YIMBY: Why Housing is a Crucial Component to Affordability
Or: "Yes In My Backyard" — an acronym you've maybe seen, fronting a movement that explains a stunning amount about why your rent keeps going up. And what any of it has to do with Prescott Valley.
60-Second Version
YIMBY = "Yes In My Backyard." A housing movement arguing that rent and home prices are high because we haven't built enough homes — not because of greed, foreign buyers, or [insert preferred villain]. NIMBY = "Not In My Backyard," the opposite force. The economics are clearer than the politics. The honest answer is messier than either side admits. Today: a deep dive, the strongest critiques, six real-world experiments (Auckland, Houston, Tokyo, Minneapolis, California, Montana) plus the research behind them, and what any of it means for Prescott Valley specifically.
The Prescott Valley gap
Median PV household earns $70,793/yr. The math doesn't reconcile. The gap is the whole article.
Wait, What Even Is YIMBY?
Okay, let's start at the beginning, because every time we use these acronyms a tiny percentage of you start glazing over and we cannot have that.
YIMBY stands for "Yes In My Backyard." It's a housing movement that grew up in San Francisco in the 2010s, founded primarily by — and we promise we are not making this up — a former math teacher named Sonja Trauss, who in 2014 launched the San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation.CPDR The acronym, if you're following along, is SF-BARF. They went with BARF. Voluntarily. As an organizing tactic. We respect it.
The core YIMBY belief is simple to state and surprisingly controversial in practice: the reason housing is unaffordable in a lot of America is that we haven't built enough of it. Not because of greedy landlords (although they exist), not because of foreign buyers (mostly a myth), not because of Airbnb (sometimes a factor but rarely the main one) — but because every city in America made it slowly more illegal to build housing over about five decades, and now we are short several million homes.NBER
NIMBY = "Not In My Backyard." This is the opposite force — people, usually existing homeowners, opposing new development near them. And here is your first plot twist of the day:
What each side actually says
If you collapsed every dinner-table version of this fight into two cards, it'd look about like this:
- Housing is expensive because supply is short.
- Supply is short because most neighborhoods made it illegal to build anything denser than one detached house on a big lot.
- Legalize duplexes, triplexes, ADUs, apartments near transit.
- Filtering: even expensive new homes become affordable older homes over time.
- Single-family-only zoning was, historically, often used to keep out specific kinds of neighbors.
- The neighborhood I bought into shouldn't change overnight because someone else decided.
- Traffic, parking, schools, water, sewer — there are real infrastructure limits.
- "Just build more" usually means "luxury apartments I can't afford."
- Local people should have a say in local land use, not the state, not developers.
- Density can cause displacement of the existing lower-income residents.
Both sides have real points. We're going to take them seriously. Spoiler: the data leans one way, but the legitimate concerns on the other side are also real — especially in a water-scarce place like ours. Keep reading.
The Story Behind Today's Zoning Rules
This is the part of the housing conversation that doesn't usually come up in city council orientation. Walking through it isn't about assigning blame. It's about understanding why the rules look the way they do — and why changing them is harder than it sounds.
The first U.S. zoning code is written in New York City. It separates industrial buildings from residential ones. So far, so reasonable.
In Buchanan v. Warley, the Court rules cities can't write laws explicitly banning Black residents from white neighborhoods.SCOTUS That settles one question and immediately opens another: if you can't separate residents by race directly, can you do it some other way?
In Euclid v. Ambler, the Supreme Court rules cities can separate by use. Apartments can be banned from single-family neighborhoods.SCOTUS
The opinion is worth reading. Justice Sutherland calls apartment buildings "parasites." He writes openly about preserving "high-class" districts and keeping "lower" populations out. Those are direct quotes from a published Supreme Court opinion.
The federal government draws color-coded maps of every major American city. "Red" zones — disproportionately Black neighborhoods, regardless of actual economic indicators — can't get mortgage insurance through the FHA. White suburbs can.MAPS
The federal underwriting manual explicitly recommends racial covenants in new developments. A generation of American suburbs is built with that preference baked into the funding.
Explore the live map →
“Very ragged, occupied by Mexicans, Negroes and the low class of white people. There is no sale for property herein.”
Shelley v. Kraemer makes racial covenants legally unenforceable in 1948.SCOTUS The Fair Housing Act makes explicit housing discrimination illegal in 1968.HUD
The explicit racial infrastructure is gone in a few years. The neighborhood patterns it produced are not. Neither are the zoning rules that protected those neighborhoods.
When explicit racial restrictions became illegal, cities turned to neutral-sounding rules that produced similar outcomes. Minimum lot sizes. Single-family-only zoning. Bans on multifamily housing.
Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law (2017) documents this in city after city.BOOK The rules don't say "no Black residents." They say "no homes smaller than 2,000 square feet on lots smaller than half an acre." The outcome is similar enough to be measurable.
This doesn't mean everyone who opposes a duplex on their street is acting in bad faith. People care about real things — schools, traffic, water, the character of where they live. Those concerns deserve serious engagement.
But "this is how it's always been" is doing more work than people realize. The "always been" started somewhere, on purpose, with documented intent. We don't have to repeat the original intent to keep producing the original outcome.
The point of knowing this isn't guilt. It's clarity. The rules can be revisited.
Why Building More Homes Lowers Prices (Mostly)
It's the same as gas prices. Or eggs. Or anything else.
When there isn't enough of something, the thing costs more. When there's plenty, it costs less. Housing follows the same rule. It just took American policymakers about fifty years to remember.
Since roughly 1980, big swaths of the country quietly made it harder to build new homes. Bigger lot sizes required. Apartments banned from neighborhoods that used to allow them. More approvals. More hearings. More reasons to say no. Meanwhile, demand kept growing — more people, more households, more families wanting to live somewhere.
The result, according to a 2025 working paper by Harvard's Edward Glaeser and Wharton's Joseph Gyourko, is that the United States is short roughly 15 million homes compared to where supply would be if construction had kept up with population.NBER 2025
That's not a typo. Fifteen million.
But new homes are expensive. How does that help working families?
This is the part that surprises most people. New construction starts out expensive, almost always — that's just what building costs. But homes age. A brand-new $700,000 home today is the slightly-worn $550,000 home of 2035, the dated-but-livable $380,000 home of 2045, the working-family starter home of 2055.
It works like links in a chain.
A new luxury home gets bought by someone with a higher income. They vacate the home they were in, which gets bought by someone with a slightly lower income. And so on, all the way down to the working family that finally gets to buy a home that started out as someone else's brand new build twenty or thirty years ago. The whole chain shifts down by one.
If we don't build at the top, the chain doesn't move. Higher-income buyers end up competing with middle-income buyers for the same existing homes. Prices spiral. Working families get priced out of the market entirely.
This is why most housing researchers — even ones who care most about helping low-income families — support building at every price point, not just subsidized affordable units. Block the top of the chain and you make the bottom worse.
There's academic disagreement about exactly how much of high housing prices is caused by regulation versus by the simple fact that some places are more desirable than others.CRIT But the basic claim — that building more housing keeps prices closer to construction cost over time — is about as well-supported as findings get in economics.
And cheaper rent isn’t even the whole story.
Here’s the part that gets lost in the should-we-build fight: rooftops don’t show up alone. They drag jobs, stores, and the money to fix the roads in behind them.
Start with the obvious one — building homes is a job. A lot of them. The National Association of Home Builders puts it at 2,900 full-time jobs for every 1,000 single-family homes built, and about half of those aren’t even swinging hammers — they’re the lumber yard, the appliance store, the surveyor, the folks cutting the countertops.NAHB Those same 1,000 homes throw off roughly $111 million in taxes and fees for local, state, and federal government — the boring money that actually pays for cops, firefighters, and schools.NAHB
“Retail follows rooftops” isn’t a slogan — it’s how site selection works. Grocery chains, coffee shops, urgent cares: every one of them runs the household count before signing a lease. Too few rooftops nearby and they build in the next town over. The stores go where the people are. Always have.
You can watch it happen in Prescott Valley’s own numbers. The three things the most people here do for a living are health care, retail, and constructionCENSUS — which is just another way of saying the three industries that exist because people and homes are here. Every new rooftop feeds all three.
The flip side is the leak. About a third of the area’s workforce — 32% — is hitched to jobs down in the Maricopa County area, per this year’s regional Community Pulse survey.PULSE That’s a whole lot of paychecks earned somewhere else, and mostly spent somewhere else. Build the homes, let the commercial that follows them actually get built too, and more of that work — and that money — stays up here.
And the worry that more homes means crumbling roads and maxed-out pipes? Backwards. New development is how you pay for that stuff — through impact fees and the bigger tax base it brings. A town that stops growing doesn’t get cheaper infrastructure. It gets older infrastructure and nobody new to help carry it.
Housing first. The jobs, the stores, and the road money follow.What Happened When They Actually Tried It
This isn't theoretical. Cities and whole countries have run the experiment of legalizing more housing — and in the places that actually built, rents and prices came down for regular people. Here's the proof, plus the cautionary tales that show why how you do it matters as much as whether you do it.
In 2016, Auckland abolished single-family-only zoning across about three-quarters of its residential land under the Auckland Unitary Plan, roughly tripling how much housing was legal to build. Builders responded: construction roughly doubled, adding tens of thousands of homes the city wouldn't otherwise have gotten.JUE
And here's the part that matters for your rent: a University of Auckland analysis estimates that six years on, Auckland rents were about 28% lower than they would have been without the reform — compared against similar New Zealand cities that didn't upzone.RENTS Real city. Real reform. Rents that bend down instead of up. This is the entire thesis, working — not "prices stayed flat," but living got more affordable.
A peer-reviewed study in the Review of Economics and Statistics tracked what happens when large new apartment buildings open in lower-income neighborhoods. The result: nearby rents fell by about 6% compared to similar blocks, and the buildings drew more lower-income residents in — the opposite of the displacement people fear.REST
Why? Economists call it "moving chains." A higher-income household moves into the shiny new building and vacates an older home. Someone earning a bit less takes that one and frees up something cheaper. The chain ripples down to working-class renters — and it happens within months, not decades.CHAIN Building any housing helps everybody.
Houston has no zoning in the conventional American sense. In 1998 and again in 2013, the city cut its minimum lot size to ~1,400 sq ft — roughly a third of what most US cities require. Developers responded by carving formerly single-family lots into tens of thousands of new townhouses.HUD
The deeper signal: land values didn't spike after the rules changed. That's the tell. Developers captured the upzoning value by actually building, not by speculating. The point isn't that prices went down — it's that they stayed roughly in line with construction cost, which is what affordability looks like in practice. Houston grew. Houston built. Houston is still affordable. That's the entire YIMBY thesis, working as advertised.
Tokyo is a city of 14 million people with just 12 zoning categories, set at the national level. The mayor can't kill housing the way a US city can — the rules are made centrally, and local opposition to specific projects mostly doesn't override them.JPZ
Here's why that matters: for most of the past three decades — while prices in nearly every other major world city exploded — Tokyo's stayed remarkably flat, because supply kept pace with demand.FT That's not "nothing changed" — that's the win: affordability held in Tokyo while it broke everywhere else. The caveats: costs have started climbing in the last couple of years as construction costs rise, and Japan's demographic decline and building norms differ — so you can't just copy-paste it. But the policy lesson — build enough, no neighborhood veto — travels fine.
In 2019, Minneapolis adopted its "Minneapolis 2040" plan, becoming the first big US city to end single-family-only zoning citywide.MFED Symbolic win, and rent growth did slow.
But the Minneapolis Fed's own 2025 analysis found the rent slowdown came mostly from softening demand, not new supply.MFED Why? Because in three years only 46 missing-middle buildings were permitted — and just 20 in formerly single-family areas.MFED Legalization isn't the same as making it pencil out. Construction costs, financing, parking rules, and design review still matter. This is the lesson most cities miss.
California legalized duplexes and lot splits on single-family parcels statewide. A 2021 Terner Center analysis projected up to 700,000 homes might become feasible — while warning few would actually be built. They were right: a year in, Los Angeles had received about 211 applications and approved fewer than 40 units; San Diego got 7.TERNER
A rounding error. Cities found a thousand quiet ways to make compliance impossible — owner-occupancy requirements, weird setbacks, fees, design review boards, appeals. If you want a case study of how local discretion can defeat a state law, this is it.
Montana passed a bipartisan reform package (locals call it the "Montana Miracle"): duplexes allowed on any lot in cities of 5,000+, ADUs by right, and statewide growth planning — a Republican-and-Democrat compromise that's hard to dismiss as a coastal-elite project.MTFP
A homeowners group sued. After several rounds, the Montana Supreme Court unanimously upheld the laws in March 2026, ending the challenge and locking in the experiment.MTFP Construction data is still maturing. But the model — bipartisan, legalization plus removing implementation barriers — is the one most likely to be portable to Arizona.
Places that built a lot got cheaper — Auckland's rents fell, Houston stayed affordable, nearby rents dropped 6%. Places that legalized but kept the implementation barriers got modest results. Supply has to actually get built, which requires changing not just zoning but financing, fees, parking rules, design review, and local political incentives. Easier said. Harder done. Necessary.
The Other Side of the Argument, Honestly
Not every concern about new housing is a smokescreen. Some are legitimate. Some aren't. Some are a real worry attached to the wrong solution. Here are the four you'll hear most — taken seriously, with the evidence.
If you read this section and you're a strict YIMBY, you should be slightly uncomfortable. If you read it and you're a strict NIMBY, you should also be slightly uncomfortable. That's how we know we're in the right neighborhood (no pun intended) of the actual truth.
Arizona Passed Two Housing Laws. Neither One Reaches Us.
In 2024, Arizona joined the national wave of state-level housing reform. Two laws got signed. Both are real and significant. Both — and this is the twist — apply only to the state's bigger cities. Prescott Valley isn't one of them.
The first law lets homeowners build a small second home on their lot — what's usually called a "backyard cottage" or "granny flat" (technical term: an ADU, or accessory dwelling unit). Homeowners can build them without going through long approval processes. (For curious readers: this is HB 2720.)BILL
The second law requires bigger cities to allow "middle housing" — duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and townhomes — by right in two places: on single-family lots within one mile of downtown (the "central business district"), and on at least 20% of any new development of 10 acres or more. It also stops cities from using design-review boards to quietly block projects that already meet the objective rules. (For curious readers: this is HB 2721.)BILL
The 75,000 population threshold wasn't an accident. It was a deliberate compromise to keep statewide rules from reaching smaller-town representatives' districts. The practical effect: most of the cities that probably need reform the most — small, fast-growing places running into water and infrastructure limits — are the ones least covered by it.
There was also a more ambitious bill, the Arizona Starter Homes Act (HB 2570), that would have forced larger cities to allow smaller, cheaper single-family homes by right — capping minimum lot sizes and barring forced HOAs and design mandates. Governor Hobbs vetoed it in 2024, calling it "a step too far." Lawmakers revived it in 2025, but that version stalled in the legislature and never reached her desk.PRESS
There is a newer law that reaches Prescott Valley: HB 2447, signed in 2025 and effective at the start of 2026. It doesn't change what you can build — it changes how routine, code-compliant projects get approved. Site plans, plats, and design reviews now get signed off administratively by city staff against objective standards, with no public hearing.BILL
We're not going to pretend that's a clean win. Taking the public out of any part of the process should make you uneasy — it does us. But it's worth being honest about why it happened: the bill's stated purpose was to cut bureaucratic delay and end the inconsistent, project-by-project gauntlet that routine reviews had turned into.
And that's the warning in this whole article, compressed into a single law. When a community's public process gets used to slow or kill nearly everything — not to make projects better, but to make them disappear — eventually the state takes that process away. The lesson isn't to mourn the lost hearing. It's to show up and make local input mean "build this well," not "build nothing," so the state never has a reason to override us. (To be precise: rezonings, variances, and conditional-use permits still require public hearings — the biggest land-use decisions still have your voice. For now.)
So here's where this leaves Prescott Valley: Arizona's marquee zoning reform is real but partial, the two big laws don't reach us, and the choice of whether to adopt similar rules voluntarily is ours to make. Town council, planning commission, ballot measures. That's our table.
Eight Arguments. What Does the Evidence Say?
Below are eight arguments you've probably heard. For each one, take your best guess: legitimate concern, exclusionary in disguise, or genuinely complicated. Then see what the evidence actually says. There's no shame in missing — most of these are designed to feel like one thing while being another.
Watch a House Get Cheaper
Remember filtering? Here's what it looks like in slow motion. Drag the slider to age a brand-new $700,000 house through 30 years of normal housing market dynamics. Watch where it ends up.
Numbers are illustrative but reflect typical real-world filtering rates: roughly 1.5–2.5% real-price depreciation per year on existing single-family stock in normal markets, with quality and area effects layered in. Some buildings appreciate (great location, renovations); most filter down. MFED
The point isn't that this brand-new luxury house personally helps a working family today. The point is that it pulls a higher-income household out of an older home today, which makes that older home available to someone earning less, and so on down the chain. The market sorts itself one link at a time. Over 30 years, today's new construction is tomorrow's affordable housing.
So What About Prescott Valley?
We've spent six sections on national-scale arguments. Here's where they meet the ground in Yavapai County, because abstractions don't pay anyone's rent.
Three things are simultaneously true about Prescott Valley:
First, we have a real affordability problem. Per the Elliott D. Pollack & Company Housing Needs Assessment prepared for the Town of Prescott Valley (2025), the median household in PV earns $70,793 a year, which qualifies that household to afford a home priced at roughly $254,000. Only 13.0% of 2024 home sales in PV were under $300,000. The math doesn't reconcile.POLLACK
Second, zoning is not our binding constraint. The same Pollack analysis is direct about this: the two factors most limiting new attainable housing in PV are development cost (construction inputs, labor, financing) and water (availability, infrastructure, the still-unbuilt Big Chino pipeline). The Town's current zoning isn't perfect, but loosening it overnight wouldn't unlock a flood of new starter homes the way it would in, say, San Francisco — because the limits aren't legal. They're physical and financial.
Third, we still get to make choices that matter at the margin. Whether PV allows ADUs by right. Whether the next master-planned development requires meaningful attainability set-asides. Whether infill in existing neighborhoods is treated as opportunity or threat. Whether we use the next 10 years to set up water infrastructure that lets housing actually pencil out, or whether we let the constraints decide for us. These are real, local, voteable choices.
YIMBY orthodoxy says: build more, prices fall, problem solved. That's mostly right nationally and absolutely wrong as a stand-alone solution here. PV's housing math doesn't pencil out without parallel investment in water supply, infrastructure, and attainability requirements tied to incomes. Supply matters. Supply alone isn't enough. Anybody telling you it is, is either selling you something or hasn't read the local data.
We'll lay out the affordability numbers in deep, sourced detail in our next article. This one was about the framework. If you want the short version of where Together Strong lands on this whole fight, here it is.
Where Together Strong Stands
We are pro-housing. With caveats that matter.
Supply matters. The evidence on that is solid. But "build more" as a stand-alone policy ignores the specific reasons housing doesn't get built in Prescott Valley right now. Here's what we're actually for.
- Yes to gentle density. Duplexes, ADUs, triplexes, courtyard apartments, missing-middle infill. The kind that fits into existing neighborhoods without bulldozing them.
- Yes to mandatory attainability. When the Town approves master-planned developments, attainable-housing set-asides should be real percentages tied to AMI, not vague language. 7.9% is a start, not a solution.
- Yes to water investment alongside housing. You can't solve affordability without solving the water-supply question simultaneously. Big Chino. Recharge. Reuse. Storage. All of it.
- No to status-quo zoning that quietly excludes. If our current rules effectively prohibit anything except large-lot single-family on most of our land, those rules need updating — even if state law doesn't force us to.
- No to "build anything anywhere." Smart Growth principles still apply: directing development to existing communities, preserving open space, walkability, transportation choices. YIMBY doesn't mean abandoning good planning.
If you've made it this far, you are now better-informed on national housing policy than approximately 95% of people who vote on it. Congratulations. Now go read the affordability piece, where we put real Yavapai County numbers next to all of this and look at what it would take, locally, to actually move the needle.
Terms You'll Hear
Quick Answers
Is Together Strong saying we should bulldoze single-family neighborhoods?
Doesn't building more just mean more luxury apartments?
If zoning isn't PV's main constraint, why does this article matter here?
Does Arizona's housing law apply to Prescott Valley?
Is this a partisan issue?
This Took Hundreds of Hours
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Knowing how it works is step one.
Showing up is step two. The choices that decide what gets built in Prescott Valley — ADUs, attainability, water, infill — get made in rooms most people never enter. We'll tell you when they matter. You decide what to do about it.
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