Prepare for the Era of the Shy NIMBY
and why you can't "just build" without confronting corporations or the wealthy
I was recently interviewed on the excellent podcast Christianity on the Spectrum, and it became one of my favorites that I’ve done, out of hundreds of podcast appearances. Unfortunately the host’s audio was corrupted, so he’s had to reconstruct his questions after the fact, but I still think the conversation is very much worth listening to. The host, Jon, is a programmer and autism researcher who himself has Level One ASD and describes himself as a former neurodiversity activist who has become skeptical of that movement. We talked about all sorts of issues relating to autism specifically and disability generally. I hope you’ll check it out.
I’m on a bunch of PR mailing lists, which doesn’t bug me as much as it does some other writers. (Emails are easy to delete.) One I received recently struck me as interesting, given that you almost never ever hear from the NIMBY opposition, while YIMBYs receive wildly disproportionate media attention thanks to the demographic makeup of American media. An excerpt:
Since 2012, over three dozen rights of nature and community rights initiatives for inclusion on city and county ballots in Ohio have faced varying levels of obstruction from the state. In 2019, the State legislature prohibited communities from enacting “rights of nature” laws after Toledo residents overwhelmingly voted for a law, the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. In 2020, the State doubled down, passing a so-called “preemption law” in response to the city of Athens and Cuyahoga County (where Cleveland is located) passing laws banning single-use plastic bags.
The following media release discusses the Columbus, Ohio bill establishing the right to local self-determination and the State of Ohio's consistent efforts to squash local lawmaking efforts that afford greater protections than the state….
The proposed amendment states that “the principle and practice of home rule and local self-government in Ohio, as established in 1912, has been increasingly infringed upon and eroded by state legislature overreach via the practice of state preemption,” including by preventing residents from legislating on important community issues such as “minimum wage protections, gun laws, oil and gas bans, rent control protections, knife laws, plastic bag bans, rights of nature, flavored tobacco bans, pesticide use, red-light camera use, telecommunication installations, natural gas hookup bans, puppy mill bans, paid leave, and many others.”
Though it’s only glancingly referred to here, housing and zoning issues would likely prove to be among the most impacted by the proposed amendment.
This is, again, a perspective that the American media has largely excluded from public debate; it would be genuinely difficult to find one NIMBY-adjacent piece for every ten pro-YIMBY pieces published in major publications. There are some in the business (who I will decline to name) who have essentially built careers by catering to the preferences of older white media neoliberals, acting as though simply holding opinions contrary to the YIMBY/abundance crowd is inherently illegitimate or wicked. That whole movement is deeply influenced by the Juicebox Mafia, especially in the embrace of a rhetorical style that presumes that no one who disagrees with them is worthy of debating. This attitude, that there are no sincere counterarguments to the neoliberal policy agenda, is an unfortunately common tendency in general, but is especially problematic when it comes to NIMBY/YIMBY issues. I genuinely can’t think of a set of debates where more voters will ultimately reveal preferences that are out of step with elite consensus than issues of zoning and housing regulation. Nobody wears a t-shirt that says “Proud NIMBY,” just like nobody professes to be a neoliberal, and yet both are massively influential groups.
You will remember the concept of the “shy Trump voter,” Americans who voted for Trump in 2016 but who did so without discussing their preference socially or in polling. This dynamic helped contribute to the echo-chamber-induced shock liberals experienced that Election Day; their preferred media outlets were dominated by people who had the same exact political and cultural assumptions that they did and who had similar personal networks, education, pop culture tastes…. And so they were blindsided. Democrats had the ability to create intense social disincentives against announcing support for Trump, but they couldn’t actually stop people from voting for Trump. I strongly suspect something similar is going to happen with this supposedly-ascendant abundance agenda and NIMBYism. YIMBYs have benefited from the fact that there is no actual NIMBY movement, that it’s not a political group at all but an emergent tendency that reliably grows out of a scenario in which a federally-guaranteed fixed-rate mortgage is the only reliable path to increasing wealth for millions of Americans. (Paper wealth, but that’s a conversation for a different time.) Eventually, those people will wake up to what’s happening and fight back. There’s going to be a lot more legislative fights like this one coming.
NIMBYs, after all, are responding predictably to both policy incentives and a culture that lionizes homeownership. Demonizing them might make for good red meat for people working in media, but it makes progress less likely, as it creates an us vs. them atmosphere that hardens opposition to progress. And there will prove to be many, many more NIMBYs in votes and action than there will be NIMBYs on BlueSky. Like the shy Trump voters, they will have something to say about the future of American zoning and regulation. To achieve progress in housing affordability and the pursuit of “new urbanism” - two very different things that are constantly conflated - we would need to demonstrate why such progress would be good for the NIMBYs too. More controversially, we would have to accept that any new regime would entail compromise with incumbent homeowners. That notion seems so contrary to current YIMBY culture that it’s hard to imagine now, but eventually hardening opposition will force their hand. If not, the result won’t be unfettered YIMBY victory but unequally-applied change that does little to upset the status quo broadly but which The football-spiking YIMBY crowd overestimates their chances for victory at their own peril.