then, was for likeminded folks to discuss questions like: How do we build, sustain, and fund more of The Good Stuff? Where, what, and how are we winning? What challenges do we face, and what are the next frontiers in YIMBY?

YIMBY successes and challenges

YIMBYTown happened at a somewhat auspicious moment. California SB 79, which just passed the state legislature and is headed for an almost-assured signature by Governor Gavin Newsom, will “make it faster and easier to build multi-family housing near transit stops…by making it legal for more homes to be built in these areas,” according to YIMBY Action. Pro-housing supply victories have also been achieved in red states; at least two panels at the conference celebrated pro-homes wins in red states like Florida, Montana, Arkansas, and Texas.

Unfortunately, these victories seem to be somewhat limited right now to housing, as discussed in the aforementioned panel We’re Winning the Housing Fight but Losing the Transportation Fight. Why? Sitting in the panel, I cringed with recognition at the dire funding situation for transit agencies across the country, including SEPTA in my hometown of Philadelphia, which faced an operating budget shortfall of $213M (only temporarily plugged by robbing the capital budget). In that panel and elsewhere, folks suggested that a big reason we’re winning the housing fight but losing the transportation fight is that the pro-homes reforms “just” involve removing legal barriers to building homes. They just entail, e.g., legalization of multi-family where only single-family homes were previously allowed. These reforms don’t require any upfront public or private expenditures.

But public money is exactly what’s needed for public transit or other YIMBY-beloved public infrastructure investments, like the green energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. The question is: where should we get that money? This is where I think Georgism should come in.

Georgism can support Infrastructure

I think there are basically two arguments Georgists can make to YIMBYs about why public transit and other infrastructure ought to be funded by Georgist policies like land value tax, congestion tax, and demand-based pricing of infrastructure.

First, it only seems fair that those who benefit from public infrastructure ought to pay for it. Fees at point-of-use are one way to do this, but can be hard to administer and enforce. The other way is to tax the land value which is created by public infrastructure investment. Everyone, Georgist or not, knows that the three things that matter most in real estate are location, location, location. The value of land depends on what’s around it, including the schools, parks, and public transit. By taxing land, you ensure that owners of land near public transit are paying for that amenity. This also helps reduce reliance on rural state legislators who don’t want to pay for urban public transit that their constituents don’t use, thereby giving urban state legislators more leverage for their other priorities.

Second, Georgist taxes are efficient. Other local taxes might achieve that same goal of local funding for local services, but these often discourage the very economic activity that is supposed to generate them, including the home construction YIMBYs want (see: Philadelphia’s wage and business taxes, and its 10 year property tax abatement on the value of improvements). Georgist policies, on the other hand, by taxing the fixed quantity of land, don’t discourage any economic activity. Quite the opposite, they can encourage more efficient use of land. For example, congestion pricing in NYC has led to a decrease in driving in the CBD, and an increase in transit ridership.

So Georgism is where I think YIMBY as a movement, and YIMBYTown as a conference, should go next. To facilitate that, we Georgists have our work cut out for us, because how Georgist policies were discussed at this year’s YIMBYTown, or whether they were even discussed at all, was a bit of a mixed bag.

Georgism at YIMBYTown

On the plus side, LVT got a decent amount of love at the conference. The night before the official start of the conference, Max Clark of Common Ground USA organized a well-attended LVT happy hour at a local bar, where I met great, LVT-curious folks from Maine and Maryland. Throughout the conference, Max and his colleagues ran a table in the hallway where they spoke to folks about LVT, and gave away cute cards inspired by Lizie Magie’s The Landlord’s Game, which was adapted into Monopoly.

Max Clark’s cards inspired by The Landlord’s Game

In her plenary, Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather recommended LVT, to cheers from the crowd. Some folks from AEI at the conference shared a report they’d done showing that when Philly temporarily abated the building tax for new improvements, housing construction went way up, while not displacing anyone! I heard serious interest in LVT from advocates at YIMBY organizations from Maryland to Texas. I talked about Land Value Tax to anyone that would listen; by the end of the conference, one or two people knew me as “the land value tax guy”!

That said, in contrast to the many panels about zoning reform(s), there were none about LVT, let alone congestion pricing or demand-based pricing of parking. And these latter two policies came up even less in discussions during and in between panels and other formal events. I see three possible reasons for this:

First, historically, the YIMBY movement has been more focused on housing than transportation. (Though I got the sense the conference was trying to change that this year. The slogan for the conference was “pro-homes, pro-riders,” referring to transit riders.) Second, advocates and policy-makers believe (understandably) that adding new taxes and fees is politically harder than simply relaxing zoning laws. Even shifting taxes around, no matter how efficient or fair, creates winners and losers, and conventional wisdom is that losers criticize their elected officials more than winners praise them. Third, across two panels involving folks at Greater Greater Washington, the Sightline Institute, and the Parking Reform Network, it seemed that reforms that can be perceived as “anti-car” are more difficult to message than reforms that boil down to “let people have some choice in what they build and live in.” One well-known YIMBY wondered whether removing parking minimums is as good as it gets, and that we’ll never manage to get demand-based pricing of parking and other land uses.

A sticker I obtained from the Parking Reform Network. “Repeal costly parking mandates” is the top-line recommendation. “Manage parking with pricing” is buried in the middle, after “repeal mandates” has been repeated.

So while Georgist ideas have some foothold in YIMBY spaces, there is much more we Georgists need to do.

The future of Georgism and YIMBY

Among all the various reform movements in the US and beyond, I think YIMBY is the movement that is (a) most ideologically aligned with Georgism, (b) organized and successful, and (c) in need of Georgist ideas. I think we therefore have the greatest likelihood of achieving Georgist and YIMBY policy goals if Georgists match YIMBY tactics and join their spaces, while inviting YIMBYs into their own.

One YIMBY tactic to imitate is their approach to coalition building. YIMBYTown cultivated a warm, welcoming atmosphere while also having ideological diversity within a shared common ground of values and norms. YIMBYTown had everyone from libertarians, to liberals, to democratic socialists. The conference had both land acknowledgments and a (good!) plenary from the Republican Governor of North Dakota. It showed how ideological diversity, disagreement, and dialog is possible, while not platforming fascism or “deportation abundance”. Georgists also ought to welcome everyone from democratic socialists to libertarians, but we cannot tolerate those who say they support Georgists policies, but fundamentally don’t believe in democracy. If Georgism is the idea that land belongs to everyone, then everyone has a right to decide how it is used.

As for moving into each other’s spaces, Georgists should invite YIMBY’s into their conferences, organization boards/staff, meetings, etc. Conversely, Georgists should be joining their local YIMBY Action and/or Welcoming Neighbors Network affiliate. We Georgists should be showing up to YIMBYTown and related conferences in greater numbers, and shaping conference content more directly. We should be proposing panels about how Georgist policies can help achieve YIMBY goals of producing affordable and equitable housing, transportation, energy, etc.

As we further intertwine with YIMBYs, we may have to endure their occasional eye-roll. After a day or two at the conference, my wonderful colleagues started groaning the second I said the word “land.” On the one hand, yes, we Georgists can be zealots. On the other hand, I know from experience that YIMBYs experience the same exasperation when they talk about zoning with anyone who is not a YIMBY. But YIMBYs have never let that stop them from bringing up zoning where relevant, and now they’re winning. So, yes, we Georgists can be a little odd. But people are going to think that as long as our policies are outside the mainstream. We can only fix that by continuing to talk about it where relevant, refining our message and presentation, and making it mainstream in the same way that zoning reform now is.

Which brings us to messaging. Zoning reform message-testing is now quite advanced, with many YIMBY organizations having invested significant time and money into research on selling wonky topics like parking minimums. They have found, for example, that people are more receptive to messages that emphasize freedom of choice in transportation than messages that encourage driving less. Message testing for land-user taxes and fees probably has a lot to learn from such research, at least in approach if not in substance. In fact, we at Progress and Poverty Institute recently conducted a message-testing survey about Land Value Tax, inspired in large part by zoning reform surveys conducted by Sightline and Welcoming Neighbors Network. Watch this space for future posts about our survey!

Conclusion

YIMBYTown in many ways reflected an ascendant YIMBY movement. Pro-homes zoning reforms are winning in red and blue states, and even at the federal level bipartisan zoning legislation is sailing through committee. These are necessary reforms, but they are not sufficient for building and sustaining housing, transit, energy, and other infrastructure in my or anyone else’s backyard. Transit and other infrastructure, for example, desperately need new money. This is where Georgist policies like LVT, congestion pricing, and demand-based pricing of parking can help. To realize those policies, we Georgists will need to join YIMBY spaces, and invite them to join ours. It won’t always be easy work, but the juice will be worth the squeeze.

Russell Richie is Associate Director of Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, Treasurer of 5th Square Advocacy, and Vice-President of the Board at Progress and Poverty Institute.