Can new cities be built in California? How can the federal government facilitate housing affordability? Are charter cities really happening? What lessons can policy advocates take from the YIMBY movement?
While we didn’t plan a formal “housing track” for Progress Conference 2025, the concentration of experts created one organically. There were many many talks, unconference sessions, and conversation about housing, urbanism, and infrastructure. Here are some selected talks from the conference and related writing.
writes about how good policy ideas become real-world progress.
Patience and perspective have to enter the picture here. To stick with YIMBYism as an example, we’ve been working on housing reform for about a decade, and people will sometimes question why we haven’t “fixed” the housing crisis yet. Often implicit in that question is an assumption that the movement has prioritized the wrong things. Obviously, I’m inclined to disagree, but the deeper lesson here is that high leverage doesn’t always mean fast.
With regard to U.S. housing policy, we live in a different universe from the one we inhabited 10 years ago, but we’re refactoring institutions that developed over the course of a century, so there’s miles left to go. The same could be said of many issue areas that concern members of the progress community.
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The progress community still believes in solving specific problems; we’re just becoming more self-aware about implementation as a meta-problem. We’re moving beyond simply identifying root causes to thinking more deeply about how to intervene in systems that are sometimes inefficient and other times actively hostile. Whatever the case, there’s a growing recognition that a solution is worthless without a mechanism for putting it into the world.
Talk videos
Building Freedom’s Forge 2.0, on 100 SQM an hour north of Silicon Valley
California is worth fighting for.
Jan Sramek, founder and CEO of California Forever — which recently announced the Suisun City expansion plan — spoke about the inspiration for and progress towards building a new city in California. Jan’s description: “America cannot remain the world’s superpower without building its response to Shenzhen. And we cannot build a response to Shenzhen without proximity to Silicon Valley. So the future of America depends, once again, on California. This is also California’s best chance at owning the Abundance Agenda, and showing it can build.”
of IFP called this talk “a very compelling case that the new city they are building northeast of San Francisco has legs: both that they will be able to build it, and that it can be viable in the long term as a midsize urban agglomeration.”
Progress In Practice: YIMBY lessons in single-issue advocacy
Sonja Trauss (Executive Director at YIMBY Law) and
(Executive Director at YIMBY Action) did a joint talk on lessons learned from the YIMBY movement that can be applied by other policy advocates (and followed this talk with a hands-on workshop). “Single-issue constituent advocacy is the most effective power-building strategy in modern politics. Building a visible constituency with a narrow focus avoids falling prey to the omnicause and enables you to influence policymakers. These are the lessons learned from nearly a decade of practical experience on the part of YIMBYs nationwide.”
How the Federal Government Can Help Solve the Housing Crisis
Will Poff-Webster (Institute for Progress) interviews Chris Elmendorf (UC Davis School of Law) and Alex Armlovich (formerly Niskanen Center) about their research on policy proposals for Leveraging LIHTC for Housing Abundance and other recent federal action on housing policy. “Thus far, the YIMBY movement has (appropriately) focused on advocating for policy changes at the state and local level in the US. Indeed, that’s where most of the juice is when it comes to zoning and land use issues. But that doesn’t mean there’s no role for the federal government: In fact, the Senate Banking Committee just unanimously passed a package of housing reforms that might move the needle. And there are other ambitious ideas — such as using tax credits to influence housing policy in big cities — that could do even more to help.”
Charter Cities: It’s Happening, an Update on Traction
Mark Lutter, Executive Director of the Charter Cities Institute, covers charter cities. Charter cities have long been discussed. The last few years have seen substantive traction, including serious teams, government engagement, and legislation being passed.
Laura and Sonja recommend this post as a pre-read to their join talk.
Most US cities are predominately one-party towns, and the press often flattens local candidates into a spectrum of blue, from far left to moderate. But when you zoom in, things don’t line up left to right because many local issues aren’t “naturally” moderate or “naturally” progressive. Much ink has been spilled with folks arguing that “you can’t be a real [conservative/moderate/progressive] if you’re bad on housing.” But I’m going to sidestep this by saying that YIMBYism can —and should — be left, right, or center. When you’re fighting regressive regulations, you can be anything.
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YIMBYism’s ideological promiscuity is a feature, not a bug.
and this essay as prep for their action-oriented workshop:
A lot of what a politician does is try to collect as many interest groups as they can. Ideally, they want the support of the chamber of commerce AND the teachers union AND the homeowners association AND environmentalists… Candidates run around town having one-on-ones with the leaders of local organizations, collecting supporters like pokemon cards. Robert Dahl’s theory of interest-group pluralism basically summarizes this as “politicians are like several interest groups jammed together in a trench coat.”
But here’s the problem: groups have differing, and often opposed, agendas. Especially for groups fighting for the level of change YIMBYs envision, our goals are incompatible with other interest groups a politician might want in their trench coat.
As an advocacy organization fighting for major policy changes, our job is to be (1) valuable enough that we can (2) demand public specificity so a candidate is willing to (3) give up other interest groups to have us inside their trench coat coalition and (4) still win.
, RPI Fellow and Chairman of the Board for Strong Towns, shared his reflections on the conference writ large and some specific thoughts about the housing, urbanism, and infrastructure conversations:
At the conference I learned more about California Forever via a session with the developer. Candidly, I went in expecting to be disappointed. Instead I was delighted by the project’s dense, walkable, human-scale design, and its approach of creating a permissive platform to be built up by many hands. To get a better sense of the project, I recommend Aaron Lubeck’s description of the design, and Michael Natelli’s more general description of the approach. I don’t know about the financing or infrastructure phasing, so I can’t speak to those aspects, but after seeing the vision I’m rooting for its success.
Earlier this year, Jason Crawford wrote an essay about the opportunity for a YIMBY movement for healthcare.
The YIMBY movement is now well established and gaining momentum in the fight against the regulations and culture that hold back housing. More broadly, similar forces hold back building all kinds of things, including power lines, transit, and other infrastructure. The same spirit that animates YIMBY, and some of the same community of writers and activists, has also been pushing to reform regulation such as NEPA.
Healthcare has both types of problems. We need breakthroughs in science and technology to beat cancer, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and aging. But also, healthcare (in the US at least) is far more expensive and less effective than it should be.
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Where is the equivalent of the YIMBY movement for healthcare? Where are the people pointing out the gross violation of economic wisdom and common sense? Where are the campaigners for reform against the worst inefficiencies?
This field is wide open, and some smart writer or savvy activist should step in and fill the vacuum.
We are publishing videos of conference talks over the next several weeks. We’ll post videos on the RPI YouTube channel. 2025 talks will all be added to this specific playlist here.
Thanks to Big Think our conference media partner, for producing all these videos and The Engine of Progress, a special issue of Big Think exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.
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