To the editor: Since YIMBYs of NOVA, an official chapter of YIMBY Action, entered the Arlington Missing Middle (aka Expanded Housing Options or EHO) debate in August 2021, the organization framed its support for the initiative as a fight for housing equity and racial justice. Given Arlington’s progressive inclination, this message resonated.
But YIMBY Action, the parent organization of the YIMBYs of NOVA, has a checkered reputation.
Since 2017 it has aggressively pushed for a “trickle down” solution to housing. Numerous interviews with housing advocates have illustrated a build-first-ask-questions-later attitude that permeates everything YIMBY Action touches. This attitude of just building more and hoping that it will work out for those already living in the community is the same as the attitudes of those who have pursued the gentrification of historically marginalized communities.
YIMBY Action’s enthusiasm for gentrification has never been a secret. Founder Sonja Trauss has made her contempt for anti-gentrification activists known in her fight to gentrify San Francisco’s Mission District, a historically racially diverse and predominantly working-class community.
As Trauss and others called for the construction of more housing, community leaders expressed concern that further development would result in the construction of only luxury housing and the gentrification of the community. In response, Trauss described opponents of the construction as “nativists” who were “exactly the same as those who don’t want immigrants.”
Given YIMBY Action’s historical animosity towards anti-gentrification, why would YIMBYs of NOVA be different?
There is no debate that the affordable-housing situation in Arlington is dire. Affordable – often six-, eight- or 12-plex garden apartments – have been demolished and replaced with luxury apartments and townhomes.
Those developments housed diverse communities from across the world. My best friend growing up, the son of Bolivian immigrants, lived in one of these affordable apartment buildings. The site of that building is now covered with luxury townhomes currently selling for $1.2 million each.
The few affordable-housing developments that have escaped the greedy eyes of real-estate developers have fallen into varying degrees of disrepair. One of the most egregious examples of this is the Serrano Apartments, which for years, despite protestations from residents, has been plagued with “rodent infestations, mold, HVAC problems, slapdash repair work, and other poor living conditions.”
The Missing Middle plan championed by the YIMBYs of NOVA, however, is unlikely to resolve this lack of affordable, livable and safe housing. Although it claims its mission is to “make housing affordable to all by enabling the development of more and denser housing,” the plan they are pursuing will, as county leaders have admitted, have “very close to zero” impact on the price of housing in Arlington.
Since the Missing Middle plan will have no meaningful impact on the price of housing, what, precisely, does YIMBY Action hope to achieve in Arlington? Based on the statements and opinions espoused the founders of the organization, one can only conclude that YIMBYs of NOVA are cynically exploiting those in the community who support diversity and inclusion to further gentrify Arlington. The people they claim to speak for, people who can barely afford to live in Arlington now, will be priced out of the market.
So, what does YIMBY Action really want? I submit that their goal is to provide housing for the tech-sector workers likely to flock to Arlington with the Amazon HQ2 project.
Perhaps instead of YIMBY (“Yes In My Back Yard”) the organization should adopt a new acronym: “GIMBY” or “Gentrification In My Back Yard”.
Alan Bederka, Arlington
