Kamala Harris Holds First Rally With Running Mate Governor Tim Walz Of Minnesota. (Photo by Cover Images via AP Images)
After years of community organizing and conversations between residents and city planners, Minneapolis City Council voted 12-1 to approve a historic, first-in-the-nation plan to end single-family zoning citywide back in December 2018.
A lawsuit led to a judge halting the implementation of that plan in June 2022.
In May of this year, Minnesota state legislators passed a bill negating that judge’s decision, clearing the way for the original plan’s implementation to move forward.
The governor who signed that bill into law? Vice President Kamala Harris revealed him yesterday as her running mate and would-be veep, Tim Walz.
Does the Minnesota Governor’s signing of that bill back in May make him a “YIMBY”? Leading voices in the growing YIMBY movement were quick to claim him yesterday on social media.
YIMBY stands for “Yes In My Backyard,” an acronym that has become a shorthand for a movement that claims to be in favor of zoning reforms that allow for greater housing density in the name of affordability, environmental responsibility, and just better urban design overall.
The YIMBY movement’s earliest recruits and funding sources came from Silicon Valley tech workers and the real estate industry. The largely white, male-dominated real estate industry was more than happy to gain new allies with usually younger, more gender-balanced faces — not to mention a seemingly progressive bent. YIMBYs loudly denounce the racist origins of single-family zoning, ironically first created in the otherwise progressive bastion of Berkeley, California.
Back in 1916, the state of California delegated the power of zoning to local governments. Shortly thereafter in Berkeley, the local real estate industry convinced policymakers to create single-family zoning as a way to maintain racial segregation without explicitly using race. Limited by racial discrimination in job markets and banking, families of color could only afford to rent smaller apartments in neighborhoods zoned for higher density.
After the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed explicitly race-based zoning in 1917, the Berkeley model took off across the country as the next-best alternative for policymakers looking to maintain racial segregation. It’s still the norm in U.S. cities today, where 75% of residential-zoned land is still limited to single-family housing.
The racist history of single-family zoning is well-known among many seasoned tenant organizers and racial justice advocates. They’ve spent decades fighting back against the racist real estate industry that helped create single-family zoning in the first place.
YIMBY groups didn’t do their movement any favors by taking money from — and politically aligning with — the real estate industry. Given its track record of racism from before 1916 up until the present day, there’s still plenty of reason to doubt the real estate industry would suddenly serve everyone equitably if only zoning got out of the way.
Whether or not any of it can be attributed to the YIMBY movement, more and more jurisdictions are doing away with single-family zoning. After Minneapolis, the entire state of Oregon followed in July 2019, then California in 2021. In 2023 it was Washington State and Virginia’s Alexandria and Charlottesville, as well as the other Twin City, St. Paul. Also in 2023, Boise, Idaho, opened some areas previously zoned for single-family to denser forms of housing such as duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and cottage villages.
Proponents of abolishing single-family zoning are not a monolith. You don’t have to be a card carrying YIMBY to oppose single-family zoning. But those who oppose blanket upzoning of states or cities aren’t monolithic, either.
Yes, there are still plenty of white, wealthy or middle-class homeowners who oppose upzoning their neighborhoods for reasons that range from veiled racism like “preserving neighborhood character” or “maintaining property values” to not-so-veiled racism like “keeping out criminals and other bad elements,” or worse. Early observations from Minneapolis since abolishing single-family zoning citywide have so far refuted such racist dog-whistles — citywide home values in Minneapolis have gone up 3% to 5% since the zoning change, according to one study.
At the same time, as Next City has covered before, there are also working-class communities of color who fear upzoning would only throw gasoline onto the fire of speculative investors who are already jacking up rents or and making all cash-offers to buyout homeowners at a fraction of what their homes are really worth — not to mention engaging in outright deed theft.
Real estate speculation was on the rise in the Twin Cities for years even before the abolition of single-family zoning was just a possibility. It’s become rampant enough that researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis started tracking investor purchases of single-family homes in the Twin Cities metropolitan area.
Those purchases have been focused in high-poverty areas, undermining homeownership opportunities for many people of color, say the researchers at the Minneapolis Fed. It’s a reflection of the racism still endemic in the real estate industry. It doesn’t help quell fears that upzoning would provide more opportunities for the real estate industry to profit at the expense of working-class communities of color.
In his time as governor, at least, Tim Walz has supported efforts to address housing with more than just upzoning and hoping the real estate industry will figure it out. Last May, Governor Walz signed legislation to spend $1 billion of state money on housing. He followed that up in December with another $350 million for housing.
Beyond money, last year Walz also signed a package of legislation expanding tenants’ rights statewide. Expanding tenant rights is one of those things that helps curb endemic racism in the real estate industry even without mentioning race explicitly, just by the nature of who are landlords and which tenants are most likely to suffer from a lack of protections. Landlords are overwhelmingly white, while Black tenants represent 51% of all eviction cases even though they only represent 18% of tenants.
As of January 1 this year, landlords in Minnesota must give renters 14 days’ notice before filing an eviction, include all required fees in the advertised rent, ensure units maintain a temperature of at least 68 degrees Fahrenheit during the winter, and provide tenants 24 hours’ notice before entering a unit. All evictions will be removed from a tenant’s record after three years, or sooner if there is a settlement with the landlord. Landlords can no longer ban tenants from having cannabis in their units (although no-smoking or no-vaping rules can still apply), nor can they evict tenants for minor crimes committed away from their properties.
Tenant advocates spent years organizing to obtain those rights. Another new law, going into effect on January 1, 2025, protects the rights of tenants in Minnesota to organize freely and prohibits landlords from retaliating if tenant organizations report a code violation to a government entity, seek assistance from a community organizer, contact the media, or testify in any court or an administrative proceeding concerning the condition of the premises.
Walz’s support for abolishing single-family zoning may or may not make him a YIMBY. It certainly aligns him with the top of the ticket — as part of the Biden-Harris administration, Vice President Kamala Harris has helped champion initiatives like federal grants to help cities ditch single-family zoning policies. On tenant rights, the Biden-Harris administration has also been moving in the same direction as Minnesota under Walz.
For the record, their campaign opponents definitely fall squarely in the “NIMBY” camp, as in “Not In My Backyard.” Project 2025, widely seen as the blueprint for a potential second Trump Administration, proposes to “oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning” and “prioritize any and all legislative support for the single-family home.” As for potential support for expanding tenant rights, Donald Trump’s record as a nightmare landlord is well-documented.
Maybe it doesn’t matter whether the Harris-Walz ticket is a YIMBY ticket or not. It took years of organizing to abolish single-family zoning in Minneapolis and expand tenant rights in Minnesota. Both steps help curb the real estate industry’s historic and endemic racism, and there are many more steps to take toward that end. Maybe what matters is continuing to take those steps and recognizing the important role of organizing with tenants and communities to make the end of racist practices possible.