YIMBY Funding & Evolution - The Grandmother Hypothesis and the Grandmother Tax

Emma McGrath-Cohen’s article (“US billionaires fund Australian YIMBY battle,” Housing, Australian Financial Review, 12-13 July 2025, p.2), points to a pattern of external influence in Australia’s land-tenure and planning laws, with parallels to US trends and implications for democratic control.

YIMBY Funding and Influence: The article confirms YIMBY Melbourne received a $500,000 grant from Open Philanthropy, a US foundation backed by tech billionaires like Dustin Moskovitz, to advocate for housing density.  Open Philanthropy has also funded US YIMBY groups, such as $1.5 million to California YIMBY and support for New York’s “City of Yes” zoning reform, which aims to add 80,000 homes over 15 years. Also mentioned in the article was Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, who is a donor to Open Philanthropy's initiatives, notably contributing to its $120 million Abundance and Growth Fund (launched March 2025) alongside Good Ventures. This funding pattern suggests a coordinated push for developer-friendly policies across both nations, pushing high-density housing, relaxed zoning, and reducing residents’ rights.

Immigration and Population Pressure

YIMBY Australia and YIMBY USA avoid discussing immigration’s role in housing demand. Australia’s population growth is mostly driven by legal migration (520,000–550,000 net overseas migrants annually). In the year ending June 2024, net overseas migration accounted for 83% of population growth, while natural increase made up the remaining 17%. Similarly, cities like New York and San Francisco face housing demand pressures from both legal and illegal migration. Yet, YIMBY groups focus solely on supply-side solutions, such as building more apartments. This omission aligns with developer interests, as migration fuels demand, benefiting corporate landlords and financiers like BlackRock, which dominate “Rent to Build” schemes. 

Regime Change via Land-Law and Land-Tenure Changes

Open Philanthropy’s funding of YIMBY Australia, alongside increasing financial media coverage normalising YIMBY as an entirely benign prospect, raises concerns. This narrative fails to question its alignment with developer interests and concentration on supply, legitimizing policies that shift control from local councils to corporate-administered Activity Centres, as seen in Victoria’s planning amendments. The goal to reduce free-standing home ownership and promote “rent-to-buy” models favors large transnational developers. This resembles patterns of land-corporatisation in Ukraine, albeit without the bombs so far, where BlackRock, Vanguard, and various financial institutions capitalized on war to gain ownership and control of land. 

Corporate Influence in Australian Banking

BlackRock and Vanguard are among the top three investors in Australia's big four banks, according to Richard Henderson, “Andrew Leigh takes on BlackRock and Vanguard,” Financial Review, 8 June 2021. Their global influence on real estate and financial stake in Australian banking is concerning in the context of authoritarian government behaviour driving changes to Australian land-tenure and land-use regulation that benefit and give almost free-rein to such developer-transnationals.

Democratic Deficits and Tenant Rights

The lack of transparent consultation, as criticized by the National Trust, undermines democratic input, effectively disenfranchising citizens despite their voting rights. YIMBY’s supply-side focus, backed by Open Philanthropy, sidesteps migration-driven demand, aligning with corporate interests over broad ongoing long-term community needs. Like Open Society Foundations’ external influence on national policies and law, but with a different focus, Open Philanthropy’s technocratic agenda pushes market-driven reforms, potentially eroding local governance. Ordinary residents’ groups of many years standing try seriously and with evidence-based arguments to counter this but fail to gain traction in corporate and government media, whilst YIMBY’s media amplification and funding gift it significant clout.  A major difference in these two aspects of the battle over land-use is that residents’ groups claims do not align with big development and international finance, whereas YIMBY policies do.  Architect Alistair Sisson has written an interesting article on the effects of YIMBY policies overseas: "The YIMBY movement is spreading around the world. What does it mean for Australia’s housing crisis?" (Architecture Au.)

Ageism and the YIMBY vs. NIMBY Debate

There is another aspect of this mediatised ‘debate.’ That is, as expressed by the National Trust Victoria, the divisive rhetoric of YIMBY vs NIMBY.  Why does it feel like ageism? Maybe because developers and governments that want more immigration repeatedly erroneously say that this will help our aging population problem.  No matter that immigrants arrive in Australia at a mean age of about 27, whereas babies arrive at age zero, and the Federation of Ethnic Communities Australia (FECCA) told us in 2011 to prepare for our aging immigrant population, which is the oldest cohort in Australia. Maybe also because older home-owners are in the majority (due to post-oil shock economic policy changes, not their own design) and home-owners who want to continue to live in peace are most likely to be the target of YIMBY tax policy.
 

The Grandmother Hypothesis

Evolutionary theory highlights the value of elderly individuals for their knowledge and care-giving roles and is known as the grandmother hypothesis. This theory suggests that humans evolved to live long past their reproductive years to help raise grandchildren, thus increasing their fitness by supporting their offspring and enabling them to have more children. This extended lifespan, particularly in females, is linked to the cultural transmission of knowledge and the practical support provided by older individuals, especially grandmothers. In turn, the younger generation learns to respect and take care of their elders. This idea does not suit modern economic or demographic dogma in Australia.

The Grandmother Tax

A statement by YIMBY’s Jonathan O’Brien to the Legislative Council Economy and Infrastructure Committee indicates that he is in favour of getting old people to move out of their freestanding homes, which he acknowledges means they will lose things, because he thinks that [such] housing can be better allocated to other people [“those who need it most in the moment”] which sounds to me like he thinks old people should lose their rights on grounds of their age. See quote below:

"I can tell you the story of my grandmother, who currently lives on her own in a four-bedroom house, and she has done so for many years. Now, she is a stubborn old woman, and I can say that because I think I have parliamentary privilege. There are many reasons why she might not want to move, but one of them is absolutely the imposition of stamp duty. This is a woman who grew up during harder times and who worries about the resources she has. In simple terms, when she thinks about moving she thinks about what she will lose, and an additional loss, the imposition of stamp duty, is a part of what keeps her from moving. This is not a moral position on taxation. In fact land tax, for which we advocate in our submission, sometimes gets derided as a grandmother tax, because it functions as a new tax on those who have held property for a long time. But we see a tax like this, one that incentivises rather than disincentivises a better use of scarce resources such as land, as a good tax. Any tax that even on the off-chance might make a woman as stubborn as [Name Redacted] consider moving house rather than staying put in her own four bedrooms on an acre block is fundamentally a good tax. We have to use land better, and we have to enable our ageing population to feel okay about moving and downsizing so that housing can be better allocated to those who need it most in the moment." (Jonathan O'Brien, Inquiry into Land Transfer Duty Fees, Legislative Council Economy and Infrastructure Committee, Wednesday 28 June 2023, p.2)

Dystopia

It is surely understandable that elderly homeowners may be reluctant to move into high-rises, facing uncontrollable body corporate fees along with various other issues related to apartment living (Ericka Altman, “Downsizing cost trap awaits retirees – five reasons to be wary,” https://candobetter.net/erika-altmann/blog/5278/downsizing-cost-trap-awaits-retirees-five-reasons-be-wary). However, there is a substantial message conveyed by the media and others that they should do so because they are perceived as less worthy than younger people (no matter that it is mostly new immigrants driving demand). They are urged to ‘move aside’ and ‘make room.’ This attitude is dangerous; not only do we all grow old, but in a digitized, mediatised world, it is difficult to ascertain an accurate history of past events. Yet, older individuals can recount what actually happened.

Imagine in 2050, as the last of the baby boomers pass away, corporate governments addressing the aging inhabitants of high-rise sprawl, telling them that they never had it so good while their forefathers lived in misery. How will future Australians know any differently from what their masters and landlords tell them if they never listened to the lived reality of the older generations?