Unravelling the False Binary of NIMBYism Vs YIMBYism: Why Reinserting the Land Question Can Support Long-Term Resistance to Housing Commodification

The housing crisis is a land crisis. Yet the question of land ownership has long been detached from discussions of how we intervene in the UK’s chronic housing problems. This detachment is not merely reserved for political discourse and policy-making roundtables, it has become so normalized that it has leaked into spaces of resistance. Activists resisting housing commodification are forced to centre their efforts on firefighting immediate problems of eviction, temporary accommodation and rent rises, as opposed to longer term proactive resistance to land grabbing and speculation. This paper, and broader project, seeks to reinject the land question into our struggles against the commodification of homes. It does so through blasting open the false binary of ‘NIMBYism’ vs ‘YIMBYism’, a divisive positioning which has come to the fore in UK politics. This discourse has created a folk devil of anyone opposing the mass building of house by for-profit developers, regardless of why opposition is present, in doing so it operates as a process to manufacture consent for the commodification of housing and opposition to those resisting it. Inevitably, this flies in the face of efforts to push for state-owned housing to be a dominant tenure. Thus far, activists, unions and researchers have failed to make visible precisely why and how this discourse plays into the hands of private interests extracting financial gain from our housing. However, as this research shows, if we centre the ownership of land in our conceptualization of the UK’s housing crisis the vested interests become much more visible, therein making space for resistance at community, policy and political levels. This requires interventions at multiple levels. Political education and a tooling up of activists to understand land ownership structures in the UK, predominantly through tracing the transfer of public land to private entities facilitated by local states under austerity. Alongside a wholesale shift in the UK’s development model, which currently allows land ownership to be the most lucrative assets, moving towards one in which ‘hope value’ is abolished and land is use for common good.