YIMBY organizers still get a lot of criticism from its early days where they would show up to support housing wherever it was being built, and in the mid-2010s that typically meant low-income, minority neighborhoods that were already experiencing a lot of displacement pressure. This gave them a bad reputation among equity organizations which supported alternatives like rent control and moratoriums on new construction. Some YIMBYs still think that policies like rent control are like a metaphorical wrench in the housing market machine which reduce the incentive to supply more housing but even more still realize that the machine is already full of wrenches like apartment bans, onerous parking requirements, and single-family-only zoning, excessively long discretionary review processes, etc [1].

The latest in the movement for new public housing in California is actually supported by YIMBY organizations [2]. AB 2053, The Social Housing Act is making its way through the state legislature right now. While just about every YIMBY organization supports it, it's opposed by NIMBY orgs like Livable California, the League of California Cities, and even the California Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, the orgs which have long talked about supporting social housing are taking either no position or support-if-amended stances on the bill because they don't like that the way it generates subsidy for below market housing is by building market-rate housing to cross-subsidize it. They strongly believe that any new market-rate housing causes displacement but don't want to be on the wrong side of history when this bill succeeds.

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney/video/709917153557088183... [2] https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/