California YIMBY — General Support (2019)

[Housing Policy Reform] Organization Name: California YIMBY Award Date: 4/2019 Grant Amount: $2,000,000 Purpose: General support. Grant investigator: Alexander Berger This page was reviewed but not written by the grant investigator. California YIMBY also reviewed this page prior to publication. The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $2,000,000 over two years to California YIMBY (short for “yes-in-my-back-yard”) for general support. As part of our focus on land use reform to promote housing affordability, we’ve supported a number of advocacy organizations in high-wage, high-cost regions (e.g. Seattle and Washington, D.C.) to push for more housing. We see advocacy aimed at changing California state policies to allow more housing as a promising philanthropic opportunity for several reasons: California accounts for 12% of the U.S. population and roughly half of most expensive metro areas in the country.1 As a result of the state’s high housing costs, California has the highest rent-inclusive poverty rate in the country, and a high rate of out-migration by low-income residents.2 As we’ve seen with our work on criminal justice reform, state-level advocates can often be very effective in winning statewide victories without enormous resources. By comparison, we expect building city-by-city support for reforms to be much slower and more costly, and in some cases potentially impossible.3 Housing markets tend to operate at a wider geographic scope than current responsibility for housing approvals is allocated: people looking for housing do not necessarily stop their search at the city limits.4 States have the constitutional authority to determine land use and may be able to more effectively balance the costs and benefits of new housing approvals, but there has not been a lot of experimentation on this front.