Pittsburgh needs more housing: that’s the conclusion of the 2022 Pittsburgh Housing Needs Assessment. But exactly how to produce that housing is now at the heart of a battle pitting a group calling themselves YIMBYs against other local housing activists.
YIMBY stands for “yes in my backyard,” and it’s an approach to solving urban housing shortages by increasing density, scrapping single-family zoning, and building as much housing as possible — regardless of its affordability — everywhere.
The YIMBY movement began in California about a decade ago and rapidly spread across the country. It arrived in Pittsburgh in 2017, and in 2022, locals founded Pro-Housing Pittsburgh. Since then, YIMBYs have infiltrated local social media debates over affordable housing, and they have become vocal advocates in City Planning Commission, Historic Review Commission, and City Council hearings.
YIMBYs preach what some housing experts describe as “supply-side urbanism.” It’s based on the premise that building more market-rate housing yields lower rents.
Erin McElroy and Andrew Szeto, writing in Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance, describe YIMBYs as pursuing what they see as an “all housing matters” model that asserts “luxury and market rate development are as important as the construction of housing for poor and low-income tenants.”
Eliot Tretter, a University of Calgary geography professor, studies YIMBYs. He described the movement in a Zoom interview as an alignment of new urbanists, planners, and ecologically-minded would-be homeowners.
“To me, it is a way of thinking of the housing problem as a problem of supply and demand,” Tretter tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “They’re often very ecologically minded, [and] they’re very frustrated and concerned over the lack of certain kinds of housing and housing choices and the availability of housing in certain neighborhoods, particularly in neighborhoods that are deemed very desirable.”
The YIMBY logic is flawed, Tretter explains, because it excludes lots of external factors from their arguments about local housing markets.
“I don’t think that one can really make very strong causal claims about the relationship between the production of housing and issues associated with land value or rent,” Tretter says. “We really don’t know. I think, fundamentally, there is some evidence that says that making more housing can do this, but there’s a lot of evidence that says making more housing doesn’t do this.”
Bay Area bona fides
YIMBYs first emerged in San Francisco in response to a shortage of housing for the city’s growing tech workforce. Around 2014, the Bay Area Renters Federation (BARF) became the nation’s first YIMBY organization, though a pro-development group calling itself YIMBY Stockholm was founded in Sweden in 2007. The YIMBY acronym originated in a 1988 New York Times article on responses to NIMBYism (not in my back yard). It originally stood for “yes in many backyards.”
NIMBYism — organized opposition to a wide array of developments, from toxic waste sites to high voltage transmission lines, cellphone and broadcast towers, and new housing — has been a fixture in local politics nationally since the 19th century. NIMBYs got their name after a 1970 New York Times article described opponents to large new construction projects in the New York City area as “backyard obstructionists.”
In Pittsburgh, early NIMBY movements included opposition to a fertilizer plant on Herr’s Island in the 1880s and wealthy Highland Park homeowners who defeated a proposal to build the Civic Arena in that neighborhood (it was eventually built in the Lower Hill District).
“The NIMBY-YIMBY debate is a national one, but it plays out in hundreds of local zoning decisions on specific projects and on proposed amendments to the zoning code,” architect and attorney Sarah Bronin wrote in her 2024 book, Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World.
Since appearing about 11 years ago, YIMBYs have created a nationwide organization, YIMBY Action, and they hold annual conferences called “Yimbytown.” Most Americans are never farther away than a mouse click or social media post from YIMBY influencers.
David Vatz is a software sales professional who founded Pro-Housing Pittsburgh in 2022. “I was following the YIMBY movement in California from afar here,” Vatz tells City Paper. A former Pittsburgher living there kept Vatz apprised of new developments in the movement.
“I started to look at what was happening in Pittsburgh and hearing or seeing news stories about new housing being proposed and, you know, largely people coming out and saying that they don’t support it,” Vatz explains.
Vatz experienced what he had been reading about in 2021 while attending hearings evaluating rezoning in Oakland. He didn’t like what he heard: “I listened to a community meeting and everybody at the community meeting came out and said, ‘We don’t want more housing in our area.’”
Pittsburgh YIMBYs
Vatz responded by convening a small group of friends to speak at public meetings. Pittsburgh’s first YIMBY meetup happened in late 2022. “From there, we started advocating for building new housing in Pittsburgh,” Vatz says.
Estimating they’ve involved some 500 people in their work, Vatz says Pro-Housing Pittsburgh is a loosely organized group. Its members testify before city boards and Pittsburgh City Council in favor of policies they think will advance their objectives to increase housing stock and against things that they see as obstacles. The group’s strategy, laid out in a January meeting held in Squirrel Hill, included involvement in this year’s mayoral primary, zoning reform, the city’s new comprehensive plan, education, and research. Their goal is to produce more housing in Pittsburgh.
Pro-Housing Pittsburgh’s outreach efforts included buying copies of Richard Rothstein’s 2017 book, The Color of Law, and distributing them to City Council members. They used funds provided by YIMBY Action. The national group gives Pro-Housing Pittsburgh a $360 annual stipend, which it used to buy the books, bumper stickers, and yard signs.
The group got a lot of attention in late 2024 after Vatz and Jack Billings, an unemployed doctoral student in economics, produced a research paper on inclusionary zoning (IZ). Their study appeared the same day that Pittsburgh City Councilor Bob Charland introduced an IZ bill meant as an alternative to Mayor Ed Gainey’s citywide IZ proposal. In a marathon 11-hour January Planning Commission hearing, the two approaches to housing policy collided.
Local housing activists, some who did not want to give their names citing worries about retaliation by Pro-Housing Pittsburgh leaders, describe Charland as a Pro-Housing Pittsburgh founder. Vatz says Charland reached out to him after the Oakland hearings in 2021. “He was definitely involved very early on with us,” Vatz says. Charland declined multiple CP requests to discuss IZ and the local YIMBY movement.
Many local economists, affordable housing activists, and planning experts panned the Pro-Housing Pittsburgh report, which heavily influenced Charland’s bill. Before being cut off in the January hearing by Planning Commission Chairperson Lashawn Burton-Faulk, Charland had planned to have Billings testify as an expert in support of his proposal.
Former Planning Commission member and University of Pittsburgh professor Sabina Deitrick found numerous holes in Pro-Housing Pittsburgh’s work. Deitrick’s critique turned on the group’s failure to consider external factors other than Pittsburgh’s existing IZ districts in Lawrenceville, Oakland, and Polish Hill.
“The authors don’t talk about interest rates and how that affects development and housing,” Deitrick said. “The authors don’t talk about available land and available properties. You can’t build new housing if you don’t have the lots.”
Deitrick also slammed the group’s failure to discuss the role that interest rates played in housing production. “Remember, interest rates skyrocketed. Developers pay money, right? They get short term loans and all that. Interest rates affect development. There’s nothing about interest rates in this paper,” Deitrick explaines.
University of Pittsburgh regional economist Chris Briem also blasted the Pro-Housing Pittsburgh report. “There really is not sufficient data yet to attempt the analysis at the core of the paper. That would be true in any circumstance, but the timeframe we are talking about includes a lot of events that have significantly impacted development locally and nationally,” Briem tells CP.
Briem singled out COVID and interest rates as the leading factors inhibiting housing production in Lawrenceville. “Each of those external factors clouds any causal analysis of the impact that IZ has in the neighborhood.”
Beyond the IZ analysis, Briem finds fault with the basic YIMBY premise that boosting housing production automatically leads to making more affordable housing available.
“The argument that more construction, higher density will make homes, housing more affordable is certainly probably true at some level of geography,” Briem says. But “there’s no reason to necessarily believe that is going to be the case for a particular neighborhood or even a group of neighborhoods. Pittsburgh is particularly challenged in this way in that there’s lots of examples in history of groups of folks who’ve been displaced from one neighborhood into others because of the lack of available housing.”
Style vs. substance
Pro-Housing Pittsburgh’s leadership doesn’t put much stock in Briem and Deitrick’s criticism. Vatz had never heard of Deitrick, and he dismissed Briem’s comments. “I’ve looked into Chris’ body of research, and there isn’t much. Chris has not published much in the way of research at all that I’ve seen,” Vatz says.
One of the criticisms of the Pro-Housing Pittsburgh IZ study is that it wasn’t peer reviewed or otherwise scrutinized by experts before its release. Billings and Vatz didn’t respond to requests for the names of academics and other experts who reviewed the initial report released in December or a revision released in January.
In the short time that they’ve been active, Pittsburgh’s YIMBYs have alienated a wide swath of the city’s housing advocacy communities, including some of the groups that convene the Pittsburgh Housing Justice Table.
Longtime housing advocate Randall Taylor says that some of Pro-Housing Pittsburgh’s members had attended Housing Justice Table meetings: “There was some discomfort when they appeared,” Taylor tells CP.
City Councilor Barb Warwick really wanted to work with Pro-Housing Pittsburgh when it first appeared — their goals for tackling Pittsburgh’s housing crisis appeared to align with hers. “It’s been sort of a complicated relationship. I can start out by saying that their approach [is] sort of disparaging community members and disparaging the public process,” Warwick tells CP. “They have a very much sort of ‘my way or the highway’ attitude.”
It’s a formula that Warwick believes won’t work in a city like Pittsburgh. “This movement [is] grounded in insulting the people that you are working against as opposed to trying to work with them,” she says.
Warwick also has trouble with Pro-Housing Pittsburgh’s attempts to sway public opinion with unvetted reports like the IZ study. “Their whole lobbying effort is just throwing documents at you and throwing research and saying that it backs up everything that they say,” Warwick says. “They love a chart.”
The IZ study’s faults spurred the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group to release its own report ahead of the January Planning Commission hearing. Its authors included Lawrenceville United executive director Dave Breingan and PCRG research analyst Druta Bhatt.
“The PCRG report is extremely misleading in the way it presents IZ as being a success, and includes many factual errors,” Vatz wrote in an email responding to questions after its release.
The Pro-Housing response to competing views or to opinions that don’t mesh with their own reflects a larger trend in the YIMBY movement. Tretter finds problematic approaches like Pro-Housing Pittsburgh’s that state their findings to be conclusive and dismissive of contradictory research.
“If you’re in the realm where people are accusing the other side, like where you’re not even talking in the same universe, it’s very hard to have a conversation,” Tretter says. “My sense is that what you see in housing studies is that the research is incredibly inconclusive.”
Vatz and Billings responded to questions about academic research that contradicts YIMBYism’s supply-side urbanism by saying that they did not recognize scholars named in interviews with them.
Vatz compared researchers who have produced studies critical of YIMBYism to climate change denial. “It’s kind of like climate change, where the vast majority of empirical research supports that building more housing creates more housing affordability broadly,” Vatz said in December after a public meeting about the nomination of Donny’s Place as a city historic site. “And there might be some very limited study that contradicts that, but the vast majority of it does show what we are saying.”
War of words
YIMBYs across the country have mobilized via social media. They use X, formerly known as Twitter, and other platforms to spread their message and to battle people they consider to be NIMBYs. A 2022 Tufts University thesis examined YIMBY discourse on Twitter. Its author found YIMBY adherents aggressively sought to control discourse through marginalizing counternarratives.
In Pittsburgh, online trolling and sharp exchanges among local YIMBYs and others have spilled into hearing rooms and beyond. Pro-Housing Pittsburgh members traded barbs with housing justice activists in the January Planning Commission hearing.
Pro-Housing Pittsburgh members testified that people opposed to Charland’s IZ bill were paid activists. “I wish,” says Tanisha Long after the hearing where she testified against Charland’s bill. “That would absolutely improve my finances.”
“Most people aren’t paid activists any more than David [Vatz] is a paid activist,” Long tells CP. “I work for the Abolitionist Law Center. This is not actually one of our big issue areas. It’s not something that we have litigation over. But we do respond to issues in the community as individuals.”
Long has gotten into multiple online scraps with Pro-Housing Pittsburgh members, especially Membership Committee Chairperson Amy Zaiss. “I’ve told her on multiple occasions that she is unwelcome on my page, and she will continue to argue, continue to nitpick,” Long explains
After the Planning Commission hearing, 1Hood Power’s Nichole Remmert, who lives in her late parents’ Moon Township home, called the police to report that Zaiss had doxed her. “She decided to go online and post the property tax records of the house that I live in,” Remmert says after Zaiss posted the tax records on X.
Remmert shared screenshots from Zaiss’s posts that show Zaiss posted screenshots from Allegheny County tax records showing Remmert’s complete address in a post that read, “Lmao pay your taxes hunny and leave me alone.”
Zaiss subsequently deleted her Twitter/X account and has not responded to requests for comment on the incident. Likewise, Billings and Vatz did not respond to requests for comments on the incident.
Can YIMBYs solve Pittsburgh’s housing crisis?
Though their methods, constituencies, and data are widely divided, Pittsburgh’s YIMBYs and housing justice movements say that they have common goals: solving the city’s housing crisis. Some cities, like Minneapolis, have ended single-family zoning to increase housing production. There, it increased property values and density.
Janne Flisrand, co-founder of a Minneapolis YIMBY organization, Neighbors for More Neighbors, told a Senate subcommittee in 2023 that three factors aligned in her city to change public policy and the law: expanding public participation in zoning decisions, city staff with the capacity to expand participation, and elected leaders willing to adopt and implement changes.
Montgomery County, Md, where the nation’s first IZ law went into effect in 1974, has expanded IZ and is now pursuing what it calls an “attainable housing” strategy. In it, the county wants to open up single-family-zoned areas to allow more housing types.
Pro-Housing Pittsburgh seems to be following a playbook printed in Silicon Valley, with revisions made in communities around the United States and Canada. Many of the clashes between Pro-Housing Pittsburgh and other groups have been hashed out in other cities, resulting in fractious debates and posturing. The YIMBY movement’s primary goal, from Washington, D.C. to Sacramento, is to influence public policy through antagonistic discourse, wrote McElroy and Szeto. How effective those methods will be in Pittsburgh is an open question.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled Sabina Deitrick’s name “Dietrick.” The misspelling has been fixed above, and CP regrets the error.
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2025.
