What I try to do at this newsletter is identify the actual, substantive disagreements or points of divergence between urbanists/YIMBYs/etc. and everyone else—everyone else being regular people with NIMBY-ish opinions, which seems like most people.
One of these points of disagreement that I’ve sensed is what it means, broadly, to live in a specific place and be part of its community. If you follow, say, Facebook pages on town news, there will be posts about new housing developments, and the comments will lean heavily against. What’s interesting to me, though, is not that people don’t want their communities to change—which is a normal sentiment, if an unrealistic one—but how they specifically present that opinion.
It usually isn’t some variant of “Ugh more development, I don’t like that.” It’s often more along the lines of “Who is this for?” or “Nobody wants this!” or “They’re turning our quiet little town into [either big city or slightly more developed small town nearby].” In other words—whether it’s greedy developers or corrupt politicians or illegal immigrants or entitled Millennials or whatever other left-NIMBY or right-NIMBY bogeyman—some “they” is responsible for foisting over-development on a happy, self-contained community that doesn’t want it.
In short, in the NIMBY view, development is a thing that is done to communities collectively, not a thing that is fundamentally part of what it means to be a community.
There is a definition of community membership or neighborliness which implies defending the community writ large against outsiders, as though favoring growth and development and new housing is an illegitimate opinion.
The disagreement, then, is whether choosing to live in a specific place implies that you have agreed to a sort of contract to fight to keep the place more or less as it is—whether being a housing advocate, in short, makes you a bad neighbor, a traitor, someone who selfishly chose a community not to your liking and now seeks to impose your own preferences on everyone else.
This conception of what it means to be part of a community is zero-sum. It treats neighbors not as people, but as fixed entities. It treats communities as consumer products, not as dynamic, living things. Most of all, it definitionally fails to count “I live in this town and I am in favor of this new housing” as a valid answer, and so the notion that “nobody wants this” becomes circular. Anybody who wants it isn’t really part of the community. You aren’t proving that some members do want it; you’re just proving that you’re one of those nefarious “they.” This notion of neighborliness and community is akin to basing fellowship on excommunication.
Now those are strong words, and I really want to say that I’m not trying to be dismissive of the underlying feeling of NIMBYism, as a normal human impulse. My objection is turning it into policy. I understand hometown nostalgia and I understand the impulse to keep familiar things the same. But trying to translate these human feelings into housing policy is how we got into this mess.
And what I’m doing here is (hopefully!) articulating the worldview or the web of unspoken assumptions behind the things that NIMBY-sympathetic people say, because I suspect that a lot of them have never really thought through this stuff very much.
Before I got interested in housing advocacy and urbanism, I subscribed, more or less by osmosis, to the NIMBY side. Who the hell wants more traffic and construction noise and crowding? What kind of lunatic wants more neighbors? Etc., etc. It would never even have occurred to me that there was an actual other side that wasn’t a conscious attempt to ruin nice places. I too would have assumed that “housing advocacy” was a Trojan horse for greedy developers/corrupt politicians/etc. What other explanation could there be?
Growing up and having to find a place to live disabused me of that, but so did learning about these issues and hearing directly from people involved in housing—those who are regular people who favor new housing in their own communities, and not as an abstraction or a thing to go “somewhere else.”
Related Reading:
Becoming What They Were By Becoming Something New
“I’m An Antisocial Urbanist Living In Suburbia, Ask Me Anything”
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This is right on! I'm on our county commission and we hear about the evil "theys" every land use meeting. THEY are very active developers apparently.
I'm really curious what NIMBYism looked like 40, 50, or 60 years ago. Were the farmers of Long Island up in arms about Levittown, or did they welcome it as "progress?" I feel like development was talked about differently in past generations, but I didn't live through it and can only consume the news/advertising/propaganda that has survived.