Hi there! This is my second article round up, sharing three pieces I’ve encountered recently that I think connect to the concepts of YIMSR (you can read the previous article round up here.)
Without further ado, here are my top 3 YIMSR articles:
1. A New American Awakening by & (After Babel, 2025)
The After Babel Substack, run by
and , has done a great job laying out the problems with our overly digital American life, and some of the possible solutions. In this article, I’m struck by how much the values resonate with the ones I am trying to lay out here at “Yes In My Spare Room”—values of community, hospitality, and embracing embodied life with others.Below are key snippets from the article, with emphases added by me:
“We need to go deeper to imagine and then build — in piecemeal, over the long haul — a new paradigm. We see the decline of community not as a particular policy problem to be solved within a three-, five-, or even ten-year timeframe, but as a generational challenge that calls us to imagine and live into new civic possibilities. This challenge invites us to co-create new models for building community life and new ways of being when we show up in community — or, at the very least, relearn old models and old ways of being anew. And this challenge calls us to push our motivations beyond the purely material and measurable, creating space for the ineffable, undefinable, and uncontrollable spirit that emerges in human relationships and community. […]
“The heart of renewal is local experimentation in new forms of gathering, association, and social connection across America. There are no blueprints and no “silver bullet” solutions to community renewal in the 21st century — we can only discover what needs to be done by trying things out and spreading what works. The best way to support this flourishing is to support the local cultivators who are experimenting with new approaches to civic life. […]
“[We must] question the ideals of hyperindividualism while imagining possibilities for a more community-spirited future. When you have concrete experiments flourishing on the ground and inspiring ideas circulating in the air, momentum builds.”
Please take some time to read their whole article here. I believe that YIMSR can be one of those “local experiments” that shift the narrative around what it means to be an American in the 21st Century, as Pressler and Davis advocate for. We don’t have to embrace more and more atomization, alienation, and digitization. Instead, by choosing true hospitality (as I’ve written about before), YIMSR can help show that another life is possible.
2. “Older Coloradans are turning to the “Golden Girls” housing model to fight costs, loneliness” by Jennifer Brown (Colorado Sun, 2025)
In this piece, sent to me by subscriber
(thanks!), Brown highlights a Colorado-based nonprofit called Sunshine Home Share that is helping older homeowners fill up their extra bedrooms. From the article:“Little and Novak were matched up through an agency called Sunshine Home Share, which pairs aging Coloradans who own homes with people looking for a bedroom to rent. Tenants get a break on rent in exchange for doing household chores, like taking out the trash or mowing the lawn. It helps older people who can no longer handle the upkeep of their homes, or who are lonely, and at the same time, offers a solution for people who can’t afford Colorado’s rising rent costs. Bedrooms rented through Sunshine are $700-$800 per month on average, far below Denver’s near-$2,000 for a small apartment.
“It’s a service that’s growing more popular as Colorado continues to get older. The state is the third fastest aging in the nation, with more than 25% of Colorado’s population projected to hit age 60 and older by 2050.
“Besides Novak, Little has three other roommates renting bedrooms. Not all of them are through Sunshine. Others came through Craigslist or word of mouth. Some have worked out their own rent-for-chores arrangements with Little. […]
“Sunshine Home Share Colorado made 30 matches last year — each one taking 30 or 40 hours of interviews and home visits. The nonprofit has made about 20 matches so far this year and has at least that many homeowners on the list looking for roommates. […] Sunshine is struggling to find a sustainable business model. It costs about $7,000 to make one match, mostly in staff time put in by the agency’s one social worker and three graduate student interns. Besides spending hours on interviews to find a match, they visit every home share once a quarter to make sure the roommates are compatible. Another goal is to build a volunteer program to help with the match check-ins.”
Click here to read the whole article. While I really love the heart behind Sunshine Home Share, I do question its ability to scale. I imagine with 30-40 interviews and home visits per match, the matches they do make are pretty high quality: all of the subpar options get filtered out. But as the article mentions, the need is already great (and getting greater), and the resources are limited. So what if more people in general had a value for YIMSR, and could help each other to find suitable housemates without having to go through a non-profit? Most Americans have at least one person in their life who is looking for housing, and one person who has a spare room that could be made available.
So ideally, I’d love for non-profits like Sunshine Home Share to keep doing what they’re doing by modeling YIMSR to the world at large, but then also lean into making this program way more accessible and replicable for others to start on their own.1
3. In Colorado’s war against NIMBYism, Democrats want to give churches the right to build housing by Brian Eason (Colorado Sun, 2025)
In this article, Eason shares about another Colorado movement designed to address the housing shortage: rezoning churches to allow them to build housing on their land. Known as “Yes In God’s Backyard”, or YIGBY, this movement has popped up in a few places. From the article:
“This week, Colorado Democrats introduced legislation to become one of the first states in the country to allow religious institutions to build housing on their land — whether it’s zoned for residential construction or not.
”The measure was inspired by the “Yes In God’s Backyard” movement, or YIGBY. Think of it like a religious counterweight to NIMBYism — the acronym for not in my backyard, which has long been used as a derisive label for the neighborhood-level opponents of new housing.
“House Bill 1169, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Andrew Boesenecker of Fort Collins, would go beyond just churches, allowing public schools and universities to build housing on their land as well. It allows for up to three stories, but churches could build even higher densities if neighboring buildings are already taller.
“This can really move the needle in a meaningful way,” said Boesenecker, a former Lutheran minister. “We’re building housing where it makes sense, and really taking care of one of those huge question marks, which is can we get the land, and how much does it cost?”
Read the rest here. I think YIGBY is a great idea for urban and suburban churches to consider, as many of them have significant chunks of land in desirable locations. Unfortunately, this past May the Colorado Senate declined to take up HB 1169, meaning this rezoning effort has stalled in Colorado for now.
But other places should consider YIGBY. As I’ve mentioned previously, my church owns multiple properties that we use as medium-term, “transformational” housing for folks coming out of homelessness. What if we were allowed to build a couple more brand-new, economy units in the back corner of our parking lot? What if every church (or synagogue or mosque etc.) did? The results could be incredible!
I have similar thoughts about Nesterly, which was featured by
in her excellent book Brave New Home (which I wrote about here). Nesterly also does a housing match system for elderly people, but so far they are only active in a handful of communities due to issues of organizational capacity. Quality control over co-housing is definitely important, but when it comes to helping people find housing, sheer quantity is important too. That’s why I am pitching YIMSR as an overall strategic value that I hope more people can adopt all across the board, and not just be for a handful of non-profits.