The Yimby movement has gone from strength to strength. The term – an acronym of “Yes in my backyard” – has climbed to the top of British politics. Even Keir Starmer, very likely the next prime minister, has declared himself to be one, and named planning reform as one of his planned engines for economic growth.
Nonetheless, it remains to be seen which part of the British political spectrum ends up politically owning the Yimby identity. Currently, the term is used by an ideologically diverse coalition that includes: campaign groups such as PricedOut, London Yimby and the Yimby Alliance; wonks like the Centre for Cities’ researcher Anthony Breach, the Centre for Policy Studies’ Robert Colvile, the Social Market Foundation’s Shreya Nanda, or the former Adam Smith Institute boss Sam Bowman; and supportive journalists such as Jonn Elledge, Henry Hill (who both spoke at PricedOut’s manifesto launch last autumn), and GB News’s Tom Harwood (the PricedOut journalist of the year 2023).
This broad Yimby coalition has plenty in common: naturally, it wants more houses built. It thinks that the planning system is too geared towards the preferences of homeowners who are trigger-happy when it comes to filing planning complaints. Self-described Yimbys are generally young and drawn from the graduate class – the kind of people who would not have had issues securing decent housing ten or 15 years ago but now face a struggle to rent, let alone buy, and are understandably livid. They’re likely to be middle class, they’re likely to be online and they don’t check their party allegiance at the door. It’s an acronym that draws people from all party affiliations, galvanised by the pursuit of planning reform and opposition to their arch nemeses, the Nimbys.
But Yimbys agree on little else. They believe different things about regulation, about the market and the role of developers, and even, to an extent, about what the point of housing is.
Some Yimbys argue that those who are looking to shift policy within the Conservative Party should be considered an entirely separate lobby, but right-wing Yimbyism is an important part of the push for planning reform. Significant and younger chunks of the Tory party – the kind of people concerned about “cheems mindset”, in which barriers to policy changes are thought of as natural laws, and woke civil servants – and its aligned think tanks consider this a key issue for the country (and even an existential one for their party). It’s a truism that you can’t lock people out of capital and expect them to be capitalists, and in this country capital means property.
If Yimbyism has been a concern of young Conservatives for some time, it’s only boomed among progressives recently. People I speak to cite the retreat of political oxygen-sucking Brexit discussions, and even the comparative internal stability within Starmer’s Labour, as reasons for this spread. Without a forever war to occupy attention, you have time to campaign on housing and planning reform. An alliance between people ideologically committed to deregulation and those who aren’t is always going to be difficult, but for those who think we must build, build, build, the benefits are clear. The Labour MP Andrew Western took a similar line when I interviewed him last year. He said he was aware that such campaigns often lead to “strange bedfellows” – along with the Tory MP and former levelling-up minister Simon Clarke, Western is a parliamentary champion for PricedOut – but stressed that he was in favour of different regulation, not deregulation.
Freddie Poser, PricedOut’s director, is bullish about his organisation’s place within the movement. While people come at things from different directions, he said the “underlying coalition is quite strong, quite robust”. John Myers of the Yimby Alliance is similarly optimistic: “I think it’s clearly true that some people will be in some coalitions and not others. The key is that we have winning coalitions for more homes, and I am confident that will always be possible.”
Not everyone looking to solve the housing crisis takes a positive view of Yimbyism, however. Many, particularly further to the left, feel its priorities are wrong and have taken the debate over the housing crisis in a direction that focuses too heavily on development and not enough on a balance of housing types (all the self-described Yimbys I spoke to reject this criticism).
While Poser described the organisation’s relationship with developers as “friendly”, he was critical of the idea that PricedOut focuses on private development at the cost of social housing. “There’s so much benefit to society that we can unlock through Yimby campaigning that we don’t have to fight over ‘should we do X-type housing or Y-type housing’… Yimbys understand that those are not mutually exclusive.” Other Yimbys I spoke to also buy this abundance principle: that if they can turn on the house-building tap, the benefits will be of such a magnitude that disputes will be blotted out.
That is not, however, the view of Aydin Dikerdem, Labour’s cabinet member for housing in the London borough of Wandsworth. There is a trade-off, he said, in what gets built: “Viability is threatened by me trying to get more council housing… The idea that developers are going to build themselves out of profits by reducing land values and house prices is pretty naive.” A spokesperson for the London Renters Union also took a dim view of Yimbyism: “We cannot just simply build our way out of the housing crisis. The type of housing matters more than the sheer quantity.”
Dikerdem, at least, said that in an ideal world he would call himself a “left Yimby”. But some view Yimby priorities as not just misjudged but malign. The housing barrister Nick Bano thinks the movement is “exploiting people’s good nature and their desire to see an end to the current housing misery”, but “is designed to divert attention away from the rentierism and commodification that drives the crisis”. Popularising “supply-and-demand and anti-planning rhetoric” is something he described as a “clever move by property developers”.
Whether you think they’re pragmatic or harmful, Yimbys have reached a level of political salience that seems likely to keep them in the housing debate for some time yet – earlier this year, PricedOut announced two more parliamentary champions, Labour’s Siobhain McDonagh and the Conservative, Brandon Lewis. Perhaps ideological divides in the Yimby movement are only to be expected when a cross-section of politically active under-40s is crammed into one acronym.
But if part of your coalition is bolted to an ascendant Labour Party that’s promising to take serious action on planning reform and another part of is tied to a Conservative Party likely to get lost in the wilderness of opposition, there will be strains and, possibly, fracture. Considering the recent proposals to reserve social housing for British citizens (proposals defended by Henry Hill in ConservativeHome), the fault line may be immigration. We don’t know the details of Starmer’s planning reforms yet, but it seems more likely they’ll satisfy the Andrew Westerns and draw the ire of the Simon Clarkes. As to who would get custody of the acronym in a divorce – that’s all to play for.
[See also: Have the Tories even been to London?]
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