Today, Explained - How the YIMBYs won

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Yes in My Backyard-ers are celebrating reforms to California's landmark environmental laws, which they say will bring much-needed housing. Nationwide, the revolution might finally be here. This episode was made in collaboration with Vox’s Future Perfect. It was produced by Devan Schwartz, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Former LA City Councilmember Joe Buscaino showing off a "YIMBY" (Yes In My Back Yard) shirt. Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, my name's Sean Rommesser, my host today explained along with Noel King, and I can still remember the first time I heard about Nimbies. You know, not in my backyard types. Ah, cool, apartments, yeah. Apartments are good for society, but don't put them behind my backyard and block my view. Put them somewhere else. All right, boys, let's pack it up. And I also remember when I started hearing about Yimbies, yes, in my backyard types.

Oh cool, apartments, yes. Apartments are good for society. Please put them behind my backyard and block my view. You know what, you can build them on top of me. All right, you heard the lady. Put it down right here. And I can even remember when it seemed like the Yimbees won, because that kind of just happened. The best evidence is out in California, and we're heading there, at least spiritually, on the show today. Support for this show comes from Icy Hot. You want to run, lift, and sweat harder than ever before, but that doesn't just happen

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or a prebiotic. It's all of those things, and then some. And it tastes great. In each daily pack, you get 20 vitamins and minerals and more than 60 whole food ingredients. Get up to 45% off when you go to groons.co and use code VOX. That's G-R-U-N-S dot co. Using code VOX for 45% off. My name is Henry Grabar and I'm a staff writer at Slate.

And though you live in Boston, we're here to talk to you about California. Why you? Well, I think if you're interested in housing politics as I am, California looms pretty large for the rest of the country, both as a cautionary tale about what not to do, and then from time to time, like in this instance, as an example of how reform is possible. Ooh, which reform are you talking about specifically for those not in the know?

I am talking about the latest round of California housing reforms, which were reforms to the California Environmental Quality Act in such a way that reformers hope will be a very big deal in terms of permitting the state to build more homes. Okay, and it's my assumption that to talk about the reforms, we first have to talk about the act. So let's talk about the California Environmental Quality Act. What's its story? So the California Environmental Quality Act, which by the way, everybody in California

calls it CEQA, so I think we should do that. Okay CEQA, so I think we should do that. Okay CEQA. So CEQA is passed, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1970. Richard Nixon creates the Environmental Protection Agency. We can make 1972 the best year ever for environmental progress. The time has come for man to make his peace with nature. It is part of a bipartisan push in the United States to protect the environment in a systemic way

that goes beyond just the creation of national parks. I mean, here we're talking about cleaning the air, cleaning the water, regulating industrial pollution. And in the context of California, there's a particular focus on forcing the government to reckon with its own actions in terms of the types of projects that it takes on. So we're talking about interstate highways, dams, nuclear power plants, all those kinds of things are in the crosshairs when Sequa is passed in 1970. Just a couple of heavyweight Republicans passing landmark environmental legislation.

Politics used to be pretty different, huh? How big a deal is this law once it's signed? Well, I think there's some ambiguity right at the start about what exactly this law is going to apply to. And then there's a big court case that happens in 1972 in the California Supreme Court, where the court decides that this law applies to basically any project that requires any kind of government oversight. So basically anything that you want to do. And in particular, this case concerns housing. And so when the Supreme Court decides is,

from now on all housing in California is subject to environmental review under CEQA. And this is just a bombshell. I mean, nobody's really prepared for this. In San Francisco, the city decides to halt new building permits until they can figure out what this means. And Los Angeles has these disclaimers saying that they can't be liable if these building permits are later found to be unconstitutional.

So it is a big surprise for the development industry and city planners in California. And over the years, does it come to be regarded as a good thing or a bad thing or both or what? I think that depends on whom you're speaking to. Environmentalists in California think of this as part of what they consider the state's really agenda setting on environmental issues for the entire nation, right? And it's true that CEQA has helped the state preserve a number of its natural treasures, but the flip side of this is that housing production in California has slowed to a crawl. And the consequences of that have become very apparent to anybody who lives in or visits California. It's apparent in the number of people who leave the state every year, citing affordability issues and sort of fan out across

the Mountain West and the Sun Belt. More people are moving out of California than any other state in the country, according to a new study by Pods. Your governor Newsom this year was nominated as the number one real estate agent for the state of Florida. Only 16% of Californians can afford to buy a home. It is apparent in the large numbers of homeless people who live on the streets and in their cars in California cities because they can't find a place to live. And so CEQA has also begun to be seen as part of the problem, as part of the reason that it's so difficult to build new housing in the state. So when does a movement to reform this landmark piece of legislation get underway? It's been going on for at least a decade. Governor Jerry Brown, who was Newsom's predecessor, talked about it, couldn't get it done. But it's certainly been one of those issues that's

always discussed in Sacramento as, well, if we really want to make it easier to build housing, we could remove this very strict and powerful law that governs the creation of any type of new housing that anybody would want to build. But Moonbeam Jerry Brown doesn't get it done. It's his successor, Gavin Newsom. And it wasn't easy. I mean, Newsom has been in office for almost a decade and he and a number of sort of Yimby affiliated legislators have chipped away at the California housing problem with all of these little bills that they've done several that are focused on ADUs or

accessory dwelling units, right? Like backyard cottages or granny flats. They've done bills focused on transit oriented development and on affordable housing and on student housing. But CEQA has remained the kind of elephant in the room that no one was willing to take on until now. Huh. And then also I would say that there's been a kind of changing sense within the environmental movement and within the labor movement about what CEQA does and the extent to which it might be curtailing the creation of new housing in the state. And who's mad about changes to CEQA?

Who's mad? Well, obviously a number of environmental groups are upset. But the other group that's been upset, and I think this will come as a surprise to people who are not versed in California politics, is labor unions. The State Building and Construction Trades Council was ultimately neutral on this bill. They say that if you allow projects to go forward without SQL review, you get rid of this moment of negotiation that compels these builders to employ union labor and to create these safer, highly paid jobs in construction in California cities.

Hmm. It occurs to me that Gavin Newsom has maybe grand ambitions beyond running one of the biggest economies in the world, the most populous state in the country. Does this have anything to do with his ambitions for maybe holding national office? I don't know, the White House? I think what he can say and what he will say as he talks about this achievement is that California has recognized the severity of their housing crisis and they are willing to take steps previously considered unthinkable to fix it, right? He thinks of this as part of his track record as a problem solver who is willing to negotiate and get things done. It's too urgent, too important to allow the process to unfold as it has for the last generation.

But deregulating, freeing up development, letting industry do industry, these are things that you hear Republicans saying. This is Gavin Newsom tacking to the middle because these problems that they're having in California around housing are not just California problems. Yes, I hear you on that and I've seen the framing of this reform as being a kind of setback for the environmental movement and I think in this case there's a plausible case to be made, and many pro-housing groups have made this case, that it reflects a different understanding of

environmentalism. What we have done here is made absolutely needed housing easier to build, at the same time, advancing, not derailing our environmental goals. It's a very straightforward and intuitive bill. If it's good for the environment for a housing project to get built, then those projects should be exempt from CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act. And then environmentalism in the 21st century is no longer merely about can we save this tree from being chopped down, but also are we living sustainable lifestyles in a larger sense and you know, the largest contributor to

emissions in this country is transportation and so if you block housing from being built in an urban neighborhood in a large city that have those people Still need houses, right and so that those people still need houses, right? And so they might go and they might live 40 miles inland and drive 40 miles every day to go to work, or they might leave California altogether and move to a place like Dallas or Orlando, where they'll drive 40 miles pretty much wherever they live.

And so maybe this SQL reform reflects a new understanding about environmentalism and one that suggests that California actually is a pretty sustainable place to live. So the bill essentially recognizes housing that is close to existing infrastructure, that is close to jobs and public transit, results in lower greenhouse gas emissions and is good for the environment because it means people are driving shorter distances or perhaps not even driving at all. Dense housing is green housing. And I'm happy to say that this week, California finally internalized that truth. And across the US, we are seeing a very hard time building enough housing to accommodate their populations, right? And so in that context, I think if these places, these other places, don't start to reform their development policies now, then they will wind up like California in the years

to come in a bad way. In a bad way. Like, not like palm trees and surf, but like million dollar houses and people living in vans. That was Henry Grabar. The last time he was on the show, he was talking about parking because he's the author of Paved Paradise, How

Parking Explains the World. When we return on today explained how housing explains our world. Support for today's show comes from Smalls. Smalls began with a couple of guys at home cooking cat food in small batches for their friends. Totally normal. A few years later, they say they've delivered millions of protein packed preservative free meals to cats across the US Cats.com I'll have you know even named Smalls their best overall cat food if you don't trust cats.com I don't know what to tell you. Here's a real review that Smalls gave us from a customer named Elizabeth C

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So if you want to get to your destination feeling good about yourself, check out Delta. Keep climbing with Delta. Book your next adventure at delta.com. Thank you for your abundant mindset. It's a plug to Ezra. Who? Today explained from Vox, Marina Balatnikova works at Vox. She's an editor who sometimes writes and her most recent writing was about housing, a subject we've covered plenty in years past, but we asked her for an update on the crisis.

So housing is a lot more expensive in the United States today than it was several decades ago. And the average, I thought this was kind of stunning, the average monthly mortgage payment in 2024 was over $2,500, which is far and away above the $1,400 payment that was averaged just three years earlier. And we heard about this CEQA law in California from 1970 that really slowed development in that state. But from what you're saying, it sounds like there's a host of other factors that are leading to this crisis.

Yeah, there are the housing crisis that is at the root of so many of our national problems. It's not just a technical policy failure, but a logical endpoint of that cherished American ideal. And what I mean by that is think about if you think about how the United States builds housing. Since the end of World War II, our housing supply has been built overwhelmingly in the form of suburbs and sprawling single-family homes radiating ever outward from city centers. So instead of building cities up with density, which had been the normal pattern before, we largely kind of just built out and out. And the problem with that is you can only sprawl so much before

it doesn't work anymore. Either you run out of land because you hit a mountain or an ocean or a literal physical barrier, or you get so far from the city center that people, it doesn't make sense for people to live there anymore. So we've built out suburbs really far in all of the really desirable parts of the country, like the Northeast, California, and increasingly in the Sun Belt too, which has been prized, celebrated for a long time for being relatively affordable compared to the coasts. These suburbs are getting really expensive. They're also low density, so in theory, they ought to have room for plenty more people. That's impossible to do.

It's illegal to do in most of the United States because, unfortunately, I have to use the Z word, which is zoning. Zoning is just a fancy way of saying it, you know, local rules on what kinds of things can be built where zoning has made it so that the overwhelming majority of residential land in the United States cannot contain anything besides a detached single family home, apartments are banned, duplexes are banned, triple deckers are banned. There's little capacity to incrementally densify in the communities that already exist. Some listeners might be thinking, well, wait a minute, I see these big fancy apartment

buildings, some people know them as gentrification buildings going up all around me. What do you mean it's illegal to build them? It's true that we're building them. They're going up on a really small share of residential land. Most Americans live on suburbs. Most of that land you can't intensify beyond a single family home. And so the suburban dream offered Americans this implicit bargain will freeze our communities in amber. They'll never have to change, never have to become more dense, and instead we can accommodate population growth by sprawling out forever. That's been the engine of housing construction and it is, I think, I think it's fair to say that

it's it's failing us. You mentioned suburbs like in the Northeast in California which I'm guessing are a little older in some cases at least than those in the Sun Belt. Did like some belt suburbs learn anything from the mistakes that were maybe made in California or the Northeast? This housing crisis in California keeps getting even worse. Massachusetts is, has, was, and will continue to do a terrible job of building housing. There's no two ways about it. It is practically impossible to buy a home unless you are essentially wealthy these days. Yeah, the coastal suburbs in California and the Northeast are much older and belong to metro areas that

built out much earlier than the Sun Belt. You know, Phoenix and Las Vegas, these are places that grew from just desert towns to massive metropolises since World War II. And part of the big spark for the story I wrote was that I encountered the leading urban economists, Ed Glaeser and Joe Giorco. They write about the collapse in housing construction in the Sun Belt over the last few decades. That happened on the coast long ago. And what the researchers find now is that the same pattern is sort of repeating itself in the Sun Belt, where cities like Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix, Miami had really, really high rates of housing growth in the early 2000s, the 90s.

And it has since plummeted to rates almost as low as coastal cities that are barely building anything like Los Angeles. And it really surprised them because the Sun Belt is celebrated for being friendly to building stuff. The fundamentals of housing in that region are not so different from the coasts in the sense that it has been population and housing growth in the Sunset has been overwhelmingly driven by suburban sprawl since the end of World War II. Soterios Johnson Right. So we talked about reforming CEQA in California, which sounds like a very California solution because most states don't have a CEQA.

What do we need to see in other states to really get to the heart of this crisis? Yeah, so major comprehensive reforms to zoning to make it easier to build different types of housing, higher densities of housing. So during the pandemic, Austin had a huge run-up in rents because so many people were moving there. And pretty quickly, the city responded with changes to make it easier to build housing. It also made it easier to build taller buildings. And the result has been that in the last few years, it permitted new homes faster than almost anywhere else and rents are down perhaps over 20% since

mid 2023 and that's huge. It's the difference between paying $2,000 a month for an apartment versus $1,400 a month. And for a lot of people, that's the difference between being able to stay in Austin and being priced out. Similar things are happening in other places. Minneapolis famously ended all single-family exclusive zoning in 2018. Montana has made it a lot easier to build apartments and ADUs. Oregon has made it a lot easier to build duplexes, triplexes, other multifamily housing. So we're seeing the contours of a major shift in how housing in America gets regulated and built.

Does that mean that the Yimbys have won and the Nimbys have at long last lost? Yes and no. ["The New York Times"] have at long last lost? Yes and no. We've seen a remarkably fast change in consensus on housing policy across cities and states, both blue and red, in the last several years. And that's a really promising sign. It hasn't yet translated into relief in housing prices because there's such a large gap to make up. I think the momentum of the last several years has been remarkable and more than anyone in the

yinbi movement could have expected five years ago or so and there's reason to be optimistic. Our colleague Marina Balatnikova making her today explained debut. Iconic. Marina's with Vox's Future Perfect section. They're all about making the world work better. This episode was made in collaboration with them. It was produced by Devin Schwartz, fact checkedchecked by Laura Bullard, mixed by Patrick Boyd, and edited by Miranda Kennedy, who's still in the club. What's that you ask?

Who else works here? Well, let's just say Peter Balanon Rosen, Andrea Christensdottir, Gabrielle Burbay, Denise Guerra, Rebecca Ibarra, Avishai Artsy, Hadi Mawwadi, Miles Bryan, and Noelle King from the Apple Store. Our supervising editors, Amin Al-Sadi, and our deputy executive producer is Jolie Myers. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder and listen to music by Justin Bieber.

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