They are fed up with a lack of new housing, they’ve read up on the technicalities of zoning and heritage protections – and they’re coming to a local council meeting near you.
Historically low building approval rates as Australia stares down a worsening housing crisis have led to a chorus of housing activists and economists rebelling against the traditional opposition to any proposals to increase density from nimby (not in my back yard) residents.
Groups have sprung up in Melbourne and Sydney in the past six months with the goal of encouraging communities to say yes to sensible increases in housing density, and converting nimbys into yimbys.
Priorities vary slightly across Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra (where an earlier yimby iteration, Greater Canberra, has existed since 2021), but their shared strategy is to encourage local activism to support infill development in inner urban areas which are well serviced by infrastructure but have restrictive planning rules.
“Housing abundance” is their common aim, which they say will bring about affordability, sustainability and liveability.
Yimby groups aim to arm like-minded locals with information they need to speak in favour of proposals before councils and to act as a voice for future residents who desperately want to live in an established suburb.
Their vision is not so much skyscrapers as Paris. Sensible development of terraces, townhouses and two-and three-storey apartment blocks is how Australia should embrace “soft density”, the yimby movement believes.
The grassroots groups are at pains to stress they have no links to developers, but have been motivated by personal experience of terrible rental properties, dashed dreams of home ownership or work in the planning approvals process.
‘There’s no injection of new energy’
Sydney Yimby is Australia’s newest group, officially formed in April.
Fierce opposition to a proposal for a four-storey unit block near Leichhardt’s light rail stop at an Inner West council meeting left a handful of those in attendance scratching their heads, including Justin Simon, a 36-year-old software engineer.
“We went for a beer afterwards and we said ‘OK, we’ve just seen 50 people come into a room opposed to housing next to public transport, in a suburb right near the city. Maybe we should start something up so that there are five or 10 of us at every one of these meetings so that the local councillors are hearing something other than no’,” Simon says.
He recalls watching “pretty modest developments get knocked back or delayed”, while living in a string of poor-quality rentals. “I was in a terrace with rampant black mould, then we went to another place, before going into an art deco place with mould again.”
Simon then moved into a three-bedroom house in a new eight-storey complex in Summer Hill with his partner and two young daughters, which they liked so much that they bought it when the opportunity arose. Now he wants others to have a similar opportunity.
Melissa Neighbour also walks the walk of the urbanist lifestyle the movement calls for. The 39-year-old urban planner and sustainability lecturer at the University of Sydney rents in a 12-unit apartment block on the Drummoyne street she grew up in.
Aside from frustrations at seeing the effect of planning restrictions through her work, Neighbour was pushed into activism by a concern that fewer and fewer Australians will be able to live where they grew up, without the development of more diverse housing types.
Sharath Mahendran, 21, has also joined the Sydney Yimby leadership. The civil engineering student is best known for his YouTube channel, Building Beautifully, where his videos on city planning and transport in Sydney attract hundreds of thousands of views.
He lives in his family’s freestanding house in West Pennant Hills, and was driven to join the movement in part due to the journey of more than 90 minutes to university from his car-dependent suburb.
The Sydney group strongly supports greater density in areas that have benefited from recent investment in light rail and metro projects.
Simon meets Guardian Australia in Haberfield, renowned as the “federation suburb”, with its wide streets of handsome freestanding houses.
The suburb is less than 7km from the CBD and parts of it are close to light rail, but is covered by a range of restrictions – a floor-space ratio limiting building to half the land of a residential lot, R2 low-density zoning allowing only detached houses, height limits, and a heritage overlay that prevents extensions and subdivisions.
As a result of the restrictions, and demolitions for the construction of Westconnex, the number of dwellings in the suburb has fallen from 2,537 in 2001 to 2,332 in 2021, and the population from 6,785 to 6,480.
Heritage protection laws serve a purpose, Simon said, but rather than applying them as a blanket over an entire suburb – such as with Haberfield – councils should instead select between 5% and 10% of the best examples of homes to preserve. “What if we preserve one block of federation homes, or Californian bungalows, instead of the whole suburb?” he says.
Simon characterises the meagre increase in housing in neighbouring Leichhardt in recent decades as no more than a “rounding error”, and blames it for the decline of Norton Street’s Italian restaurant strip and food and apartment complex The Italian Forum.
“People who don’t want their neighbourhood to change have been seduced by the idea that you can fix the housing crisis without changing the urban environment,” Simon says.
“There have been no new people brought in here within walking distance, no migrants starting a new business. There’s no injection of new energy in the suburb. It doesn’t have to be huge developments, but if everywhere takes their fair share, it can be soft and sensible and bring amenity.”
Neighbour says: “The suburbs with only detached dwellings, there’s this effect where people leave their houses to go to work or uni and these neighbourhoods become ghost towns during the day. There’s no sense of community.”
The group, which has just begun accepting paid memberships, plans to recruit local captains in each council to mobilise members. As mostly younger people with full-time work or study, they struggle for time to counter the campaigning of established residents’ groups.
Neighbour is blunt. “They’re mostly retired, they have a lot more time on their hands, they don’t work. It’s a huge advantage.”
The group counts efforts such as averting the heritage listing of 15 electricity substations in the inner west as an early victory, but Simon believes blanket changes to prevent densification across a large area – such as a move to prevent townhouses in Bayside council – is more insidious and a higher priority.
Neighbour believes education around yimbyism is crucial.
“We’re not about building as many skyscrapers as we can. There’s probably yimbys out there that don’t realise it yet, so we need to show what good densification can look like and join the dots so people see the benefits of more housing.”
Mahendran also believes part of the effort should be illustrating to inner city residents opposed to density just how much Sydney has grown. “Some of those opposing low-rise in their suburb might think Sydney ends at Parramatta, but they’re not thinking about those [people] in places like Marsden Park, like Oran Park, who are spending four times as long to get to work,” he says.
‘Every home is a single-storey family house’
Jonathan O’Brien is so committed to the yimby cause that he honours an interview arrangement despite being hit by a car as he cycled to a cafe on Sydney Road in the inner Melbourne suburb of Brunswick.
His bike was totalled, but the 27-year-old escaped largely unscathed, save for some cuts and a rush of adrenaline.
O’Brien, the co-founder and lead organiser of Yimby Melbourne, also works as a software developer in mental health. He estimates he works the equivalent of two full-time roles due to the hours he devotes to the yimby group.
O’Brien considers his housing situation lucky. He relocated to Melbourne from Brisbane at the end of 2021 when the rental market had dipped, and moved into a two-bedroom unit in Coburg.
“Ever since then, I’ve watched others struggle to find a place to live in Melbourne. What radicalised me on housing abundance was seeing that contrast between the brief window of when there was a surplus supply of rentals, and what people have had to deal with since,” he says.
Ethan Gilbert, a fellow organiser, is front and centre of the housing crisis.
The 25-year-old, who works as a project coordinator of digital displays at restaurants, lives in a sharehouse in Boronia in Melbourne’s east. There are five housemates, but only three bedrooms – one rents the couch, while another lives in a van in the driveway.
Gilbert considers himself lucky to be in a bedroom. When he first moved in, all that was available was the van option.
Gilbert fears the housing crisis is affecting his connection with family.
“A lot of my relatives have had to move really far away. It’s harder to have family gatherings now, it’s disconnecting everyone,” he says.
Yimby Melbourne formally began in February, following months of online discussions after like-minded Melburnians met through Twitter and Reddit.
As in Sydney, the yimby leaders in Melbourne have benefited from first-hand activist experience. O’Brien previously volunteered with the Greens, but is no longer a party member. Gilbert also volunteered for the Greens when younger, but is now a Labor member.
“I’m not a partisan person, I’m much more about bringing people together to solve problems,” Gilbert says.
Next @georgievpurcell asks what else can be done to increase housing supply: pic.twitter.com/9i6G50BwD8
— YIMBY Melbourne (@yimbymelbourne) July 1, 2023
By remaining a broad church that is unaffiliated politically but “willing to criticise bad policies”, Yimby Melbourne can appeal to various camps, O’Brien says.
“There’s a sustainability argument for densifying that appeals to the Greens supporters, while you can talk about a social safety net to Labor voters and about liberalising the market to Liberal supporters,” he says.
The group’s presence has grown to the point where O’Brien was invited to speak at a Victorian parliamentary inquiry into land transfer duty fees last month – something he considers an early win.
Yimby Melbourne is now running workshops on how to make parliamentary submissions.
After coffee, O’Brien and Gilbert walk through Brunswick. “Look, every home is a single-storey family house here, and we’re 5km from the city,” Gilbert says.
The pair are walking to Nightingale Village, the site of not-for-profit housing projects next to Anstey train station that have been lauded for their sustainability and design.
They stop at a car park, the site of a proposed seven-storey 28-home Nightingale project with 10% affordable housing that was knocked back by Merri-bek council in part due to its height, despite neighbouring buildings being taller.
The pushback was led by a bloc of councillors that included Socialist Alliance and former Greens members, while remaining Greens ultimately voted in favour of the development. O’Brien acknowledges the Greens can be “more prone to nimbyism” due to their focus on consultation and localism, but he notes councillors for the minor party have championed housing elsewhere.
He believes more effort should be directed towards lobbying parties in government, particularly at the state level, where broader planning laws that can trump council powers are set.
O’Brien ultimately hopes his group can change the way Melburnians think and talk about housing – away from treating home ownership as everyone’s goal and viewing density as a dirty word. If swathes of land are unlocked for buildings of three to seven storeys, density in Melbourne doesn’t have to mean skyscrapers, he insists. It can be Parisian.
“Everyone in Australia seems to love European cities; they talk about Paris, about the vibrancy of the city, and how they’d like that here. Well, it starts with having that kind of density here too.”
