Housing reform should be bipartisan

Obviously!

Over the past few months, I’ve read several articles in my local urbanist publication Greater Greater Washington expressing various degrees of angst about the fact that the most recent YIMBYtown conference was held in Texas and prominently featured Montana Governor Greg Gianforte.

I don’t want to oversimplify the argument, but the alleged problem here is essentially that Gianforte, as a person, and the state of Texas, as a collective, stand for a lot of bad ideas on non-housing topics. I completely agree with that! If I lived in Montana, I would cast an ineffectual protest vote for Gianforte’s Democratic Party opponent. Or to put an even finer point on it, I will almost certainly support Katie Hobbs’ reelection against whatever freak show the Arizona GOP throws up against her in 2026, even though she vetoed a good housing bill. But that’s because I, Matthew Yglesias, am not a housing reform institution, even though it’s a cause that I care about a lot and am closely identified with personally. I also care about other things.

That said, as a stakeholder in the housing movement, I would be upset to see a housing organization uphold Hobbs as a figure to celebrate. There are plenty of Democrats who are good on housing — talk about Wes Moore or Jared Polis!

By the same token, the thing about Montana is that it is a very conservative state. I don’t believe that any state is unwinnable on a gubernatorial level, but the median voter there is way to the right of the national average, so any candidate would have to say some pretty conservative stuff to win. What’s notable about Gianforte isn’t that he has normal (bad) Republican Party positions on abortion and LGBT issues, it’s that he championed and signed a significant bipartisan housing reform. That’s good! And an organization focused on housing should highlight people who do things like that.

This all seems sufficiently obvious to me that it’s hardly worth saying, but I worry that it’s going to become one of these scenarios where the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passion and fury.

Muhammed Alameldin’s lament that YIMBY politicians won’t take the pro-Palestinian stances he prefers is totally reasonable as a personal reflection from someone with family in Gaza. But as a NextCity take, I think it’s dangerous. I know YIMBYs with lots of different views on Israel/Palestine, a very divisive and emotional issue with extremely tenuous links to domestic urban policy in the United States. Pressuring everyone to come into alignment on it would blow the movement up.

Meanwhile, the fact that YIMBY reforms have non-trivial Republican support is a genuine source of strength that is worthy of celebration. I can think of many causes that would benefit from being less partisan, and few if any that are suffering for not being sucked into an omnicause.

Good for the movement vs good for the staff

I think part of the breakdown here is that most of the people doing the work of YIMBYism are under-forty college graduates who live in big cities.