Jonathan O’Brien is the Lead Organiser for YIMBY Melbourne, a grassroots, member-based organisation that advocates for building more homes where people want to live. He is also a Queensland Literary Award-winning writer, researcher and software developer, and a 10% pledger. Collectivity Talks Founder, Genevieve Brannigan spoke with him about the YIMBY movement, and where he sees the opportunities for architects and developers to help address the housing crisis.
YIMBY, standing for Yes In My Back Yard, started about eighteen months ago. The concept grew out of your typical pub politics chat, sitting around discussing the issues we’re facing—what we see as the two most dire crises of our generation in the climate crisis and the housing crisis, two interconnected problems, with greenfield developments right at the intersection of both. We realised though that we were tired of just talking—we wanted to do something. We wanted to make a difference on these issues.
So we started local. We began going to council meetings and speaking in favour of new, denser developments. Right from the outset, we began to gain a huge amount of attention and support. In part because we’re good at what we do, well-educated on these issues, but also I think because there has never been an organised voice in favour of housing growth and supportive of neighbourhood change before. Previously the narrative has been aggrieved residents and sometimes greedy property developers, but we know that’s not the only dichotomy. There’s a strong contingent of developers who genuinely want to deliver great homes for people where they want to live in them, and there’s a giant, often silent majority of people who want this too, but are too time poor to organise in the same way that we can.
We have a planning system that lends itself to either flat, urbanised carpet sprawl or high-rise towers in small, defined precincts—an approach and range of policy decisions that we’ve been making for decades. Developers like Assemble, Nightingale and Milieu are all presenting alternatives to that approach. They’re producing a product that people want where they want it, on side streets, near trains, trams or transit generally, close to existing amenity and employment opportunities.
And there is a huge market demand for it—buildings like the ones they’re creating are oversubscribed. There’s a hunger to build these great things, we just need to rebuild the framework to allow it to happen.
YIMBY Melbourne now has almost 400 paying members, and we take a three-pronged approach to our advocacy. We have a digital team that’s a lot of communications, a lot of surveys, compiling data both new and existing to create new research and reports. We also have a policy team, they’re examining what best practice looks like using examples from around the world to deconstruct the Victorian planning system and unpack why it has become so hard to build things that people want to live in, in the places they want to live.
The third arm is our local action group, which is really our bread and butter. They’re the ones going to local council meetings, encouraging other people to go along too, coordinating submissions, attending consultations and speaking with communities. This is the team who are really the ones actively moving the needle in favour of pro-growth developments, what we’re calling ‘pro-city urban optimism’.
It’s important that we strike a balance across these three things, and each approach is tailored to tackle a specific issue as we see it.
The biggest problem that we see is that the planning system is set up to be adversarial. There’s a real sense amongst council and state planners that they almost feel obliged to fight developers at every step. I’m sure a lot of architects and developers have seen this, where through planning a project is stripped repeatedly in an effort to ‘value manage’ and keep communities happy, which takes a lot of the original, quality design work out of a project.
For architects, I see the biggest thing as continuing to push the boundaries and ask, ‘Why can’t I build beautifully?’, why do I have to strive for the lowest possible common denominator and not the best quality product? For example, things like absurd setbacks that are not good for the environment, nor the people living there, and objectively are not a necessary part of the planning process, with no real structural engineering or social value—yet they are so prominent in the system.
We hosted our ‘Unbanning Beauty’ event earlier this year with Andrew Maynard, Kirsten Thompson and Colleen Peterson where we took a deep dive into this issue. We discussed the rules and systems that make it so hard to build beautiful things, liveable things; why bad design outcomes have occurred previously due to these rules. We discussed how the biggest counter to these things is pointing them out, promoting the great things that you are trying to do and letting people know when the rules don’t let you reach those goals. Because I think that’s something a lot of the public don’t realise; many of the things that they don’t like about new builds are things enforced by planning rules, they’re not decisions made by the talented, creative and ambitious people trying to build better. If as architects, developers and designers, you can communicate how and why a bad result has happened, it’s a huge boon in terms of advocating for change.
I appreciate that this can often be easier said than done. Nobody wants to be the one to say that yes, I made a bad design because I was forced to by the existing systems. That’s where YIMBY voices can come in—that’s the advantage of our grassroots approach. Without any financial stake on either side of the equation we can be the ones to observe the bad outcome, and link it back to the poor planning decisions.
One of the most significant pieces of change that needs to happen is that we need to shift from a self-selecting consultative system to a more representative one. Currently we work from a model that relies on people to volunteer, to show up themselves, and often these people are going to be the angriest—the most anti-development. At YIMBY we work within this system, and encourage and support our members to also show up and be a pro-growth voice, but this is only a response to a system designed to be adversarial. What we need instead is representative consultation, whether that is phone surveys, citizen juries—where people are randomly selected until an accurate demographic is represented, and demographics are actively sought. For example, in an area with 20 or 30 per cent renters, 20 to 30 per cent renters should be consulted. We know that in our current system, renters are almost always completely excluded from consultation—and it is scenarios like that we must avoid in future.
Obviously a large part of this goal is systemic change, but I believe there is room for architects and developers to do this research up-front, to really advocate before going into planning submissions for the kind of building they want to create, with the evidence from the community to back it up.
One of the pieces of work I am really interested in is to work with developers and architects to document the true cost of the planning system in its current form. What’s the cost of the wait time? The cost of every revision and every form you’re forced to do along the way? What is being value managed out, what compromises are you making because one day a senior planner shows up and demands you change the setback by an additional three metres? These things are embedded into our system and are actively occurring all the time, but it’s incredibly difficult for people to speak out against when they don’t want to burn their bridges. This is where I want us to come in. If we can speak with people about the actual cost, what it’s truly adding to the bottom line of our homes—if our cards are all on the table, we can work from a much stronger position in advocating for change. Because the answer will be in the tens if not hundreds of thousands, and it’s making our city less affordable, less liveable and less accessible. It’s making projects, no matter how well conceived or intentioned, not stack up altogether.
