The following conversation was featured on Radio Abundance, Episode XXI: LA All-Stars.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Hey, everybody! Welcome to Radio Abundance!

I'm your host, Steve Boyle, here on location in downtown Los Angeles with three amazing Angelenos. YIMBYs. Abundance-minded Democrats.

I'm with Azeen Khanmalek, Alex Melendrez, and Dulce Vazquez.

Dulce, Alex, Azeen – thanks for hanging out with me today, and thanks for welcoming me to Los Angeles.

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Thanks for having us!

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

Thanks for having us!

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Happy to be here!

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Why don't we go around? If everyone can maybe share, for a second, who you are and what's your background in the YIMBY movement? How'd you come to this? What are you most passionate about here? And what's on your mind today?

Azeen Khanmalek, Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA:

Sure, I'll start. I'm Azeen Khanmalek. Thanks so much for having me today. I am the Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA. For the past 10 years or so, we have been LA County's YIMBY organization. We're a nonprofit advocacy organization. We advocate for more housing at all levels of affordability throughout LA County.

I am an urban planner by education and training, and that's how I first came into this work. I worked at the City of Los Angeles for many years for the Planning Department and for several years at the Mayor's Office focusing on housing policy, housing finance, and land use, all in the service of building more housing.

In my journey in the public sector and as a policy expert in the housing space, I think what became clear to me over about a decade or so – and I really started my planning career right as the YIMBY movement was also dawning and in its infancy – I came to the realization that, although I loved being a planner and I love working for government, the solutions that we need to solve our housing crisis go beyond what any one city can do.

Local advocacy and local organizing is extremely important to this movement, and it is, in fact, what Abundant Housing LA mostly focuses on, but this is not just a policy effort that we're involved in, right? This is a social effort to change hearts and minds. And it's also a political effort, to get the kinds of leaders elected that will actually pass the policies we all know we need to get out of our housing crisis. So that's why I'm here today.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Speaking of a multi-pronged movement, Dulce, how about you?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Yeah, absolutely. Dulce Vasquez, longtime Los Angeles resident, former candidate for Los Angeles City Council and the California State Assembly. I've been in the YIMBY movement for a long time, and, I feel like, as a candidate, I was kind of in the first wave of those who were really honing in and centering pro-housing and Abundance in my platform.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

And what year was that?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

2022. 2020 to 2022 was the campaign, and I got a lot of pushback for it, particularly in where I was running, where there were bountiful anti-gentrification efforts.

Azeen talks about sort of the social aspect of it and changing of hearts and minds. I was swimming in this very big ocean, but I've continued on in the movement. I'm a former Board Member of Abundant Housing. I continue to be involved with organizations like California YIMBY, YIMBY Action, launching YIMBY Latino with Alex, and I'm just happy to be here and continuing to spread the message.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

How about you, Alex?

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

Well, Alex Melendres. I have been in some combination of Democratic Party advocacy and YIMBY advocacy for the last 10 years. I started as a volunteer and basically worked my way up in a variety of capacities.

I'm a former Organizing Manager with maybe four different former titles at YIMBY Action, from LA Organizing Manager to Regional Bay Area Manager to National Chapter Manager. And I, for a while, was the Equity Officer at YIMBY Action, where I really focused on building equity-based coalitions trying to work with affinity groups and diversify the movement. Which is something I had been doing for a while, but I was given more of an official role with that.

In the Democratic Party, I pretty much started as any basic Democratic volunteer and worked my way up to be a DNC attendee. I got elected to my local Democratic Central Committee, which are the local governing boards for the Democratic Party.

I should say most of this was in the Bay Area. I just moved here, roughly a year ago.

I've been neck deep in the state Democratic Party, and I like to joke that one of my biggest side missions in the California Democratic Party for a number of years has been to make it more pro-housing and more pro-Abundance. And that's taken a lot of work.

But, given the last election cycle in 2024, we saw a big shift with then-Vice President Kamala Harris actually adopting a lot of the housing shortage language and a lot of the messaging that was really important to what YIMBY Democrats for America is really pushing for. It speaks to the origins of YIMBY Democrats and the YIMBYs for Harris movement.

I've been doing that for a number of years, and my approach has always been to come from a grassroots building-power approach. There's enough policy people out there, but I've always been somebody to focus on building power in people because that's really what it takes. The old joke I used to say is: you can be right or you can learn how to win. We know we're right, and we have to work on winning.

So, that's where a lot of my work and background has been spent.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Nice! And Alex and Dulce, can you tell us a little bit about YIMBY Latino?

Dulce Vasquez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

I think this is Alex's baby.

Alex Melendrez, Los Angeles-based YIMBY Activist:

One of the things that I started to notice around 2018 and 2019 is – I'm just gonna speak kind of candidly – very oftentimes, I was the only person of color in the room, as both my co-guests are probably familiar with!

But, over time, I did notice the movement start to grow more diverse. There was a variety of online discourse and in-person discourse, not just in the Bay Area, but in the state of California, about YIMBYs and Latinos at odds. But, there were a lot of people in the Abundance and YIMBY movement at the time who were Latino and who saw the connection of how their neighborhoods and displacement efforts were actually being affected by the housing shortage.

One of the reasons why I started that was because I saw a real untapped audience there. There was an untapped group of people who felt like they didn't have a space to be both their, affinity-based self and pro-housing at the same time. There were a couple activists in San Francisco that were actually really mad that I started this!

One of my very first events was a walking tour of a freeway removal in San Francisco at the time. It was to remove the Central Freeway and replace it with a park and housing, and some Latino activists in San Francisco were really upset by that.

But, when I started building this audience, I noticed that there were a lot of people that were happy that they had a space. There were other Latino YIMBYs out there who were really willing to hold their values and hold their representation forward.

Since then, we’ve held a couple of events. I held a panel at the last YIMBYTown on how to make the YIMBY movement more diverse. There was also a secondary panel by one of my good friends at California YIMBY, his name is Jordan, on Latinos in YIMBY. And, since then, it's become just a more common thing to see.

Steve M. Boyle, Executive Director of YIMBY Democrats for America:

Well, thinking of all of your cultural backgrounds, I'm curious about your experience growing up of housing in your community? I don't think you speak for your entire demographic! But everyone has a community, right?

Think of your community's experience of housing: did you come to feel like you developed a heterodox take on that?

I mean, I think this is one of the most pivotal questions right now in the YIMBY movement and the Abundance movement is. One of the reasons I'm animated about this is because when you have scarcity – when you have a world where there aren't enough homes and it becomes an auction just for a roof over your head – the first people to lose and suffer are going to be marginalized people. They’re going to be vulnerable people, whether they're low income or whether they have historically not had access to certain communities or neighborhoods or levels of wealth.

And it feels like there is a tension, of course, when you have communities that are cultural communities, that are vital, that we want to keep and sustain and thrive and protect, that are at risk from gentrification, that are terrified of being displaced or eradicated by new luxury towers, and so, therefore