The Left Case for YIMBY
Cr Philippa Scott, Inner West Council
Speech to NSW Fabian Society
19 June 2025
I begin by acknowledging that we are meeting tonight on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay my respects to their elders past and present.
Thank you so much to the NSW Fabians for having me here tonight and to Amanda Rose for inviting me.
This organisation has such a long and well-respected history. You are the custodians of a century-old progressive tradition.
Fabians have always met the challenges of their time with courage.
Asking the hard questions, embracing bold ideas, and never shying away from unorthodox solutions.
It’s in that spirit that I am proud to address you tonight.
The Fabians aim to “promote greater equality of power, wealth and opportunity.”
With that in mind, I ask you this question:
“What would a modern housing system look like if we wanted to promote great equality of power, wealth and opportunity?”
I’ve been asked to make “The Left Case for YIMBY” because I believe YIMBYism is essential to create such a system.
I want to start with a story.
In the late 19th century, Sydney was growing fast, and workers housing was needed to support an urbanising city.
Terraces and cottages were built quickly and cheaply, including my own home in Leichhardt, a brick workers cottage with a tin roof.
When it was first built in 1910 it was for a “storeman” - a shelf stacker.
It was bought on a working-class wage - probably the only household income. In those days, that was enough to buy a home just a few kilometres from Sydney’s centre.
When my husband and I bought that same home in 2017, we paid $1.8m.
It was no longer a home for a nightfill worker - it was only affordable on the combined wage of a senior public servant and a lawyer.
Australian society has changed enormously between 1910 and 2025, mostly for the better. We live longer, healthier, safer lives.
But one change has taken us backwards: the average worker can no longer afford to buy a home in Sydney.
Even renting is becoming prohibitively expensive, especially for young people and essential workers.
This isn’t just a Sydney problem, it’s happening in cities across Australia and around the world.
Today, someone in the same job as the storeman who once owned my house is likely a first-generation migrant, living in overcrowded shared housing and commuting hours from the city’s edge just to get to work.
And theirs is just one story among millions.
Housing is a social justice issue. It is one of the most urgent challenges of our time.
That’s why the Left must embrace YIMBY as a core value in the fight for a fairer future.
YIMBY stands for Yes In My Backyard.
More than just an acronym, it’s now a global social and political movement.
A movement that is explicitly pro-housing and opposes the types of regulatory restrictions that make it hard to build housing quickly, at scale, and in the right places.
A YIMBY is someone who believes that we should build a lot of homes where people want to live.
YIMBYs are a response to the NIMBY “Not In My Backyard” politics that has come to dominate the housing debate in recent decades.
YIMBYism is a powerful force in US politics, and in the past two years it’s found a home here in Australia too.
I am a YIMBY.
I am a YIMBY because I believe we should direct policy, regulation, and activism towards building more homes.
I’m a “Left YIMBY” because I believe that there is a social justice imperative to do so.
Because if we break the back of the housing crisis by embracing YIMBYism, it will be an historic victory for social justice.
It’s a settled fact that housing is too expensive for working people in Australia. I hope I don’t need to convince anyone here tonight that that is the case.
The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council’s State of the Housing System 2025 report, released in May, paints a grim picture.[1]
The median-income household now spends more than 50% of their income to service the average new mortgage.
Renters pay 33% of their income for the median new lease.
More than half of households in the lowest 40% of earners were in rental stress
And housing costs are still rising faster than incomes.
Last year, rents and house prices rose nationally by almost 5%, while incomes increased by only 4.3%.
These are national figures. Sydney’s are worse.
And the most desirable parts of Sydney are worse again.
This is a social justice issue because the crisis affects more than just household budgets.
There is strong and consistent evidence that insecure housing leads to negative outcomes across many wellbeing indicators.
According to the housing theory of everything, nearly every major social problem in the developed world is either created or worsened by the housing crisis.
When good, well-located housing is this expensive, working people are forced to find other ways to pay for it.
They pay with:
● their time, enduring long commutes or working overtime to make rent,
● their physical and mental health, trapped in overcrowded share houses or with families they’d like to leave,
● environmental pollution and degradation, as koala habitat is bulldozed to build car dependent exurban housing developments,
● Their children pay with poorer educational outcomes.
If they are completely priced out of their community they pay with their social and communal bonds as they are forced to move to other cities, states or countries, away from their family and support networks.
And if they can’t pay, they become homeless, trapped in the worst cycle of disadvantage and with a greater chance of incarceration.
Housing this expensive is terrible for intergenerational mobility - we are at a stage now where you can only afford to live in Balmain if your parents also lived in Balmain.
These are all outcomes that progressives strive to avoid.
We fight for safe jobs with good wages, so that working people can enjoy good health, a clean environment, and live in a community that supports and nurtures you and your family.
I believe there is a solution. And it starts with saying Yes.
We can reach these goals by embracing housing abundance.
Like all essential goods, whether it's food, clean water, or medicine, working people suffer when housing is scarce and they thrive when it is abundant.
When we understand that housing is expensive because it's scarce, and that it's scarce in large part to planning regulations, we can start working toward solutions.
We cannot achieve these goals without more housing – abundant housing - in the right places.
Saying yes means reevaluating the progressive mindset when it comes to building.
And using the levers of government that the Left knows are powerful, to build both more public housing and allow more private housing development.
Housing is expensive because it is scarce.
According to the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council, we needed 241,000 homes built in the 12 months to June 2023, but we only built 173,000 of them.[2]
This shortage has built up over decades. A deficit of tens of thousands of homes every year.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we build much less housing now per capita than we did 50 years ago. And the number is falling. Dwelling completion fell another 4% last year. [3]
At the peak of the housing boom in the 60s and 70s, we completed 11 dwellings each year per thousand people. Today it is less than 5.
YIMBYs contend that the central cause of scarcity is planning restrictions that constrain supply.
These restrictions include:
● Zoning
● Height and density limits
● Minimum lot sizes and setback requirements,
● floorspace ratio limits and minimum parking requirements
● and Heritage protection
I acknowledge that this is a heterodox view for the broad Left, but it is widely accepted by almost all researchers, institutions, and economists who study the housing market.
While there are always sceptics, we should accept the research on what is making housing scarce and expensive just as we accept the advice of climate science as settled fact.
YIMBYs have evidence on their side.
My friend Peter Tulip, one of Australia’s leading housing economists published a comprehensive summary of the international and Australian research last year.[4]
He described the evidence before us as a 'mountain' of economic data.
The research he highlights includes original economic analysis from:
● the London School of Economics[7]
● The University of Auckland[9]
● the Greater London Authority
● the NSW Productivity Commission[10]
● and Infrastructure Victoria[11] among many other institutions.
Collectively, their research shows:
● home prices exceed marginal costs for both detached houses and apartments;
● there is less home building in jurisdictions with tight planning restrictions;
● more home building when restrictions are eased;
● The lower prices and rents when restrictions are eased;
● planning restrictions make housing supply inelastic to demand;
● there is substantial economic harm from zoning restrictions.
We can also use our own observations of the world around us to confirm this.
In the left, we value lived experience and the views and knowledge of ordinary people.
We all know young people who can’t afford to leave home or if they do, can’t afford to stay in the communities they grew up in.
We know families that have had to move further away.
We can see around us that our communities are becoming more racially homogenous, and older.
We see long lines at rental inspections.
We can also see that very little is being built in these desirable places.
I can count on one hand the number of new apartment blocks approved for construction in Leichhardt in the last five years. So few I can name their addresses. And the average home price in Leichhardt has increased 33% in five years.[12]
In the 70’s, the global left environmental movement fought and won battles to protect our environment and neighbourhoods.
Concerned by the speed of new housing development and environmental degradation, governments across the English-speaking world enacted new town planning and environmental protection legislation.
American authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have grappled with this in their new book, Abundance. Describing this process in the United States, they write:
“The raft of environmental laws in the 1970s, represented a “Grand Bargain” of sorts. The quid pro quo for a cleaner environment was that development would become slower and more expensive”[13]
They cite the example of the California Environmental Quality Act “CEQA” in 1970. The California legislature required public authorities to produce environmental impact reports before embarking on new public projects – a highway, for example.
Just two years later, a resident action group called Friends of Mammoth sued a developer to stop construction of a mixed-use development in the town of Mammoth Lake.
They sued under CEQA – and won.
The California Supreme Court held that any development that required state approval was a “public” project.
That meant it applied to basically everything anyone tried to build in California. Abundance contends that “CEQA became a potent weapon against the construction of new homes.”[14]
In NSW, the Wran Government enacted the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979, which is still the basis of our modern planning system.
It was a landmark piece of legislation. Since then it has been amended countless times, expanded, renumbered and reordered, mangled, patched up, repeatedly and by various governments.
The one thing everyone seems to agree on about the Act? It’s too long, too complicated, and unfit for purpose.
These changes illustrate the changes to the planning system itself.
Planning and zoning has become so complex, so slow, that the houses people need are not getting built.
With good intentions we have created a tangle of regulations and processes that have done harm to working people.
We don’t want meat processing plants next to preschools.
And closer to home the movement that stopped an expressway from being built through Glebe and Annandale was a good, progressive movement that was correct then and is still correct on that issue now.
But the addiction to planning and zoning has hamstrung us from making progress at all.
Each individual requirement sounds reasonable—a shadow study, an arborist report, a heritage assessment—but together, they form what the Productivity Minister Andrew Leigh calls a “thicket of regulation” that stops us from doing what planning should be designed to do: build good cities.[15]
In 2024, a member of the pro-housing advocacy group Sydney YIMBY found the original development application for his 1960s red brick unit building in Newtown. It was just three pages long.[16]
Today, apartment building applications require hundreds of pages of compliance reports and environmental statements.
Meanwhile, the red brick walk-up unit building has become a Sydney icon. Not horribly environmentally damaging, they don’t have huge strata fees, or underground parking, they have a compact footprint but with spacious apartments, made of brick they’re easy to keep cool or warm, often with a balcony and an outside clothesline, all built with just a three page description.
Now objectors have mechanisms to appeal at every step, but there are no equivalent fast-track processes for builders—only fast-stop barriers.
Builders run out of money waiting for approvals. Land sits vacant. And people are denied the security of a roof over their heads.
According to NSW government league tables, it takes an average of 107 days for a development application to clear the planning system in the Inner West. In other desirable communities—Woollahra, Willoughby, North Sydney and Georges River—it takes between 150 and 250 days.
If we don’t fix this, we will rob our communities of the creativity, joy, and vibrancy that new housing and young people bring.
I know it’s unsatisfying to say that there is a mountain of evidence, so much that it overwhelms my ability to describe it. But
1. If we accept there is a historic shortage of housing and
2. This is causing housing to become unaffordable then
3. We agree we need to build much more housing to reduce these shortages.
So how can we ease the planning restrictions that are such a central cause of these shortages?
There’s one excellent case study right next door.
In 2016, the Auckland Unitary Plan upzoned about three-quarters of the city, allowing townhouses, terraces, and units where previously only detached houses were permitted.
Economists Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy and Peter Phillips have closely studied Auckland’s broad upzoning reforms.[17] Their research confirms that planning liberalisation worked.
Construction doubled.
Rents are estimated to be 28% lower than if the reform had not occurred.
The Sydney equivalent would be upzoning everything between Narrabeen, Hornsby, Parramatta, Bankstown, and Cronulla to allow six-storey apartments.
The Grattan Institute’s Brendan Coates estimates that if similar upzoning had occurred in Australia, house prices and rents would be about 10% lower.
I want to turn now to our homegrown YIMBY movement.
Sydney YIMBY are a grassroots group of volunteers who believe that abundant housing will make Sydney more affordable, sustainable and liveable.
You’ve probably read about them in newspapers, showing up at councils and street meetings to take the fight for more housing against noisy NIMBY residents associations who have honed local opposition to new housing into a fine art.
They launched shortly after the 2023 state election - I was delighted to speak at their launch. But I was the only elected representative to do so.
Fast forward to the 2024 local government election, over sixty candidates signed the Sydney YIMBY pledge, and half were elected.
These included representatives in Sydney’s most desirable communities - City of Sydney, Randwick, Willoughby, Burwood and Canada Bay.
I’m particularly proud that every Labor candidate for Inner West Council signed the pledge - and we maintained our majority. It was electorally popular.
That’s despite our community being host to some of the most vociferous campaigns against new housing, even today.
In the last two years the conversation has shifted.
NSW’s Labor Premier has declared himself a YIMBY; Labor’s Federal Productivity Minister also.
The Prime Minister urges more housing for his local community and agrees that new supply is the solution to our problem.
Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are all YIMBYs.
Legendary environmentalist Bill McKibben has declared that it’s time for progressives to love the building boom.
This week, New York City’s Democratic Socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani declared he now believes the private market plays an important role in building housing.
It’s a broad church.
This fight is not without its challenges. The politics of housing are not settled.
Because the tricky thing about our system of local, representative democracy is that the people who need your help aren’t always the same people who vote for you.
So not all politicians have turned the corner.
And for some, the cheap thrill of saying no is like a drug. It’s easy to manufacture, readily available, and dangerously addictive. Stoking fear and shutting down progress is easy.
Even in my own community, politicians are still fighting against new housing, even those long retired from public life. It’s hard to break the habit of a lifetime.
Saying No is easy. Saying Yes is hard.
Politicians need to reform the Planning Act to reduce the amount of steps, agencies, and processes before a home can be built.
But they need to be convinced to act for the common good.
We need to rebuild our systems and rewrite the rules so that they serve us, not the other way around.
The public developers, who buy and sell land and choose where and how much public housing to build, and the Ministers for Housing both Federal and State need to make a case for a big investment in their portfolios.
There is a powerful argument for building public housing on public land, including some of the most desirable land left in Sydney, at Glebe Island.
People who need public housing should still be allowed to live in the most beautiful places in our city, and to not include them in meaningful numbers would be a missed opportunity for inclusion and fairness.
But the planning system gets in the way of public housing, too.
Private developers should be encouraged to build high quality homes in desirable places by making those places available and easier to build in, and incentivised to include public amenity in their developments.
Private developers act only from a profit motive, so we should use the tools of government that we have at our disposal to angle that motive towards the common good.
The incentive to include affordable or community managed housing in a development in exchange for height bonuses seems to be a win-win situation where the wealthiest among us who are willing to pay for a top floor penthouse are subsidising a single mother or an essential worker in the same building.
We would love government to build as many houses as it can, but this is also how a government can use its powers to align market forces with social outcomes.
And local communities need to accept change.
And that might be the hardest part. But the social justice imperative is undeniable.
Just two years ago, before the NSW government’s agenda gained momentum, it was almost avant-garde for an Australian politician to openly support building a lot more housing.
For decades candidates of all political stripes promised to 'stop overdevelopment'.
That’s no longer the case. The politics of housing are changing.
Our YIMBY movement and political leadership are having a positive impact.
The Inner West Council has just released a plan to rezone large parts of the LGA to allow for 35,000 new homes. Five years ago—even two years ago—this would have been unimaginably controversial.
As a councillor, I can tell you: the complaints we used to hear simply aren’t coming in anymore. This is a good news story. Progressive communities are recognising the need for more housing.
I watch Facebook comments closely. The tone is changing—fast. The organised groups that once opposed housing altogether no longer have the sway they used to.
I’ve received fewer than five emails about the sweeping changes to the LGA.
Leading this change means redefining what it means to be a leftist and progressive in communities that already see themselves that way.
But these communities are coming on board, and rightly so.
The progressive communities that accepted multiculturalism, environmental causes and LGBTQ families decades before other places should be and can be at the forefront of a changing approach to housing.
Whenever there is a proposal to build more housing by cutting red tape, we hear the same counterarguments, maybe even tonight.
I can’t and won’t answer them all, but I want to address some in short.
The private market can’t solve the problem, we need public housing
The private market isn’t for everyone, but it is for almost everyone.
Even at its historic peak in 1991, only 5.6% of Australians lived in social housing. We absolutely need more public housing, just as we need more housing of all types and tenures.
Most Australians want to own their own home. We should make that possible, just as we let people choose their own doctor while supporting them with Medicare
New supply just helps developers make a profit
Yes, someone will make money when they build new housing, but actually, it's a lack of housing supply that makes homeowners and developers stratospherically wealthy.
Rezoning dramatically increases land value, which is clear evidence that planning permission is scarce and highly valuable.
But rezoning itself is free. Government has the power to create more of it, reducing the opportunity for unearned gains.
And if rezoning were less rare, it would be worth less and fewer unearned windfalls would occur.
New supply won’t be affordable anyway
Nothing new is cheap, it always comes at a premium. The price impact of increased housing supply is on the existing stock.
When wealthier households move into new homes, older stock becomes available to others, and landlords reduce rent on older units to maintain occupancy.
It’s like a game of musical chairs. When we don’t have enough chairs, it’s the most vulnerable who are left out.
The real issue is capital gains tax, or negative gearing, or not restricting holiday rentals
Those are all factors that affect demand, and those tax concessions that induce demand have a tiny impact on prices compared to the regulations that restrict supply.
The real issue is land-banking
The vacant homes rate hasn't changed in 45 years, and the measures we have now, water usage as opposed to census data, indicate it might be even lower than earlier thought.[18]
At face value, you have to accept that keeping a property vacant is not a way to make money.
Will infrastructure keep up, what about schools?
The truth is, families in the inner west and inner city are a declining population.
The schools aren’t full. They’re shrinking. Some quite profoundly.
But what about my heritage, overshadowing, traffic, parking…
These should be the easiest for progressives to handle.
An hour more a day of shadow on your backyard herb garden is not more important than a safe, warm bedroom.
Free on-street car storage is not more important than meeting our community’s basic needs.
And while it is important to acknowledge our heritage, that is not the bricks and mortar of street after street of uninsulated federation homes.
It's the waves of working people who lived their lives inside them.
I am so grateful again for the opportunity to address you tonight.
There’s so much more to this conversation. It was agony to choose what to include or not.
I can’t make the entire case in one evening, that would take hours.
But I hope that I have shown you that there is a better way to conceive of our housing debate.
To promote greater equality of power, wealth and opportunity by embracing seemingly unorthodox approaches to housing policy.
That is a contribution I want to make to public life.
And if we do that together, we will leave a great legacy for the next generation of Fabians.
Footnotes
[1] https://nhsac.gov.au/sites/nhsac.gov.au/files/2025-05/ar-state-housing-system-2025.pdf
[2] https://nhsac.gov.au/sites/nhsac.gov.au/files/2025-05/ar-state-housing-system-2025.pdf, p 94
[3] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/industry/building-and-construction/building-activity-australia/latest-release
[4] https://www.cis.org.au/publication/housing-affordability-and-supply-restrictions/
[5] https://www.nber.org/papers/w20536
[6] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.32.1.3
[7] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1evD3BsDCUkw0oqqPfzOE1zZoX9iR9MfU/view
[8] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3960822
[9] https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/business/about/our-research/research-institutes-and-centres/Economic-Policy-Centre--EPC-/WP016%203.pdf
[10] https://www.productivity.nsw.gov.au/white-paper
[11] https://www.infrastructurevictoria.com.au/resources/our-home-choices-how-more-housing-options-can-make-better-use-of-victorias-infrastructure
[12] https://www.realestate.com.au/nsw/leichhardt-2040/
[13] Klein, E., & Thompson, D. (2025). Abundance. Simon & Schuster. p 94
[14] Abundance, p 54
[15] https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/labor-minister-says-thickets-of-regulation-need-to-be-slashed-20250602-p5m47r
[16] https://x.com/ItsDoonby/status/1794961696219664534
[17] https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/business/about/our-research/research-institutes-and-centres/Economic-Policy-Centre--EPC-/WP016%203.pdf
[18] https://onefinaleffort.com/blog/housing-market-deep-dive-1-vacant-homes
