By Thomas Silverstein, President/Executive Director, Poverty & Race Research Action Council 

Affordability - and how to achieve it - is the defining policy challenge of the moment. Nowhere is that more true than with respect to housing. We know that housing costs consume the plurality of each household’s monthly budget, that homelessness is at near-record highs, that eviction filing rates have raced past pre-COVID levels, and that progress toward fostering more racially integrated neighborhoods has stalled. There is no silver bullet for solving the housing affordability crisis, but, at times, the loudest voices on social media (rather than organizers and practitioners) have claimed that there is. The all too predictable fault line in online debates over housing policy interventions among progressives has been between abundance-oriented adherents of the Yes in My Back Yard (YIMBY) movement and housing justice proponents, such as tenant organizers, organized tenants, and closely aligned lawyers and policy analysts. The important yet under-reported story is that there are a growing number of counterexamples of YIMBYs and tenant organizers resisting this negative polarization and working harmoniously to advance complementary solutions that meet the true scope of the crisis. Now is the time to build on that work and make clear that there is more that unites housers than there is that divides us. 

What are the pillars of a housing policy that marries the demands of the tenant movement and those of YIMBYs? A comprehensive approach must (1) enshrine tenant protections, (2) invest public resources in the development and preservation of social and other permanently affordable housing, and (3) reduce zoning and land use regulatory barriers that limit both subsidized and unsubsidized housing production. New York City - where Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a rent freeze a core campaign demand and set a goal of producing 200,000 social housing units but also endorsed ballot measures to amend the New York City Charter to expedite project approvals - is a salient example of this more holistic approach starting to be put into practice. This cross-movement cooperation had precedent. During the City of Yes debate, groups with significant tenant organizing programs like the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB) and the Fifth Avenue Committee supported zoning reform, and Open New York, New York City’s primary YIMBY organization, backed good cause eviction legislation — establishing that supply and tenant protection were not competing demands but complementary ones. Tenant organizing groups with 501(c)(4) structures also mobilized in support of Mayor Mamdani’s campaign while the architects of City of Yes helped to staff his transition and his administration. This should serve as inspiration for housing advocates nationwide. 

Complementary Strategies Compensate for Each Other’s Shortcomings 

Neither a YIMBY approach nor one limited to the core demands of organized tenants can address the flaws in the existing housing system on its own. Tenant protections - such as rent stabilization and just cause eviction protections - can provide households with stability, prevent displacement, and reduce housing cost burden, which are all valuable goals. They can also provide almost immediate relief upon enactment, increasing their political salience. They also do not - nor are they intended to - create new housing where there is an insufficient supply to meet current or future needs. Typically, they do not address affordability or bring down rents over the long term. For a household that is already paying 60% of its income in rent, the relief provided by facing a 3% rent increase rather than an 8% rent increase is real but extremely modest when evaluated in broader context. Lastly, while well-designed rent stabilization policies afford landlords sufficient operating income to maintain their properties in habitable condition, it is true that, in the absence of robust municipal code enforcement, some landlords have responded to rent regulation by disinvesting from their buildings, thereby harming the health and safety of their tenants. 

Public investments in affordable and social housing, whether tenant-based or project-based, also have undeniable benefits. Public subsidy is a sine qua non for efforts to provide homes for households living in poverty. Because the operating costs of providing housing will typically exceed the rents that poor households are able to pay, no amount of rent regulation or added supply achieved through zoning reform will push rents low enough to be affordable at such income levels. Market exit (or abandonment or demolition followed by expensive new construction) by landlords is more likely than providing homes at a loss. Subsidy can bridge the gap between what poor tenants can pay and what it actually costs to provide housing. Tenant-based subsidy - most typically in the form of federal Housing Choice Vouchers - can also be deployed very quickly when funding is available. But money on its own is not a cure-all. While tenant-based subsidy can be deployed quickly, building project-based affordable or social housing takes time and cannot occur without appropriately zoned land. Similarly, shortages of overall rental housing supply can make it harder for tenants to find units in which to use their vouchers and may even result in landlords price-gouging the housing authorities that administer vouchers.  

Zoning and land use reforms similarly have both strengths and weaknesses. Because, under the status quo, the most exclusionarily zoned areas in metropolitan areas tend to be high-income, disproportionately white neighborhoods and municipalities with high-quality public services (including well-resourced schools), reforms that target such areas have the potential to foster racial and socioeconomic integration and increased access to opportunity for low-income households, including low-income Black and Latine households in particular. Additionally, zoning for increased density within the developed cores of metropolitan areas and in proximity to public transit - rather than relying on low-density suburban sprawl to increase housing supply - can reduce car-dependency and protect green space thereby furthering climate goals. Because low-density types of housing frequently will not provide the economies of scale that are necessary for affordable housing to be financially viable, zoning for increased density is often a prerequisite for social housing production. Moreover, while middle- and moderate-income households are not suffering from the affordability crisis in the same ways as poor households, the increased, market-rate housing production that zoning reforms can unleash may reduce cost-burden for those individuals and families. And an increase in the supply of new, market-rate housing may result in slower rent growth in older market-rate properties as part of a process known as filtering. At the same time, without public subsidy, the affordability gains from new construction are unlikely to ever result in the availability of homes with rents that are sustainable for households with incomes below the poverty line. 

Strategic Collaboration and Compromise Unlock Benefits While Reducing Tradeoffs 

Both sides of the divide have much more to gain by working together than they have to lose. Because housing markets are intensely regional and subject to the ebb and flow of the business cycle, the exact nature of those compromises will vary across time and space. Nonetheless, there are some foreseeable points of legitimate tension that may arise. 

Rent stabilization, in particular, is likely to be a topic of heated debate where it is permitted by state law. Although there are more libertarian-oriented YIMBYs who may see no role for rent regulation, there are many progressive YIMBY advocates, including those who are most likely to see value in collaboration with tenant organizers, who are open to some form of stabilization. This can be seen through the support of YIMBY groups in California for A.B. 1482, which passed in 2019 and imposed a statewide rent gouging cap and just cause eviction protections. However, from a tenant movement perspective, the varieties of rent stabilization that have been most likely to garner support from progressive YIMBYs tend to fall far short of what tenants are demanding. Specifically, rent gouging caps like those in place at the statewide level in California and Oregon allow increases of a magnitude that, when repeated year after year, do not really provide stability for tenants and continue to leave them at risk of displacement. 

What is the give and take that can reconcile these competing considerations? With respect to the size of annual increases allowed under rent stabilization, a compromise policy may seek to mirror the extent of increases for which lenders typically underwrite, often in the neighborhood of 3%, as compared to the extremes of A.B. 1482, which can allow for rent hikes of up to 10% when inflation as high, or municipal rent control ordinances that limit increases to 70% of the change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a figure that will typically be (and currently is) below 3%. Given that lenders generally will not credit developers’ projections of rent increases of larger than 3%, a 3% cap should not depress production. Given that wage growth and CPI-related adjustments to public benefits will often be in the ballpark of 3% (though perhaps slightly less), year-after-year 3% rent increases will not price most tenants out, and, for the tenants who would be displaced by annual 3% rent increases, tenant-based rental assistance may be a strategic intervention. 

To be clear, the possibility of compromise around these points does not mean that there are shortcuts to arriving at such a compromise or even that a compromise represents the best policy mix from a technocratic standpoint. It would be perfectly natural for tenant movements to launch their campaigns with a north star of a 70% of CPI rent cap. Likewise, it would be equally expected for YIMBYs who are supportive of some form of rent regulation to advocate for a maximum of allowable increase of 3% plus the increase in the CPI. The important exercise is not to come up with, in advance, a universal set of intra-progressive compromise positions on hot button housing policy issues. Instead, it is to anticipate how a mutual acknowledgement of different groups’ top priorities - here, preventing poor and working class tenants from getting priced out due to the cumulative effect of multiple years of rent increases and not depressing housing production - can steer negotiations towards outcomes that leave everyone involved feeling mostly positive. 

Similar approaches to compromise between tenant organizers and YIMBYs are possible across a range of issues. With respect to subsidy programs, while both tenant organizers and YIMBYs ostensibly agree about the importance of public funding for social housing development and tenant-based rental assistance, there may be significant differences with regard to what types of taxes or fees are most strategic. In particular, some YIMBYs may be concerned that impact fees or real estate transfer or recordation taxes that are often used to fund affordable housing development might dampen multifamily production while some tenant organizers might worry about the regressive effects of alternatives, such as sales tax increases. But there are other avenues, such as land value taxes and progressive income and wealth taxes, that should function in a redistributive way while not constituting a barrier to development. What, then, would compromise look like? It may look like, in the first instance, the prioritization of taxes of this ilk, while, if that is not a viable option due to either state preemption or local economic conditions, not pooh-poohing the best among the available options. 

Healthy Disagreements Will Still Occur 

The possibility of dialogue, grounded in mutual understanding of goals that are sometimes consistent and sometimes not, does not mean that compromise will always result. The example of Measure ULA, the City of Los Angeles’s Mansion Tax, is illustrative. Measure ULA imposes a real estate transfer tax of 4% on the conveyance of properties valued between $5.3 million and $10.6 million and a tax of 5.5% on properties valued at $10.6 million or more. Some YIMBYs have advocated for weakening the law by exempting multifamily properties from its coverage, believing that the tax has deterred transfers of properties that might otherwise be redeveloped with denser housing. At the same time, tenant organizers have fought to preserve their landmark victory and to ensure maximum financial resources for the development and preservation of social housing, knowing that more theoretically ideal forms of revenue generation for housing subsidy (such as local land value, income, and wealth taxes) are not meaningfully on-the-table for California municipalities due to state law constraints.  

In the zoning context, the question of what strings, if any, should be attached to upzoning looms large. This question has become more fraught over time. At the advent of the YIMBY movement in the early to mid-2010s, it seemed that many if not most progressive YIMBYs were supportive of inclusionary zoning requirements. Indeed, when California Senator Scott Wiener introduced S.B. 827 in 2018, the first iteration of his transit-oriented upzoning bill that was eventually enacted as S.B. 79 in 2025, no significant teeth had to be pulled in order to get affordability requirements into the bill. By contrast, progressive YIMBY antipathy to inclusionary zoning grew enough over the intervening years that some viewed the ultimate inclusion of affordability requirements in S.B. 79 as a significant concession by YIMBYs. Observers can also see this shift in Oregon where the state legislature recently preempted municipalities from imposing inclusionary zoning requirements unless they effectively compensate property owners with property tax relief or other means. Tenant organizers, by contrast, may be loath to give up on robust affordability requirements because, on an ad hoc basis, they have experience of achieving higher proportions of affordable units project-by-project through a negotiated process. The prospect of any compromise over zoning reform that does not include inclusionary requirements is remote, but tenant organizers should still have leeway to give ground on how aggressive those mandates and whether they are offset by incentives or tax relief, with the exact parameters of resulting policies varying based on local market conditions. 

The Path Forward 

Figuring out the kind of give and take contemplated above will be complicated in practice. The details will - and should - vary from region to region based on different market conditions and movement priorities. Sometimes, no deal will be possible. Still, the effort of trying will be worthwhile, both because of the instances where tangible breakthroughs result in the adoption of policies that improve the lives and poor and working class people and poor and working class Black and Latine people, in particular, and because the trust and mutual respect built through principled negotiation will reinforce that there is no such thing as a permanent enemy, thus leaving the door open to future collaboration. From the standpoint of policymakers, an increasing number of whom ran for office on an all-of-the-above policy mix including tenant protections, social housing, and zoning reform, reflection upon even a superficially failed attempt at compromise will clarify the real trade-offs involved in designing a piece of legislation, whether it relates to tenant protections, housing subsidy programs, or zoning and land use reform. For grantmakers, these efforts at collaboration would give greater confidence that concurrent investments in groups with divergent orientations are not operating at cross-purposes. Ultimately, neither YIMBYs nor tenant organizers have the power to solve the housing crisis without each other. The time is right to try to do it together.