Spotlight: Women Leaders in the YIMBY Movement

When you’re in college, you don’t realize how valuable it can be to have all your friends live 15 minutes away from you. In my own experience, being able to constantly see and interact with my friends helped me grow in so many ways. That close proximity allowed me to build a genuine community. But then when I got out of that community and into the larger city community, I felt alone and isolated because so much of my city is designed to separate people. Now, I work with my other YIMBY Tampa leads to really build our community up because when you push poor and marginalized folks out, you’re removing the people who build up the undercurrent of your city. Then you’re left with this city that only serves certain people. So I do everything I can to turn those tides and help bring people into that larger group consensus that this problem with our housing system is already destroying us and getting rapidly worse. I’m working to let people know that we have a lot of tools to push back and to make changes that could make the city a place where everyone can live in nice, quality places with a future of abundant housing.

Downtown Tampa Skyline

Q: Why do you think grassroots activism is such an important tool for housing policy reform?

A: In America, a lot of our country is designed to encourage isolation and individualism. We live in one of the largest countries in the world but rarely communicate within our broad communities. Grassroots organizing taught me that it’s incredibly valuable to talk to your neighbors so that we can all align on the problems we need to fix and what it will take to create solutions. Without communication, it becomes harder to teach each other things that will benefit us all.

For example, the first time I saw a map of the different zoning classifications in Tampa, I literally did not understand what was in front of me. I was so confused that I became overwhelmed. I was lucky that I had people around me who were urban planners who could explain what these terms meant in basic language. Instead of having to understand very technical housing terms, YIMBY volunteers were easily able to explain in terms like this: There is historic displacement and segregation that is being rapidly increased by some profit seekers and a very small minority of people who are very vocally saying “our neighborhood cannot change.”

Tatiana and her co-panelists delivering a presentation on how to diversify the YIMBY movement at YIMBYtown 2024 in Austin, Texas

When we talk about grassroots organizing, we’re talking about people who are meeting their neighbors and figuring out how we talk to the community leaders and bring them in so that we can figure out how to stop pushing our neighbors out. To create change, it really does take being on the ground and directly going door to door and talking to people. It’s important to fill educational gaps for people who are not housing experts. People like our bus drivers or our teachers are folks who are part of our community who may not have information on how they can make housing more abundant for themselves. We have to connect with them because when you ignore them, then they get angrier and join the NIMBY pool.

That’s happened a lot in Tampa where the NIMBY pool is filled with people that this system doesn't benefit. For those people, I try to point out who the system truly benefits and how we can make it better for everyone. YIMBY Tampa volunteers are great at showing how in our community, fighting to keep 85 percent of our homes as single-family is only going to keep the population widely rich and white. Part of the organizing we do here is simply letting people know that if we just made one, two, or three percent of our housing stock into duplexes and townhomes, our neighborhoods could be just as beautiful as they are now while allowing us to accommodate so many more people that will make our city more vibrant, profitable, and successful. It’s all about sharing our game plan where everyone wins.

Are you curious to see what Tatiana and her fellow YIMBY Tampa volunteers are up to? Take a look at what they’re working on by visiting their website here.