The article from Village Preservation (Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation) triumphantly declares the YIMBY consensus—that deregulating zoning and upzoning everywhere will magically solve housing affordability—is cracking, again. It traces YIMBY’s rise from Bay Area tech optimism, where elites peddled deregulation as a “simple technical fix” to high costs, spreading nationwide via media and politicians who treated it as gospel. But recent studies (Buchholz et al. 2026, Schuyler et al. 2025) are getting real coverage, showing that housing prices track income growth far more than regulations restrict supply, with new construction often failing to “filter” down to affordable levels or even pushing prices higher in some cases.
As residents fiercely defending our local zoning authority, this is music to our ears. The piece exposes YIMBYism as a flawed free-market dogma that ignores inequality as the true driver—wealth concentrates, prices soar for everyone else—while overriding community input with top-down mandates like NYC’s “City of Yes” schemes. These ham-fisted approaches don’t build truly affordable homes; they just enable more luxury development that erodes neighborhood character, schools, and livability.
We don’t need distant ideologues or real-estate cronies stripping cities of control. Local planning lets us balance growth thoughtfully, preserving what makes places like ours special. The “fall” of this YIMBY fever dream proves what we’ve known: affordability demands tackling wages and inequality, not bulldozing local democracy.
