The Origin Story of RVA YIMBY
Field Notes of an Organizer: Part 2
Growing up, I never expected to call myself an “organizer”. In the Asian American world that I knew, it was always “scientist”, “engineer”, and later on, “software engineer”. To this day, it still feels strange for me to claim the title and mandate as an organizer — it is still a mode of action that feels foreign to who I am, though increasingly more familiar.
This is a multi-part story of how I:
started RVA YIMBY, a YIMBY Action chapter that advocates for affordable and abundant housing in the Greater Richmond area
started RVA E-Bikes, a non-profit that funds an electric bike library and an electric bike rebate program for public school teachers and Richmond city employees
2022
One of the areas that I was interested in with regards to local politics was housing. I was quite radicalized after having gone to school in the SF Bay Area and experiencing first-hand the consequences of obstructionist NIMBY housing politics and the incredible power that lay in local city councils. As housing prices increased almost nationwide during COVID-19, including in Richmond, I slowly moved towards finding ways to be ✨agentic✨ beyond doomscrolling on twitter.
, founder of YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, was working on trying to pull together a Richmond chapter by gathering people into a Twitter group message, and reached out to me. We ended up going on a night-time stroll in Arlington, where he generously shared with me his time, his advice, and his experience in starting a YIMBY chapter.
This is not meant to be an intro to YIMBY post, but in brief: YIMBY stands for Yes In My BackYard and focuses on making it easier to build more housing, especially various kinds of multifamily housing. You can find YIMBY Action’s intro resources — some books that were particularly impactful for me were Color of Law and Golden Gates. Let me know if you want a copy and I’m happy to lend mine out!
2023
It conveniently happened that the first ever Virginia-wide YIMBY meet-up took place in Richmond in February 2023. It was my first time actually meeting a group of urbanists in-person, with folks coming all the way from NoVA, Charlottesville, Fredericksburg, and Hampton Roads.
I was somehow asked to say a few words at the event and when I finished, one of the organizers closed by saying “and Charles is going to be leading our new Richmond YIMBY chapter!” It’s amazing the power being volun-told has on a person (or more accurately: empowering people by giving them a higher vision for themselves)
So the next month, we hosted a kickoff meeting for the newly formed RVA YIMBY, with more than 50 people in attendance! Here, one of my co-leads and I are sharing about what RVA YIMBY is and what we’ll be doing as a new chapter.
One of the most consistent pieces of advice I got as an organizer was “create a sense of urgency”. It helped that Richmond city was considering 3 major zoning policy changes, including two which were strongly YIMBY aligned: abolishing parking minimums and allowing accessory dwelling units (ADU) by-right1. We were able to quickly build off the strong momentum from our kickoff event and turn out a large petition in support of abolishing parking minimums. At the deciding city council vote, 8 people spoke in favor of the measure; 5 of them were from RVA YIMBY; the measure passed unanimously.
Later in the year, we also successfully advocated for allowing ADUs by-right across every residential zone. Again, we turned out a large petition and had 4 people speak in favor of the measure at city council; all 4 were from RVA YIMBY; the measure passed unanimously.
Building up to the Virginia state elections in November, YIMBY Action endorsed a bipartisan slate of pro-housing candidates. We also hosted our second Virginia-wide meetup again in Richmond, to discuss our state-wide strategy for the upcoming legislative session in January.
2024
In 2024, YIMBY groups across Virginia, in coalition with other environmental, faith-based, and urban advocate groups, launched the Commonwealth Housing Coalition [and worked with legislators to introduce a suite of 4 pro-housing bills:
Housing near Jobs (SB 430): allowing residential developments by-right in commercial areas
ADU by-right (HB 900, SB 304): allowing ADUs by-right in residential areas
Single Staircase Reform (HB 368, SB 195): why this niche building code policy matters for housing
Faith in Housing (HB 1124, SB 233): allowing faith organizations to build affordable housing on their land by-right
I cannot emphasize enough how transformative passing this suite of bills would be. Virginia would pass, in one fell swoop, the best of housing policies that have passed legislatures in California, Montana, Washington, and even Richmond’s ADU by-right ordinance! Not only that, this set of bills would unleash sustainable housing development across Virginia, create significant new sources of housing supply and reduce the rise in housing prices.2
If you live in Virginia and want to show your support, you can:
Or even better, email/call your state representative in the house of delegates and the state senate to tell them you support these bills!
I cannot emphasize enough how much of RVA YIMBY’s success is due to the many Richmonders who came out of the woodwork to help us build connections with other local orgs (including my co-leads!).
There is a much longer post to be written about what I’ve learned about non-profits and community building here, but I want to focus on identifying what I think several of RVA YIMBY’s key contributions were:
Because we existed as a single-issue organization, we both provided public cover and signaled to city council that housing is something they should take action on, both in major votes on ordinances like the ones discussed, as well as on the special use permits required for various apartment buildings.
While I think it was likely that both of the Richmond city ordinances we supported would have passed without us, we ensured that they were not watered down or delayed.
Our existence as an organization is also important because it allows us to participate in coalition building, both at regional and state level, and act as a Schelling point and a training pipeline for budding local urbanist advocates.
In the same way I was empowered by other organizers to actually take action on my beliefs (i.e. starting a YIMBY chapter), our group acts as a funnel to repeat that process in dozens of small ways, getting folks to be part of a small group of neighbors who advocate for more housing, above what they counterfactually would do on their own.
One of the most encouraging things that I heard several times in conversations with other advocate leaders is “we have been waiting for a group like yours in Richmond” — a volunteer-led, grassroots-driven group specifically focused on increasing supply of market-rate housing. We helped fill a gap in the local advocacy ecosystem and complement other groups working on public transit, biking, and public housing/affordable housing.
In the next post, I’ll share about some more recent public infrastructure work I’m doing around electric bikes. For a sneak preview, you can read my previous post about why e-bikes are cool!
Accessory Dwelling Units aka granny flats aka backyard cottages, are a secondary housing unit on a single-family residential lot
As I hope you can tell, I am very excited about the next couple months for the state of housing in Virginia. With that said, I frankly played a very small role here and much of the credit goes to the other YIMBY organizers who worked behind the scenes to speak with legislators to rally support and find patrons, as well as reach back out to many of the organizations we had built relationships with over the past year and create this coalition.