In 2024, YIMBYism made its way into top Democrats’ speeches. 2025 saw the movement finally break into the party’s actual policy.
For years, the “yes in my backyard” pro-housing movement struggled to gain traction in most states and cities, failing to get either voters or elected officials on board with wonkish proposals concerning zoning and regulatory reform. Last year, that all began to change. The high cost of housing was rising in polls of Americans’ top concerns, and evidence that the U.S.’s severe shortage was to blame had become overwhelming. During the 2024 election, housing advocates were thrilled to find top Democratic leaders begin to sing from the YIMBY hymnal. Barack Obama anointed the movement at the Democratic National Convention, calling for the country to “build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes." That fall, Kamala Harris ran on a plan to build 3 million new homes in four years, blaming the “serious housing shortage” for high prices.
While Democrats lost the election, their renewed focus on the housing shortage, which has long been more acute in blue states, ultimately proved prescient. Four of the five states in which Donald Trump gained the most ground — California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts — happen to have the first, second, fourth, and 10th highest median home prices in the continental U.S., respectively. Indications that housing had become a unique vulnerability for Democrats went even deeper: An NBC analysis found that the president also made his biggest gains in counties with the “toughest housing markets.”
That was the backdrop going into 2025, and, at long last, the lesson seems to have sunk in. A record number of blue states enacted pro-housing reforms this year.
Among the new laws:
California: Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a number of bills that collectively represented the state’s biggest reforms in decades, streamlining approval processes and overriding local regulations to allow for denser neighborhoods and more homes near transit. Most significantly, the state finally made changes to the California Environmental Quality Act, a decades-old law that has been frequently abused by housing opponents.
Connecticut: Gov. Ned Lamont signed a law expediting the conversion of commercial properties to residences, eliminating parking requirements for some new housing, requiring localities to develop plans for new housing units, and tying some state funding to new production.
Oregon: Gov. Tina Kotek signed multiple laws expediting new production, speeding up production of low-income units, and providing new state funding for public housing and housing-related infrastructure. Most notably, it’s led the country in standardizing zoning rules, overriding localities that previously blocked many types of housing.
Washington: Gov. Bob Ferguson signed bills reducing parking requirements, expanding tax credits for affordable units, overriding local regulations to mandate denser neighborhoods and more homes near transit, and exempting some new projects from the state’s environmental law.
Rhode Island: Gov. Dan McKee signed legislation expediting permitting; allowing for new development in commercial areas; and green-lighting new, smaller units like townhomes in areas where they’d previously been limited.
Maine: Gov. Janet Mills signed laws expediting permitting, requiring some localities to allow for more housing units, and boosting the conversion of old or commercial properties into residences.
Colorado: Gov. Jared Polis signed laws streamlining production of “modular” homes — manufactured, ready-to-go houses — and allowing smaller apartment buildings to have single-stair systems.
San Francisco: Mayor Daniel Lurie signed a major rezoning law, overcoming decades of resistance, that will allow thousands of new units to be built.
New York City: Voters approved changes to the city’s charter that expedited certain affordable housing projects and eliminated council members’ ability to block new projects.
While the measures vary in impact, the trend in blue states this year was clear. And it’s hard to ignore the rise of the “Abundance” movement, which cannonballed into Democratic discourse this year after Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published a book of the same name. Advocates in the Abundance space were pleased by what they saw in 2025, from housing reform to energy policy. “I’m really happy with how quickly it’s been adopted,” Derek Kaufman, the founder and CEO of Inclusive Abundance, told me.
The fingerprints of the movement are indeed all over blue states’ moves this year. In addition to the new focus on housing, several governors quietly tip-toed away from hardline environmentalism and towards the all-of-the-above energy strategy favored by many in the Abundance camp. Kaufman called 2025 a “watershed year” and said he foresees the movement having lasting political influence. “I want to see, into the gubernatorial [elections] and midterms in 2026, more and more candidates picking up these ideas, using the right messaging and winning, and ideally into 2028 with the presidential primary.”
The developments in New York, a city with a population larger than 38 states, are especially notable. In the final days of 2024, outgoing mayor Eric Adams signed “City of Yes,” a sweeping rezoning plan set to unlock tens of thousands of new units. And this past November, voters approved three ballot measures that significantly altered the city’s charter in order to remove roadblocks to new construction. Together, these developments put the city, currently a symbol of the nation’s housing crisis, at the forefront of the country’s reform efforts. “This is seismic in terms of the amount of housing it could potentially unleash in New York City,” said Amit Singh Bagga, who directed the “Yes on Affordable Housing” campaign in support of the measures. “We haven’t seen these types of reforms in New York in decades.”
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Several states can make the same claim. After years of stalled efforts, California finally saw a breakthrough this year when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the state’s biggest reforms in decades. The author of one of those reforms, state Sen. Scott Wiener, is now running for Congress in San Francisco and lists housing as his top priority on his campaign website. Newsom himself has bragged about the new laws as he gears up for an all-but-certain presidential bid. The very fact that ambitious politicians feel an incentive to align with the pro-housing movement represents a significant change to Democratic politics.
That shift was seen in New Jersey, where Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill ran on a fairly robust pro-housing platform during her campaign. It was a notable choice in a state dominated by suburban communities that have historically resisted new housing. And yet, despite her opponent’s efforts to make her support for new construction a liability, she won comfortably. I had the opportunity to ask her recently why she felt her campaign didn’t suffer politically.
“I didn’t garner backlash at the polls because the number one issue I was hearing about until utility costs went through the roof was housing costs,” Sherrill told me. “People realize there’s a deep need.”
The evolution of the politics of housing was also on display across the Hudson. Many on the political left have long been skeptical of efforts to boost private development, viewing it as a giveaway to corporations and landlords. But Zohran Mamdani eventually came to run on a decidedly pro-housing — even Abundance-curious — platform. He began his primary campaign with a questionable housing record, having previously rallied against new building in his district, and ended it by appearing on Thompson’s podcast and telling the New York Times that he had changed his mind on “the role of the private market in housing construction.” Even many progressive and leftist opponents of Abundance — who argue the movement ignores issues of wealth concentration and corporate power — now back YIMBY reforms. Bagga attributes the evolution in part to the severity of the crisis. “The way in which the housing crisis has become so acute has forced the left to reckon with its own sort of intransigence on this front,” he said.
Still, the progress is not universal, or guaranteed. The actual impact of the laws enacted this year vary significantly in scale — and many will require dogged, years-long implementation to be effective. It’s worth noting too that, even after these reforms, several red states, including Montana and Texas, continued to lead the way in pro-housing policy this year, lapping many of the blue states above.
Some Democrats, like Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, continue to stand in the way of new development. Hobbs infuriated housing advocates in 2024 when she vetoed a bipartisan bill to jump-start so-called “starter homes,” a decision she attributed to the bill’s “unintended outcomes.” Her continued opposition has, singlehandedly, frozen those efforts, even as they enjoy majority support in the state’s legislature.
Others, like Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, are giving housing advocates exactly what they want — but facing challenges in achieving results. Kotek, who came to office in 2023, has aggressively prioritized housing during her time in office, arguably more than any other governor. She’s signed numerous laws aimed at speeding up production, including several this year, but has struggled to meet the targets she previously set. This year, she lowered the state’s goal from 36,000 new housing units per year to 30,000 — a number it still didn’t meet in 2025.
In the long term, Oregon still expects to meet its housing production goals. A recent state report estimated that 250,000 new homes will be built by 2035. To those who’ve spent years, even decades, toiling in the housing sphere, that kind of prognosis still represents welcome progress. For those living in high-cost areas, it means they’re still years away from relief.
More than that, it means the direct political benefit of Democrats’ housing shift could still be a ways away. Many communities may not see tempered housing prices for years, which will do little to stanch the affordability problems that are driving so many Americans from blue states to red ones. That general migration will march on, and it could be enormously consequential in future elections. Right now, both liberal- and conservative-leaning projections estimate that red states will gain significant power in the Electoral College and House of Representatives after the 2030 census and reapportionment — which will make it even harder for Democrats to win the presidency in 2032.
The party’s recent shift on housing is likely coming too late to meaningfully change that trajectory. But it could be the beginning of crucial work toward repairing its tattered brand. And it could set in motion years of building and growth, setting up the next decade to be far different from this one. Better late than never.
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