At the Labour party conference, one buoyant new faction stood out: the yimbys. After hosting a packed reception at Liverpool’s Hilton hotel last Sunday, the new Labour Yimby grassroots group is becoming a much discussed force in UK politics, with Keir Starmer saying he too is a champion of the cause. But does its pro-property development agenda live up to the hype?
Yimbyism was born of the supercharged real-estate boom in Silicon Valley that saw private rents around San Francisco climb to some of the highest in the US. Incoming tech workers began a culture war calling for more condominiums, cleverly adopting the acronym yimby (which stands for “yes in my back yard”) to imply anyone advocating controls on new property development was merely a self-interested nimby (“not in my back yard”) resisting progress.
