About YIMBY Melbourne
YIMBY Melbourne is Australia's foremost voice for housing, land-use, and abundance policy. We are a registered non-profit, funded by members and philanthropy.
Our story
YIMBY Melbourne was founded in 2023 to help enable more homes to be built where people want to live.
Our organisation began with one simple premise: Australia’s housing crisis is a housing shortage, and the most effective response is evidence-based reform of the legacy planning systems that have constrained supply for decades. We fight for the broad reform required to create more affordable, liveable, and sustainable Australian cities.
We began by speaking in favour of thousands of homes across Melbourne’s local councils, supporting social housing and market-rate housing projects alike, disrupting the outdated status quo that favoured opposition.
In September of that year, our first report, Melbourne’s Missing Middle, proposed enabling six-storey, mixed-use development near transit — creating 1,992 high-amenity, walkable neighbourhoods.
Since then, land use and housing policy has progressed rapidly across Victoria. And we’ve continued to release major reports, appear at parliamentary inquiries, and operate at the cutting edge of Australian housing research.
We’ve been cited in parliamentary reports at the state and federal levels, engaged with public and private stakeholders, and appeared in all major media publications and channels, including The Age, ABC News, The Guardian, Channel 7, 9, and 10, and dozens of other outlets.
We are funded by members, donors, and philanthropic grants, with major support from Coefficient Giving. We are a member of the Abundant Housing Network Australia (opens in a new tab), and we take no money from developers or the housing industry.
Our Approach
Values
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Impactful
Through high-quality research and hands-on advocacy, the work we do drives meaningful change.
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Independent
Our research is funded by members, donors, and philanthropic grants. We take no money from developers or the housing industry.
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Evidence-based
Every claim we make is grounded in data, peer-reviewed research, or original analysis that pushes the debate forward.
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Constructive
YIMBY Melbourne differentiates itself by going beyond critique, and proposing detailed solutions that can actually be implemented.
Team
Staff
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Jonathan O'Brien
CEO
Jonathan O’Brien is the Lead Organiser of YIMBY Melbourne. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of long-form policy journal Inflection Points (opens in a new tab), and a Queensland Literary Award–winning writer and publisher. He is a 10% pledger with Giving What We Can (opens in a new tab), and an extremely uncompetitive triathlete.
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Ethan Gilbert
General Manager
Ethan is the Deputy Lead Organiser at YIMBY Melbourne. He is also a founding editor and head of digital at Inflection Points (opens in a new tab). Ethan lives in Melbourne, where he grew up, and has aspirations to one day be a historian.
Board of directors
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Tom Pisel
President
Tom Pisel is a founding member and inaugural secretary of YIMBY Melbourne, and longtime advocate for housing density and affordability with a breadth of experience across architecture, data science, and Australian emerging technologies.
In 2012, and in response to growing dissatisfaction with Melbourne’s public transport, Tom founded Tramsurance, a fare evasion insurance scheme that made news around the world. Tom has served as interim CEO at tech startup Macropod Pty Ltd, where he negotiated and enacted a buyback of investor shares, returning it to founder control. Then, as managing consultant at RSF Consulting, Tom advised on research and development across the Australian technology sector. Tom now works in health data and research for SiSU Health, a Wesfarmers Health company.
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Tris Layton
Vice President
Tris Layton is a planning lawyer and founding member of YIMBY Melbourne. As a planning lawyer, Tris is at the coalface of Victoria’s broken planning system and brings an important insight as a practitioner to YIMBY Melbourne.
Prior to his admission to the legal profession, Tris worked as a staffer and policy advisor to the Victorian Liberal Opposition. Tris served as YIMBY Melbourne’s inaugural treasurer.
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Katie Roberts-Hull
Secretary
Katie Roberts-Hull is passionate about allowing more homes where people want to live. Katie is an education researcher and became a YIMBY in part because of the strong connection between housing policy and school equity. Katie was the face of objection to heritage-listing a concrete carpark (opens in a new tab) in Carlton, and she wrote for the Guardian (opens in a new tab) about the tension between heritage policy and housing supply. Katie was one of the original YIMBYs profiled (opens in a new tab) by The Age in 2023. She is also an urbanist parent with two young children and cares about making the inner city a better place for families to stay long term.
Katie has served as the CEO of an education sector not-for-profit organisation and on the local school council. Katie holds an MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and an MPA from the Kennedy School at Harvard University.
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Romeo Takafuma
Treasurer
Romeo is a Chartered Accountant (CA), Chartered Tax Adviser (CTA) and Associate of the Governance Institute of Australia (AGIA) with more than 15 years’ experience in strategic finance, corporate governance and M&A across SMEs and listed. As a long-standing virtual CFO and board adviser to multiple mid-sized Australian companies, he is known for translating complex financial issues into clear, community-focused action plans that unlock growth and manage risk.
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Dan McKenna
Committee Member
Dan McKenna is a passionate advocate for transforming Australia’s housing sector. As CEO of Housing All Australians, he is dedicated to addressing the nation’s housing crisis by pioneering innovative solutions that challenge traditional models and drive meaningful change.
Before taking on his current role, Dan was CEO of Nightingale Housing, an award-winning not-for-profit organisation committed to developing socially, financially, and environmentally sustainable homes. Dan played a key role in expanding the organisation’s influence and impact in the housing sector.
In 2023, Dan received Monash University’s Distinguished Alumni Award in recognition of his leadership and contributions to the industry.
Funding transparency
YIMBY Melbourne is funded by members, individual donors, and philanthropic grants. We receive major funding from Coefficient Giving.
We take no money from property developers, the real estate industry, or any organisation with a commercial interest in planning outcomes. This independence is fundamental to our credibility and the trust placed in our research by government, media, and the public.
We are a not-for-profit organisation registered with the Australian Charities and Non-profit Commission.