Introducing the YIMBYs: Renters, housing, and supply-side politics in Los Angeles

Abstract

This paper advances debates around the financialization of housing with a case study of Los Angeles’s yes-in-my-back-yard (YIMBY) groups. In response to the post-2008 affordable housing crisis, YIMBYs have emerged in support of orthodox economic policies that deregulate land use, expedite construction, and intensify financial accumulation in rental housing. Using detailed empirical analysis collected from YIMBY housing activists, this paper examines how the market-based logics they advance take root in local land use issues. It focuses specifically on the impact of YIMBYs on existing divisions within urban politics, including the scale at which housing is contested. By conceptualizing the YIMBY position as one that facilitates financialization, this paper reveals the ways financialization is more than a mode of accumulation: it is a political process embedded in the state from the bottom up and inside out.