Hi everyone, this week Gary and I talked with Matthew Lewis, communications director at California YIMBY, about why the hard part of the housing fight isn’t the economics but getting people to believe things that are true. We get into why housing and transportation are really one fight, why he thinks AARP were the original YIMBYs, and how bad-faith actors on both the left and right exploit the collapse of local news to lie about bills like SB 79. His bottom line is stubbornly hopeful: SB 79 took seven years to pass, 90% of Americans still don’t know what a YIMBY is, and judging “abundance” one year in is a category error. Call him in 15 years.

Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. I’m here with my co-host Gary Winslett, and today we have a very special guest. We have Matthew Lewis here. Matthew is the Director of Communications at California YIMBY. He previously spent a decade as a broadcast and print journalist, then moved into advocacy communications with a focus on environmental justice, energy policy, and climate change. Before this, he was Director of Communications at ClimateWorks and also co-led the Risky Business Project, an effort to quantify and communicate the economic risk of climate change in the US. Matthew is a YIMBY homeowner who also believes there’s plenty of room on his block for more neighbors. Happy to have you here.

Matthew Lewis: Thank you. In fact, there is literally a ton of room on my block for more housing. I’m here in Berkeley, California, and it’s sort of astonishing that in 2026 I can still say that with a straight face. And I could say it about the entire city of Berkeley.

Gary Winslett: I went to Berkeley for the first time last year for a conference, and it was a startling kind of place to walk around, just because with proper zoning reform the market would build new housing there relatively quickly.

Matthew Lewis: It is a highly desirable place. People ask me, how do you like Berkeley? I’m like, well, it’s very pleasant. I have a lot of friends here, I’ve been here a number of years, it’s very easy to get to San Francisco, the weather’s actually perfect. But putting on my climate hat for a second, the marginal resident of a California coastal city, just by nature of moving to a California coastal city, reduces their carbon footprint, because of how relatively well managed these cities are in terms of their carbon emissions. So it’s not just room on the merits of land use, it’s good for everybody to put more people in cities like Berkeley.

Tahra Hoops: People underestimate how much living in a walkable neighborhood makes you walk more. I grew up in New York City and DC, and now I live in Los Angeles, and every time I walk for longer than 15 minutes I just accept my fate, like someone might hit me and that is just my life. That is just going to happen.

Matthew Lewis: I am one of those weirdos. Every now and then I make the mistake of flying into LAX. I usually fly to Burbank when I have to go to Los Angeles because it’s so much easier. But I flew to LAX once or twice and I’m like, you know what, I’m not gonna deal with all this. I walked from LAX to Crenshaw for a meeting, down Centennial Boulevard, and I got the whole “oh my God, how do people live this way?”

Tahra Hoops: Imagine me. Imagine me.

Matthew Lewis: It’s like a 10-lane freeway through the heart of the city. There was good bus service, I could have hopped on the bus, but the weather was nice, so I walked. It was like two miles. And I grew up in DC, so the idea of walking two miles is like, oh, just walk two miles, it’s not that big a deal. But in LA it feels like you’re going through a war zone.

Tahra Hoops: I tell my husband all the time, you’re so lucky, I love you, and I am willing to live here. But there are great places in Los Angeles. We actually just had the expansion of a D Line come out, and it was such a fun experience. It was still a bit of a walk, but we didn’t care, we wanted the full experience, we were walking there and I wanted to use the subway. It was the first weekend, it was so clean. The transit doors are something New York City should adopt, because they were full opening doors. We got to downtown LA in around 13 minutes from the west side, which you would not be able to do in a car. So I know there are good parts of it.

Matthew Lewis: I feel like the sleeper story of all these US urban housing and transportation situations right now is the amount of money Los Angeles is investing in transit. It’s the most in the US, as far as I know, at least last time I checked. LA is the city with the best weather and the worst transportation planning combined at once, historically. Everybody’s saying, but Matt, you’re crazy, there’s no way this ever happens, LA’s so broken. And it’s like, yeah, LA is broken in a lot of ways, but I actually really believe it’s the city with the most potential on the planet.

Tahra Hoops: So much space.

Matthew Lewis: It’s sitting there right beneath the surface. It could be the greatest place ever, because the weather really is that good, and it is so flat for most of the city. Nothing’s ever gonna be paradise about Los Angeles, but you could make it so much better than it is now. Compared to all the other deltas of any other city, the potential is so huge.

Housing and transportation are the same fight

Gary Winslett: So with the weather and the flatness, I wanna ask about this, because to me it seems like LA should be e-bike heaven. If you just built fully separated lanes for bicycles. I own a bicycle, I’ll ride it around my neighborhood, but I refuse to share space on the road with a car going 55. I’m just not gonna do that.

Matthew Lewis: You’ve got some really good leaders in LA who are starting to see this. People like Catherine Blakespear. And you’ve got Streets for All, founded in Los Angeles by Michael Schneider. They’ve got a chapter up in San Francisco now, but he successfully ran and passed Measure HLA to try to force LA’s Department of Transportation to do exactly what you’re describing. And the problem, this is one of those deep-state problems that’s actually real, they don’t wanna follow the law.

One problem that YIMBYs are gonna have to confront, not just in California but all over the United States, is that most state and local transportation departments are basically broke. So you can pass measures to improve street safety or to invest more in protected bike lanes, and the transportation departments will just be like, nah, we’re not gonna do that. And it goes both ways. In a city like San Francisco, you’ve actually got an incredibly talented transportation staff who know all the stuff they need to do to make the city safer. Car crashes are the number one cause of violent death in the city of San Francisco, and it’s been that way for years in Los Angeles too. So everybody knows there’s a problem, but you have this combination in some cases of agencies that won’t obey the law.

LADOT is openly and flagrantly violating HLA, which was passed by the voters, which is amazing, that you got a majority of voters in Los Angeles to say yes, spend money making our streets safer. You wouldn’t have expected that, right? But people get it. To your point, Gary, people kind of get the potential. And then in San Francisco you have a transportation agency that really wants to do it but keeps getting blocked by the mayor’s office and by the supervisors. So one way or the other, you’ve got political skullduggery going on.

Because of the completely inseparable relationship between housing and transportation, this is something we’re gonna have to get our heads around as YIMBYs and in the pro-housing movement. We talk to members of the legislature all the time, it’s part of why we exist. And one of the things more of them are coming to realize and really trying to lead on, people like Buffy Wicks, is you can’t just plop houses down and not improve the transportation infrastructure and expect it’s gonna work out. So Buffy’s got bills she’s working on related to this. I mentioned Catherine Blakespear. Laura Friedman, who we worked with on the parking reform bill several years ago, she’s now in Congress, but she could have basically recited the Ten Commandments of Donald Shoup back in the day. So you’re seeing a convergence here, folks realizing these things actually are not separate issues. And I think the next big fight is gonna be over some of these transportation questions.

Listening to NIMBYs on parking

Gary Winslett: Yeah, I think that’s right. The other thing about transportation is it can ease some of the NIMBYism. Not all of it, it’s not a magic wand, but some people aren’t ideological about it. They just have all these concerns about traffic and parking. So if you can ease that, you’ve at least alleviated that kind of problem.

Matthew Lewis: In the YIMBY movement we talk a lot about the history of exclusionary zoning and how it was openly racist. People back then didn’t hide it, because there weren’t laws against discrimination. You gotta remember, zoning came around in the 1910s and ‘20s, and you could openly say all kinds of nasty things about people of different races and ethnicities. And while that’s still the roots of how we got into the predicament we’re in today, I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say that’s still motivating most people.

The reason I wanted to mention this is that I actually think NIMBYs are being honest, and to a certain degree accurate, not wrong, when they say if you build more housing here it’ll make it harder for me to park and increase traffic. When they openly share that concern, I look at it and think, yeah, that’s actually not wrong. If you put a bunch of housing somewhere and don’t also address the transportation issues, you will in fact make it harder to park and increase traffic. So I feel like we should be listening to them at face value and saying, okay, let’s make that part of what we’re also solving for. I’m as YIMBY as they come, and when I hear them say that, I’m sort of offended in one way, like, wait, we’re not building housing so that you can have parking. But on the other hand, you’re not wrong. It’s an accurate statement in a world where the marginal way to move around is a car. So what we need is a set of leaders who realize that unless we intervene in some way, the marginal mobility solution for a new resident is a car, and that doesn’t scale.

Tahra Hoops: If you ever look on the website Nextdoor, which I love to go look at—

Gary Winslett: What is Nextdoor?

Matthew Lewis: Oh my God. It’s awful.

Tahra Hoops: It’s the page for the older woman in my neighborhood to get on. I live in a place where I am probably the youngest person for miles, and honestly I kind of love it that way. Um, and they’re all on Nextdoor, and they are as NIMBY as they come, and I see the parking thing all of the time. They bulldozed an entire run-down vacant building that had been empty for some time and started to rebuild it. They actually stopped for a bit, because, get this, the workers got deported. It was so bad. And they finally came back on site, they’re close to finishing it, and there was so much pushback on Nextdoor about this development, because people were like, I already can’t park on the street.

The aging-in-place coalition

Matthew Lewis: I know we were gonna talk about communications and how you move people. And I think there are some really interesting ways into this conversation through the lens of older people. I have to give credit where credit is due. My boss, Brian Hanlon, the founder and CEO of California YIMBY, and I talk about this often. We’re getting ready to do a convening on transportation for a separate project we’re working on, and one of the participants is AARP. When you go back in history, you quickly realize, oh, AARP are actually the original YIMBYs, and they’re the original let’s-solve-transportation people, because their members are the ones most negatively impacted by where NIMBYism has brought us.

To drill all the way down to an anecdotal version of this: every year California YIMBY does a lobby day in Sacramento. We have all our priority bills, we get volunteers from all over the state, we converge on Sacramento, and they go around and meet with their legislators. It’s bigger every year. This year we had over—

Tahra Hoops: I was there.

Matthew Lewis: Oh yeah, that’s right, Tahra. I can’t believe we missed each other.

Tahra Hoops: I know.

Matthew Lewis: So you were in the room, you saw it was a huge crowd, but there were also a lot of older people there. One of the women in my group, we were just talking as we walked between offices, like, so tell me your story, why are you here? And she’s like, well, my husband and I live in a suburban part of Walnut Creek, and we have to drive everywhere. We raised kids here, but we’re empty nesters now, and I’m concerned he shouldn’t be driving. I tried to take away the keys, but he’s not that into that. And there’s nowhere for us to move to, to downsize.

AARP wrote a briefing on this like 35 years ago. They’re so far ahead of the game. But you realize the cohort of potential pro-housing folks is so much bigger than we even think it is, because there really are tens of millions of people aging in place in suburbs with driving mandates, who are like, I live in a place where driving is mandatory, I don’t have an option, and I’m realizing I maybe shouldn’t be driving, or my spouse shouldn’t be driving anymore, and we actually would downsize, but for the fact that the neighborhoods where we’d like to downsize to have made it illegal for us to do so. So there’s this large and growing cohort of folks who realize that and are coming out of the woodwork to say, hey, wait, where’s all the senior housing?

And where it ends up, here in the East Bay, I live in Berkeley, there’s a senior housing proposal down by the Rockridge BART station, and it’s going through thanks to bills California YIMBY passed. So we get the full connection of, wow, yeah, this stuff really works. You had asked in the prep, in the questions you sent over, what are some of the messages and communication strategies you can use? And I think this gets at a big one, which is: as big as the tent is now, I actually think it’s even bigger.

Matthew Lewis: There are a lot more people out there who are natural allies. I tried to explain this, unsuccessfully, to some of our erstwhile supporters on the far left. The challenge is that most people actually are not housing-challenged. Even though people might complain about the cost, most people across the United States are securely housed. 65% of Americans own their home. Some might be cost-burdened, but that’s a huge share of Americans who are like, well, I get that there’s a housing problem, it doesn’t really affect me. So how do you activate people? You do it with the highest-level, values-level stuff. Are you concerned about where your kids are gonna live? Are you old and concerned about where you’re gonna live? Would you like to live somewhere more walkable, if you had that option? But it’s very hard to activate people when they’re not impacted directly.

What the YIMBY movement has done, and we’re really lucky, this is one part skill and about five parts luck, is we’ve tapped into a cohort of nerds. We’ve found all the people who get obsessed with stuff like floor-area ratios and single-stair buildings. It’s so weird, like, wait a second, I would never have predicted there’d be millions of people going, oh my God, I’m obsessed with the single-stair building. What a weird thing to be obsessed with. And yet we found them. So keeping the tent as big as possible is really part of the key.

Gary Winslett: No, I think that’s right. And to your point about age cohorts, this is something I’ve found in Vermont, because we’re the second-oldest state in the country. We’ve just got a lot of seniors here.

Tahra Hoops: Second? Is the first Florida? Maine. Okay.

Gary Winslett: Maine is slightly older than us, but we’re pretty old. Even if they’ve been securely housed for a while, they do dislike the fact that wait times to get a doctor’s appointment can be a while, because where are the nurses and NPs gonna live if they can’t move in here? And a lot of them actually want to downsize, but there’s nothing to downsize to, because we don’t have the missing middle. Then it’s got this knock-on effect, where you’ve got an empty nester or elderly couple walking around their three- or four-bedroom house that they would, in theory, like to sell to a younger family, but there’s nowhere for them to move to. And so you just get this blockage in the system, and they can understand that.

Matthew Lewis: They’re experiencing it right now. That’s the key, they’re actually experiencing it, it’s their lived experience today. It’s really unusual to have a large cohort of people seeing firsthand, oh, wait a second, last couple weekends ago we went and looked for condos and there weren’t any. And they suddenly go, wait a second, why aren’t there any condos for us to move into? You’ve gotta find that set of people who get the self-interest in solving the problem. And then you also have to bring in all the people who are like, well, I am secure, but I have an interest in the broader issue. You’ve gotta combine all those things.

Keeping the tent big (and non-partisan)

Matthew Lewis: And the thing we’ve been really lucky at achieving, but that was also very deliberate on California YIMBY’s part, was not turning this into a partisan issue. Not making it about a class war, or about capitalism or socialism, or any of these other in-the-trenches fights that a lot of activists get into. It’s given us a pretty significant advantage, not just in Sacramento. Everybody’s like, oh, well, California’s more liberal. It’s true, we are dominated by Democrats in California, there’s really no Republicans with power to speak of except in places like Huntington Beach, and we’re always suing them over housing anyway. But every one of our major housing bills in Sacramento was passed with Republican votes and would not have passed without them. And you go to other states and that ratio goes way up.

As bad as Republicans are nationally with what’s happening with Trump and in DC and in Congress, and this Cornyn election with Paxton, which is just like, oh my God, how much worse can it get, you go into legislatures in Montana or Idaho or North Carolina or Texas and there are Republicans looking around like, my people are having housing problems, and they’ll vote for good legislation. So the need to keep the narrative at a level where it’s like, yeah, those people in Washington are a mess, but we can solve these problems at the state level, and not make it about that, is really important. Make sure you’re doing the messaging that way. Make sure you’re not letting one breakaway group say, oh no, this is all about this unrelated issue that’s gonna charge things up and shrink the tent. Nope, we don’t do that, we’re about the housing problem. And what we realize is that as long as you keep it pure in that lane, you can draw in a ton of people who, on many other things, you might not wanna work with at all. Just focusing on the housing, you get to work with them.

Gary Winslett: No, I think that’s right. To your point about state-level Republicans being kind of different, Phil Scott, the Republican governor of Vermont, is like super YIMBY. He’s great. Not all state-level Republicans are like that, but some—

Matthew Lewis: No, but you could say the same thing about Democrats. Democrats don’t have any special superiority on housing or transportation either. I’m in constant arguments with my friends in the climate movement about, where are you guys on infill housing and transit investments? Nowhere. They’re nowhere.

Climate, YIMBYism, and a giant mistake

Matthew Lewis: One of the frustrations we have: we passed two major pieces of infill legislation last year. There’s SB 79, which is about more housing near transit. But the other was the full CEQA exemption for infill housing in urban areas, and the climate and environmental movements came out in full opposition to that second bill. And it’s like, wait a second, I come from that movement. When I was working at ClimateWorks, we did a bunch of projects in China through the Energy Foundation China cities program, and we worked with all the Chinese academics. We even published brochures. I have one somewhere, I should have brought it out. It was called “Building Cities for People,” and it was basically, you can reduce all of these impacts by concentrating more housing growth in your cities. This is something people have known for decades. This is 50, 60, 70-year-old stuff. The climate movement has basically forgotten that. Obviously we get a lot of support from climate activists, we get a lot of support from smaller climate groups, but writ large, they’re not there. And it’s like, when are they gonna show up and help?

This gets at the other piece of it. You can solve a lot of climate problems with YIMBYism, important climate problems. In fact, there’s evidence that some of the biggest ones you can only solve with YIMBYism to a certain degree. That’s not to say there isn’t tons of other stuff you have to do, you’ve gotta do electric vehicles, industrial decarb, grid upgrades and all that. But you get a lot of Republican support for things that actually are climate action, by not calling it climate action.

Tahra Hoops: You could do that with so many things when it comes to climate change. It’s sad to see, because I was also working more in the climate-tech space before this, but the second you say the words “climate change,” people think you’re doing 2016, 2020, culture-war stuff, and they just do not care about it. Sorry, go ahead—

Matthew Lewis: It was a giant mistake. There was a giant pivot the climate movement made, and it was a huge mistake, in my opinion. They turned it into a culture war. That was not thoughtful.

Tahra Hoops: And Republicans haven’t moved on from it. If you look at the reasonings for why clean-energy projects are being stopped, it’s nonsensical thinking. I do wanna pull on the thread of why you think that. Because there are climate actors who do show up on these bills—

Matthew Lewis: Oh, totally.

Tahra Hoops: A hundred percent, and we’re not making a blanket statement here. But for those who—

Matthew Lewis: Some of my closest friends are climate activists. I just want everybody to know this.

Tahra Hoops: I know three of them personally. But for those who still push back, I struggle to understand the reasoning there. Or the reasoning of degrowth as a whole. I know Gary has amazing takes here too, but it boggles my mind.

The epistemic crisis and the death of local news

Gary Winslett: I wanna ask Matthew about this, because you’re from the climate space, and there’s climate-change deniers who just deny what is relatively settled science. And it seems there’s a housing equivalent to that, where the economic science is pretty darn clear, housing price is related to housing supply. I’m curious what lessons from the climate space you think translate.

Matthew Lewis: Totally. So Tahra mentioned I was one of the founders of Climate Nexus back in 2010. The challenge we faced at the time, I’ll give the really short version of the creation myth, was there was a group from the Heritage Foundation and some other right-wing think tanks that broke into an email server at the University of East Anglia in the UK. They stole tens of thousands of emails from a server, climate scientists communicating with each other about research they were working on. They mined that email list to find what they thought would be discrediting emails, and then spread it across right-wing media, and Fox News picked it up, and it was all over the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal. Oh, climate scientists are lying to you, climate science is fake.

Long story short, we had to come up with a response to that, to resubmit science as foundational to why climate mattered. I founded Climate Nexus to do that, to ground everything in peer-reviewed research, to really train climate scientists on how to communicate, to get everybody on the same page about, look, what you do with the science after we’ve established it is up to the politicians, but we’ve gotta at least make clear that physics is real. To your point, physics is real, it’s not fake.

The reason I think that’s relevant is that strategy worked in an era when we still had most people getting most of their news and information from mainstream media. Most humans in 2012 were still reading the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, whatever, to get their basic news. That really started to dissolve in the subsequent years. By 2017, really by the first Trump election, there was this giant cohort of people just getting information from totally fake sources. That’s one of the ways Trump won. And the reason that’s so relevant is we’ve now seen that metastasize, and you have these cults of ideology and cults of personality, and everybody’s atomized in the information space. That includes a cohort we colloquially refer to as the left NIMBYs. How is it that socialists who read Marx, who are supposed to do material analysis, would somehow conclude there’s enough housing? That doesn’t match your own experience. And then they’ll say, oh, well, there’s enough housing under capitalism. And you realize, well, wait, so then what’s your first move? And for some of them, their first move is, well, we need to end capitalism. And it’s like, guys, look, I live in Berkeley, California, I’m pretty much on the left, but that’s not happening. We’re not there. You get into these circular debates about, well, is capitalism good or bad? And I don’t care. I mean, I do kind of care, but my job is to end a housing shortage, not to end capitalism. So you end up in these very cloistered conversations that aren’t connected to reality.

Unlike with Climate Nexus, where you could actually work with mainstream media and TV producers to surround-sound like “climate science is real,” we don’t have a vector now to inoculate as effectively as we used to. People are much more in their TikTok lane, their YouTube lane, their Instagram lane. I have no idea where people get information anymore. California YIMBY gets incredible media coverage from mainstream media, and part of the reason is that journalists, all the journalists I’ve worked with, and having been a journalist for many years, they care deeply about accuracy. They do not want to report stuff that’s false, and when they do by accident, they’re like, I need to correct that, because my whole reputation is on accuracy. Because we’re following the bulk of the evidence, that supply and demand is real, Gary, to your point, but also all the housing research about moving chains and filtering and all this other stuff that’s been replicated over time, reporters see that our messaging and our advocacy and even our legislation tracks directly to what the research shows is necessary to end the housing shortage. I think that inoculates us to a degree. Even though people may say, oh, you’re ideologically this or that, it’s like, look, me personally, sure, I ride a bicycle, that puts me in a kind of a cult. But separate that from the fact that all the work we’re doing points back to peer-reviewed research. Oh, okay, yeah, that’s not one person’s opinion, that’s an accumulated consensus from researchers all over the country.

One of the things we realized early, actually my boss had the foresight to say we need to be publishing syntheses of this research. I’ve gotta put in a plug to your listeners: go to California YIMBY and sign up.

Tahra Hoops: I am a subscriber.

Matthew Lewis: Twice a month we publish syntheses of the best housing research you can find. The reason that’s so important is that reporters read it too.

I think the atomization of audiences gets worse before it gets better. I don’t know anybody who’s figured out what you do about journalism and media. It’s a huge problem. And the right is kind of running with the ball, because they can say, well, we’re just gonna do right-wing propaganda and hold our cohort together with that. On the left we have a much bigger challenge, because we’re more heterogeneous. And this is a sub-frustration of mine that I work on as a side project: we can’t get donors from the center to the left to invest in journalism at scale. That’s a huge problem. There are some little examples of it working. One I love to call out, it’s been a major reason for our progress in California, is CalMatters, an independent nonprofit news organization. They’re not growing as fast as I’d like, they need to raise the money, but they’ve got reporters all over the state who are funded to do good journalism. And that good journalism translates up into good legislation, because journalism is the fourth estate. You don’t have an effective democracy without it, you just don’t.

So when we’re talking about communications, yeah, I can do all the messaging research and try to build the big tent and hold the cohort together, and then message on our bills in a way that isn’t too nerdy, but also create a space for the nerds to nerd out on the stuff they get obsessed with. But none of that is as effective now without a really robust ecosystem for journalists, and CalMatters is that. We’re really lucky in California, in the Bay Area at least, and increasingly in the Central Valley, there are really good news organizations and journalists committed to the cause. Los Angeles has been a bit of a wasteland, I’m sorry to say. The size of the city compared to the amount of journalism there just doesn’t line up. There are like three or four really good housing reporters for the entire region of 11 million people. They can’t cover all this stuff. But CalMatters is ramping up, Politico is making some good investments in LA, and that’s very heartening. Even if the reporters are sometimes saying, oh, LA did something bad, that doesn’t bother me, because what I want is more journalism, more coverage of the issue.

So that’s a gating factor, Gary, to answer your question about how you get people to believe things that are true. It’s really hard in the era of atomized audiences where there is no mediator. It’s called media for a reason, it’s mediating a conversation, and we’ve lost the mediation function to a degree. So again, I come back to what I said in the beginning: we’re really lucky to have tapped a thread of deep housing nerds and really urbanist nerds in the United States, that I don’t think we could have created. I think we had to just find it. It’s almost a happy coincidence that there are so many of them out there.

Tahra Hoops: YIMBYs are so prevalent online, and they’re just the best community. One of my dear friends, Natasha Kul, I met her through a YIMBY group chat on Twitter, and I was in her wedding last year. We became such close friends from that. It’s amazing to see such a large grassroots community grow from there. But I’m really glad you mentioned the media aspect, because right now we’re facing kind of a doom cycle. Annie Lowrey wrote a great piece a day or two ago in the Atlantic on how the vibecession is now becoming sort of a permacession. And it’s because the feedback loop, from news translating into policy, is so broken, where there are such mass spouts of misinformation, sometimes disinformation, where people might get corrected, but because outlets are incentivized to get clickbaity headlines, it harms good policymaking. We keep bogging down on Los Angeles, but Spencer Pratt is a perfect example. Someone who was corrected several times on bills like SB 79, and then would still go out there and lie point blank about what it would do. And there was a separate bill, I’m blanking on the other one, for residents in Altadena, that was there to help them—

Matthew Lewis: Oh, the Ben Allen bill. Yeah, yeah.

Tahra Hoops: That had actual—

Matthew Lewis: It was off the hook. It killed the bill. Literally a bill to help people rebuild.

Tahra Hoops: Yes. And it’s shocking that you have to continue to combat this. And you have it from the right, where people like JD Vance go out there saying, we don’t have a housing crisis, we have a people crisis, we need to kick all these people out of here. And it’s like, you are creating fake victims to make yourself seem like a savior. When someone is trying to fear-monger and direct you in a certain direction, that’s when you should stop and question what the prior motives behind this are. This feels like basic stuff I would learn in undergrad.

Matthew Lewis: There’s this emergent joke in the debate about AI, and it’s becoming much more existential as AI becomes a more commonly used thing. It’s an epistemic crisis, no doubt. We’re really having these challenges establishing, well, what is empirically replicable reality? And we’re losing touch with it. The AI joke is, we don’t need more young people going into computer science or engineering, we need more people going into liberal arts and critical thinking. To your point, way back in the day, I don’t know if it’s still around, there used to be this magazine called The Skeptic. Do you guys remember this? Maybe 20 years ago. It felt a little right-coded when you came into it, but when you opened it up you realized what they’re talking about is the scientific tradition of skepticism. Like, I will believe your evidence once you’ve demonstrated it to me to be refutable. We sort of lost that. There’s a huge risk of the death of skepticism, and the opposite of skepticism, of course, is credulity. When you have a credulous population, you’re in real trouble, because, to your point, Tahra, people just start believing whatever crap they’re being fed. Did you believe it because it was told to you by a friend, or by someone very convincing on social media? Or do you believe it because you investigated the claims and, oh yeah, those claims checked out? We don’t do the latter anymore.

Gary Winslett: This is one of the things I’ve been noticing that I find very worrisome. We’ve got this odd juxtaposition where people are often very credulous about what they’re being told right in front of them, and yet at the same time public trust in various institutions is through the floor. So there’s this odd mix of credulity, but also just nihilism.

Trust, state capacity, and the power of City Hall

Matthew Lewis: I think there are good explanations for all of this, and the problem is they’re siloed as far as how people experience them. I’ll give you an example from Los Angeles. The city has spent how many billions of dollars on homelessness in the last 10 years?

Tahra Hoops: Oh God.

Matthew Lewis: Many, many billions of dollars. No progress. And then you have these people being indicted for corruption, for spending the money wrong, and that makes the news. So if I’m a taxpayer who’s very tertiarily paying attention to all this, and I’m a California taxpayer, and California taxpayers are notoriously generous passing bond measures, we probably more than most places actually approve bonds. In Berkeley we approve bonds for parks, you approve bonds for schools all over the state, you approve bonds for the train, and for homelessness. If after several years you’re not seeing results, and then you read a story about how the money all got spent on Ferraris by someone corrupt, you should be like, well wait a second, government is not doing what I thought I was giving my money to it to do. And that will breed skepticism. But it’s even deeper than skepticism, to your point, Gary, it’s actually a loss of trust.

I mentioned at the top that YIMBYism is gonna get pulled into transportation, because we kind of have to. The other place we’re getting pulled into is this bigger discussion about state capacity, and how you not just rebuild state capacity that was lost in the neoliberal era, but to get there, you’ve gotta rebuild trust that state capacity can deliver what it’s saying it can deliver, like trains and affordable housing and actually constructed homelessness services, as opposed to wherever the money ended up going. So you can’t really blame the taxpayer or the voter for being cynical when they’ve got evidence that supports their cynicism. And especially in a democracy like ours, that’s flawed in many ways, people are much more participatory in national politics than in local politics. I actually think the solution is much more local journalism, but then, I come from local journalism, so let’s see if that happens. Most people can name maybe their congressperson, they certainly know who’s president and vice president, but most people can’t name their city council member. And they almost definitely can’t name their state legislator. So they’re attributing the blame to the government they’re most familiar with, even though they don’t really know how the mechanism works, they’re not participating in it. There’s an erosion of civic institutions that’s happened alongside the erosion of our cities. And part of the big-picture YIMBY philosophy is, as we rebuild our cities and fix the mistakes of the last 60 years, my theory is you’ll actually, through osmosis and proximity, get better civic participation and better civic awareness as a result. That’s shorthand for a bunch of other things that have to happen. But a good example, a place that’s super dysfunctional, but nobody would say San Francisco has low civic participation. It’s very high. The problem is there’s an information malfunction.

Tahra Hoops: I also think when people are more open to civic participation, it lets them think of people as a collective, as a community. Right now a lot of Americans across the federal level are acting from a place of scarcity, which causes them to be very individualistic. It’s why people were able to adopt fear, the same as toward anyone else, because we’re already drowning. They can’t even think about someone else, because there’s no stability under their feet. But people forget, if you show up to a city council meeting, you could get things done—

Matthew Lewis: It’s insane. It’s crazy how much power is at City Hall, and I don’t think people connect that. You feel like, well, what does the city do? It collects the trash and paves the streets. And it’s like, well, yeah, and determines the entire fabric of the whole community. They don’t make that connection. You really do have disproportionate power at the local level. I feel like we’ve almost got an upside-down governance problem, where everybody’s super focused on Congress and what the president is doing. And it’s like, wait a second, my theory of governance is that Congress largely reflects a roll-up of what’s happening at the state and local level. So if you have disengagement at the local and state level, you end up with a Congress that looks the way it does, far less accountable to what’s going on at the local level. It doesn’t reflect the values and priorities of people at the local level. And the reason is, well, who’s speaking from the local level?

Tahra Hoops: Mm-hmm.

Matthew Lewis: It’s these NIMBYs. So the YIMBY theory of change is, well, let’s just flip that. Let’s elect a slate of YIMBYs at the state level, and then work our way down and elect them at the local level. And it’s kind of starting to work. You end up with the largest city in the United States electing basically a YIMBY mayor. And in LA, let’s hope and pray something good happens.

Tahra Hoops: It’s a lost cause.

Matthew Lewis: She’s a contender in a way she wouldn’t have been five years ago. She would not have been a contender five years ago. And I think that reflects this pent-up demand for solving cities, among the people who live in them. Wait a second, it doesn’t have to be this broken.

Abundance, one year in

Matthew Lewis: And you started to get at the question about abundance. Tahra, I think that’s where you were going.

Tahra Hoops: Oh, not even. Well, I guess I wasn’t even meaning to. I guess I’m just so abundance-filled it came out by accident. I was going to talk about the fact that you were bringing up the small basics, like picking up the trash. I have a funny story. Back in undergrad I was a very annoying political science major, and I was interning for a member of Congress who was running, and I was out there knocking on doors. I was in college from 2016 to 2020, so I got all the politics, it was very hyperbolic. I remember walking in Queens, ready to talk to people about democracy and what’s at stake, and one of the first things, this old guy just started yelling at me. He’s like, are they gonna fix the streets? If they fix the streets, I’ll vote for him. Other than that, get out of my face. And I remember thinking, wait, that’s not what I was expecting. And then, no, that is what people should care about, and that is what politicians should be held accountable for, because these are the daily things that add up in your life. As you said, in places like California, and this was in New York City, people give a lot from their tax dollars and they just expect the very basics to be working.

Matthew Lewis: It’s like, if you’re driving around a city filled with potholes, and you see an elected official talking about something completely unrelated to that, like, I’m gonna vote to have peace in the Middle East, which is something that happens in a lot of cities. Wait a second, I want peace in the Middle East too, but is it your job to fill the potholes? Make the connection for me here. I get that there’s a lot of passion for peace, I share that passion. But I’m also civically aware enough to know that’s literally Congress’s job. There’s no foreign policy power in the Berkeley City Council. But all the streets in Berkeley are falling apart.

Tahra Hoops: Yes.

Matthew Lewis: Like, actually, I live on a street that’s been abandoned. The city has a program of abandoning streets. No, no, I’m not actually joking. The city of Berkeley is in such arrears on maintaining its streets that the public works department put out this whole guide: here are the streets we’re abandoning, we don’t have money to fix them at all. So I live on an abandoned street.

Tahra Hoops: Oh God.

Matthew Lewis: The city doesn’t have the money to pave our streets. It reaches a state of disrepair where the only option is to tear it up and rebuild it, and we don’t have money to do that. So all we’re gonna do is triage the streets we can save. They didn’t use the word “abandon,” but, you know me, I’m the annoying YIMBY at the city council, and I’m like, hey, I’m just reading this line, this means “abandoned,” right? When the public works department says these streets are beneath the level we have funding to repair, that’s, we’re walking away from these streets. Everyone looks around awkwardly, like, darn it, but yeah, that’s what they’re doing. They’ve abandoned like 15% of the streets in the city. They’re just gonna let them crumble.

Tahra Hoops: That’s insane. These are the things. We can take this back to abundance, but that’s a lot of what abundance was asking for. It was a large state-capacity issue. Abundance has morphed itself, where I think if a lot of people actually read the book, I kind of thought of it as a really nice public-policy 101 intro. It covered some introductory things, it wasn’t all-encompassing, but it was fine as is. Now that YIMBYism, for many people, is combined with abundance, do you think that’s been helpful for the movement or hurtful? Because this is a year later, or is it still up in the air?

Matthew Lewis: I get this question a lot. The way I like to answer is to say, I’ve been a YIMBY kind of since the beginning. There were people before me, but we all met each other in the Bay Area around the same era. Sonja Trauss, we gotta give Sonja Trauss credit, she stood up in 2012 or 2013, the loud Philadelphian at the San Francisco meeting, like, you guys are wrong, we should build more housing in San Francisco. Brian Hanlon met her shortly thereafter, and we all met each other at either Berkeley City Hall or some housing meeting.

The reason I mention that is I’ve been doing this professionally now for nine years, and I can say with a straight face that if somebody gave me the money to do statistically valid research, I bet 90% of Americans still have no idea what a YIMBY is. They probably haven’t even heard the word. YIMBY, what is that? We’re 10 years, 12 years into this thing, and I would say we’re seeing incredible success all across the United States, whether it’s Mamdani, or the Colorado reforms, or the Idaho reforms that just passed, or what we’re doing in California, what’s happening in Texas, what’s happening in Kentucky and North Carolina. It’s grown its own momentum, and people still don’t know what YIMBYism is. So, one year into a new coalition is not the time to ask if it’s working.

The long game

Matthew Lewis: Change in civil society and governance, and I wanna get a little philosophical for a second, I think part of the problem of the collapse of our information environment is that people have lost track of how time works. The kind of change that’s really transformational is decadal in length. It takes decades to really change things in a direction. The common example is the civil rights movement. It did not begin in 1963, the year before it. It began in the 1700s. It took centuries to convince people that humans are equal. Then it grew into a more specific set of asks in the ‘20s and ‘30s around, we want to pass specific laws around voting and access to facilities. And that second phase was still a 60-, 70-year project. The KKK was still running around openly in the 1920s and didn’t get dissolved until the 1930s, when people were like, oh wait, maybe it’s not okay to be lynching people all over the South.

The environmental movement is very similar. It kind of started in the ‘50s with the open-lands and conservation movement, and you had national parks before that, but the clean water and clean air stuff starts in California in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, and you don’t see progress on clean air and clean water until the end of the 1980s. It took that long to solve acid rain. You still had horrible water quality all over the United States up until the end of the Reagan era. So I wanna ground it. Year one of abundance? Call me in 15 years. Let’s see. YIMBYism is 10 years in, and what gets me excited is that we’re only 10 years in and we’ve got this massive amount of momentum. We’ve passed possibly hundreds of laws around the United States at the state level to unleash more housing growth. That suggests this thing has a lot of growth ahead of it. It’s gonna be so much bigger, because we’re so young and so new. Again, if you ask most Americans what a YIMBY is, they look at you like, I don’t know what word you just said. That’s my take on abundance.

Tahra Hoops: And I love that, and I’m of your mindset. There are a lot of people who saw the one year and thought, one year in, it’s failed completely as a movement.

Matthew Lewis: I was really pissed at Ezra. I actually reached out, I talked to Brian, I was like, dude, we should talk to Ezra, because that’s not fair. And I think if he’s listening to this, I’d say, Ezra, you kind of made a mistake there, bro. The laws we passed a year ago haven’t taken effect, you can’t really be evaluating those. And there’s all these other cycles that have to happen. It takes effect July 1st, so it’s not even in effect yet. But more importantly, it was a little bit of, I wrote the book a year ago, and why hasn’t all this changed? You didn’t really mean that. He’s a really smart guy, I don’t think that’s, I think it came out wrong on his side, and a lot of YIMBYs got kind of Twitter-piled about it.

Tahra Hoops: Just to give people context, that was the recent New York Times interview. It was very long, but I listened to all of it. At one moment they were talking about some YIMBY bills that got passed, and they basically said, oh yes, these bills are passing, but rent’s still high, et cetera. And the one specific one, SB 79, as you mentioned, does not go into effect yet. I see it all the time, people think it’s been enacted for decades. I don’t know where people got this from.

Matthew Lewis: This is where there’s a really funny irony to the way this stuff works. SB 79 began its journey in 2018 as SB 827.

Tahra Hoops: Yes.

Matthew Lewis: And we’ve been fighting publicly about it ever since. This gets back to the typical-voter hypothesis, where they’re not actually paying that close attention, but if you make enough noise about something it becomes part of their peripheral awareness. So they’re like, oh yeah, they passed this in 2018, didn’t they? And it’s like, well, no, we first started talking about it in 2018, but it took us seven years to pass it. So they’re conflating in their minds, well, wait, didn’t you already do that? And it’s like, no, no. And this isn’t a hit against the average voter, it’s an awareness that I’m a nerd, so I’m paying really tight attention to a lot of nerdy stuff most people never even hear about. So the fact that they’re conflating it, that’s not a flaw on their part. We just have to do the extra work of explaining, no, it took seven years, and it just happened, and it’s gonna take another two years to really start to kick in. That’s just the nature of legislative advocacy work.

The downside is we have a lot of bad-faith opponents who will take advantage of people’s lack of awareness to spread misinformation. And that’s as true on the far left as the far right. You’ve got Spencer Pratt spreading misinformation in LA, a low-information environment, everybody’s like, hasn’t SB 79 already passed? It’s like, no, dude, it hasn’t. But we have the same thing with the socialists in San Francisco who will say, oh, they passed all these laws and it’s still not affordable. Both of those polar opposites take advantage. It’s almost like a horseshoe. The thing is, they take advantage of the relatively low salience of public policy issues. And that’s not just true for housing, that’s true for almost everything. Most people just aren’t paying that much attention.

And this gets back to the Climate Nexus discussion. Most public policy issues are low salience, and in a way, Gary, I think you’ll appreciate this for some of the writing you’ve done, it’s a sign of how well off most people are, honestly. It’s a luxury to be able to stop paying close attention to public policy. Most people, even the ones who say, well, I’m kind of struggling, it’s like, well, you’re struggling, but there are solutions, and we could work on them together. Not everybody can be an activist, I wanna be really clear. But I see the $75,000 pickup truck parked in front of the house with a person saying, I’m struggling, and I’m like, yeah, that’s not struggling, buddy.

Gary Winslett: And it’s also a function, when you say it’s about people getting better off, there’s a little bit of privilege going on when you can treat politics as a form of self-expression rather than an activity, just getting something done.

Matthew Lewis: Totally. If YIMBYism were about my self-expression, it would never work. I have a very specific set of the Matt Lewis Perfect World, and I could draw a picture of it and people would be like, I don’t want any piece of that. But that’s not what I’m advocating for.

Gary Winslett: Exactly. And this is one of the great things about YIMBYism. There’s a wide variety of earnestly felt definitions of what the good life looks like, and the great thing about building a lot more housing of all different types is it makes it easy for different kinds of people with different definitions of the good life to honestly and earnestly pursue that. It’s not forcing everybody to agree on this one script of what it means to live the good life. That’s just one of the reasons I like it.

Insurance, cost, and the hard conversations ahead

Matthew Lewis: And this is at the core of our DNA at California YIMBY and the Metropolitan Abundance Project. The thing we’re gonna have to reconcile with, and it’s being forced on us, my other favorite hobby horse is what’s going on in insurance markets and housing risk. It’s an unavoidable collision, there’s no way around it. Where it’s leading is a very politically hard, painful discussion about costs. And it’s not one we’re gonna be able to avoid, because there is, in fact, only so much money in the world. By far the most expensive item on our entire national budgets is not just the housing, but all the infrastructure that serves that housing. To the extent that we’re now staring down the barrel of an insurance crisis in the largest states in the United States, and these are not just blue states, Texas and Florida are in just as much trouble as the rest of us, we’re gonna have to start having some really painful discussions about how to allocate the cost, how to write off costs that can’t be covered anymore. At the small level, it’s the version of, my city has abandoned my street. Imagine that at the scale of an insurance industry that says, we are not going to rebuild that anymore.

This is happening in flooded areas. I talked about journalism. One of my favorite reporters is Liam Dillon, he used to be at the LA Times, now he’s at Politico. He did this incredible piece of investigative journalism last fall where he went back and looked at all the areas that had burned in California since 2015 or 2016, and how many building permits had been pulled to rebuild, and how many houses were actually rebuilt since 2016. It’s 38%. Most people never rebuild the places that burn. And if you look at what’s happening right now in the Palisades, in Altadena, it’s at least as bad as that, actually much worse.

Tahra Hoops: I drove past it recently.

Matthew Lewis: This has huge implications for public budgets. It has huge implications for housing affordability. If it costs $1.5 million to rebuild, to a fire-safety standard, a house that was built for $50,000 in 1940, you’re not gonna build a house. So what are you gonna build? And if you’re not gonna build anything, where do all those marginal humans go? This gets into pretty major areas of public finance and budgets and infrastructure, and we’re just barely cracking the surface of that conversation.

The good life

Matthew Lewis: But to your point about the good life, I agree completely. There is a good life to be had with housing abundance. We’re still in this Cinderella era of the early phases of YIMBYism, where we’re doing the stuff that had to be done, the obvious stuff, zoning reform, building-code stuff, fee reform. And we’re gonna be coming into this infrastructure and budgeting stuff pretty quickly, because how you raise the money and how it gets spent is incredibly material to how good that life actually ends up being.

Tahra Hoops: Well, this has been a lot of fun. I don’t wanna end on the dark and scary note of what is—

Gary Winslett: I enjoyed it.

Tahra Hoops: I feel like we’re sleepwalking into this.

Matthew Lewis: We are, but in a way these are giant first-world problems. But first-world problems. The country has good bones, and we are incredibly wealthy. The combination of those two things is almost the American superpower, really. Setting aside the bigger threat from what’s going on nationally, the long-term implications of our international relations and all that, which YIMBYs don’t work on. Assuming we somehow prevent a total wipeout at the federal level, we’re seeing this growing demand for the better life, Gary, to use your phrase, and people realizing the better life can be a combination of what we consider the better life to be now, but also that it can be different. And the difference piece is where YIMBYism comes in. You really are seeing huge demand for urban living, for walkable living in particular. This is something I write about a lot: people pay a premium for walkability. They pay a lot more for it. And that’s a clear sign of not just demand, but people’s changing preferences. And the changing preferences are where the hope is. When people preferred something that was exclusionary, unsustainable, highly polluting, high-risk, well, we’re seeing the results of that. And what we’re also seeing is that people’s preferences are changing for something that’s less exclusionary, more sustainable fiscally and environmentally. And that, to me, is a good-news story.

Tahra Hoops: It has been very heartwarming to see more of, not exactly the word YIMBY being placed in headlines everywhere, but the only thing you could appreciate about how dire the crisis has become is that people are coming to a good consensus that the only way out is to build your way through it. You’re seeing this from editorial boards, the New York Times had one recently. I find that really encouraging. Even five years ago, if I posted that I was a YIMBY on Twitter, people were coming for you, putting your address in your DMs, saying “stay up at night.” It became, overnight it feels like, where YIMBYism is now almost celebrated, where it wasn’t always the case. There’s been so much growth of what you said is still a movement that is just beginning. That gives me hope, as someone who’s still got a lot of years to live. I haven’t even bought my first home yet. I don’t even know what the market will look like then.

Matthew Lewis: For what it’s worth, I didn’t buy my first home till I was 40.

Tahra Hoops: That will be me as well.

Matthew Lewis: But to your point, there’s this old saying I’m an activist, that I make a joke out of. It goes: first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they join you and claim they were with you all along.

Tahra Hoops: Oh, I’m fine with that.

Matthew Lewis: I kind of feel like that’s what’s happening with YIMBYism. They ignored us, then they were laughing, oh, you’re crazy, you’re never gonna reform CEQA. Then they fought us, and then we reformed CEQA, and everybody’s like, oh yeah, infill housing is great, everybody loves it. So there’s a bit of a secret, and I don’t know that there’s a way to create it from scratch, I’ve never done it successfully, but if you just create enough social momentum with something, you actually will get people to say, oh, I agree with all that, even if they didn’t before. Because there is in fact social norming that happens, and there’s the casual pressure of, well, I don’t wanna be seen as being on the wrong side of this thing that I don’t understand, so I’m gonna pick the side that seems more popular. So the fact that YIMBYism is getting more popular is a really good sign.

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