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YIMBYs Making Gains

YIMBYs Making Gains

Min read

Aug 5, 2025

YIMBYs Making Gains

The Mercatus Center has an interesting briefing out alleging that YIMBY-style legislation is "going vertical" in 2015.

"With no relief from high home prices and rents, more and more state legislators are interested in pursuing housing reform. As a result, state legislatures set new records for the number and strength of new laws intended to unlock homebuilding," they write.

The report shows that 412 pro-housing bills were introduced this year compared to 263 in the previous legislative year, with 123 pro-housing bills passed from July 2024 through June 2025, 102 of those in the first six months of 2025. This represents a dramatic acceleration in housing reform efforts, with states like Texas, Montana, Washington, and California leading major legislative packages.

Importantly, the movement has expanded beyond traditionally high-cost coastal states to include states in the South and Midwest, which have less acute affordability problems and have not been part of the housing conversation in years past, such as Iowa and Arkansas passing strong accessory dwelling unit (ADU) laws.

The reforms encompass both multifamily and single-family housing strategies, though with a notable emphasis on density-enabling policies. For apartments and higher-density housing, states are implementing transit-oriented development laws, eliminating or reducing parking minimums, allowing single-stair buildings up to six stories, and enabling residential construction in commercial zones. Washington did away with local parking minimums almost entirely, Montana eliminated them for homes up to 1,200 square feet, while Texas's SB 840 sets a new standard for bills to legalize housing construction in commercial districts.

For single-family housing, the reforms focus on enabling more units on existing lots rather than traditional suburban expansion. The most popular reform continues to be ADU legalization, with Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Nevada passing new ADU laws. States are also reducing minimum lot sizes - Texas's SB 15 cuts minimum lot sizes to 3,000 square feet for large subdivisions in populous cities, while Maine's LD 1829 caps minimum lot sizes statewide at 5,000 square feet for lots with sewer and 20,000 square feet for those with septic and allows at least three homes on each sewered lot.

Overall, this seems to be good news. As you'll recall if you read our previous reporting on this issue, we've become convinced that YIMBY needs to focus not (certainly not primarily) on building more apartments, but on building more single-family housing, because that is what most Americans say they want and that is the most pro-family option. Americans persist in telling every survey taker who will listen that they want to have a family and they want to have it in a proper house with a garden.

This is important because the preferences of real estate developers and urbanite YIMBY advocates may be different and may end up being counterproductive. On the whole, however, these reforms fall under the banner of what's been called "gentle density," allowing slightly more units within new neighborhoods rather than trying to recreate Manhattan everywhere. So good news overall.

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