YIMBY movement promotes housing abundance

by Ari Armstrong
February 5, 2025

If my wife and I didn't already own a home in the Denver metro region, I'm not sure we'd be able to afford to live here. I have friends who have moved out of state because of the high cost of housing.

The problem is harsh restrictions on the construction and provision of housing, rules that create artificial scarcity and drive up prices. The solution is to roll back those restrictions and enable housing abundance.

I was therefore thrilled to attend a January 23 meetup hosted by YIMBY Denver (Yes In My Back Yard), where some 200 people, including several state legislators and two Denver city councilors, met to celebrate legislative victories and plan for future campaigns. In a time of political turmoil, I found the group's optimistic and progress-driven spirit inspiring.

I'll leave it to YIMBY Denver's president Ryan Keeney to articulate his organization's aims (most but not all I agree with) with his recent letter. Here I want to explain why I applaud the organization, why I'm independently pushing for important aspects of the group's agenda, and why I think others should join the YIMBY cause.

Conservatives and libertarians who care about property rights and free markets should be on board with enabling people to develop their property as they see fit and with deregulating the housing market. I say down with land-use socialism!

Some conservatives get hung up on "local control," even though in other contexts they continually remind us that we live in a Constitutional republic, not a pure democracy, and that the rights of the individual deserve legal protection.

We should remember that those who tend to protest new building usually are not representative of the people who live in the area, and obviously those who are locked out of a neighborhood due to building restrictions typically do not attend local government meetings regarding land-use policy.

Progressives rightly are concerned about the poor, including the homeless. The housing shortage puts the financial screws to people of limited means and helps drive the problem of homelessness. Housing scarcity in effect forces people to play Musical Chairs, except when the tune stops some families end up on the streets.

Progressives also want Colorado to remain a welcoming place for immigrants, women who wish to maintain their reproductive autonomy, and LGBTQ people. These days especially transgender people often feel marginalized. Yet our anti-housing policies effectively tell people of limited means seeking sanctuary that they are not welcome here.

Part of J. D. Vance's pitch to restrict immigration was that "you've got housing that is totally unaffordable." But our policies of artificial scarcity, not immigrants, created this problem. Vance manifests a fixed-pie mindset, where one person's gain is another person's loss. With housing abundance, everyone can afford a place to live to fit their budget and needs.

As economist Bryan Caplan points out in his book Build, Baby, Build, another way that housing scarcity perpetuates poverty is by making it harder for people seeking work to move to centers of job creation. In many cases people just cannot afford to live where the jobs are.

People understandably worry about maintaining our wild spaces and keeping traffic manageable. But Colorado has been growing in population for over a century and a half, and we can keep growing while preserving what makes Colorado distinctive. As of the last census, Colorado ranked 39th among the states in terms of population density. "Too many people" is not a real problem.

Generally, people are good, and we should welcome them. And whether a family goes back generations in Colorado or just moved here, it is hardly too much to ask that they can afford a place to live.