Appendix B: The YIMBY Menace
Inconspicuous! Intolerable! Insatiable! Watch out! They get you while you're sleeping! Final part of a 4-part series.
Chief amongst the perils of power is co-optation. NYC-DSA now possesses power, ties to elected officials with influence, and consequently the real estate advocates have swarmed us like a pack of hungry predators. And in a credentialist political environment where working for a think tank is better valued than any kind of practical experience, it was all but inevitable that HWG leadership should be thoroughly infiltrated by a pro-corporate clique that supports luxury high-rise development and gentrification. Until every member is made fully aware of this loathsome and reactionary tendency, any tenant organizing work we pursue will be continually subverted by DSA’s own crop of YIMBYs.
YIMBY, short for Yes In My Back Yard, is an astroturf affinity group whose aim is to denounce any opposition to real estate development. They believe that the housing crisis in this country is caused by excessive zoning ordinances, and therefore support developers’ attempts to deregulate urban planning. Higher density is their end-all and be-all, so anyone resisting redevelopment is considered a member of their enemy tribe, the NIMBYs. Property owners opposing necessary public infrastructure and homeless shelters are to them indistinguishable from residents with natural and healthy concerns about gentrification and displacement. A YIMBY sees landlords charging extortionate rents as a supply-and-demand problem rather than an open conflict between rich and poor.
It is at first glance difficult to understand how such a capitalistic trend could emerge in NYC-DSA, which built much of its early success on fighting corporate redevelopment schemes. CBK struggled valiantly against the Bedford Union Armory rezoning, SBK prevented the further expansion of Industry City, and Queens DSA shocked the world by blocking the state-subsidized plan for Amazon’s second headquarters. Moreover, any socialist worth their salt understands that rents are not dictated by supply constraints but are instead an articulation of bourgeois class power by the real estate sector. New York City rents have been skyrocketing even amidst a decades-long construction boom. How, then, did people so ignorant of the city’s political economy become so prominent in our organization? The taboo truth is that NYC-DSA has always attracted more professional-class transplants than lifelong New Yorkers.
YIMBYism is an ideological contagion that evolved as an outraged response to the single-family-home-dominated urban planning system of California, in particular Silicon Valley. Its gospel of increased construction is spread across the country by migratory yuppies. The patent absurdity of transporting such a belief system to a city with more skyscrapers than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere is lost on these individuals. They know only basic solutions (more buildings means an apartment for me!) and basic resentments (these preexisting inhabitants are hoarding the land and refuse to share!) An Oedipal fixation on the provincial petty-bourgeois circumstances of its childhood compels the average YIMBY to conflate wasteful suburban landowners with established urban residents, among them tenants who fear rising rents as a result of luxury development. That pro-construction yuppies seek apartments in historically lower-income neighborhoods inevitably imbues this generational hatred with a distinct racist dimension.
Local organizers in communities of color recognize the implicit racism in the YIMBY fetish for unrestrained real estate development. Across the country, messy public clashes have taken place between affluent construction-happy transplants and more established residents. 2018 saw white YIMBY counter-protesters scream at a more diverse group of anti-displacement activists during a San Francisco rally against a statewide zoning deregulation bill, SB 827. Later that year, Black and Brown-led neighborhood groups stormed the national “YIMBYTown” conference in Boston, demanding that YIMBYs center the needs of marginalized tenants and not impose high-end real estate deals on low-income neighborhoods without community input. This “YIMBY Pledge” was signed by attendees, then promptly ignored. The same organization that pushed for SB 827, California YIMBY, would go on to advocate for SB 50, a virtually identical bill sponsored by the same legislators.
Lying is the principal tactic employed by YIMBYs confronted by progressives. They will declare full-throated support for the government building “social housing,” then alter the meaning of the term until it is subordinated to trickle-down economics. They will cite studies and figures that your own lived experience proves objectively false. (You are a resident of New York City, where there are residential skyscrapers full of empty units that don’t light up at night). They will say anything to get you to play along with the notion that cities are not made unaffordable by asset-price bubbles, that the rent is too high due to lack of real estate investment. This is the essence of neoliberalism.
Whenever you are compelled to debate a YIMBY on the merits of their argument, don’t. Instead, ask if they’re in favor of gentrification. Their answer will be exceptionally evasive compared to the average DSA member, even if they reside in low-income neighborhoods. Next, ask if they have a plan for expropriating vacant apartments from landlords. They will respond that expropriation alone will not resolve the housing crisis, in order to avoid talking about the extent to which it will help lower the pressure on renters. In truth, they have no plan to do anything but facilitate construction, and the public or private character of the resulting buildings is an afterthought. The more they are permitted to bloviate about the role of the public sector in their ideal deregulated system, the less time you have to ask how they feel about our class enemies in the private sector. It’s a dodge.
Talking of this menace in the abstract is not sufficient: the proud YIMBYs of NYC-DSA have names and prominent positions. The most visible and unapologetic are Andy Zhao, Nicole Murray, Émilia Decaudin and Paul Williams.
Zhao and Murray are EcoSoc volunteers in Manhattan who aggressively promoted the Illapa Saritupac campaign on Twitter. They also post about other things too. (Links to screencaps are heavily employed in this section to protect against the possibility of tweet deletion).
Zhao has called our candidates “NIMBY cucks” and publicly admitted to doing entryism into our organization on behalf of the YIMBY lobbying group Open NY. (More on that later). In true YIMBY spirit, he has publicly belittled those protesting against the potential demolition of People's Park in Berkeley, California. That is but one of many stances he shares with the late Ronald Reagan: he also believes that real estate development has nothing to do with increased rents and gentrification, and has mocked City Councilmember Kristin Richardson Jordan for even suggesting as much. There is ample evidence of Zhao articulating rightwing stances in the name of YIMBYism: denying that upzoning for more skyscrapers in Manhattan counts as a “developer giveaway,” declaring Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders to be politically equivalent and a frankly bizarre take on Israeli settlements and the nature of settler-colonialism.
These statements attracted the attention of tenant organizer and former DSA candidate Mike Hollingsworth, which led HWG to distance themselves from Zhao. But there are others with the exact same opinions who have yet to face scrutiny. Nicole Murray is equally spirited in speaking her version of the truth to power.
Murray has been known to argue with fellow DSA members about how luxury redevelopment in Queens is actually good. She defends the concept of Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH), a neoliberal developmental tool favored by former Mayors Bloomberg and De Blasio. Operating from this intellectual framework, she concludes that Innovation QNS, a development with 25% subsidized private units (that still aren’t affordable to minimum wage workers) couldn’t possibly have a splash effect on the rents of the surrounding area. Constructing new unaffordable housing is somehow justified by the fact that existing housing is not affordable. Like a good YIMBY, her logic is deployed in the service of development and nothing else.
She also demonstrates how the YIMBY real estate fetish is not merely a hatred of zoning ordinances, but also an ambivalent or outright hostile approach to government regulation of any kind. When you support supply-side economics, it's easy to deny the idea that public ownership and a robust welfare state are necessary for housing construction to actually result in lower rents. Similarly, she sees demanding concessions from developers as unnecessary, based on the notion that the government should deliver the goods themselves rather than make demands of real estate. This is a typical YIMBY rhetorical maneuver- arguing against any regulation of the private sector by pointing out that the public sector should provide public goods.
Truthfully, Murray sees no contradiction at all between left-wing politics and support for the real estate sector. She argues that it’s unfair for a rich person to pay high taxes on a pied-a-terre because Angela Davis had one. Her thinking is more in line with the YIMBY-favorite economist and anti-socialist 19th century single tax advocate Henry George, who valued economic production in the abstract over actual human need. George is a common reference in the pseudo-intellectual world of construction advocacy: Murray has cited him to riff about housing prices with Ben Thypin. Thypin is the founder of YIMBY lobbying group Open NY.
But what exactly is Open NY? It’s a nonprofit organization that has been profiled in glowing terms by real estate industry newspaper The Real Deal. The group’s founder, Ben Carlos Thypin, has DSA in his sights. As co-founder of Quantierra, a “data driven real estate investment platform” and heir to the Thypin Steel fortune, an expanded construction boom in New York would be a very lucrative prospect for him. He sees DSA as a useful tool to that end: Witness the strange spectacle of a millionaire industrialist nonprofit executive decrying the Nonprofit Industrial Complex (NPIC) in an effort to reach out to us. He is announcing to the world that we are easier to co-opt than the Working Families Party, and invites us to work with him on the YIMBY project of zoning deregulation. A wealthy real estate baron with a political agenda saying socialists are easily recruited to whitewash his dirty work. It’s a good thing he can’t penetrate our organization beyond a few especially obnoxious volunteers, right?
Émilia Decaudin is the Data Coordinator for the DSA national staff. She handles the personal information of every DSA member across the country. She is a member of Open NY and has been a fixture on their official Slack. Here she can be seen chatting with her former colleague, Democratic Party District Leader Ben Wexler. Wexler insults our candidate Illapa Saritupac and his rival Jasmin Sanchez for being insufficiently YIMBY. Decaudin responds with another dig on Sanchez, without acknowledging the insult to the organization she works for. They’re making fun of us.
Decaudin’s Twitter account is a vehicle for Thypin and other YIMBYs to present the Open NY deregulation agenda as progressive. By her own admission, she interacts more with Thypin than most of her other followers (his profile pic is highlighted in red on this screencap for easy identification).
She is not the first to give Thypin a chance to communicate with DSA members and insinuate himself into our spaces, however. An earlier and more egregious attempt was made by Paul Williams, the epicenter of NYC-DSA’s YIMBY network.
Williams is a relatively recent transplant to New York City. After a stint as an analyst for the Chicago Department of Housing, he moved here, was hired by a liberal think tank known as the Jain Family Institute, and caught the attention of undisputed NYC-DSA HWG leader Cea Weaver. Weaver immediately and unilaterally decided to incorporate Williams into the highest levels of HWG, tapping him as both the group’s unofficial policy guru and NYC-DSA’s liaison with the housing NGO coalition she also manages, Housing Justice For All. Nobody bothered to ask why a man with no social movement organizing experience should be given these responsibilities without open discussion amongst the membership.
Williams is also active in Open NY circles. At their March meeting, he gave a presentation about what HJ4A was doing. This is someone whose commitment to rent control is entirely contingent on whether or not it increases construction. In an interview, Williams recently remarked: “If you have a housing market where we’re restricting growth on initial rents it’s going to have a serious negative impact on housing supply.” He does not seek to decommodify housing so much as control a small percentage of rents once developers get what they want. This fits entirely into MIH, the real estate-serving model of the status quo.
Some members of the NYC-DSA NYCHA Solidarity Working Group had long been skeptical of Williams' proposals, given his outspoken support for the exact NYCHA financialization legislation that the group was founded to oppose. (The conflict over financialization is discussed in the Housing section of this report). We in NYCHA Solidarity had already separated our work from HWG, due to HWG OC’s passive-aggressive hostility inhibiting our growth and development. So when Williams was somehow given the go-ahead to form his own HWG Social Housing Committee, in order to present a rival government-subsidized housing vision to NYCHA Solidarity, comrade Sarah Lazur and the author of this article attended their first meeting to observe and report back.
She was the one who told me about Ben Thypin. No attendee publicly expressed any unease when he showed up on the Zoom call.
The meeting itself was little more than Williams lecturing a dozen people about his legislative proposals, followed by an unstructured open discussion. He is not, after all, a movement organizer by any stretch of the imagination. But despite being mostly populated by his neoliberal Twitter followers, including Thypin, this was still an official DSA meeting with prominent DSA members in attendance. Andrew Hiller, a leader in Lowman HWG, was there, as was EcoSoc’s Darren Goldner. There is little chance that a veteran HWG OC member in Manhattan would be ignorant of who Thypin was. Hiller saying nothing, during the meeting and afterwards, was a sign of approval. A millionaire real estate executive with a pro-developer political agenda has entered DSA spaces with the consent of our leadership.
Central to Williams’ attempt at a Socialist-YIMBY synthesis is the idea of a social housing developer. After all, his advocacy for NYCHA financialization hinged on the premise (shared by none of its proponents in the actual government) that a NYCHA capable of leveraging debt could issue bonds to finance new construction. So, given the opportunity to write actual housing policy, would he create more public housing? Since he claims to have helped write AB 2053, a piece of California legislation known as “The Social Housing Act,” it will be simple enough to find out.
The bill in question was brought to the Legislature by DSA-endorsed State Assemblymember Alex Lee, with its counterpart in the State Senate sponsored by Scott Wiener. Wiener, who receives more money from the real estate industry than any of his legislative peers, was also the sponsor of the two other YIMBY bills previously mentioned in this appendix, SB 827 and SB 50. He and Williams have crafted a bill that favors the nonprofit sector while placing substantial encumbrances on the subsidies necessary for real affordability.
AB 2053 has a definition of “social housing” that includes any building owned by a “mission-driven not-for-profit private entity.” This already creates the potential for public-private partnerships with any number of entities, including the nonprofit appendages of real estate firms. The resulting California Housing Authority would then raise funding for these nonprofits by way of a bond issue. Selling debt obligations would give the nonprofit developers the money to construct new buildings, and there the subsidies would end. “Social housing,” in this bill, would be revenue-neutral and cross-subsidized, meaning that the buildings would be expected to pay for themselves by charging market-rate rents. All of the costs, be they building maintenance, the existence of affordable units, or paying off the bond debt, would be reliant on the proliferation of high-rent units.
That self-financing debt-driven cross-subsidy rent crunch is reminiscent of Williams’ plan for a semi-privatized NYCHA developer run on municipal bonds. Even if the government built its own housing rather than subsidize existing nonprofits (which it is in no way incentivized to do), the financial constraints imposed by revenue-neutrality and cross-subsidy would produce the same results. Since low rents must be buttressed by market-rate rents, a building will need more high-rent units than subsidized ones. The Social Housing Act is not a way to decommodify housing, or even an efficient method of sponsoring rent affordability.
What it does do, though, is build. Both the system’s inherent failure to meet its own meager affordability quotas and the flawed metric it uses to determine the state’s housing deficit create the conditions for a nonprofit construction bonanza. “Annual regional housing needs assessment targets” are to be determined using the state government’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RNHA), a process that, thanks to a bill passed by (you guessed it) Scott Wiener, has begun to overestimate California’s residential construction needs by a factor of 100%.
In a nutshell, Paul Williams’ vision of “social” housing has little to do with socialism or public ownership. We can describe SB 2053 as neoliberal MIH expansion by another name. But it was sponsored by a DSA elected official. And California is far from the only place we have been compromised. One of the Buffalo DSA co-chairs, in charge of a vast volunteer organization, has recently come out as a YIMBY.
Beyond the extraordinary racism, capitulation to private profit, and blatant entryism of the above linked posts from one of the Buffalo chapter’s two highest-ranking officials, beyond him letting his YIMBY followers rebrand Buffalo HWG into something completely different by Twitter poll, is the simple fact that this man is repping DSA while he does it. He won his co-chair election because nobody bothered to check if he was associating with real estate lobbyists. Nobody bothered to ask if he was in favor of the historically racist pro-gentrification policy of Urban Renewal either, but it seems like someone probably should have. There is a distinct possibility that people who support bulldozing neighborhoods of color are taking charge of DSA all over the country.
And, YIMBY or not, there are leaders in many different DSA chapters who favor Paul Williams’ approach to social housing. Saorise Gowan, a policy analyst and former member of the Metro DC DSA Steering Committee, has laid out a similar vision for cross-subsidized mixed market rate and affordable units in public buildings, a situation which she describes favorably as “solidarity rents”. Gowan, who came of age in post-Thatcher Britain and is a former member of the pro-Jeremy Corbyn group Momentum, really ought to know better. But there are people like her in positions of influence across the United States.
Paul Williams is certainly looking to expand his reach to the national level. He has recently received funding (from as yet unknown sources) to start his own think tank, the Center for Public Enterprise. The Center is staffed by two of his Twitter followers and an expert on power grid regulation. Despite his behind-the-scenes modus operandi, the neoliberal quality of his proposed legislation and his questionable links to the YIMBY lobby, he is still deferred to by HWG leadership. They trust him, and that is enough.
All this is to say that HWG paramount leader Cea Weaver is coming around on the idea of inclusionary zoning. In an interview for online publication Hell Gate, she criticizes Kristin Richardson Jordan’s rejection of the proposed mixed-income One25 apartment complex, bemoaning that“[t]here's just so much power in the hands of single city councilmembers to kill site after site after site.” She expresses the belief that the problem established residents have with MIH development is not the threat of gentrification and displacement, but that there’s simply not enough of it to go around:
[N]eighborhood residents are not really going to be able to move into One45, even if it was 100 percent affordable, because it's simply not that much housing. The demand will just far outpace the supply and no one's going to see it as something that's meaningfully impacting them.
Weaver’s belief that “...neighborhood-based rezoning to encourage the production of low-income housing isn't the worst thing in the world,” and that “it's maybe the best we can do with the current tools that we have,” is basically identical to the housing platform of Bill de Blasio. With this supply-side vision of economic prosperity, former Mayor de Blasio, who entered office as a “progressive,” did nothing but stand idly by as rents continued to skyrocket.
Because nothing is all you can do when you no longer believe it politically feasible for the government to tax and spend. That is why Weaver, who is not herself a YIMBY, has facilitated Williams’ settlement in HWG: he offers convenient fantasies of affordable housing that do not involve messy budget fights. But without taxing the rich, without an emphasis on complete decommodification of housing, these proposals are nothing more than clever packaging for the YIMBY construction fetish. Socialists produce for human need, not for the sake of capital accumulation. They cannot afford to be YIMBYs or NIMBYs. Yet the bulk of our housing organizers ignore the dangerous possibility of the organization being subsumed by YIMBYism, because the HWG rank-and-file implicitly trust Weaver and the OCs to set policy by themselves.
Some DSA members fear a hostile takeover by sectarian groups with a rule-or-ruin attitude, whose performative ultraleftism decries our tangible accomplishments as insufficiently revolutionary. Others fret constantly over the prospect of being co-opted by the liberal establishment and losing our leftist outsider bona fides. Neither group has felt the need to pay attention to the YIMBY phenomenon, resulting in more extreme consequences than either thought possible. The sworn enemies of socialism walked in through the front door, were greeted warmly, and got to work. How can anyone say they care about the continued functioning of DSA, or its ideological consistency, when they permitted this to happen?
To put it bluntly: our organization has been infiltrated at every level by libertarian real estate lobbyists, and virtually no one in leadership noticed or gave a shit. This was always going to happen in a chapter that lacked the courage or self-respect to debate housing policy for ourselves, one that consistently deferred it to Cea Weaver and her confederates in HWG. We are all to blame for this mess until we take back control of NYC-DSA’s housing politics and have a clean break from strategies that leave the real estate predators unchallenged. Even in a big tent organization, a line has to be drawn somewhere. If supply-side Reaganomics isn’t that line, what is?
It is incumbent on every DSA member who has ever fought a rezoning or corporate land development scheme to push back against these people. The overwhelming majority of our membership is staunchly opposed to YIMBYism’s rigidly pro-construction worldview. Socialist ideas of urban development cannot align with the real estate barons. It is past time that the average DSA member felt empowered to make real decisions about our housing orientation. Credentialists, who operate from the standpoint that professional–class book knowledge is more important than tenants’ life experiences, are generally less intelligent than the average working-class New Yorker. It’s imperative that we refocus housing efforts in the interest of the preyed-upon. Let’s work together to make our organization YIMBY-free by 2023.
This is the final part of a 4-part series. Part 1 can be found here.