A new YIMBY (“Yes, In My Back Yard”) group has launched in Melbourne. Jonathan O’Brien founded the Melbourne New Progressives due to frustration at the prevalence of NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”) sentiment at the local council level.
The group joins a fledgling chorus of pro-development voices in Australia and overseas calling for more well-located housing amid record-low rental vacancy rates, record-high public housing wait lists, rebounding commute times and persistent unaffordability.
They argue planning rules subordinate apartments and public transport to quarter-acre blocks and station wagons, making scarce dwellings proximal to job centres more expensive and increasing commute times for those priced out.
But are Australians receptive to a European or Asian style of urbanism? And can they dislodge the sway of NIMBYs over their local politicians?
More Australians are saying ‘yes’ to development, but resistance remains
There are tentative signs Australians are becoming more open to denser development, albeit cautiously. In the Centre for Equitable Housing’s (CEH) March survey, respondents overwhelmingly supported increasing the supply of public housing (70%), while nearly half agreed we must relax planning restrictions to increase other supply, compared to 18% opposed.
According to Max Holleran, author of Yes to the City, sentiment is shifting.
“There are so many people who would’ve been buying their big block house but now cannot afford it,” he told Crikey.
“But also [sentiment is shifting] for lifestyle reasons — people don’t want to be stuck in traffic. So renting or having a downsized home is becoming more culturally acceptable.”
Infrastructure Victoria recently found most new homebuyers want to live in a three-bedroom detached home with car parking. But at least one in five would prefer a townhouse or apartment closer to the city if it were affordable.
The CEH found more people supported than opposed their home’s value halting if it increased affordability overall — though boomers were more evenly split. But when asked about “more units built on or subdivision of the street where I currently live”, support was 44% and opposition 26% — the least popular option, behind some demonstrably ineffective ones like first-home grants and superannuation deposits.
Status quo bias and financial self-interest are strong foes and Australia’s culture of big cars, lawns and spare bedrooms won’t die quietly. Holleran, who moved to Australia from the US, believes the biggest barrier to convincing Australians of denser urban living is the quality and reputation of our apartments.
“There are not that many examples of good, modest, mid-rise developments,” he said.
“We’ve condensed a lot of development into CBDs, with these dystopian Jenga towers hovering over each other. They’re built terribly, with basic problems like cladding, cracking walls, really small spaces. People think ‘I don’t want to live in an apartment because I’ve never seen a good one’. It’s a big psychological burden for YIMBYs to overcome.”
NIMBY MPs are feeling the heat
As more Australians cautiously embrace the call for more housing, controversy around rejected developments is rising. For instance, Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather copped blowback last week for opposing the redevelopment of the Bulimba Barracks in his inner-suburban Brisbane electorate.
Chandler-Mather raises some understandable concerns about flood risk on the site. Mind you, most of Brisbane’s well-connected inner suburbs are similarly vulnerable, and development cannot all be pushed elsewhere.
But his use of NIMBY-like rhetoric such as “traffic chaos”, “overdevelopment” and “luxury” apartments (the latter is often just marketing gloss for cheaply built mid-market dwellings) threatens to undermine his otherwise reasonable objections to federal Labor’s inadequate housing bill. It’s hard to take the Greens’ policy to build 1 million homes seriously when their housing spokesman disapproves of putting 1300 in his backyard.
But the Greens are hardly the only hypocrites on this issue. Labor’s Jerome Laxale, quick to jump on Chandler-Mather, once weaponised development backlash as a local councillor, as have state Labor MPs.
The Liberals’ chief development evangelists, Andrew Bragg and Jason Falinski, both abandoned their principles at last year’s election, opportunistically capitalising on local NIMBY campaigns. Falinski campaigned against a proposal from the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council — hardly the caricature of a greedy developer.
Meanwhile, the teal movement turned from chief beneficiary of development-led demographic change at the federal election to most cynical exploiters of affluent NIMBYism at the NSW state election.
But more MPs are saying yes
As YIMBY sentiment grows, politicians are increasingly seeing their parochial pandering fall flat. The teals’ “overdevelopment”-focused NSW campaign bombed, and the backlash Chandler-Mather is facing simply wouldn’t have occurred a few years ago.
“Max is not reading the room correctly, because the mood is shifting,” O’Brien told Crikey. As the homeownership rate drops, fewer people have an interest in guarding their asset value or aesthetic attachments from interlopers, and more have an interest in well-located options to move to.
Thus, more politicians across all parties are seeing benefits in full-throated support for more housing. Last week, new NSW housing minister Rose Jackson sent a pointed message to anti-development activists: “get out of the way”.
New Victorian Liberal MP Evan Mulholland, a millennial, recently called out inner-suburban councils for pushing development to outer growth areas — “that’s pretty immoral, and it’s doing my generation a deep disservice” — earning plaudits from outside his political tribe.
“Both the NIMBYs and YIMBYs transcend party lines in interesting ways,” O’Brien said.
“Some Greens councillors in Queensland, there is a very NIMBY contingent, but you meet with Greens councillors down here [in Melbourne] and some are very YIMBY. It’s the same for Labor and Liberal. But as more people struggle to be housed, the incentives are changing.”
Overseas, the YIMBY movement has similarly split allies on the left and right. While its followers tend to be young, centre-left, renting knowledge-workers, almost making odd bedfellows are libertarians, centrist wonks and socialists.
“There is a big potential coalition to get new housing built: those who will get jobs, those who will get housing, businesses,” Holleran said. But as O’Brien concluded: “It’ll take organising — we’re up against essentially a landowning gentry.”
How would you feel about housing development in your “back yard”? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Journalists love to denigrate the NIMBYs – but if you don’t look after your own back yard, who will?Certainly not the politicians or the developers.
And here we have another article that just assumes that population growth is a given. No thought to the exponential nature of getting back to 1.6%pa – that means 100 million people in another 90 years.
Crikey, along with all the major parties and environmental groups, chooses to refuse to engage in a discussion of where we are heading.
Reducing immigration to some 70,000 leaves room for refugees and scarce skills while allowing pur population to stabilise. But it seems we aren’t allowed to discuss that.
That’s a strawman argument using generic headline data?
‘Reducing immigration to some 70,000 leaves room for refugees and scarce skills while allowing our population to stabilise.’
Opinion, masquerading as correlation which is not causation; while ignoring demographic decline in Oz inc. ongoing increase in the retiree population.
There is no grounded research evidence, as it’s simply greenwashing of the eugenics movement (supported by old ‘fossils’) based on simplistic headline data analysis, masquerading as demography. Now demands students and backpacker churnover caught in the NOM net overseas migration with no potential permanency be described as ‘immigrants’ to be dog whistled and stopped….
Further, the issue is very apparent in regional centres with little direct immigration (except Australians from urban centres) or temporary residents except students, WHVs, seasonal workers, lower income etc. unable to find housing in regional towns or centres; not helped by local NIMBYs, council (zoning, caravan parks & rates) and real estate agents wishing to preserve house prices and revenue inc council rates.
Totally agree. Like it or not (and I don’t really) there are a lot of different dependencies in the way our economy and community works on steady immigration flow. If you just dramatically reduced immigration without making a lot of other major systemic changes you’d only make life much harder for those already struggling to make ends meet. (Tellingly, people who own a home without a mortgage would probably be just fine). And those sort of visionary social changes are the kind of thing that our two party system of government finds almost impossible to manage.
I also disagree with the assumption made in the opening statement that by definition resisting increasing residential density = looking after your backyard. There are certainly many instances of poorly designed developments negatively affecting a neighbourhood/community. There are also ways for well designed developments informed by local community consultation and supported by better urban planning to improve a neighbourhood/development.
Uh, really ?
More secure employment, wage increases, increased rental availability & lower rents, less crowded public schools/bulk-billing doctors/public hospitals/roads/public transport/etc.
I mean, it’s not wrong that an enormous chunk of the Australian economy is built on the assumption of easily exploitable immigrant labour, and that a lot of businesses would probably go under if it disappeared, but workers would find employment elsewhere because ultimately the useful & productive work still needs to get done.
Fewer coffee shops and food delivery riders would not do the country any serious harm.
There’s plenty of excess labour in the system to work through a transition period, especially after the last year (and the one coming).
Well those people will nearly always be just fine, so that’s not really saying much. But they are certainly a lot higher up the list of beneficiaries from the ponzi than anyone poor (who arguably aren’t even on it).
Lots of opinions or claims, but are made with neither explanation nor evidence, while avoiding anything based on relevant subsets of data i.e. ‘digging down’ vs. resorting to headline data claims?
One of the ‘elephants in the room’ if no temporary migration churn over, which many avoid, is how to fund budgets into the future with a permanent population (pyramid) imbalance i.e. increasing old age dependency ratios (with working age demographic decline & fewer youth) meaning budgets will be tugged on for more pensions, health care & retiree rebates.
We must simply trust these opinions that promote ‘horizontal’ links for any issue and blaming immigrants, youth, unions, ‘woke’ etc., but ignore that this protects suboptimal government, revved up housing policies and media that does not inform anyone well; running protection for power?
The best giveaway of your libertarianism is how everything you write assumes supply-side economics and neoliberalism will work as theory explains, but reality is the complete opposite.
Wow those poor little overmatched YIMBY’s.
And here was I thinking they were a bunch of developers using youngsters as a front.
Just because developers’ interests might align with what the YIMBY approach is advocating doesn’t mean the YIMBY view isn’t valid. The article’s main premise still stands that increasingly people are able to take a bigger picture view and weigh up the disadvantages that will come from increased density in their neighbourhood and see that it’s better than the current alternative.
It’s sad to see such short-sighted responses to urban planning.
As various thinkers (and doers) have demonstrated, the quarter-acre block is the perfect size for an environmentally sustainable future – enough to grow significant amounts of fruit, veggies and animal protein as well as to provide a significant amount of your own power and water.
What we need is more people per house and a reform of zoning arrangements that separate work and home, allowing people to run small-scale home-based businesses, including light industrial ones.
Additionally, we need to cap the size of our grossly outsized major cities and actively create economically productive and environmentally sustainable towns and cities in the country.
Agree with your points, esp. the last.
Apart from a couple of capitals, London & Moscow (also St Pete’s – an ex-imperial blob) there are no cities of 5M+ in the West – Paris is half the size of Sydney, Berlin <4M.
Nor is there a serious country of any size with more than half its population in two cities & suburbs.
Not even in bigly land, apart from NY at 8M, the next largest is LA well under 4M.
Well, all depends on definitions. By those definitions Sydney (City of Sydney LGA) is 208,374. Greater Paris (Paris metropolitan area) is 13 million.Regardless of comparisons, endless high-rises are not the answer. Planned population and building caps and a focus on sustainability, coupled with regionalisation, is the sensible way forward.
Oh for Whitlam. He was calling for bigger and more regional hubs back in the 70s
We also need to make it easier and more advantageous to move or downsize, by reforms to stamp duty, including the value of the home in the pension asset test etc.
Your statement about the sustainability of quarter-acre blocks might have some validity were it not for the inextricable link with car dependency and the fact that 99% aren’t used in anything like the way you suggest.
We’re talking about planning, about the future, not about the present.
These changes could be encouraged, even mandated, rather than herding us all into unsustainable concrete blocks.
Likewise, transport planning and policy could give primacy to pedestrians and cyclists.
We have planned car-centric, anti-sustainable suburbs, they’re not some accident or some natural occurrence.
We can plan differently.
With EVs and local solar generation, a raft of old arguments against cars are have now disappeared.
Very few of them. Cars are still incredibly wasteful and resource intensive both upstream and downstream. Improving the fuel that runs them is only a small mitigation of all the other environmental and social ills they cause.
Wow, a defence of the backyard! That is a rare sighting, thanks Bob!
There was the possibility to build a lot of amenable affordable housing when the inner city warehouse and industrial areas started to shutter.
But it didn’t happen.
Why? Because government allowed big investor companies to partner with big developers and create urban deserts. Big shoddily built high-rises vaulting straight up from the edge of their blocks. None of the out dated roads were rerouted – I’m talking about Sydney’s tangle not Melbourne’s grid.
No real urban planning
Developers and the Ponzi scheme they are part of have no interest in affordable housing – they want maximum profit whether it’s chewing up four semis in a row in some residential suburb or dropping a six story monolith onto a whole city block.
Unless the government gets directly involved and runs social housing projects themselves nothing will change.
Think the Ponzi is Australians’ all consuming obsession with property?
Interesting too, how the CBD and some inner city apartment developments are black spots i.e. many are in private or closed markets, hence, suboptimal or zero public data for commercial reasons; we also observed in Sydney some apt. buildings bypassing of (non existent?) regulation…..
Personally one has no issue with living in a (decent quality) unit or apt. building in old age due to amenity and access to services.
Well put. We need properly planned medium density housing, where the amenities are. But what we get is developers given carte blanche to pack in double the number of dwellings that might reasonably fit on a piece of land – no greenery – no open spaces – shoddy build – and a fat profit.
Time for governments to govern!
The problem with units and townhouses in Australia is they are too small! Most of them are 2 bedrooms 2 bathrooms and one open plan kitchen/living area. Back in the 1930s, a unit was proportioned like a house – complete with hall, living room, dining room, eat in kitchen, laundry, full size bathroom and bedrooms. Okay there were no built ins and the layouts weren’t the best, but try to find a generously proportioned 3 or 4 bedroom apartment with multiple living spaces and a decent sized balcony for a family of 4 for under 3 million!!!