37 ms·

It's not just in megaprojects either. In my large, fairly dense US city, basic, easy-to-build, local infrastructure like adding a 1-mile bike lane to a straight

by acabal 4y ago

It's not just in megaprojects either. In my large, fairly dense US city, basic, easy-to-build, local infrastructure like adding a 1-mile bike lane to a straight street is impossible because a handful of NIMBYs are constantly taken seriously by local politicians. My city has many bike lanes that are popular and well-used, as well as a bike-share program that is extremely popular. It also has a large number of cyclist deaths - including children! - due to the spottiness of existing bike infrastructure and overall lack of protected bike lanes. It seems like improving that infrastructure would be both easy, cheap, and popular, given the popularity of cycling and its existing infra, and the cheapness of plopping a concrete barrier onto a street. But no - the second anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a handful of NIMBYs write in with "but muh cars" and the politicians throw up their hands and surrender. I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. It seems like at any point in history, any local project will be opposed by somebody, no matter who they are or what the project is. But previous generations seemed to be able to get over that in favor of building. For today's generation it seems like doing nothing has become better than doing something. If this were the 1900s, government would have told the NIMBYs to get bent, we're building Thing X because it's good for society and if you don't like it, tough. That's what living in city means sometimes!

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sylens 4y ago
I half wonder if you live in my city because your description matches it to a tee, but I bet this is happening in cities all over the country. As for why they care about NIMBYs so much - it is because our current class of politicians aim to be career politicians. Therefore, they look to remain in power at all costs, and part of that means not pissing off the most vocal members of their community. What we need is real leadership from politicians who are willing to stake their tenure in office on pushing projects through.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  What we need is real leadership from politicians who are willing to stake their tenure in office on pushing projects through. Easy to say, but our current system proves that it selects for politicians of exactly the opposite ilk. How do we change the system?
  - CoffeeOnWrite 4y ago
    Maybe by getting younger people to vote more? (I know this has been tried since forever, but have we tried everything?) And, holding public comment hearings outside of traditional working hours so that non-retired people have a fair shot? IDK seems pretty hopeless..
    - tacocataco 4y ago
      I got some ideas: Could just put a ballot at the end of tax forms. Just piggy back the ID confirm the IRS does. Doesn't have to be mandatory. Give a $5 tax credit for filling it out. People who don't pay taxes can vote normally or by mail. Universal mail in voting. I'd go as far as to make mail in voting the only way to vote. Make every state have the same voting day (primaries/general). This helps reduce media influence on the elections. Get rid of first past the post voting. Allows for more political parties, increasing the odds people are engaged with one of the parties. Something like ranked choice would keep their vote relevant even if their preference didn't make the cut. It's infuriating to me when people recognize there is a problem, yet toss up their hands and not try new things. How is repeating the same thing going to get different results?
  - b112 4y ago
    You know what I hear in this thread? Combined, posts have said that NIMBYs, a tiny minority, who always vote, show up to council meetings, and politicians listen to them, and yet everyone here trying to figure out what is broken. Well, nothing is broken, except non-NIMBYs dont care enough to do the same! The answer is simple. Show up to council meetings and vote! If you don't, you don't care as much as the NIMBYs, and the result is clear. Nothing is broken, it is called democracy.
ekkeke 4y ago
I believe (though I don't have the evidence for it) that we likely see a similar phenomenon in the UK. House prices seem to have become the most important thing to the home owning class and they selfishly oppose anything that would affect them negatively, whether that be HS2 or new house building programs. This is not current generation I might add, who I believe would be quite happy with a shake up. It's previous generation of 50 years olds and over that have brought this about.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  I was interested in HS2 after seeing stuff about the Elizabeth Line, so I watched some YouTube videos about it. In my eyes it seems like a great project despite the high cost (easy for me to say since I'm not British), but holy smokes, the amount of people in the comments poo-pooing it with comments like below is absurd. "It breaks my heart to see such needless desecration of our beautiful countryside for this catastrophe!" -- the video in question was drone footage over wholly unnatural farm fields. That will return to being farm fields once construction finishes, with a 20m strip of train tracks running through it. Of course, they didn't mention the existing motorway that was also in the shot. "An obscene use of fossil fuels, environment, and money for something we don't really need." -- About a train that will use zero fossil fuels and will lessen demand for cars. Really. Also, a bunch of people saying it's useless because it won't have a station in their town. It's a high-speed line, of course not! The whole point is to make local services faster and more frequent by removing express services from the existing over-crowded lines.
  - ekkeke 4y ago
    Yup, exaclty. We seem to have become a nation of landlords seeking to turn a profit without an ounce of effort, rather than the industrious country we once were.
- api 4y ago
  It's the same in a lot of US cities, but to play devils' advocate: this generation was basically told that their home was their savings and in many cases their entire capability to retire or take care of their health and other needs in old age is tied to the value of their home equity. We dug a very, very deep hole by treating housing as an investment instrument and it's going to be hard to dig out.
VictorPath 4y ago
Local politics here is run by real estate interests and government does little. A local business wanted an underground garage, and had its curb open up onto a crosswalk. This kind of thing happens all the time. There is too little resident input into construction, and too little government oversight of it, not too much.
bobthepanda 4y ago
> I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. It seems like at any point in history, any local project will be opposed by somebody, no matter who they are or what the project is. But previous generations seemed to be able to get over that in favor of building. This is the root cause. The highway overbuilding was so devastating to the people it affected that many processes were put in place so that it would never happen so undemocratically again. It‘s a pendulum.
- seoaeu 4y ago
  Not just overbuilding. Also the impunity with which politicians routed highways directly through neighborhoods whose inhabitants they did not like (demolishing homes, businesses, and community centers in the process)
  - yadaeno 4y ago
    And its one of the best investments the government ever made. 600% ROI transforming the American economy, connecting communities. The amount of displacement caused by a national rail system or bike lanes would be minuscule in comparison but have a similar impact. Politics nowadays seems too risk averse to pull large infra projects. Sometimes you have demolish some homes but nobody is brave enough to make these tough decisions anymore. https://www.google.com/amp/s/infrastructurereportcard.org/happy-60th-birthday-interstate-highway-system/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/infrastructurereportcard.org/ha...
    - kbenson 4y ago
      It's possible there are far more negative externalities than you're accounting for. What's 600% ROI if it turns out it contributed significantly to inequality, both for income and race? How negatively has that effected the nation, or even just the economy, over decades? It's important to note that the argument is not as simple as "highways or no highways", but more nuanced, as perhaps 10% harder to accomplish yields a 50% reduction in problems. Finding that sane middle ground is hard, but we should be careful not to reduce the problem to such simplicity that the many of the important parts of the solution are no longer even assessed.
_greim_ 4y ago
> I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. Could it be these are the only voices local politicians are hearing? 99.99% of residents being okay with new builds doesn't always translate into a political will that a politician can exploit.
- burlesona 4y ago
  This is the real issue. Almost nobody pays attention to or votes in local elections in the US. The 5% of the population that are NIMBYS may be >= 50% of the voters.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    In the federal elections, primaries have the same problem: people who vote in them tend to be much more ideologically motivated than general populace. That's how you end up with parties that oppose policies supported by a supermajority of their voters - that opposition doesn't matter because those voters won't vote for the other party (with whom they disagree on way more) anyway, so all that matters is winning the primaries.
    - pif 4y ago
      People don't have the right to complain if they didn't show up to vote.
      - bluGill 4y ago
        Which is why I vote for third parties that haven't a hope of winning. It isn't my fault, but I voted. (both major parties have something in their platform that is a major no for me)
  - pif 4y ago
    People don't have the right to complain if they didn't show up to vote.
chrisseaton 4y ago
> I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. You already explained it yourself. They write in. They probably also vote. Their representatives do what they're told.
- pas 4y ago
  Yep, they're overrepresented.
causi 4y ago
People and governments need to realize that trying to make city living and non-city living the same is a losing proposition. Cities should not have an obligation to be car-accessible. It's unnatural for a place with thirty thousand people per square mile. It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities, as long as it's possible to live in a city without ever leaving it and to live outside the city without ever entering it. Half the square footage of a street being taken up by cars parked on it is utterly perverse. I say that as someone who has never ridden a bus or subway and who would rather pull my tooth with a pair of pliers than set foot in a major city.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  This has increasingly been on my mind lately with the discussions around firearm laws. I grew up in a relatively rural state where firearm ownership and usage was pretty much assumed and a normal part of life because law enforcement and animal control services simply aren't available at the speed you need them in an emergency. In an urban area there are different considerations that might weigh less heavily in favor of unrestricted access to firearms. It strikes me that rural area firearm ownership might warrant a different treatment than urban area ownership. And if that's the case maybe there's a wide class of these sorts of things that we should address on a similar basis.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    Really well put. The reason I'm making this Reddit-style comment is because I believe this sort of nuanced perspective is exceedingly rare in any venue that actually matters. There is little to not attempt to understand or empathize with the "other side" in these sorts of debates, usually.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      It's also combined with years, decades, of trying to "solve problems at the highest level" which is the federal government, and those often end up being heavy handed or failures entirely.
nonethewiser 4y ago
I'm not sure NIMBYism is to blame here. Not every idea should be executed. I understand that it's a problem if projects always cave if there is resistance, because there will always be resistance, but that is not NIMBYism. That's just politics.
- pas 4y ago
  The problem is there's just no cost to passivity. NIMBYs pay with their time, and they have a lot of it. This should be "taxed" at some rate. It has to be enough to provide some minimal balancing force against passivity.
  - phaistra 4y ago
    What is your concrete solution? Create a fine for not-voting in local elections and local initiatives?
    - I-M-S 4y ago
      If you block development for X number of years and it turns out you had no grounds to do so, you need to compensate the developer (or even more broadly - damage your opposition to the project incurred to the common good)
    - xxpor 4y ago
      Remove the private right of action from CEQA etc.
      - pas 4y ago
        that could stay, but make them prepare the assessment. also the whole problem is that the timelines are ridiculous. there's no need to create a report that goes over 99.999% of the whole problem space. do a 95% job, check for the past fuckups (ie. are we literally trying to pave over homes of disadvantaged communities? are we promising very fair compensation for this but then just scam them and leave them with some half-assed dilapidated boarding house on the outskirts of town? are we willfully ignoring some group with real data?) it can even go to court, but make it quick. have a standing tribunal for this and they should be bound by law to decide whether the claim has enough merit to proceed based on 1-2 weeks of examination. simply put there are not enough standardized and well structured parts of this bureaucratic pipeline. (and there should be very very few non-standard parts. and standard parts should be quick and transparent to evaluate.)
correlator 4y ago
From my experience NIMBYs are typically local property owners who don't want their view, neighborhood, etc. to change. These folks could be better off financially than their YIMBY counterparts who maybe don't own all that same property. If there's a group of people with money and a group with less debating the same issue, I would expect the politician to support the party most likely to make large campaign contributions. I have no data to support this idea and should not be taken seriously in this context.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  I think it's less likely the donations and more likely that the politician is a member of the well off property owner group.
notacoward 4y ago
This is what I think of as Consensus Paralysis. There are usually many reasons to do a thing, and many reasons not to. A sane person or organization would weigh those reasons against each other. However, in most political decision making there's an important asymmetry: any one reason to block action is sufficient, but no number or weight of reasons is sufficient to ensure its progress. In our earnest wish to avoid the tyranny of the majority by requiring full consensus (or close to it), we've handed all of the trump cards to obstructionists. Often a tiny minority, not even pretending to believe in the nominal reason for their objections, can unilaterally block any progress. The US senate is another example of this problem BTW, both in the form of the filibuster and in the general inadvisability of huge omnibus bills that give everyone their very own excuse to oppose without consequence, but maybe that's getting a bit off topic.
larrik 4y ago
It's easy to vilify NIMBY, but those are ALSO the people stopping developers from tearing down historical buildings just to put up parking lots or worse. Then again, there's also a vocal minority who thinks the government should spend as little as possible, and new projects are even worse.
- quacked 4y ago
  I always end up qualifying as a NIMBY, because all of the projects proposed are endless 4-on-1s that look exactly the same as everywhere else with no parking, or godawful commercial real estate. If there was any taste in development, I'd be a YIMBY.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    Yeah that's the problem. If taste is important enough an objection that you block infrastructure that could save lives or house folks on the edge of homelessness, then do we really need to take the objection seriously? As a GP said, there's always a list of pros and cons. We can't let any tiny con, namely something as subjective as taste, get in the way of building life-saving infrastructure.
    - quacked 4y ago
      Ah, get real. None of that infrastructure is life-saving, most building is happening in rapidly growing areas, and most rapidly-growing areas are filled with moneyed transplants who are coming for local industry jobs. That's who new development is for: people who will make rent that will cover the loans that were taken out to finance the property. No one seems to understand this: developers develop when they predict an increase in housing prices. Their builds will accompany a massive increase in demand. The number of people who need their "lives saved" will only grow as a city grows in popularity and density, and the rent only goes up. If you want to look at what continuous "life-saving" no-taste development looks like, go to Houston, or Chicago, or SF, or really anywhere that's very populous. The people still need their lives saved, but everything is disgusting and falling down after ten years anyway. If you want to get serious about housing people in America, you need to think about supporting policies that would slow down the 200K-1M people we add to the US every year, each of who needs housing.
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7952 4y ago
More and more these are culture war arguments rather than NIMBYism.
zackmorris 4y ago
NIMBY is the wrong term for this. What we're really talking about is eminent domain. To get the rate of progress you're talking about requires bulldozing through neighborhoods and often buying up private property. So you have to be comfortable with personally taking away someone's property for public use. If you aren't ready to do that, then you're distracting from the fundamental issue by substituting terms. You're also using proxy to put these moral dilemmas onto someone else, maybe an elected official. It's analogous to convincing someone of murder and then having another person pull the switch for the electric chair. Without getting too far out into the weeds, we're seeing this problem in recent Supreme Court rulings. I've chosen for myself to use proper terminology now. I expect that from others and will be pointing out this issue in future discussions. If the people I'm debating continue to use hand waving to avoid the crux of issues, then I will make light of it and point out their inadequate communication skills. Basically questioning their leadership authority if they don't have an understanding of debate and continue to insult the intelligence of their constituents.
- SteveGerencser 4y ago
  I have to agree with your take on this. We were recently sent an 'offer' by the local water district to buy 15' of frontage along our property for a new water line that will be a major service upgrade for about 8 homes. My issue came when I discovered that the current water line and easement is on the other side of the road, but they would have to cut down quite a few tree while it was a lot easier to dig in front of my farm. So far, I get it. Then I could out that they offered us 3 cents per square foot of frontage but the home next to us was offered 4x as much at 4 cents per square foot. And someone else offer 4 cents, and they didn't even know about the 3 new houses on our road before they even started planning. I'm all for improving infrastructure, but it needs to be in a fair, and well planned, way. Neither of which is common with this sort of thing.
- karaterobot 4y ago
  I would go even farther, and say you'd have to be comfortable with someone taking away your property to build something you don't think should be built at all. It's easy to say "they should take somebody else's property and build something I want." Anybody can do that! But if you think of it that way it makes more sense why you get people blocking these projects.
dfxm12 4y ago
I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. Don't discount that your elected officials may be NIMBYs themselves, or well-funded by NIMBYs. Consider this if you still have an upcoming primary election or when you go to the polls in November.
sschueller 4y ago
We have NIMBY here is Switzerland too but we try to find a solution most of the time if we see a need for it. In the end it's usually a compromise everyone can live with but sometimes a project can also fail. Like the subway that was proposed in the 70s to run under Zürich. The subway station at HB was even built but then people voted against the whole project later. Today that station runs a regular train (S4 and S10) not a subway. There is also another tunnel with station that was supposed to be part of the subway which was built (near tierspital) but is now a standard tram line. What's interesting is that there is almost no room for the tram. The tracks are as low as they can be and the trams pantograph gets almost completely compressed. [1] [1] https://youtu.be/RUoiUAsLZM0 https://youtu.be/RUoiUAsLZM0
- microtherion 4y ago
  …and the trams need to switch sides when entering/exiting the tunnels, because those stations are the only ones in the city with center platforms. The biggest NIMBY opposition these days is against the new soccer stadium, which is supposed to both warm up the area too much and throw too much of a shadow.
  - sschueller 4y ago
    There is another center platform where this occurs. Bahnhof Enge and the Tram 5.
warning26 4y ago
Fact is, if you want to build a megaproject (highway, HSR, whatever), you have to step on someone's toes. In the past, America did this by stepping on the toes of people with no political power, resulting in the excesses of 1960s destroying of historic areas in favor of unfortunate highway interchanges. Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction -- no project can be built because no one is willing to step on anyone's toes.
- nybble41 4y ago
  > Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction -- no project can be built because no one is willing to step on anyone's toes. I don't see this as a bad thing at all. We could do with fewer "megaprojects" unapologetically stepping on people's toes. Frankly, if the project isn't economical after accounting for what it would cost to buy up the necessary property at market rates--which is to say, rates the actual owners will voluntarily accept without any threat of coercion or eminent domain--then it simply isn't worth doing.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    You don't need to do anything of the sort. Housing is one of the most tightly regulated form of capital expenditure in the US. Most of the US is zoned to SFH-only zoning. What this means is that real-estate developers and property owners are not allowed by law to build anything other than a single-family home. This is accompanied by mandates to achieve certain minimum lot sizes (lots have to be at least a certain size), maximum FAR (Floor-Area Ratio), and minimum setbacks (a residence has to be set back from the street by a minimum number of feet). You cannot build low-impact businesses in these areas like corner stores or barber shops/salons. These rules result in the suburban American homogeneity that you see throughout many neighborhoods in America. This doesn't even cover the role of HOAs which are additional local bureaucracy which control what residents are or are-not allowed to build when and where on their property. Relax (but don't get rid of) zoning and other mandates around US building and empower property owners to make the changes themselves. If they don't want to, they don't have to either. But give them the choice.
  - warning26 4y ago
nobodyandproud 4y ago
> But no - the second anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a handful of NIMBYs write in with "but muh cars" and the politicians throw up their hands and surrender. That is a damn shame. As a driver and also cyclist, I hate seeing bicycles on the car roads; I also hate being on the road when I cycle, as there are too many inattentive drivers. And please, keep pedestrians off of cyclists lanes. Ticket them if you must.
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
This is not a US specific thing... people here in slovenia build a house at the end of the by-the-street village, and then complain when someone else does the same, claming the the village is getting too large.
colechristensen 4y ago
One reason that there is pushback and needs to be pushback is that there are frequently really dumb vanity proposals because small-time politicians want to do something big. Locally there are a couple of plans to tear up and reroute highways in a decade long project where the highways literally just finished major tear-up-and-reroute project. There's another nonsensical proposal to tear up one of the busiest highways around and replace it with a nice boulevard because wouldn't that be lovely, except without any plan for what would happen to the rest of traffic. There are NIMBYs but there are also people worried about projects which are trying to help won't actually make anything better and often will have real negative consequences.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  >worried about projects which are trying to help won't actually make anything better and often will have real negative consequences the worry is misplaced because stupid projects are compensated by good ones. This obsession with efficiency, which seems to be an artifact of modern economic logic is one of the culprits of why nothing gets build. Effectiveness matters, not efficiency. This is just the same logic that VC investors use. nine out of ten startups are crap, some are scams, but it doesn't matter. Better to waste some resources than to build nothing at all. China understands this. People will laugh at empty ghost cities or wasteful vanity projects but they're compensated for by what works and tacit knowledge generated in the process. America's gilded age or new deal era or cold war military projects were no different. Better to go big and get something done than do nothing at all. And that's usually the two choices.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Efficiency matters because if you are efficient you can do more. There is only so much money you can get to build, build well and you get reelected and get more. Build bad and the project is cancled, or maybe it completes but it is too small (all you could afford) to be useful.
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      Efficiency matters but it cannot be the paramount driver to growth. If it is, then there needs to be minimum metrics agreed upon for efficiency or you're just asking for a project with no end goal aka every construction project in an American city.
BirAdam 4y ago
NIMBYs get taken seriously because they show up in large numbers. I totally understand the reaction many people have to government. I fall victim to it all the time. We see that politicians get bought and paid for, and we therefore assume that nothing can change the way things work, but this proves otherwise. At the end of the day, those who show up tend to win. If we all want change, and judging by this thread a majority do, then we need to show up. Show up at the local meetings. Call your local reps. Be annoying. Get everyone you know to also be annoying. Politicians like remaining in power, and an angry mob shouting about the roads and bike lanes... that will motivate them.
- Lammy 4y ago
  NIMBYs get taken seriously because the secondary and tertiary effects of their NIMBYism aligns with the dominant ideology of the state post-Civil-Rights-era. See also: the 1970 Congressional report from the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 (copy and paste URL to avoid HTTP Referer check) John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ sez: "We have all heard[citation needed] about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say[who?] that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills.[SUBTLE]" You may know the above as "WTF Happened in 1971?" https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    If you scratch a NIMBY you'll find a fan of Ehrlich underneath. You have no idea how quickly a Berkeley zoning board meeting devolves from ordinary discourse into Malthusian debates about whether young people are entitled to exist. Of course Ehrlich was a gigantic racist, as are his followers, which was recently covered very well at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/population-growth-housing-climate-change/629952/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/population...
jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
> If this were the 1900s, government would have told the NIMBYs to get bent, we're building Thing X because it's good for society and if you don't like it, tough. That's what living in city means sometimes! Unfortunately, much of the history of that era was exploiting racial minorities in order to build. I'm currently sitting in a neighborhood (PNW USA) that at the turn of the century was established mostly by german immigrants. They built their houses here because the more anglo population in the city proper, slightly to the south, and mostly across the river, redlined them away from those areas. Fast forward to just after WW2, and a substantial black population moved here to work building ships for the war effort. These folks were largely setting in a racially integrated town just a bit further north from me. In the post war years, this flooded, creating a local refugee crisis. The powers that were in the city at the time did not want black families in their areas, so they decided to redline them into the germanic neighborhood and make it their problem. Fast forward a couple decades, and my neighborhood has become the cultural and economic center for the black community in my city. City proper leadership is still openly and malignantly racists, so they go along with a scheme to use a free way expansion and building a hospital campus to snap up the land for a fraction of what it was worth under eminent domain. Culturally the neighborhood has not recovered from this. Several multi block scale plots of land remain unbuilt but owned by the hospital. That's just my neighborhood. Robert Moses and his peers played out this story nation wide. So, there's obviously a lot going on with the US's current failure to build civic infrastructure in a sensible and affordable way. But before we lionize what was going on in the past, we should remember a lot of what got built was at the cost of someone who's rights and economic interests were legit thwarted. It doesn't excuse modern NIMBYism from a position of privilege, but I do worry about reforms that give planning boards sharper knives.
- notinfuriated 4y ago
  > City proper leadership is still openly and malignantly racists Curious, what city is this?
  - jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
    Portland, Oregon. Note I was referring to a period in the 1970s when the hospital and freeway stuff happened. This city had a very different reputation just 50 years ago, and Oregon as a whole had defacto sundown towns until quite recently. As you might expect from headlines of recent years, things still aren't exactly great in terms of black Portlander's trusting the city will protect their interests, but progress has happened, mostly due to stubborn people pushing on it. No easy answers to this kind of problem, but there is a pretty clear moral compass pointer imo. If you'd like more about my neighborhood specifically: http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEED...
el_nahual 4y ago
The issue with NIMBYs ("Not In My Back Yard") is that they aren't really NIMBYS: They are CAVErs: Citizens Against Virtually Everything. I promise that if you took a group of NIMBYs and proposed tearing down 5 single family homes to build a midrise apartment building they'd object. But if you also proposed—to the exact same group of people—tearing down a mid-rise to build 5 single family homes, they'd object. If you propose to remove 50 parking spots for a bike lane, they object. If you propose to remove a bike lane to replace it with parking, they'd object too. These people are driven by a deep cynicism that anything can be made better: they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better, and they don't believe that ungided "forces" can make things better either. If something has an advocate, the advocate must be taking advantage. If nobody is advocating, then something unguided must be wrong. Nothing can be an improvement. Therefore, any change must be for the worst, and they oppose everything.
- rcpt 4y ago
  Beverly Hills routinely approves single family home teardowns as long as you replace with another single family home. But replacing with an apartment? Not in MY backyard!
  - asdff 4y ago
    And even those teardowns are subject to people trying to get the balloon framed single family home designated as a historical entity and preserved for all of time
- daenz 4y ago
  These sound like hypothetical scenarios. Do you have some real world examples?
  - wk_end 4y ago
    There's a completely bland, ugly, brutalist movie theatre in the downtown of my city [1]. Probably from the 80s? There was talk about tearing it down and replacing it with a much nicer looking (IMO) modern mid-rise [2]. A local news organization posted about it, and the comments were flooded with old people who live in the suburbs moaning. One just posted a link to a YouTube video of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" ("they paved paradise/and put up a parking lot"), absurdly. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@48.4255478,-123.3621296,3a,75y,105.19h,93.42t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sMK5rJkB1dbkc-S68sCXrTQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@48.4255478,-123.3621296,3a,75y,... [2] https://www.cheknews.ca/officer-tower-proposed-for-capitol-6-theatres-site-moves-ahead-to-public-hearing-950856/ https://www.cheknews.ca/officer-tower-proposed-for-capitol-6...
Patrol8394 4y ago
> is impossible because a handful of NIMBYs are constantly taken seriously by local politicians. That x 1000 !
redtexture 4y ago
It takes politics to change politicians. This is a many year process: to bring into public office people who care, willing to change laws, or city ordinances, and department values and priorities (street / public works) and budget money for the new priorities, and to flex the electoral muscle by the organizing (an increasingly important and larger number) of voters to pay attention. Like it or not that is the game you are in. If you are not playing to change the game, you are doomed to play by the same rules you complain about. The handicapped / wheelchair access to sidewalks, now visible nation wide in the US, started with zero curb cuts everywhere in the 1960s, and wheelchair non-accessbility to many essential services, such as grocery stores, post offices, other public buildings, including schools, court houses, social services, and municipal governmental offices. Hospitals had figured this out, mostly, but not entirely, by that time.
deleted 4y ago
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throwaway0a5e 4y ago
There's no shortage of Atlantic and New Yorker sob stories about how some abutting farmers are taking it in the ass over some new development. This isn't an America problem. It's a people "wealthy enough to have so few real problems they have spare fucks to give about what their neighbors are building" problem. If the "HN Class" of people (very roughly speaking) would actually give a F about other people's property rights this problem would evaporate overnight. Cities and private developers could buy what they want and develop what they want. But nope, enforcing conformity and having veto power over the next big box store or freight terminal is more important so that means no new anything gets built.
jimt1234 4y ago
I'm a NIMBY, unfortunately. Not because I'm anti-progress or whatever, but because so much of my financial life is tied to my house, and whether I like it or not, there's a lot that can adversely affect its value. So, if building a new apartment complex nearby is gonna reduce my property value by 5%, taking around $50K out of my pocket, of course I'm going to oppose it. I don't feel like that makes me a bad person. Who wants to flush $50K down the toilet? Fifty years ago houses weren't so expensive, relative to income, and thus the risk wasn't as high. My parents bought their first house in 1969 for $17K, no student debt, no health insurance expenses, etc. So, if a highway was built in their backyard, they would've been much more concerned about the hit to their quality of life than to their finances.
- theluketaylor 4y ago
  In areas of economic growth and growing density high rises going in around you only leads to higher property values. Eventually the dirt under your house is worth so much a developer will make you an offer you can’t refuse. There is basically no evidence increasing density leads to anything but higher property values for everyone.
  - jimt1234 4y ago
    Respectfully, I disagree. I have a handful of friends/colleagues who had apartment complexes built nearby their suburban McMansions, and each one had the same story: increased traffic and vehicle congestion, decreased available street parking, increased noise pollution, increased pedestrian traffic, and yes, increased crime. All of these things will make property values go one direction, and it ain't higher. Extreme example: Back in the 90s, a friend bought a brand new, suburban home. Two years later, an apartment complex was built on a vacant lot about two blocks away. Two years after that, the apartment complex started accepting Section 8's. The crime started almost immediately. His car was broken into. His house was broken into. Loud music all night. Beer bottles on his lawn in the morning. His once quiet suburban home was no more. He eventually sold and took a significant loss. I know I'm the bad guy for pointing this out, but facts are facts, and money is real. Increasing density where it was never intended will negatively impact your property value. (^^^ I was told there were lawsuits, but California officials got involved and squashed it, saying basically, "We said they could accept Section 8's, and there ain't shit you can do about it. Suck it.")
dukeofdoom 4y ago
There's also opposite of this problem sometimes. Some kids built a bike trail with jumps by a river in a local park. The local newspaper started running articles how these kids are destroying habitat and nature. Then followed it up with an actual altercation with some Karen and the kids. After a few more articles. The city paid for a bulldozer to go in an bulldoze the ramps the kids build. A year passes and the city awards a half a million dollar contract to local company build a trail and pump track in the same park. The newspaper raves about it. Moral of the story, no one makes money if things are left alone. Also moral of the story, don't trust your local newspaper. Moral outrage can be paid for.
rayiner 4y ago
My daughter’s school bought a failing golf course in a nearby subdivision to build an athletic facility. We’re not talking Texas football here, but a track and some tennis courts for a school where theater is a bigger deal than sports. The neighbors tied us up in litigation for close to six years. (It only took about a year to build the facility itself.)
thegrim33 4y ago
I mean, a portion of the population probably just simply disagrees with your ideas. They'd rather the car infrastructure actually be improved and expanded to meet the demands of increased population, rather than continuously crippled in every possible way. They're not very interested in having yet another lane of travel removed so that an average of 2 bikers an hour can ride down the road.
- chasd00 4y ago
  Hah my city did this recently. Took away two lanes of traffic on two major roads to add bike lanes. I’ve never seen the bike lanes used ever.
  - aembleton 4y ago
    Do the bike lanes connect to anywhere or to any other bike lanes?
gitfan86 4y ago
I have seen this in my city with changes to the schools. No matter what changes are suggested, a group of people gets upset. I suspect they want to make all changes difficult just in case there is a change one day that they actually don't like.
- jimmux 4y ago
  It makes them feel important. They could get the same result by pushing for beneficial development, but that's much more difficult. Mostly because of everyone opposing it to feel important.
BenFranklin100 4y ago
Here’s the reason: In the United States, zoning is controlled almost exclusively by local city councils. Voter turnout in local elections is extremely poor. The only people who vote are A. older and B. homeowners. The young and renters scarcely show up. Thus, local city councils by and large represent homeowner’s interests. These older homeowners adamantly oppose new development like apartments, bike lanes, and mass transit. They fear developments might affect the value of existing homes, change the ‘character of the neighborhood’ (read: attract the wrong type of minorities), increase traffic, compete for existing parking, etc… the list goes on. In general, homeowners are opposed to any type of change that might affect the value of their home or mildly inconvenience their lives. Local politicians are loathe to cross homeowners. They will be voted out if they do. Further, these politicians are usually homeowners themselves and are complicit in maintaining homeowner’s best interests at the expense of the broader public. The only solution is that cities be stripped of their absolute control over zoning and power shared at the federal and state level.
- pif 4y ago
  I am not from the USA and I don't live in the USA. I've read about this issue several times, and I'm not sure whether I understand why it is an issue. > zoning is controlled almost exclusively by local city councils What's wrong with it? People opposing the status quo usually look to imply that every citizen of the USA should have the right to go and live where he likes the most, at the price and at the conditions it prefers. Why should I be able to force, for example, San Francisco to build cheap homes for me to move there? If I can't afford San Francisco, I'll go live elsewhere. Instead, if I live in San Francisco, I will participate in the local political life and vote according to my preferences.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    > > zoning is controlled almost exclusively by local city councils >What's wrong with it? it excludes people who would live there but the zoning doesn't allow it. On the scale of a single town this doesn't matter, but on the scale of an entire metro area all these little zoning groups make it impossible to anything anywhere in the entire area and so it destroys the whole. zoning is good for any one small area, but across the entire metro area the sum total is bad.
mushbino 4y ago
It's simple, money rules everything in the US. Homes are investment vehicles above all else and property rights trump all. This is one reason good public transit can't be built and when there are big public works projects, the contractors who win have political connections either through campaign contributions or politicians owning stock. They also know how to game the system and milk the city for money causing massive budget overruns and go way over completion date. See Tutor Perini in California. Auto manufacturers and oil companies have had massive political influence, they've prevented good public transit from being built and they've bought public transit and ripped up the lines or bought bus companies and shut them down. Capitalism, shareholder value, and profit rule everything in the US. And don't even get me started on our foreign policy.
Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago
Who is todays generation?
chasd00 4y ago
The reason NIMBY types are taken so seriously is because they also are the types to mobilize and vote at the local level. So a local politician is taking a nontrivial risk to their employment by going against those groups.
ano88888 4y ago
Unfortunately , China's autocracy beat USA's democracy in infrastructure building.
gadders 4y ago
In the UK, at least, local councils are continuously trying to shoe-horn high density housing into unsuitable rural areas, ignoring urban brown field sites.
danjac 4y ago
If you have a society with stagnant wages and the only route to a decent retirement and some generational wealth is rising home prices, then you will do everything to protect that investment. Even if that results in, long term, making your city an overall worse place to live. In other words it's hard to blame individuals for making rational decisions in their own self-interest in a fundamentally broken system.
SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago
> It's not just in megaprojects either. In my large, fairly dense US city, basic, easy-to-build, local infrastructure like adding a 1-mile bike lane to a straight street is impossible because a handful of NIMBYs are constantly taken seriously by local politicians. And it is not just about public infrastructure projects either. Basic private projects are also bureaucratically difficult to pull off, simple things like tearing down an old house and building a small multi-unit low rise in its place, needs an army of lawyers and consultants to approve. With that, only big companies have the bureaucratic resources to do it, so "regular people" are locked out of the opportunity to redevelop their own home, and the city gets less variety of developments as the few able players keep copying and pasting the same stuff, focused only on the same target market.
hattmall 4y ago
This is basically the root of so called cancel culture. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The problem is that once a minority opinion gets an outsized amount of attention others will join it to get some of that attention. We have developed a culture of any press is good press where certain people are highly motivated by getting attention from others. These people will seek any outlet for attention and join in with many contrarian viewpoints simply because the attention ratio works in their favor. This isn't entirely new and Ben Franklin had a solution for it that allowed much of the American revolution to take place. Secret societies. Many many very small interconnected secret societies, much like an MLM scheme but where you only know your immediate downline and your single sponsor. Everyone was member of at least two secret societies, each with 6 members. The first they were invited to join and the second they created themselves. They just enabled the exchange of pamphlets, but in this fashion ideas gained wide dispersal and support before ever truly becoming public.
astrange 4y ago
> I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. It seems like at any point in history, any local project will be opposed by somebody, no matter who they are or what the project is. The basic cause of this is there were a lot of government projects in the 60s that were bad and activism successfully stopped them. That's "urban renewal", the Embarcadero highway, etc - city planners would basically knock down black neighborhoods just for the joy of building highways over them even if nobody used the result. So the government was taken over the people who stopped things and rebuilt to make it very easy to stop things, and impossible to actually do them. Another part of this is that era's environmentalism (under some names like "cities as growth engines") basically thought that doing things = bad for the environment and not doing things = good for the environment. That gets you national parks but also suburban sprawl, which is less "intense" than cities, and so more "natural".
bobthechef 4y ago
I never liked the term. It often seems to be used by people who demand that others make sacrifices for others and that’s a bad sign, a sign of coercion and exploitation. This is distinguished from considerations about the common good which entail considering the impact on others and how they might be compensated (eg responsible eminent domain), or crotchety curmudgeons who hate things that would even be to their own benefit simply because they’re resentful of everyone. Calling someone a NIMBY seems too often to be a way of demeaning someone who refuses to agree to give something up so you can have something you want.
friendzis 4y ago
> due to the spottiness of existing bike infrastructure and overall lack of protected bike lanes > But no - the second anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a handful of NIMBYs write in with "but muh cars" That's your problem right here. Adding 1 mile of bike lane is counterproductive. It does not really help biking and at the same time it potentially hurts other modes of transportation. You need commute network. What you need is a robust, modeled plan for end result and transitionary period. Building a 1 mile stretch of bike lane and building 100 miles of bike lanes in 1 mile increments are entirely different things. One is more subject to both populism by politicians and opposition from society.

by acabal 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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sylens 4y ago

I half wonder if you live in my city because your description matches it to a tee, but I bet this is happening in cities all over the country. As for why they care about NIMBYs so much - it is because our current class of politicians aim to be career politicians. Therefore, they look to remain in power at all costs, and part of that means not pissing off the most vocal members of their community. What we need is real leadership from politicians who are willing to stake their tenure in office on pushing projects through.

JohnBooty 4y ago
What we need is real leadership from politicians who are willing to stake their tenure in office on pushing projects through. Easy to say, but our current system proves that it selects for politicians of exactly the opposite ilk. How do we change the system?
- CoffeeOnWrite 4y ago
  Maybe by getting younger people to vote more? (I know this has been tried since forever, but have we tried everything?) And, holding public comment hearings outside of traditional working hours so that non-retired people have a fair shot? IDK seems pretty hopeless..
  - tacocataco 4y ago
    I got some ideas: Could just put a ballot at the end of tax forms. Just piggy back the ID confirm the IRS does. Doesn't have to be mandatory. Give a $5 tax credit for filling it out. People who don't pay taxes can vote normally or by mail. Universal mail in voting. I'd go as far as to make mail in voting the only way to vote. Make every state have the same voting day (primaries/general). This helps reduce media influence on the elections. Get rid of first past the post voting. Allows for more political parties, increasing the odds people are engaged with one of the parties. Something like ranked choice would keep their vote relevant even if their preference didn't make the cut. It's infuriating to me when people recognize there is a problem, yet toss up their hands and not try new things. How is repeating the same thing going to get different results?
- b112 4y ago
  You know what I hear in this thread? Combined, posts have said that NIMBYs, a tiny minority, who always vote, show up to council meetings, and politicians listen to them, and yet everyone here trying to figure out what is broken. Well, nothing is broken, except non-NIMBYs dont care enough to do the same! The answer is simple. Show up to council meetings and vote! If you don't, you don't care as much as the NIMBYs, and the result is clear. Nothing is broken, it is called democracy.

ekkeke 4y ago

I believe (though I don't have the evidence for it) that we likely see a similar phenomenon in the UK. House prices seem to have become the most important thing to the home owning class and they selfishly oppose anything that would affect them negatively, whether that be HS2 or new house building programs. This is not current generation I might add, who I believe would be quite happy with a shake up. It's previous generation of 50 years olds and over that have brought this about.

frosted-flakes 4y ago
I was interested in HS2 after seeing stuff about the Elizabeth Line, so I watched some YouTube videos about it. In my eyes it seems like a great project despite the high cost (easy for me to say since I'm not British), but holy smokes, the amount of people in the comments poo-pooing it with comments like below is absurd. "It breaks my heart to see such needless desecration of our beautiful countryside for this catastrophe!" -- the video in question was drone footage over wholly unnatural farm fields. That will return to being farm fields once construction finishes, with a 20m strip of train tracks running through it. Of course, they didn't mention the existing motorway that was also in the shot. "An obscene use of fossil fuels, environment, and money for something we don't really need." -- About a train that will use zero fossil fuels and will lessen demand for cars. Really. Also, a bunch of people saying it's useless because it won't have a station in their town. It's a high-speed line, of course not! The whole point is to make local services faster and more frequent by removing express services from the existing over-crowded lines.
- ekkeke 4y ago
  Yup, exaclty. We seem to have become a nation of landlords seeking to turn a profit without an ounce of effort, rather than the industrious country we once were.
api 4y ago
It's the same in a lot of US cities, but to play devils' advocate: this generation was basically told that their home was their savings and in many cases their entire capability to retire or take care of their health and other needs in old age is tied to the value of their home equity. We dug a very, very deep hole by treating housing as an investment instrument and it's going to be hard to dig out.

VictorPath 4y ago

Local politics here is run by real estate interests and government does little. A local business wanted an underground garage, and had its curb open up onto a crosswalk. This kind of thing happens all the time. There is too little resident input into construction, and too little government oversight of it, not too much.

bobthepanda 4y ago

> I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. It seems like at any point in history, any local project will be opposed by somebody, no matter who they are or what the project is. But previous generations seemed to be able to get over that in favor of building. This is the root cause. The highway overbuilding was so devastating to the people it affected that many processes were put in place so that it would never happen so undemocratically again. It‘s a pendulum.

seoaeu 4y ago
Not just overbuilding. Also the impunity with which politicians routed highways directly through neighborhoods whose inhabitants they did not like (demolishing homes, businesses, and community centers in the process)
- yadaeno 4y ago
  And its one of the best investments the government ever made. 600% ROI transforming the American economy, connecting communities. The amount of displacement caused by a national rail system or bike lanes would be minuscule in comparison but have a similar impact. Politics nowadays seems too risk averse to pull large infra projects. Sometimes you have demolish some homes but nobody is brave enough to make these tough decisions anymore. https://www.google.com/amp/s/infrastructurereportcard.org/happy-60th-birthday-interstate-highway-system/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/infrastructurereportcard.org/ha...
  - kbenson 4y ago
    It's possible there are far more negative externalities than you're accounting for. What's 600% ROI if it turns out it contributed significantly to inequality, both for income and race? How negatively has that effected the nation, or even just the economy, over decades? It's important to note that the argument is not as simple as "highways or no highways", but more nuanced, as perhaps 10% harder to accomplish yields a 50% reduction in problems. Finding that sane middle ground is hard, but we should be careful not to reduce the problem to such simplicity that the many of the important parts of the solution are no longer even assessed.

_greim_ 4y ago

> I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. Could it be these are the only voices local politicians are hearing? 99.99% of residents being okay with new builds doesn't always translate into a political will that a politician can exploit.

burlesona 4y ago
This is the real issue. Almost nobody pays attention to or votes in local elections in the US. The 5% of the population that are NIMBYS may be >= 50% of the voters.
- int_19h 4y ago
  In the federal elections, primaries have the same problem: people who vote in them tend to be much more ideologically motivated than general populace. That's how you end up with parties that oppose policies supported by a supermajority of their voters - that opposition doesn't matter because those voters won't vote for the other party (with whom they disagree on way more) anyway, so all that matters is winning the primaries.
  - pif 4y ago
    People don't have the right to complain if they didn't show up to vote.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      Which is why I vote for third parties that haven't a hope of winning. It isn't my fault, but I voted. (both major parties have something in their platform that is a major no for me)
- pif 4y ago
  People don't have the right to complain if they didn't show up to vote.

chrisseaton 4y ago

> I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. You already explained it yourself. They write in. They probably also vote. Their representatives do what they're told.

pas 4y ago
Yep, they're overrepresented.

causi 4y ago

People and governments need to realize that trying to make city living and non-city living the same is a losing proposition. Cities should not have an obligation to be car-accessible. It's unnatural for a place with thirty thousand people per square mile. It'd probably be better for everyone if personal vehicles were outright banned in all major cities, as long as it's possible to live in a city without ever leaving it and to live outside the city without ever entering it. Half the square footage of a street being taken up by cars parked on it is utterly perverse. I say that as someone who has never ridden a bus or subway and who would rather pull my tooth with a pair of pliers than set foot in a major city.

idiotsecant 4y ago
This has increasingly been on my mind lately with the discussions around firearm laws. I grew up in a relatively rural state where firearm ownership and usage was pretty much assumed and a normal part of life because law enforcement and animal control services simply aren't available at the speed you need them in an emergency. In an urban area there are different considerations that might weigh less heavily in favor of unrestricted access to firearms. It strikes me that rural area firearm ownership might warrant a different treatment than urban area ownership. And if that's the case maybe there's a wide class of these sorts of things that we should address on a similar basis.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  Really well put. The reason I'm making this Reddit-style comment is because I believe this sort of nuanced perspective is exceedingly rare in any venue that actually matters. There is little to not attempt to understand or empathize with the "other side" in these sorts of debates, usually.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It's also combined with years, decades, of trying to "solve problems at the highest level" which is the federal government, and those often end up being heavy handed or failures entirely.

nonethewiser 4y ago

I'm not sure NIMBYism is to blame here. Not every idea should be executed. I understand that it's a problem if projects always cave if there is resistance, because there will always be resistance, but that is not NIMBYism. That's just politics.

pas 4y ago
The problem is there's just no cost to passivity. NIMBYs pay with their time, and they have a lot of it. This should be "taxed" at some rate. It has to be enough to provide some minimal balancing force against passivity.
- phaistra 4y ago
  What is your concrete solution? Create a fine for not-voting in local elections and local initiatives?
  - I-M-S 4y ago
    If you block development for X number of years and it turns out you had no grounds to do so, you need to compensate the developer (or even more broadly - damage your opposition to the project incurred to the common good)
  - xxpor 4y ago
    Remove the private right of action from CEQA etc.
    - pas 4y ago
      that could stay, but make them prepare the assessment. also the whole problem is that the timelines are ridiculous. there's no need to create a report that goes over 99.999% of the whole problem space. do a 95% job, check for the past fuckups (ie. are we literally trying to pave over homes of disadvantaged communities? are we promising very fair compensation for this but then just scam them and leave them with some half-assed dilapidated boarding house on the outskirts of town? are we willfully ignoring some group with real data?) it can even go to court, but make it quick. have a standing tribunal for this and they should be bound by law to decide whether the claim has enough merit to proceed based on 1-2 weeks of examination. simply put there are not enough standardized and well structured parts of this bureaucratic pipeline. (and there should be very very few non-standard parts. and standard parts should be quick and transparent to evaluate.)

correlator 4y ago

From my experience NIMBYs are typically local property owners who don't want their view, neighborhood, etc. to change. These folks could be better off financially than their YIMBY counterparts who maybe don't own all that same property. If there's a group of people with money and a group with less debating the same issue, I would expect the politician to support the party most likely to make large campaign contributions. I have no data to support this idea and should not be taken seriously in this context.

fallingknife 4y ago
I think it's less likely the donations and more likely that the politician is a member of the well off property owner group.

notacoward 4y ago

This is what I think of as Consensus Paralysis. There are usually many reasons to do a thing, and many reasons not to. A sane person or organization would weigh those reasons against each other. However, in most political decision making there's an important asymmetry: any one reason to block action is sufficient, but no number or weight of reasons is sufficient to ensure its progress. In our earnest wish to avoid the tyranny of the majority by requiring full consensus (or close to it), we've handed all of the trump cards to obstructionists. Often a tiny minority, not even pretending to believe in the nominal reason for their objections, can unilaterally block any progress. The US senate is another example of this problem BTW, both in the form of the filibuster and in the general inadvisability of huge omnibus bills that give everyone their very own excuse to oppose without consequence, but maybe that's getting a bit off topic.

larrik 4y ago

It's easy to vilify NIMBY, but those are ALSO the people stopping developers from tearing down historical buildings just to put up parking lots or worse. Then again, there's also a vocal minority who thinks the government should spend as little as possible, and new projects are even worse.

quacked 4y ago
I always end up qualifying as a NIMBY, because all of the projects proposed are endless 4-on-1s that look exactly the same as everywhere else with no parking, or godawful commercial real estate. If there was any taste in development, I'd be a YIMBY.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  Yeah that's the problem. If taste is important enough an objection that you block infrastructure that could save lives or house folks on the edge of homelessness, then do we really need to take the objection seriously? As a GP said, there's always a list of pros and cons. We can't let any tiny con, namely something as subjective as taste, get in the way of building life-saving infrastructure.
  - quacked 4y ago
    Ah, get real. None of that infrastructure is life-saving, most building is happening in rapidly growing areas, and most rapidly-growing areas are filled with moneyed transplants who are coming for local industry jobs. That's who new development is for: people who will make rent that will cover the loans that were taken out to finance the property. No one seems to understand this: developers develop when they predict an increase in housing prices. Their builds will accompany a massive increase in demand. The number of people who need their "lives saved" will only grow as a city grows in popularity and density, and the rent only goes up. If you want to look at what continuous "life-saving" no-taste development looks like, go to Houston, or Chicago, or SF, or really anywhere that's very populous. The people still need their lives saved, but everything is disgusting and falling down after ten years anyway. If you want to get serious about housing people in America, you need to think about supporting policies that would slow down the 200K-1M people we add to the US every year, each of who needs housing.

deleted 4y ago

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7952 4y ago

More and more these are culture war arguments rather than NIMBYism.

zackmorris 4y ago

NIMBY is the wrong term for this. What we're really talking about is eminent domain. To get the rate of progress you're talking about requires bulldozing through neighborhoods and often buying up private property. So you have to be comfortable with personally taking away someone's property for public use. If you aren't ready to do that, then you're distracting from the fundamental issue by substituting terms. You're also using proxy to put these moral dilemmas onto someone else, maybe an elected official. It's analogous to convincing someone of murder and then having another person pull the switch for the electric chair. Without getting too far out into the weeds, we're seeing this problem in recent Supreme Court rulings. I've chosen for myself to use proper terminology now. I expect that from others and will be pointing out this issue in future discussions. If the people I'm debating continue to use hand waving to avoid the crux of issues, then I will make light of it and point out their inadequate communication skills. Basically questioning their leadership authority if they don't have an understanding of debate and continue to insult the intelligence of their constituents.

SteveGerencser 4y ago
I have to agree with your take on this. We were recently sent an 'offer' by the local water district to buy 15' of frontage along our property for a new water line that will be a major service upgrade for about 8 homes. My issue came when I discovered that the current water line and easement is on the other side of the road, but they would have to cut down quite a few tree while it was a lot easier to dig in front of my farm. So far, I get it. Then I could out that they offered us 3 cents per square foot of frontage but the home next to us was offered 4x as much at 4 cents per square foot. And someone else offer 4 cents, and they didn't even know about the 3 new houses on our road before they even started planning. I'm all for improving infrastructure, but it needs to be in a fair, and well planned, way. Neither of which is common with this sort of thing.
karaterobot 4y ago
I would go even farther, and say you'd have to be comfortable with someone taking away your property to build something you don't think should be built at all. It's easy to say "they should take somebody else's property and build something I want." Anybody can do that! But if you think of it that way it makes more sense why you get people blocking these projects.

dfxm12 4y ago

I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. Don't discount that your elected officials may be NIMBYs themselves, or well-funded by NIMBYs. Consider this if you still have an upcoming primary election or when you go to the polls in November.

sschueller 4y ago

We have NIMBY here is Switzerland too but we try to find a solution most of the time if we see a need for it. In the end it's usually a compromise everyone can live with but sometimes a project can also fail. Like the subway that was proposed in the 70s to run under Zürich. The subway station at HB was even built but then people voted against the whole project later. Today that station runs a regular train (S4 and S10) not a subway. There is also another tunnel with station that was supposed to be part of the subway which was built (near tierspital) but is now a standard tram line. What's interesting is that there is almost no room for the tram. The tracks are as low as they can be and the trams pantograph gets almost completely compressed. [1] [1] https://youtu.be/RUoiUAsLZM0 https://youtu.be/RUoiUAsLZM0

microtherion 4y ago
…and the trams need to switch sides when entering/exiting the tunnels, because those stations are the only ones in the city with center platforms. The biggest NIMBY opposition these days is against the new soccer stadium, which is supposed to both warm up the area too much and throw too much of a shadow.
- sschueller 4y ago
  There is another center platform where this occurs. Bahnhof Enge and the Tram 5.

warning26 4y ago

Fact is, if you want to build a megaproject (highway, HSR, whatever), you have to step on someone's toes. In the past, America did this by stepping on the toes of people with no political power, resulting in the excesses of 1960s destroying of historic areas in favor of unfortunate highway interchanges. Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction -- no project can be built because no one is willing to step on anyone's toes.

nybble41 4y ago
> Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction -- no project can be built because no one is willing to step on anyone's toes. I don't see this as a bad thing at all. We could do with fewer "megaprojects" unapologetically stepping on people's toes. Frankly, if the project isn't economical after accounting for what it would cost to buy up the necessary property at market rates--which is to say, rates the actual owners will voluntarily accept without any threat of coercion or eminent domain--then it simply isn't worth doing.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  You don't need to do anything of the sort. Housing is one of the most tightly regulated form of capital expenditure in the US. Most of the US is zoned to SFH-only zoning. What this means is that real-estate developers and property owners are not allowed by law to build anything other than a single-family home. This is accompanied by mandates to achieve certain minimum lot sizes (lots have to be at least a certain size), maximum FAR (Floor-Area Ratio), and minimum setbacks (a residence has to be set back from the street by a minimum number of feet). You cannot build low-impact businesses in these areas like corner stores or barber shops/salons. These rules result in the suburban American homogeneity that you see throughout many neighborhoods in America. This doesn't even cover the role of HOAs which are additional local bureaucracy which control what residents are or are-not allowed to build when and where on their property. Relax (but don't get rid of) zoning and other mandates around US building and empower property owners to make the changes themselves. If they don't want to, they don't have to either. But give them the choice.
- warning26 4y ago

nobodyandproud 4y ago

> But no - the second anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a handful of NIMBYs write in with "but muh cars" and the politicians throw up their hands and surrender. That is a damn shame. As a driver and also cyclist, I hate seeing bicycles on the car roads; I also hate being on the road when I cycle, as there are too many inattentive drivers. And please, keep pedestrians off of cyclists lanes. Ticket them if you must.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

This is not a US specific thing... people here in slovenia build a house at the end of the by-the-street village, and then complain when someone else does the same, claming the the village is getting too large.

colechristensen 4y ago

One reason that there is pushback and needs to be pushback is that there are frequently really dumb vanity proposals because small-time politicians want to do something big. Locally there are a couple of plans to tear up and reroute highways in a decade long project where the highways literally just finished major tear-up-and-reroute project. There's another nonsensical proposal to tear up one of the busiest highways around and replace it with a nice boulevard because wouldn't that be lovely, except without any plan for what would happen to the rest of traffic. There are NIMBYs but there are also people worried about projects which are trying to help won't actually make anything better and often will have real negative consequences.

Barrin92 4y ago
>worried about projects which are trying to help won't actually make anything better and often will have real negative consequences the worry is misplaced because stupid projects are compensated by good ones. This obsession with efficiency, which seems to be an artifact of modern economic logic is one of the culprits of why nothing gets build. Effectiveness matters, not efficiency. This is just the same logic that VC investors use. nine out of ten startups are crap, some are scams, but it doesn't matter. Better to waste some resources than to build nothing at all. China understands this. People will laugh at empty ghost cities or wasteful vanity projects but they're compensated for by what works and tacit knowledge generated in the process. America's gilded age or new deal era or cold war military projects were no different. Better to go big and get something done than do nothing at all. And that's usually the two choices.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Efficiency matters because if you are efficient you can do more. There is only so much money you can get to build, build well and you get reelected and get more. Build bad and the project is cancled, or maybe it completes but it is too small (all you could afford) to be useful.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    Efficiency matters but it cannot be the paramount driver to growth. If it is, then there needs to be minimum metrics agreed upon for efficiency or you're just asking for a project with no end goal aka every construction project in an American city.

BirAdam 4y ago

NIMBYs get taken seriously because they show up in large numbers. I totally understand the reaction many people have to government. I fall victim to it all the time. We see that politicians get bought and paid for, and we therefore assume that nothing can change the way things work, but this proves otherwise. At the end of the day, those who show up tend to win. If we all want change, and judging by this thread a majority do, then we need to show up. Show up at the local meetings. Call your local reps. Be annoying. Get everyone you know to also be annoying. Politicians like remaining in power, and an angry mob shouting about the roads and bike lanes... that will motivate them.

Lammy 4y ago
NIMBYs get taken seriously because the secondary and tertiary effects of their NIMBYism aligns with the dominant ideology of the state post-Civil-Rights-era. See also: the 1970 Congressional report from the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 (copy and paste URL to avoid HTTP Referer check) John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ sez: "We have all heard[citation needed] about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say[who?] that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills.[SUBTLE]" You may know the above as "WTF Happened in 1971?" https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
- jeffbee 4y ago
  If you scratch a NIMBY you'll find a fan of Ehrlich underneath. You have no idea how quickly a Berkeley zoning board meeting devolves from ordinary discourse into Malthusian debates about whether young people are entitled to exist. Of course Ehrlich was a gigantic racist, as are his followers, which was recently covered very well at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/population-growth-housing-climate-change/629952/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/population...

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago

> If this were the 1900s, government would have told the NIMBYs to get bent, we're building Thing X because it's good for society and if you don't like it, tough. That's what living in city means sometimes! Unfortunately, much of the history of that era was exploiting racial minorities in order to build. I'm currently sitting in a neighborhood (PNW USA) that at the turn of the century was established mostly by german immigrants. They built their houses here because the more anglo population in the city proper, slightly to the south, and mostly across the river, redlined them away from those areas. Fast forward to just after WW2, and a substantial black population moved here to work building ships for the war effort. These folks were largely setting in a racially integrated town just a bit further north from me. In the post war years, this flooded, creating a local refugee crisis. The powers that were in the city at the time did not want black families in their areas, so they decided to redline them into the germanic neighborhood and make it their problem. Fast forward a couple decades, and my neighborhood has become the cultural and economic center for the black community in my city. City proper leadership is still openly and malignantly racists, so they go along with a scheme to use a free way expansion and building a hospital campus to snap up the land for a fraction of what it was worth under eminent domain. Culturally the neighborhood has not recovered from this. Several multi block scale plots of land remain unbuilt but owned by the hospital. That's just my neighborhood. Robert Moses and his peers played out this story nation wide. So, there's obviously a lot going on with the US's current failure to build civic infrastructure in a sensible and affordable way. But before we lionize what was going on in the past, we should remember a lot of what got built was at the cost of someone who's rights and economic interests were legit thwarted. It doesn't excuse modern NIMBYism from a position of privilege, but I do worry about reforms that give planning boards sharper knives.

notinfuriated 4y ago
> City proper leadership is still openly and malignantly racists Curious, what city is this?
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  Portland, Oregon. Note I was referring to a period in the 1970s when the hospital and freeway stuff happened. This city had a very different reputation just 50 years ago, and Oregon as a whole had defacto sundown towns until quite recently. As you might expect from headlines of recent years, things still aren't exactly great in terms of black Portlander's trusting the city will protect their interests, but progress has happened, mostly due to stubborn people pushing on it. No easy answers to this kind of problem, but there is a pretty clear moral compass pointer imo. If you'd like more about my neighborhood specifically: http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEED...

el_nahual 4y ago

The issue with NIMBYs ("Not In My Back Yard") is that they aren't really NIMBYS: They are CAVErs: Citizens Against Virtually Everything. I promise that if you took a group of NIMBYs and proposed tearing down 5 single family homes to build a midrise apartment building they'd object. But if you also proposed—to the exact same group of people—tearing down a mid-rise to build 5 single family homes, they'd object. If you propose to remove 50 parking spots for a bike lane, they object. If you propose to remove a bike lane to replace it with parking, they'd object too. These people are driven by a deep cynicism that anything can be made better: they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better, and they don't believe that ungided "forces" can make things better either. If something has an advocate, the advocate must be taking advantage. If nobody is advocating, then something unguided must be wrong. Nothing can be an improvement. Therefore, any change must be for the worst, and they oppose everything.

rcpt 4y ago
Beverly Hills routinely approves single family home teardowns as long as you replace with another single family home. But replacing with an apartment? Not in MY backyard!
- asdff 4y ago
  And even those teardowns are subject to people trying to get the balloon framed single family home designated as a historical entity and preserved for all of time
daenz 4y ago
These sound like hypothetical scenarios. Do you have some real world examples?
- wk_end 4y ago
  There's a completely bland, ugly, brutalist movie theatre in the downtown of my city [1]. Probably from the 80s? There was talk about tearing it down and replacing it with a much nicer looking (IMO) modern mid-rise [2]. A local news organization posted about it, and the comments were flooded with old people who live in the suburbs moaning. One just posted a link to a YouTube video of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" ("they paved paradise/and put up a parking lot"), absurdly. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@48.4255478,-123.3621296,3a,75y,105.19h,93.42t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sMK5rJkB1dbkc-S68sCXrTQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@48.4255478,-123.3621296,3a,75y,... [2] https://www.cheknews.ca/officer-tower-proposed-for-capitol-6-theatres-site-moves-ahead-to-public-hearing-950856/ https://www.cheknews.ca/officer-tower-proposed-for-capitol-6...

Patrol8394 4y ago

> is impossible because a handful of NIMBYs are constantly taken seriously by local politicians. That x 1000 !

redtexture 4y ago

It takes politics to change politicians. This is a many year process: to bring into public office people who care, willing to change laws, or city ordinances, and department values and priorities (street / public works) and budget money for the new priorities, and to flex the electoral muscle by the organizing (an increasingly important and larger number) of voters to pay attention. Like it or not that is the game you are in. If you are not playing to change the game, you are doomed to play by the same rules you complain about. The handicapped / wheelchair access to sidewalks, now visible nation wide in the US, started with zero curb cuts everywhere in the 1960s, and wheelchair non-accessbility to many essential services, such as grocery stores, post offices, other public buildings, including schools, court houses, social services, and municipal governmental offices. Hospitals had figured this out, mostly, but not entirely, by that time.

deleted 4y ago

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throwaway0a5e 4y ago

There's no shortage of Atlantic and New Yorker sob stories about how some abutting farmers are taking it in the ass over some new development. This isn't an America problem. It's a people "wealthy enough to have so few real problems they have spare fucks to give about what their neighbors are building" problem. If the "HN Class" of people (very roughly speaking) would actually give a F about other people's property rights this problem would evaporate overnight. Cities and private developers could buy what they want and develop what they want. But nope, enforcing conformity and having veto power over the next big box store or freight terminal is more important so that means no new anything gets built.

jimt1234 4y ago

I'm a NIMBY, unfortunately. Not because I'm anti-progress or whatever, but because so much of my financial life is tied to my house, and whether I like it or not, there's a lot that can adversely affect its value. So, if building a new apartment complex nearby is gonna reduce my property value by 5%, taking around $50K out of my pocket, of course I'm going to oppose it. I don't feel like that makes me a bad person. Who wants to flush $50K down the toilet? Fifty years ago houses weren't so expensive, relative to income, and thus the risk wasn't as high. My parents bought their first house in 1969 for $17K, no student debt, no health insurance expenses, etc. So, if a highway was built in their backyard, they would've been much more concerned about the hit to their quality of life than to their finances.

theluketaylor 4y ago
In areas of economic growth and growing density high rises going in around you only leads to higher property values. Eventually the dirt under your house is worth so much a developer will make you an offer you can’t refuse. There is basically no evidence increasing density leads to anything but higher property values for everyone.
- jimt1234 4y ago
  Respectfully, I disagree. I have a handful of friends/colleagues who had apartment complexes built nearby their suburban McMansions, and each one had the same story: increased traffic and vehicle congestion, decreased available street parking, increased noise pollution, increased pedestrian traffic, and yes, increased crime. All of these things will make property values go one direction, and it ain't higher. Extreme example: Back in the 90s, a friend bought a brand new, suburban home. Two years later, an apartment complex was built on a vacant lot about two blocks away. Two years after that, the apartment complex started accepting Section 8's. The crime started almost immediately. His car was broken into. His house was broken into. Loud music all night. Beer bottles on his lawn in the morning. His once quiet suburban home was no more. He eventually sold and took a significant loss. I know I'm the bad guy for pointing this out, but facts are facts, and money is real. Increasing density where it was never intended will negatively impact your property value. (^^^ I was told there were lawsuits, but California officials got involved and squashed it, saying basically, "We said they could accept Section 8's, and there ain't shit you can do about it. Suck it.")

dukeofdoom 4y ago

There's also opposite of this problem sometimes. Some kids built a bike trail with jumps by a river in a local park. The local newspaper started running articles how these kids are destroying habitat and nature. Then followed it up with an actual altercation with some Karen and the kids. After a few more articles. The city paid for a bulldozer to go in an bulldoze the ramps the kids build. A year passes and the city awards a half a million dollar contract to local company build a trail and pump track in the same park. The newspaper raves about it. Moral of the story, no one makes money if things are left alone. Also moral of the story, don't trust your local newspaper. Moral outrage can be paid for.

rayiner 4y ago

My daughter’s school bought a failing golf course in a nearby subdivision to build an athletic facility. We’re not talking Texas football here, but a track and some tennis courts for a school where theater is a bigger deal than sports. The neighbors tied us up in litigation for close to six years. (It only took about a year to build the facility itself.)

thegrim33 4y ago

I mean, a portion of the population probably just simply disagrees with your ideas. They'd rather the car infrastructure actually be improved and expanded to meet the demands of increased population, rather than continuously crippled in every possible way. They're not very interested in having yet another lane of travel removed so that an average of 2 bikers an hour can ride down the road.

chasd00 4y ago
Hah my city did this recently. Took away two lanes of traffic on two major roads to add bike lanes. I’ve never seen the bike lanes used ever.
- aembleton 4y ago
  Do the bike lanes connect to anywhere or to any other bike lanes?

gitfan86 4y ago

I have seen this in my city with changes to the schools. No matter what changes are suggested, a group of people gets upset. I suspect they want to make all changes difficult just in case there is a change one day that they actually don't like.

jimmux 4y ago
It makes them feel important. They could get the same result by pushing for beneficial development, but that's much more difficult. Mostly because of everyone opposing it to feel important.

BenFranklin100 4y ago

Here’s the reason: In the United States, zoning is controlled almost exclusively by local city councils. Voter turnout in local elections is extremely poor. The only people who vote are A. older and B. homeowners. The young and renters scarcely show up. Thus, local city councils by and large represent homeowner’s interests. These older homeowners adamantly oppose new development like apartments, bike lanes, and mass transit. They fear developments might affect the value of existing homes, change the ‘character of the neighborhood’ (read: attract the wrong type of minorities), increase traffic, compete for existing parking, etc… the list goes on. In general, homeowners are opposed to any type of change that might affect the value of their home or mildly inconvenience their lives. Local politicians are loathe to cross homeowners. They will be voted out if they do. Further, these politicians are usually homeowners themselves and are complicit in maintaining homeowner’s best interests at the expense of the broader public. The only solution is that cities be stripped of their absolute control over zoning and power shared at the federal and state level.

pif 4y ago
I am not from the USA and I don't live in the USA. I've read about this issue several times, and I'm not sure whether I understand why it is an issue. > zoning is controlled almost exclusively by local city councils What's wrong with it? People opposing the status quo usually look to imply that every citizen of the USA should have the right to go and live where he likes the most, at the price and at the conditions it prefers. Why should I be able to force, for example, San Francisco to build cheap homes for me to move there? If I can't afford San Francisco, I'll go live elsewhere. Instead, if I live in San Francisco, I will participate in the local political life and vote according to my preferences.
- bluGill 4y ago
  > > zoning is controlled almost exclusively by local city councils >What's wrong with it? it excludes people who would live there but the zoning doesn't allow it. On the scale of a single town this doesn't matter, but on the scale of an entire metro area all these little zoning groups make it impossible to anything anywhere in the entire area and so it destroys the whole. zoning is good for any one small area, but across the entire metro area the sum total is bad.

mushbino 4y ago

It's simple, money rules everything in the US. Homes are investment vehicles above all else and property rights trump all. This is one reason good public transit can't be built and when there are big public works projects, the contractors who win have political connections either through campaign contributions or politicians owning stock. They also know how to game the system and milk the city for money causing massive budget overruns and go way over completion date. See Tutor Perini in California. Auto manufacturers and oil companies have had massive political influence, they've prevented good public transit from being built and they've bought public transit and ripped up the lines or bought bus companies and shut them down. Capitalism, shareholder value, and profit rule everything in the US. And don't even get me started on our foreign policy.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago

Who is todays generation?

chasd00 4y ago

The reason NIMBY types are taken so seriously is because they also are the types to mobilize and vote at the local level. So a local politician is taking a nontrivial risk to their employment by going against those groups.

ano88888 4y ago

Unfortunately , China's autocracy beat USA's democracy in infrastructure building.

gadders 4y ago

In the UK, at least, local councils are continuously trying to shoe-horn high density housing into unsuitable rural areas, ignoring urban brown field sites.

danjac 4y ago

If you have a society with stagnant wages and the only route to a decent retirement and some generational wealth is rising home prices, then you will do everything to protect that investment. Even if that results in, long term, making your city an overall worse place to live. In other words it's hard to blame individuals for making rational decisions in their own self-interest in a fundamentally broken system.

SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago

> It's not just in megaprojects either. In my large, fairly dense US city, basic, easy-to-build, local infrastructure like adding a 1-mile bike lane to a straight street is impossible because a handful of NIMBYs are constantly taken seriously by local politicians. And it is not just about public infrastructure projects either. Basic private projects are also bureaucratically difficult to pull off, simple things like tearing down an old house and building a small multi-unit low rise in its place, needs an army of lawyers and consultants to approve. With that, only big companies have the bureaucratic resources to do it, so "regular people" are locked out of the opportunity to redevelop their own home, and the city gets less variety of developments as the few able players keep copying and pasting the same stuff, focused only on the same target market.

hattmall 4y ago

This is basically the root of so called cancel culture. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The problem is that once a minority opinion gets an outsized amount of attention others will join it to get some of that attention. We have developed a culture of any press is good press where certain people are highly motivated by getting attention from others. These people will seek any outlet for attention and join in with many contrarian viewpoints simply because the attention ratio works in their favor. This isn't entirely new and Ben Franklin had a solution for it that allowed much of the American revolution to take place. Secret societies. Many many very small interconnected secret societies, much like an MLM scheme but where you only know your immediate downline and your single sponsor. Everyone was member of at least two secret societies, each with 6 members. The first they were invited to join and the second they created themselves. They just enabled the exchange of pamphlets, but in this fashion ideas gained wide dispersal and support before ever truly becoming public.

astrange 4y ago

> I don't understand why NIMBYs have been taken so seriously in the US in the past 50 years. It seems like at any point in history, any local project will be opposed by somebody, no matter who they are or what the project is. The basic cause of this is there were a lot of government projects in the 60s that were bad and activism successfully stopped them. That's "urban renewal", the Embarcadero highway, etc - city planners would basically knock down black neighborhoods just for the joy of building highways over them even if nobody used the result. So the government was taken over the people who stopped things and rebuilt to make it very easy to stop things, and impossible to actually do them. Another part of this is that era's environmentalism (under some names like "cities as growth engines") basically thought that doing things = bad for the environment and not doing things = good for the environment. That gets you national parks but also suburban sprawl, which is less "intense" than cities, and so more "natural".

bobthechef 4y ago

I never liked the term. It often seems to be used by people who demand that others make sacrifices for others and that’s a bad sign, a sign of coercion and exploitation. This is distinguished from considerations about the common good which entail considering the impact on others and how they might be compensated (eg responsible eminent domain), or crotchety curmudgeons who hate things that would even be to their own benefit simply because they’re resentful of everyone. Calling someone a NIMBY seems too often to be a way of demeaning someone who refuses to agree to give something up so you can have something you want.

friendzis 4y ago

> due to the spottiness of existing bike infrastructure and overall lack of protected bike lanes > But no - the second anyone mentions protected bike lanes, a handful of NIMBYs write in with "but muh cars" That's your problem right here. Adding 1 mile of bike lane is counterproductive. It does not really help biking and at the same time it potentially hurts other modes of transportation. You need commute network. What you need is a robust, modeled plan for end result and transitionary period. Building a 1 mile stretch of bike lane and building 100 miles of bike lanes in 1 mile increments are entirely different things. One is more subject to both populism by politicians and opposition from society.