It happened. Seven years after Sate Sen. Scott Wiener authored a bill that would have upzoned the land surrounding major transit stops — and six years after his second try — Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed SB 79, Wiener’s third major attempt to get a transit-oriented development statute into the books.
This is, as they say, a big fucking deal. My previous newsletter was about why, precisely, SB 79 is so important; if you’re looking for a more detailed explanation of the bill’s contents, I recommend this rundown from my former California YIMBY colleagues Nolan Gray and Aaron Eckhouse, both of whom were instrumental in getting SB 79 to the finish line. I also recommend Nolan’s Bluesky thread about the other YIMBY bills that Newsom signed this month — SB 79 has sucked up a lot of the public attention for obvious reasons, but there’s some other big stuff in there.
I have to confess that near the end of last week I was bracing myself for an SB 79 veto. Los Angeles elected officials and wealthy donors were turning out in force to kill the bill, and I suspected Newsom was about to put mollifying potential 2028 presidential campaign donors ahead of the state’s housing needs. I’m very glad to have been proven wrong, and I’m grateful that Newsom did the right thing in this case. It seems to have been a close run thing.
Why Newsom ultimately decided to sign SB 79 is anyone’s guess. But I’m willing to bet that the flood of phone calls his office received from pro-housing constituents might have had something to do with it. YIMBY organizations and volunteers really went all out over the last couple of weeks when it came to mobilizing a popular defense of SB 79. (I tried to do my part, exhorting social media followers and readers of this newsletter to call the governor.) All of those phone calls and volunteer action alerts didn’t just demonstrate the bill’s popularity with some of California’s most politically engaged citizens; it also raised the bill’s public salience, such that a Newsom veto would have ended up becoming a very unwelcome national news story for him.
So while this is no doubt a major victory for Wiener and for the groups like California YIMBY who worked other legislators on his behalf, the victory belongs just as much to the YIMBY grassroots. And, as it so happens, last week the Roosevelt Institute published an essay by yours truly about why those grassroots are able to flex so much muscle. The secret source of their strength is happy hours:
This scrappiness is one of the YIMBY movement’s greatest strengths. Even after notching local and state-level wins nationwide—and attracting influential national allies—YIMBY remains powered by local activists and volunteers. Larger, more professionalized groups such as my former employer California YIMBY still draw much of their influence from the unpaid grassroots YIMBYs who knock on doors, call representatives, and speak at public meetings.
Because the YIMBY movement can’t pay all its foot soldiers, it needs to offer them something else: Community and purpose. It offers the chance to make their neighborhoods more vibrant, inclusive, and affordable. But that’s only part of the bargain. Attend YIMBYtown—or one of the many local happy hours—and you’ll notice that being a YIMBY is also a lot of fun. YIMBYism is a movement, but it’s also a social club for nerds who love cities.
The bonds established at nearly a decade of YIMBY social events (and through YIMBY group chats, DMs, and Slack messages) are a big part of what allowed the movement to so quickly coalesce around a massive push to get Newsom’s signature on SB 79. There’s a lesson there that I wish the Democratic Party — and, for that matter, a lot of the capital-A Abundance groups in Washington — would take more to heart. If you want to do effective movement-building, you can’t just treat your base like consumers. Treat them instead like neighbors and citizens engaged in a shared social and political project.
This is, of course, another way of framing what Henry Farrell calls the “partyism” analysis of American politics. (You can read my contribution to partyism discourse here.) The success of SB 79 is another reminder that partyism isn’t just a hypothesis; it’s something that YIMBY organizations are already practicing. That’s a big part of why they’re winning.