The Yes In My Backyard movement is lobbying for denser cities and more housing in places people want to work and live and YIMBYs want these homes built yesterday. But the NIMBYs haven’t given up yet.
On a cold June night in Sydney’s eastern suburbs dozens of residents, most insulated by navy puffer coats and vests, have piled into the Double Bay Bowling Club to air their concerns at a housing forum.
They’re not happy that apartments are going up in their suburbs — some of Sydney’s most affluent. They’re concerned more people will clog the roads and strain infrastructure, especially in an area without a “decent supermarket”. They’re nervous a six-storey “monstrosity” will block their sunlight. They’re anxious the “runoff from construction” into the harbour will impact their children who “enjoy sailing”. They want legal recourse.
A resident who owns multiple investment properties in North Bondi is struggling with interest repayments and land tax and worries the onus is on him as a landlord to make rent more affordable. They’re angry “existing homeowners” are being blamed for the housing crisis when the government is allowing migration.
“We should move out and accept higher density and unliveable suburbs?” one woman asks into the microphone. “Well excuse me, it’s not our fault.”
The room murmurs in agreement.
This small gathering of homeowners and politicians is just one of the many local fronts of resistance to the Albanese government’s plan to deliver 1.2 million homes across the country by June 2029. The prime minister recently conceded it is “too hard” to build housing in Australia and promised to cut red tape to help boost supply. While many are saying no to development in their suburbs, there is a growing appetite for “housing abundance” helped by Australia’s blossoming Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) movement. YIMBYs want denser cities, they want more housing in places people want to work and live, and they want them built yesterday.
‘Not because of a New York Times bestseller’
While rolling back regulations and boosting construction isn’t usually associated with those on the left of politics, support for a “liberalism that builds” is gathering momentum globally. It has been helped by the popularity of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance, in which the authors attempt to reorient progressive politics around the provocation: “can we solve our problems with supply?”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers keeps mentioning it, Competition Minister Andrew Leigh has quoted it and Productivity Commission head Danielle Wood even claims she read it “before it was cool”. So popular is the book in Australia’s political capital that two Canberra bookstores told the Australian Financial Review they’d sold out.
Housing Minister Clare O’Neil says her focus is “absolutely on building more homes”.
“It’s been the defining motivation of our Labor government for the last three years — not because of a New York Times bestseller — but because we’re working to correct a 40-year failure of governments to build enough of them,” she tells the ABC.
“So many of the housing issues people face are solved by improving our ability to build more homes at scale. Because more homes means more affordable housing — for renters, first home buyers and downsizers alike.”
In NSW, the government is attempting to build some 112,000 new homes by overriding council restrictions to allow denser housing near public transport. The state posted the biggest increase in approvals of higher-density housing (apartments, townhouses, terrace and semi-detached houses) in the year to May.
Just three of the 171 centres the Minns government is targeting are located in Sydney’s east where the housing forum in Double Bay is heating up.
Local state member Liberal Kellie Sloane, who is hosting the forum, asks how many people have been doorknocked by a real estate agent and a sea of hands go up. One woman, who lives on Rose Bay’s Wilberforce Avenue where 12 owners are asking for $165 million from developers for their properties, says real estate agents won’t leave her alone: “I’m very scared that I’m going to be forced out of my home.” A house up the road from her that “couldn’t get a nibble at $8 million” sold earlier this year for $16 million.
In the 1.6 square kilometres that incorporate these inner-eastern suburbs of Edgecliff, Double Bay and Darling Point, population density has remained more or less stagnant for a decade, according to figures provided by Cotality to the ABC.
Up goes another puffy navy sleeve with a question.
Tom, an Edgecliff resident, says there have been a lot of “fair comments” about the need for infrastructure to support more housing but suggests the community could reflect on its history of opposing any infrastructure development. Woollahra residents objected to a train station (chasing an injunction all the way to the High Court) and also opposed a plan to turn a derelict service station into a Woolworths and apartment block. Those in the front rows turn around to take a better squiz at the questioner.
Sloane identifies Tom as a member of YIMBY Sydney and thanks him for coming — “we’ve got to build!” — but she maintains the train station was a bad idea.
A suspicion of developers
Australia’s most beloved, if fictional, NIMBY — The Castle’s protagonist Darryl Kerrigan — reminds us of a time when the arguments for and against development were simpler: humble home owners taking on greedy developers, or environmentalists trying to save the trees.
But Australia’s sprawling YIMBY movement is gaining political power amid a national housing crisis when a mortgage or even affordable rent has become further out of reach. Last month the average house price in Australia surpassed $1 million (Sydney’s median house price is predicted to hit $1.8m next year). If you’ve been lucky enough to overcome the average savings period for a deposit that now often extends beyond a decade, the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council’s recent report found that by the end of 2024 it took half of median household income to service a new mortgage. Meanwhile low rental vacancy rates mean people are climbing over each other for the luxury of forking out 33 per cent of median household income to cover a new lease. Affordable rent, attainable mortgages and the ability to live closer to work, family and schools? Tell him he’s dreamin’.
In Queensland there has historically been suspicion of development, says Travis Jordan of YIMBY group Greater Brisbane. He reckons the state’s planning, environment and heritage laws were shaped in the 1990s in reaction to a period of questionable — and in some cases outright corrupt — relationships between politicians and developers when the concerns of communities and local councils were dismissed in favour of demolition and rezoning.
Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, in office from 1968-1987, famously disregarded Brisbane’s heritage. His connections with the “white-shoe brigade” of property developers and the midnight destruction of iconic Brisbane landmarks like the Cloudland Ballroom at the hands of the infamous Deen Bros loom large in the memories of Queenslanders.
“The people fighting up-zoning are stuck in the ’90s and they want their neighbourhoods to be stuck there too,” Jordan says.
NIMBYs tend to be home owners and home owners tend to be older — Jordan sees a generation in Brisbane who went from fighting for “green bans” in the ’80s and ’90s to fighting to “save our suburbs”.
He says opponents of density are contributing to a situation in which many people face a choice between renting in “barely habitable character homes” with poor energy ratings or getting into the property market hours from their workplace and family.
“In Brisbane, it’s hard to look at the townhouse ban or how widespread our character housing protections are and think we’ve got the balance right,” he says. “We started by bringing in regulations that stop the worst harms and ended up with ones that — by the lord mayor’s own admission — stop anything at all.”
Jordan thinks that future housing is being held to standards that didn’t apply to the very housing people want to safeguard.
“[NIMBYs will] wax lyrical about a street where every old home looks the same while whinging that every apartment looks the same.”
‘The climate crisis is a housing crisis’
In Queensland frequent flooding has left “whole neighbourhoods unlivable” and people are accepting harder trade-offs, he says.
“For a lot of people in Brisbane — especially renters and older people — the climate crisis is a housing crisis.”
Jordan, a former Greens staffer, rents one of the state’s iconic Queenslanders and says they were designed to suit the Sunshine State’s tropical climate but have now become an impediment to climate-resilient homes.
“They’re by design near impossible to insulate and drought-proof. Can’t cool down in summer and can’t stay warm in winter,” he says.
New housing is often opposed on grounds of preserving something, whether it is heritage, privacy, or as one local mayor at Sydney’s Double Bay housing forum described, the ill-defined and apparently static “character” of the community.
But for many conservationists, increasing density in cities and stopping the creep of low-density residential development over large areas of land is crucial to preserving something else: biodiversity.
A 2023 report from the Queensland Conservation Council found that urban sprawl was fast-tracking the extinction crisis in the state. The council’s urban sustainability lead, Jen Basham, says urban sprawl is the “biggest threat to the unique biodiversity and liveability”, particularly in South East Queensland where there is a projected population growth of more than 2 million people by 2046.
“Waterways are being impacted, wildlife, such as our beloved koalas, are being killed and displaced, not just by the initial developments but then the years of infrastructure that has to follow it,” she says.
Conservationists are supportive of the grassroots YIMBY movement, Basham says, and Australia needs to “build up, not out” but YIMBYs have found a mixed response from Greens politicians at all levels of government. In Perth the West Australian Greens leader Brad Pettitt recently said that his colleagues on the west coast should relinquish inner-city NIMBYism as “we need to get rid of red tape”. In Sydney, Greens councillors have been voting against high density developments, most recently against the Inner West Council’s push to have the state government rezone former WestConnex sites, on the grounds the housing wouldn’t be 100 per cent public housing.
Nevertheless, this month the NSW government announced one of the sites, a slab of land on Sydney’s Parramatta Road, would be transformed into 577 apartments, 220 of which will be set aside for essential workers at a discounted rate. (A 2024 Anglicare Australia report looked at more than 45,000 rental listings across a weekend and found just 1.4 per cent were affordable for a nurse, and 0.9 per cent for an early childcare educator.)
Izabella Antoniou, one of the Greens councillors who has voted against development, says even if deregulation does lead to a greater supply of housing, it won’t help affordability.
“We have incentives such as negative gearing and land banking that continue to drive up prices and ensure housing is an investment not a human right,” she says. “To deliver genuine affordability, we need targeted interventions such as rent controls, strong inclusionary zoning targets, and the mass building of public housing by governments.”
Antoniou maintains that government intervention is the only way out of this housing crisis as “private housing developers won’t fix a system they’re benefiting from”.
“We need to ensure we’re building homes, not investment portfolios,” she says.
University of Melbourne social policy researcher Max Holleran says the YIMBY movement has come under attack from anti-gentrification progressives who, as Holleran puts it, argue these groups are “merely social justice shells concealing property interests”.
Unlike housing activists in decades past, YIMBYs are not prioritising the fight to protect existing public housing stock and push against evictions but are instead what Holleran calls “supply-side believers” who are more preoccupied with building more of everything.
“They’re basically saying ‘you’re not going to get entirely inclusionary zoning in every neighborhood and you are going to have to work with the developers’,” he says.
Resistance to the cult of supply-side economics
While no one at Double Bay’s housing forum is arguing for more public housing, the question of affordability is raised repeatedly — how would a few luxury apartments in such a posh part of the city even help a generation of people locked out of the property market?
YIMBYs are clear it isn’t a one for one process but instead a game of musical chairs — the multi-million dollar apartments going up in Sydney’s exclusive east aren’t immediately helping your average Australian with a piddling house deposit. Instead wealthy people who can afford them will move out of older stock and the person who buys that home will move out of theirs and so forth, speeding up the process of low quality stock at the back end of the line devaluing or getting redeveloped.
“This is actually really intuitive,” says Justin Simon, co-founder of YIMBY Sydney.
“New cars start at around $30K and you have used cars right down the price spectrum but when production stopped during COVID-19, those new car customers had to buy used instead, and the price went up dramatically.
“The same thing is happening when you don’t build new units in Woollahra or [Sydney’s] north shore: those people will buy a terrace in Ashfield instead, gut it and turn it into a luxury home. The family they beat at the auction has to move out to Liverpool, and the nurse who was living in Liverpool is now moving to Queensland.
“Everyone in this chain would have a better living situation and a shorter commute if we built an extra unit in the eastern suburbs — how transformative would it be if we built tens of thousands?”
YIMBYs often point across the ditch to Auckland where studies of a 2016 reform to allow more townhouses and apartments showed an increase in construction and decrease in rents. Simon cites 2019 research from the RBA, which found that every 1 per cent increase in housing supply eventually brings prices down by 2.5 per cent.
But the notion that addressing supply will help the housing crisis has its critics. ANZ’s chief economist has said focusing on new supply alone “is unlikely to materially improve affordability, even in the medium term”. Australian urban planning academics have instead suggested winding back tax breaks like negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount to reinvest into social housing and here at the ABC Michael Janda has written that other policies discourage Australians to free up their capital and spare rooms (including the tax-free status of the family home).
A shortage of planners but an excess of planning
But others say unlocking supply hasn’t happened fast enough. Despite Labor’s housing abundance rhetoric, the Liberal Party’s housing spokesperson Senator Andrew Bragg isn’t impressed and thinks Australia is yet to have a government that fully backs the YIMBY movement.
A recent report from the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council found Australia is already likely to miss its target by about 262,000 homes.
“Ultimately the numbers aren’t moving,” Bragg tells the ABC. “I think one of the reasons is that, because too many developments are still being kiboshed and I would say that a lot of the agencies, including federal agencies, have not been effective in actually getting houses or supporting the development of housing.”
YIMBY Melbourne’s Jonathan O’Brien says it can be easy to focus on the headline-grabbing behaviour of NIMBY councillors but behind them sits teams of professional planners. New analysis released today by YIMBY Melbourne, in a new “pro-growth” online journal Inflection Points, claims the number of planners Australia-wide has increased dramatically over the past three decades but key productivity outcomes — including the number of home completions — have only worsened.
“We’ve gone to planning meetings where there have been 40 rejections for a single subdivision and we’ve had members who have been the sole person speaking in favour of that subdivision,” O’Brien says. “Legacy planning is essentially like a set of normative claims, like ‘this should go here and this should look like this’ but it doesn’t actually make anything happen — things usually happen despite planning, not because of it.”
O’Brien says there’s not a shortage of planners but an excess of planning. YIMBY Melbourne’s analysis found there are almost nine times as many planners today as there were in 1986. For every planner in 1986, we built more than 50 homes, we now build fewer than 10 homes per planner.
The fight for the missing middle
Canberra’s YIMBY movement took off almost a decade ago with memes — specifically a Facebook page called Bush Capital Memes for Action-Oriented Teens (in reference to Canberra’s bus operator Action).
Greater Canberra organiser Howard Maclean says it became a place for people to talk about the city’s urbanism and established transit in particular as “really core” to how Australian YIMBYs think about housing policy.
A meme from a Facebook page called Bush Capital Memes for Action-Oriented Teens. (Facebook: Bush Capital Memes for Action-Oriented Teens)
Maclean says YIMBYs across the country are not just fighting for more apartments but for what they call the missing middle: a “gentle density” between the urban sprawl of free-standing single family dwellings and large apartment blocks. They want more townhouses, terrace homes, low-rise apartments and multi-occupancy blocks near public transport.
From conservation councils, to renting advocacy groups, to architects, to community housing groups Missing Middle Canberra is a coalition for medium-density housing. Its activism has helped along a proposal for planning rules that is currently open to public feedback.
Maclean, a member of the Labor party, says these reforms would be the largest single increase in Canberra’s zoned capacity in the capital’s history, boosting the number of homes that can legally be built in the previously untouchable and “practically sacrosanct” RZ1 (suburban low-density, single-dwelling housing) alone “by at least a factor of four”.
The reforms have been introduced for consultation, then they could be referred to a legislative committee.
“This is a very long and slow process of zoning and supply-side reform to housing,” Maclean says. “There are no quick wins and persistence is really key in order to actually see results.”
The changing faces of YIMBYs and NIMBYs
Max Holleran, who wrote the book on YIMBYs, says NIMBYism has become a “dirty word” not just for its parochialism but for its anti-urbanism as it resists density and transport in favour of the white picket fence single-family home streets of suburbia.
Holleran has written the YIMBY movement of “disgruntled millennials alarmed by rising rent prices” was founded in San Francisco in 2013 by maths teacher Sonia Trauss who began showing up to zoning and council meetings where she found even modest two- or three-storey apartment buildings under review were opposed for problems such as “casting shadows”.
He says that developers often build in lower income areas where they face less opposition.
“These [residents] might be working a bunch of jobs, English might not be their first language, they might not have a university degree and they don’t have the time or energy to go to [planning or council] meetings,” he says.
The people who would benefit from increased housing stock aren’t turning up to housing forums. Or as YIMBY Melbourne’s O’Brien puts it: “We are the voice of the most important stakeholder, which is the people who want to live somewhere but can’t and the planning process favours incumbents.”
YIMBY Sydney’s Justin Simon says politicians and planners are used to dealing with “a very narrow, very noisy class of people who like to say no” which skews their perceptions of what a community will allow.
“We can show those planners and those councillors that actually there is debate within the community on this and if they want to go out on a limb and try really hard to build more housing there will be somebody there who is going to say, like, ‘good job’.”
Simon says NIMBYs shift their arguments depending on the context but the goal is the same: “no new people, and no changes to the urban environment”. He’s seen people in Leichhardt, just a few kilometres west of the city’s CBD, declare their backyards “wildlife corridors”. When the Sydney Morning Herald asked the head of the Haberfield Association, who successfully secured his entire suburb as heritage conserved, where young people should live he was stumped, before suggesting Orange (250 km away) or Bathurst (190 km away).
“From any person’s perspective there can be good or bad things about development, but when you own your home the biggest positive is just not relevant to you, because you’re not getting rent increases,” Simon says. “That means you can engage in whatever motivated reasoning you like — it’s a luxury belief.”
In one message, seen by the ABC, a man in Sydney’s inner west tells YIMBY Sydney he signed up to the movement after he was evicted from his inner west home when his rent went up from $492 to $741 within two years.
“Often we’re accused of being funded by developers, and that shows there is such a gulf in values that the only reason they could conceive of being a YIMBY is because they’re being paid off,” Simon says. “This barrier will be immediately familiar to many who’ve had their parents tell them to ‘just move a bit further out’.”
But while stereotypes about who wants to build more — namely, only developers — aren’t adhering as securely to YIMBYs, who now claim a level of ideological and socioeconomic diversity, those rallying to oppose development are also challenging the silhouette of a grouchy, heritage-obsessed crank.
Last month dozens of kids in football jerseys and residents gathered in Sydney’s inner west to protest a planning proposal lodged by a developer to build 200 apartments on industrial land next to where APIA Leichhardt Football Club trains.
Although many of those gathered admitted to the ABC they didn’t live in the suburb, they didn’t look like your typical NIMBYs — they were young families concerned a new apartment block would force their kids’ football club to adjust training hours to avoid noise complaints. They were not thinking about housing density or affordability. They were thinking about a potential disruption to their own lives.
Tony Raciti, the club’s president and the face of the campaign, insists he is all for housing density.
“We’d love to see skyscrapers here,” he tells the ABC, gesturing to the suburb’s empty skyline.
“Love it! No problem!”
The caveat?
“Not here!”
Credits
Words: Gina Rushton
Editor: Catherine Taylor
Illustrations: Kylie Silvester
