Astral Codex Ten

YIMBYs

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YIMBYs

Article

YIMBYs is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 7 times across 7 issues between October 04, 2021 and December 04, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “The YIMBYs hate on the historical commissions”; “In a surprise major victory for YIMBYs, California has removed zoning powers from most of its cities”; “it was because we were YIMBYs and deliberately cultivated density”. It most often appears alongside San Francisco, California, New York Times.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 7
  • Issue count: 7
  • First seen: October 04, 2021
  • Last seen: December 04, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture
October 04, 2021 · Original source
The funny thing is that, in my experience of actually dealing with them, NIMBYs are motivated in part by the sheer ugliness of so much new development. The YIMBYs hate on the historical commissions and their stringent design reviews, but it never occurs to them that if new developments looked more like the historic districts they degrade, people might actually support them more.
Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
42: In a surprise major victory for YIMBYs, California has removed zoning powers from most of its cities, using an old law saying that unless cities’ zoning plans met certain criteria they could lose zoning powers as a punishment. The law was never really enforced and most cities had been ignoring it for decades, but Newsom dug it out of the books and is enforcing it as of now. Cities are rushing to make new zoning plans that satisfy the old law’s criteria, but even these will require much more development than they are currently allowing. Here’s a Manifold Market on the results:
Inline links: California has removed zoning powers from most of its cities
Change My Mind: Density Increases Local But Decreases Global Prices
May 01, 2023 · Original source
Matt Yglesias tries to debunk the claim that building more houses raises local house prices. He presents several studies showing that, at least on the marginal street-by-street level, this isn’t true.
Inline links: tries to debunk, several studies
For example, if my home city of Oakland (population 500,000) became ten times denser, it would build 4.5 million new units and end up about as dense as Manhattan or London. But Manhattan and London have the highest house prices in their respective countries, primarily because of their density and the opportunities density provides. I don’t see why Oakland being able to tell a different story of how it reached Manhattan/London density levels (“it was because we were YIMBYs and deliberately cultivated density to lower prices”) would make the end result any different from the real Manhattan or London. But if becoming just as big as Manhattan or London would make Oakland more expensive, shouldn’t we assume that a little step in that direction would make it a little bit more expensive? Wouldn’t the alternative be some kind of highly unparsimonious pricing function like this?:
What Ever Happened To Neoreaction?
December 07, 2023 · Original source
But YIMBYs have proven that there can be a constituency for building things even in a democratic system, and won enough victories to demonstrate that methods can work.
Ballots Everywhere: Call For Organizers, Times, & Dates
September 30, 2024 · Original source
Most cities will give out ballot guides before the election. Local institutions like newspapers will often make recommendations; you may choose to trust them or not based on whether you agree with their editorial perspective. You can usually Google all candidates’ names and find their campaign websites and sometimes local news interviews with them. Local interest groups (YIMBYs, teachers unions, etc) will often endorse one or another candidate, and you can Google those interest groups’ websites to see who they support and why.
What if I’m a well-informed representative of some locally popular interest group (effective altruists, YIMBYs, etc) and I want to make sure that people know my group’s perspective?
Should Strong Gods Bet On GDP?
August 05, 2025 · Original source
Are the rest not interested? Happy with mainstream culture? They don’t seem happy. 90% of articles on social media are people talking about how much they hate mainstream culture, sometimes with strong specific opinions about what improvements to make. But it never seems to occur to these people to join together with like-minded friends and secede from it. Why not? Why don’t conservatives live in trad whites-only farming villages on the Great Plains? Why don’t YIMBYs live in dense walkable towns sprung up from the forests of Vermont? Why don’t people who hate smartphones/social media/AI live somewhere that bans all of those things?
Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
December 04, 2025 · Original source
Wages never jumped back to the point where they would be if the pandemic had never happened, but they’re back to growing as fast as ever. So this could explain the mini-vibecession of 2023-2024. Still, I claim there is a broader vibecession. Young people felt closed out from opportunities before 2023, and they still feel that way. Since only the 2023-2024 period saw falling real wages, this can’t be the full explanation. The Housing Theory Of Everything John Burn-Murdoch, after examining some of these same data, agrees that wages can’t be the full story. He writes: Are millennials wrong to complain? I fear not. The per capita measure is a beautifully simple rejoinder, but it misses one crucial detail. Wealth accumulation — just like income — matters primarily to millennials today as a means to home ownership, especially as we move into an era of high interest rates. If we deflate wealth by the index of house prices instead of the CPI, millennials’ assets only go about half as far as boomers’ once did. We’re left with a smaller millennial deficit than the original chart implied, but a deficit nonetheless. The YIMBYs at Works In Progress go further, and present The Housing Theory Of Everything (or at least of everything bad): Try listing every problem the Western world has at the moment. Along with Covid, you might include slow growth, climate change, poor health, financial instability, economic inequality, and falling fertility. These longer-term trends contribute to a sense of malaise that many of us feel about our societies. They may seem loosely related, but there is one big thing that makes them all worse. That thing is a shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live. And if we fix those shortages, we will help to solve many of the other, seemingly unrelated problems that we face as well. Here is the Case-Shiller index, the standard measure of US home prices. I’ve started it in 1985 to match our other graphs: If I were designing an index to present the case that capitalism had not failed, I would have avoided naming it “Case Shiller”. During this time, average home price has approximately doubled. Might this only reflect falling interest rates? That is, suppose people can only afford a certain level of monthly mortgage payment. When interest rates are high, that mortgage payment would correspond to a cheap house; when they are low, that same person willing to spend that same amount could buy a more expensive house. To really work with this, we need average mortgage payment over time. Kevin Drum has this up to 2020: …but it matters a lot whether this that spike at the end is a temporary pandemic effect or a permanent regime change. I’ve tried to calculate an updated version from FRED data: Average monthly payment in 1985 dollars. Going to tell my bank I’m paying my mortgage in 1985 dollars from now on. This matches Drum’s data enough to build confidence, and it shows that the post-pandemic spike has lasted. Mortgage payments are almost twice as high as in the 2010s. The COVID housing spike was partly a function of lockdown locking people in their houses (meaning that having a nice house was more important), and partly a function of the government cutting mortgage rates to alleviate lockdown-related economic distress. But why did it last even after COVID lockdowns ended? Partly because the homebuyers who bought houses during COVID will never move again, because that would mean giving up their great mortgages.
Inline links: He writes, The Housing Theory Of Everything, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zP-R!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F27507c77-dfcc-49a2-8060-61faf8c8df9a_1403x402.png, has this, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!W2g8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2d40e6a9-cfaa-40e8-94e6-97cf0d07f7c3_1265x632.webp, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7GyC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc556be94-624f-48be-99fb-9918b91324a5_752x485.png