If I Were A NIMBY
What the devil on my shoulder whispers to me
Paid subscriber exclusive today, which I thought I’d have a little fun with on April Fools’ Day. “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” is tomorrow—and this coming week marks the fifth anniversary of my newsletter! I will be publishing some longer, fuller pieces and offering a discount for new subscribers.
Here, I’m presenting you my best idea of what your average, right-leaning NIMBY thinks about cities and disorder, and how some of those real issues mix with games of telephone and right-wing media tropes to lead those regular people to think they’re seeing something more than they might be seeing.
So this is not my view that I’m presenting here, but it is the view I very easily could have absorbed or come to hold, had I not “discovered” urbanism and interrogated some of the assumptions that growing up as an upper middle class white guy in suburbia taught me.
On some level, it’s still the narrative my brain wants to form, and I have to remind myself it is probably not true. And my writing is meant to reach people like the NIMBY I easily could have been.
I was sitting in a nice, recently opened coffee shop in Silver Spring, Maryland the other week, just to check it out. I think it was Ethiopian-owned. They seem like a good, hardworking immigrant community. The good kind. Silver Spring has some crime, but it was daylight and I was downtown and I figured I’d take my chances.
During the couple of hours I was there, someone came inside and started yelling. A homeless person, maybe, or some other sort of ne’er-do-well. A couple of guys who worked there were laughing and escorted him out. Seems he’s known to them and is maybe a bit of a local troublemaker.
You know, that’s never happened before in Virginia, in Fairfax County. Well, it happened once. But the homeless guy was a little quieter about it all. I’ve sat in coffee shops hundreds of times in my nice, quiet community in Virginia, and that has only happened once. First time I do it in Silver Spring, there go you go. What are the chances?