Guest Opinion: Saying Yes In My Backyard

Embrace Your Inner YIMBY

By Andy Sense

Special to the GPHN

Denver faces an exciting moment right now as our rapid growth demands that we think hard about our values and about the kind of city we want to be.

Are we going to accept a sprawling metropolitan area, or would we rather see a denser urban core? Do we mean it when we say we need more affordable housing? If so, are we willing to embrace new housing opportunities in our own neighborhoods? Are we going to just accept that personal vehicles are the way most people will always get around, or are we going to develop a vision for a city that legitimately offers people a variety of mobility options?

Recent issues like the city’s new dedicated affordable housing fund, the ongoing argument about micro-units and mandatory parking minimums, and even our own neighborhood discussion about the prospective new distillery on Kearney Street have brought these tensions into stark relief.

Enter the YIMBY.

What does a YIMBY want?

Most people have heard the term NIMBY – short for Not In My Backyard. Since that term has essentially come to mean, “anybody who disagrees with me,” many of us have even been called that before.

But what is a YIMBY – Yes In My Backyard – and what does a YIMBY want?

Recently, cities around the globe – San Francisco, Portland, Queensland, Australia, Sika, Alaska, etc.  – have seen the formalizing of YIMBY organizations. This past June, Boulder hosted the first International YIMBY Conference called YIMBYtown.

Here in Denver, the YIMBY ethos has been well represented by at least a couple of widely followed Facebook pages, DenverUrbanism and DenverInfill. As Denver grows, YIMBY ideas are resonating with a lot of people.

YIMBYism can mean different things to different people, but ultimately, as an approach to urban planning, it focuses on two broad and overlapping priorities: 1. housing, and 2. planning for people, not cars.

YIMBYs perceive that most cities face huge shortages of housing of all types, but especially housing that is affordable. Most people can agree that Denver needs more housing, but the question is tougher when it comes to adding housing in our own backyards.

Many YIMBYs feel that housing is an equity issue, and that neighborhoods with great schools and amenities should be available to anybody who wants to live there. Affordable housing, including mixed income, multi-family housing, is an important way to increase the diversity of neighborhoods, and thus, make them stronger. So while it might be hard to accept change in “stable” neighborhoods, YIMBYs embrace increased density because they believe increased density means more equitable and exciting communities, and it means cities that just work better.

Planning for people, not cars

YIMBYs also recognize that not enough affordable housing within city limits means more sprawl as potential homebuyers find themselves having to “drive until they qualify.”

Since sprawl often narrows people’s transportation options, not enough housing correlates with more cars on the road and more of the parking problems that are the focus of just about any neighborhood discussion these days. That’s why YIMBYs also tend to be in favor of urban planning that starts with how to move people around – rather than on how to move cars around.

YIMBYs perceive that a lot of urban planning has focused on how to make personal vehicles the easiest way to move, even though personal vehicles are not space-efficient, are bad for the environment, and don’t make any of our neighborhoods nicer places to live.

Mobility-wise, consider the simple geometry of how much space individuals in their personal vehicles occupy, versus the same number of people in a bus or on bikes. Is there still room on Denver’s roads for us to keep planning in ways that promote the use of personal vehicles, or is it time to start thinking a little differently?

Dashing across Colfax

Consider at the same time, the pedestrian or person in a wheelchair on a one-way road like 14th Avenue who is trying to cross the street. Is that street designed to help people move around, or is it designed to move as much metal as possible? What are the costs of that?

Consider the bike rider who gets to an intersection like Alameda and Fairmount only to discover that his bike won’t trigger the light to change so he has to make one of several decisions that put him at increased risk on a very busy road.

Consider the pedestrian trying to cross Colfax who has to walk four blocks to find a crosswalk. Is she really going to walk those four blocks, or will she make a decision to cross the street unprotected by pedestrian infrastructure?

These folks are the ones not contributing to the “congestion” associated with personal vehicle use, and yet we’ve designed our streets to put them at the most risk and to make it hardest on them to get around.

Rethinking spaces

YIMBYs understand that almost everybody is a pedestrian at least some of the time, but most people are motorists for only small fractions of the least enjoyable parts of their day.

Since personal vehicles tend to spend about 95 percent of the time just sitting in a parking space, YIMBYs often wonder whether car storage is really a good way to occupy so much valuable urban space when those resources could be better used to enhance experiences that can tend to enrich us more and offer us more opportunities to engage our communities.

People aren’t going to stop moving to this great city any time soon, and unless we can provide viable alternatives, they’re probably bringing their cars with them. Rather than complaining about all the newcomers, YIMBYs are excited about the opportunity our growth offers us to re-think who we are and to build a city of the future that is sustainable and accessible for everybody.

Andy Sense is a high school English teacher who lives in Park Hill with his wife and two kids. He is co-chair of the City Park Neighborhood Advisory Committee, serves on the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, is a member of the Blueprint Denver Task Force, and is a recent graduate of the Transit Alliance’s Citizens’ Academy and INC’s Citizens’ Planning Academy.