With origins in San Francisco, California, one of the worst cities for housing availability and affordability, the YIMBY movement advocates ending exclusionary bans for building apartments and student housing in residential areas, increasing funding for subsidized housing, and cutting permit waits, among myriad other policies.

“Congress has a role when, especially when states are failing to actually build environments where housing can get developed,” Garcia told Politico. “There’s a lot of things: One, there’s zoning and regulation that we’ve got to engage in. Two, it’s tax incentives.” 

There are seven bills introduced to Congress endorsed by the YIMBY caucus. It is co-chaired by Reps. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR), Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ), Scott Peters (D-CA), Chuck Edwards (R-NC), Brittany Pettersen (D-CO), and Marc Molinaro (R-NY).

Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimates that in 2024, the housing market is short 2.8 million homes. 

On the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris proposed a plan that would cut the red tape to construct homes rapidly.

However, Kirk McClure, a professor at Kentucky University, said the matter is more about a shortage of affordable housing than houses. He examined U.S. Census Bureau data from 2000 to 2020 to see if there was a deficit in the number of households created and the number of housing units. McClure found that just four of the nation’s 381 metropolitan areas faced a housing shortage and only 19 of the nation’s 526 “micropolitan” areas, those with 10,000 to 50,000 residents, were dealing with a shortage.

“There is a commonly held belief that the United States has a shortage of housing. This can be found in the popular and academic literature and [that] from the housing industry,” McClure said. “But the data shows that the majority of American markets have adequate supplies of housing available. Unfortunately, not enough of it is affordable, especially for low-income and very low-income families and individuals.”

This comes as mortgage rates have risen to a 23-year high last year and as rent remains 20% higher than prices before the pandemic.

But YIMBY faces criticism from Trump, who said mass production of apartments or Section 8 housing in or near their residential neighborhoods will actually lower the property values of their homes.

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But many Republicans, such as Chavez-DeRemer, Ciscomani, Edwards, and Molinaro, have gotten behind the movement, seeing deregulation in building and zoning as key to making more people homeowners.

“Obviously, we have different ideas about policy and some bigger debates,” Garcia said. “But, in this caucus, we all agree that there is a housing crisis. We also agree that, oftentimes, housing policy is overregulated. And I think both sides understand that.”