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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

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...
  - mattm 4y ago
    Kind of funny using Victoria as an example. Having lived in Victoria on and off for the last 20 years I can remember the "tall-building ordinance" that finally got removed to allow for the construction of taller condos in the downtown area. Up above is also someone posting the lack of progress for bike lanes in their city but Victoria has been pretty good about that with the mayor going ahead with them even despite significant outcry about them. I think Victoria could be faster at adjusting to change but when I think about the changes over the past 2 decades, there has been significant development.
  - tempestn 4y ago
    Not to mention the movie theatre is right across the street from a larger, nicer movie theatre.
  - tomjakubowski 4y ago
    Not that it matters but, while that theater may be ugly, it's certainly not brutalist.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  The quintessential "bad faith NIMBY" proposal is probably the infamous "historic laundromat" saga in SF where a laundromat had to do three studies on shadows and was proposed for historic preservation in an effort to stop an apartment building: https://missionlocal.org/2018/06/the-strange-and-terrible-saga-of-san-franciscos-historic-laundromat-represents-the-worst-of-planning-and-development-in-this-town/ https://missionlocal.org/2018/06/the-strange-and-terrible-sa...
  - astrange 4y ago
    A lot of small parks in SF are also there because declaring some land a park is a good way to stop affordable housing projects/senior housing/anything that doesn't sound as cute as a park.
- jnwatson 4y ago
  My college fraternity purchased a former sorority house turned retirement home, with the intent to turn it back into a fraternity house. Neighbors objected. We had to take it all the way to the state Supreme Court to use the dwelling as it was originally intended and zoned.
  - symlinkk 4y ago
    Can you blame the neighbors for not wanting to live next to a frat house? That’s pretty much the embodiment of partying, booze, loud music
    - jnwatson 4y ago
      Sure but that’s not how laws or zoning are supposed to work. A retirement home is zoned the same as a fraternity. It is like suing your neighbor because you’d rather they have 2 kids instead of 3. Or suing the corner business because they opened a coffee shop instead of a donut shop. The idea that you think you have a say in your neighbors private business is the real problem.
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        As long as you tag your hypothetical neighbor's business as "private", saying that it's inappropriate to think you have a say in it is tautological. The idea that you have a say in your neighbor's business is not a problem, it's a fact. The fact that you have property at all is an agreement amongst your neighbors to respect that claim. If you want a place where your neighbors don't get a say in what you do, you should shop for another planet.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        actionfromafar 4y ago
        Wow, I almost never see a comment to this effect on HN. So very few people understand this, and that it also extends to all property, not just land.
- seb1204 4y ago
  I've heard of people moving next to schools and playground/sport field and then complaining to the council about the noise. Some take it even further to enforce restrictions on the use of the public grounds.
RajT88 4y ago
That's one flavor of NIMBY anyways. There's also the topically focused ones, like with a focus on crime or property values. (I have had a lot more experience with the latter) Case in point, Naperville, IL (quite wealthy suburb of Chicago) had a cell coverage problem in the late 90's. The NIMBY's shot down any proposal of putting up "ugly" cell towers because it could mar the view and impact property values. (I would love to know the overlap between the people complaining about cell coverage and property values) The compromise the city came up with was designing a commemorative bell tower which sneakily could house cellular equipment. This old article describes, conveniently, that the tower was designed to hold cellular networking equipment, and by total coincidence they found a cell company interested in paying to put equipment there: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-12-23-9912230229-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-12-23-991223... The project, initially termed "The Millenium Bell Tower" (later "The Carillon"), become known locally as "The Millenium Cell Tower".
- the_only_law 4y ago
  We got that issue here to mixed in with a bit of anti-5G. It pisses me because I can barely get LTE signal. For some reason, most carriers except version are dead where I live, which is odd because I live inbetween suburbs and a busy road. It's not like I'm in the middle of nowhere. Even with version the signal strength is crap.
  - mark-r 4y ago
    Version? I assume you got attacked by auto-correct and really meant Verizon.
    - the_only_law 4y ago
      Yes, sorry, that would be correct.
  - seb1204 4y ago
    Hey, welcome to Germany.
- 4y ago
tshaddox 4y ago
That sounds like nothing more than a very straightforward description of conservatism.
- el_nahual 4y ago
  Agreed! Except in american (and increasingly global, english-influenced) vernacular the words "conservatism" and "liberalism" have begun to stray so far from their "original" meanings that they can no longer be trusted to accurately convey meaning.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    > Except in american What? In America liberal is very much displaced from its "original meaning".
    - itsumoiru 4y ago
      I read the parent "except" as "the above is true, but..." not as "in all Englishes except American English"
    - tremon 4y ago
      > [alas], in american vernacular, and hence also increasingly global, the words [..] have begun to stray... Except is used more like an interjection there (agreed, except that...). They didn't mean to except the american vernacular from the rest of the sentence, just to clarify why they didn't write "conservative" in the first place.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
bigtex88 4y ago
This literally sounds like American "Conservatism".
- rhacker 4y ago
  Most city democrats are actually conservatives. They just don't believe it. They'll still vote "democrat" but typically the most conservative ones.
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    The problem if you only have row options (liberal/democrat vs conservative/republican) is that totally unrelated things have to fit this incredibly coarse framework. If someone is against constructing anything and afraid "outsiders" will come into the neighborhood, but they are for tighter gun control are they conservative or not? It's just random labels now from a policy perspective.
  - nightski 4y ago
    I feel like everyone should find a balance between being liberal and conservative. There is no one size fits all approach to life. Sometimes one needs to be conservative and other times progressive. Explore/exploit if you will. Moreover, I don't blame people for NIMBY. A house is extremely expensive. It only makes sense to be conservative and protect that investment. Not sure what the solution is, but I have found it very comfortable in smaller cities. Less commute and hassle than living in a big city, well worth the sacrifices.
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      Not just the house, but the neighborhood itself. I get NIMBYism if only because i understand sticking with the devil you know
    - smolder 4y ago
      Not here to disagree, and I say this all the time, but I feel it bears repeating in this context: Left vs. right or liberal vs. conservative are ridiculously reductive ways of categorizing people's political opinions. Even allowing for people "in the middle" is reductive. That people are so attached to the idea of a single-axis political spectrum in the US plays into the two party system very well and helps keep voters from having any meaningful impact. We ought to be able to place ourselves independently on many axes, i.e. data privacy, gun ownership, taxation, consumer protection, energy policy, and so on. If we didn't lean so hard into the partisan tribalism then you might see movement on more of these issues where it's not such an even split of public opinion. My intuition is that the inutility of voting afforded by the left vs. right meme may be the end-goal for many reinforcing it, perhaps in support of those with the most money sloshing around in political spheres. If I intended to buy certain unpopular policy with political donations, I wouldn't want voters breaking out of their ideological silos and crossing party lines to oppose the candidates doing my bidding. Maybe that thinking is a bit too conspiratorial, though.
avar 4y ago
A more charitable description of NYMBY-ism would be that these people are mainly against the externalities that construction projects in their neighbourhood would cause, as opposed to being strongly for one end result over another.
- quantified 4y ago
  How do you distinguish between externalities and end results? Aren't both are the sum total of the outcomes?
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    It's all about the commute and the noise, and if someone who's retired is staying home all day they have A LOT of time to dwell on the small stuff like hearing a jack hammer for a few hours one day.
    - freedomben 4y ago
      I've gotten more sympathetic to this over time. A few years ago I lived in a young (and constantly under construction) neighborhood. after weeks hearing jack hammers and other construction noise, it starts to get old. especially if you work night shift and try to sleep in the morning... If it ever stopped that would be one thing, but it never does. It just moves around a bit but never stops. The noise, the bad traffic, the unpredictability, the random power outages, etc start to get really old and for the several years we lived there, it was never "done." Maybe I'm just old now, but I really understand the appeal of an established and static neighborhood that doesn't change.
      - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
        I'm not sure how likely you are to avoid this problem. Even in a static neighborhood, you need maintenance on utilities and change dealing with advances in energy and information transmission. That said, understandably there are benefits to staying in a constant neighborhood. The problem is that nobody wants to live in the static neighborhoods as there are few jobs or attractive businesses there. You can get a static area by moving to a rural area.
DoughnutHole 4y ago
My preferred term is BANANAs - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone. Here in my country you get people objecting to projects genuinely on the other side of the country. It's becoming a bit of a problem for getting approval of major project like data centres.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  "BANANAs" -- I love it. As Groucho Marx once sang: "Whatever ya got, I'm against it.'
- Dardania 4y ago
  If it’s the case in Athenry, that individual had a competing data centre project shovel ready in Wicklow.
waste_monk 4y ago
>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 unguided "forces" can make things better either. I believe my local council do want to make things better, unfortunately what the council leadership consider better I would generally consider to be worse - they are constantly making trying to make the area become "trendy" and divert tourists and foot traffic from the richer suburbs nearby, but at the expense of the people who actually live here. For example, they "upgraded" a local park by adding a bunch of sheltered seating and an enclosed dog walking area, which does look quite fancy... but removed the skateboarding area and mountain bike jumps that were heavily used by the local kids as they did not "fit the image", and put the new seating and dog areas scattered around inside the park so there isn't enough contiguous area for sports. >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. We usually end up with the worst of both worlds and get awful combined parking / bike lane areas that force cyclists to weave between the road proper and the bike lane to avoid parked cars, and that often contain small oil leaks leftover in the parking spaces that can slip up the cyclists.
jasondigitized 4y ago
It's always easier to say no. Happens in orgs and happens in neighborhoods.
deeviant 4y ago
Or NOPE ("Not On Planet Earth") I began my career in solar system SCADA systems. My company wanted to build a solar plant in CA, it was picketed and sued by the Sierra Club. Yes, an environmental club suing to stop a solar power plant.
- jandrese 4y ago
  The Sierra club is more of an outdoorsman club than an environmental club. The interests overlap sometimes, but often they do not and you end up with situations like this. They want to preserve nature, not the environment. And no, this doesn't cause cognitive dissonance in them somehow.
  - alvah 4y ago
    Maybe 100 years ago it was as benign as you suggest, but it's since been hijacked by other interests, including a eugenicist and a leader who was kicked out of Greenpeace for being too radical.
    - astrange 4y ago
      The Sierra Club is chapter-based, so it doesn't matter who its leaders are - they don't pay attention to them anyway. The SF Sierra Club is just a NIMBY front though: https://web.archive.org/web/20170620220237/http://thebaycitybeacon.com/32740/282282/a/the-sierra-club-fights-to-savea-parking-garage https://web.archive.org/web/20170620220237/http://thebaycity...
stainablesteel 4y ago
I've seen this term nimby float around a lot recently. You can tell it's the just the next wave of internet propaganda because the term is used as a subtle method of peer pressure to give advantage to whatever sugar daddy paid for all those blogposts and new articles that now reference the term. First off, it's not a bad thing to live without evangelizing their mindset on other people, the emphasis of "only caring about their own back yard". They're allowing other people to live life the way they want to, that's gracious. Emphasizing your status quo in only your own back yard is the opposite of entitlement. We live in a system of hierarchical social participation. Everyone has participation at the federal level, but each person's participation counts less there than anywhere else. As you move down the ladder to state, county, city/town the you have more control over what goes on in your locality. If you live in a neighborhood where you don't want something to change, you have every right to want that. Especially if you're rooted in the area while a demographic of transient transplants try introducing ground-changing legislation in the city they just moved to, and might leave within 10 years.
- astrange 4y ago
  If you want people to live in your neighborhood and not be "transient" (aka not homeowners), it might help to build enough houses to let them live in them. Although I don't know what being a homeowner has to do with being transient, as you can always sell the home again. This kind of opinion being popular suggests many Americans would love it if we had a China-style hukou system; if you could forbid other Americans from moving to your town you'd never have to see a younger person again.
oppositelock 4y ago
In the bay area of CA, where NIMBYs are really powerful, we call the super-NIMBYs BANANAs - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything
pessimizer 4y ago
> 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. I suspect that you're collecting all of the people that are against things that you support into one group, when they're really multiple, often opposing groups. NIMBYs just seem to be a bag that upper-middle class millennials store their resentments in. For a similar sentiment, see "haters." These terrible people whose deep cynicism causes them to hate everything that is new because they don't believe that anything is possible don't exist.
- trgn 4y ago
  > to hate everything that is new because they don't believe that anything is possible don't exist Painting these people as cynics is not the entirely right characterization imho. I think parent describes a certain class of people who are constantly in fear of getting done over. Everything new is an opportunity for them to take the short end of the stick. Their imaginary adversary is always a nebulous "they", generally people they suspect to be wealthier, either in money or cachet or political leverage. That pervasive fear of getting taken advantage of is hard to explain. To use the example of the parent, you can show CAVErs a popular bikelane addition in another neighborhood, and still they would block it in their own. I think that fear and distrust that animates the CAVErs (great term by the way, hadn't heard it), is because they really lack imagination. An almost physical inability to imagine something else, that's aspirational, outside one's own experience. I'm not sure why that is, why there is such a deeply seeped in mental sclerosis and solipsism, which at times can almost feel uniquely american.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > I'm not sure why that is, why there is such a deeply seeped in mental sclerosis and solipsism, which at times can almost feel uniquely american. Because, at least from an European POV, y'all are constantly getting the short stick in life. Rich people can do whatever the fuck they want with absolute impunity (remember Trump claiming he could shoot someone on 5th Ave [1]?), meanwhile the poorer you are the harder you can get screwed over. Even if you are in the upper classes of employment, such as a high-paid programmer, you can be fired effectively immediately in 49 states [2] for no reason at all. You can go bankrupt from hospital bills even if you have health insurance. Obviously that leads people to the desire to have at least one thing they control - their homes and neighborhoods. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/24/donald-trump-says-he-could-shoot-somebody-and-still-not-lose-voters https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/24/donald-trump... [2] https://www.betterteam.com/at-will-employment https://www.betterteam.com/at-will-employment
ehnto 4y ago
That's the nature of large open forums. It can feel like they are hypocritical, but actually it's just different voices from the same group.
bigDinosaur 4y ago
I can guarantee you that removing bike lanes to add in almost anything else will get almost zero resistance from a typical NIMBY. Until cyclists in a city reach a critical mass they have the least valued infrastructure out of any group.
offsign_p 4y ago
This won't be popular, but special interests play a far greater role in the chilling affect for modern urban infrastructure than the so called "NIMBYs" do... . Want to build a new housing complex? How many of the units are earmarked for 'affordable' housing, and you've got to have solar . Building a new bridge? Better ensure at least one lane is pedestrianized so that that <1% of potential traffic can use it as well . Want to extend public transit? Maybe, but you can't raise prices as it might affect the poor . Want to build a park? Will it be fully ADA compliant so everyone can enjoy it. . Want to install a sidewalk on a roadway? Have you also allocated space for a fully protected bike lane... can't get started without that.
- Elinvynia 4y ago
  Everything you listed sounds like a good thing to me. Infrastructure should serve the people.
  - astrange 4y ago
    > How many of the units are earmarked for 'affordable' housing This one is called IZ (inclusive zoning) and is an extremely popular weapon with SF and Portland "left-NIMBYs". They know if the number is set too high, it will both make them look good and cancel literally every housing project in the pipeline (as noone can afford to build it anymore), so set it too high they have, and so their project pipeline collapsed. When it's used at low levels it can work, but only if you accept that it fundamentally makes the project more expensive, which means the more "luxury" projects are more likely to survive, and means the cost of the market-rate units goes up.
- hgomersall 4y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion. In my experience the points you made are used as justification by those responsible for delivering those things as to why they are not doing so. Essentially, house builders want to maximise profit and not build parks. Neo liberals don't want public transport to be subsidised as a public good etc etc. When we build, to we absolutely must build the right thing because changing it later will be much harder. That does involve lots of hard work persuading people of the benefits.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
datavirtue 4y ago
There is a documentary about a guy in Michigan who had the idea to purchase all of the blighted, abandoned homes so he could tear them down and restore the area as a community farm (or something like that). The locals flipped the fuck out, apparently they didn't want anyone solving the blight and drug problems in the area. To them he was rich, and that meant he had to be stopped. Took him years to convince people that he wasn't the devil. Turns out their only real opinion was that change made them nervous.
myfavoritedog 4y ago
they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better The hard part is that often they're right, especially in California - as with the Sepulveda Pass Freeway Expansion Project, where TFA says that the commute times were actually increased. You can argue that it's a somewhat self-fulfilling belief... but the regulatory state is where it is. The CAVErs today are dealing with what exists.
ch4s3 4y ago
This really rings true for me in NYC. Any project get decried by Working Family partisans as being too pro developer, insufficiently full of affordable units, likely to cause gentrification(even in predominantly white neighborhoods), or doesn’t include enough “green jobs”. If they can’t stop it in review, they appeal to their council person to veto it. Failing that they call on the sainted congresswoman, PBUH, to intercede. If she leans on city council in public, the project dies. This is exactly how a locally popular rezoning of Industry City failed. These so called progressives are so myopic that they cement the status quo, and working people are being squeezed out of NYC as a result.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  This video from Reason.com does a great job in explaining what is happening in these big cities[1]. I see it as the major downside to utopian thinking, you miss the bigger picture for the small, less significant details. They don't want an apartment project because of a litany of small, sometimes insignificant issues that get dragged out. I'm sure the activist feel righteous in thinking that they are keeping the big bad mega developer from building apartments that gentrify the community. This line of thinking misses big picture, if you want more affordable homes, you need more supply. On the one hand you can say that this is in fact a complex multi faceted issue and the activists may not be understanding the way their actions will backfire. But on the other hand you think there is no way, there is no way someone does not see the most basic of economic principles at work: supply and demand. [1]: https://reason.com/video/2018/12/27/san-francisco-mission-housing-crisis/ https://reason.com/video/2018/12/27/san-francisco-mission-ho...
  - kcexn 4y ago
    It's shocking to me reading about some of the litigation involved in that case. While I can appreciate that there are interest groups that want to ensure affordable housing is built, all approvals should have come to a grinding halt until the special interest groups and the development company could come to a private contractual agreement. In the absence of an agreement, the appeals process should be one of arbitration, in which the court can enforce a compromise that makes neither party happy. Instead it seems like everyone is just submitting documents to approvals committees independent of talking to each other. And the judicial system is forced to deal with an overwhelming number of individual cases.
clint 4y ago
This is literally the Conservative ethos at play
kwatsonafter 4y ago
Another way of looking at this is as, "institutions tending towards prudence" which is an after effect of inheriting the anglospheric intellectual tradition (Hume, Burke, Adam Smith). This is classic empirical conservatism-- there must be a very good reason to implement new policy if the system tends toward stability, solutions must be vetted, and new policy should be, "test-driven" at small scales before being implemented more generally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke Here's my question-- without making an appeal to, "oughts" or ideals; what part of any of this is controversial or surprising given the highly capitalist nature of American civic life? People don't want their nice neighborhoods to change. I don't see this as unreasonable.
mr_gibbins 4y ago
Are you describing Twitter?

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...
- mattm 4y ago
  Kind of funny using Victoria as an example. Having lived in Victoria on and off for the last 20 years I can remember the "tall-building ordinance" that finally got removed to allow for the construction of taller condos in the downtown area. Up above is also someone posting the lack of progress for bike lanes in their city but Victoria has been pretty good about that with the mayor going ahead with them even despite significant outcry about them. I think Victoria could be faster at adjusting to change but when I think about the changes over the past 2 decades, there has been significant development.
- tempestn 4y ago
  Not to mention the movie theatre is right across the street from a larger, nicer movie theatre.
- tomjakubowski 4y ago
  Not that it matters but, while that theater may be ugly, it's certainly not brutalist.
bobthepanda 4y ago
The quintessential "bad faith NIMBY" proposal is probably the infamous "historic laundromat" saga in SF where a laundromat had to do three studies on shadows and was proposed for historic preservation in an effort to stop an apartment building: https://missionlocal.org/2018/06/the-strange-and-terrible-saga-of-san-franciscos-historic-laundromat-represents-the-worst-of-planning-and-development-in-this-town/ https://missionlocal.org/2018/06/the-strange-and-terrible-sa...
- astrange 4y ago
  A lot of small parks in SF are also there because declaring some land a park is a good way to stop affordable housing projects/senior housing/anything that doesn't sound as cute as a park.
jnwatson 4y ago
My college fraternity purchased a former sorority house turned retirement home, with the intent to turn it back into a fraternity house. Neighbors objected. We had to take it all the way to the state Supreme Court to use the dwelling as it was originally intended and zoned.
- symlinkk 4y ago
  Can you blame the neighbors for not wanting to live next to a frat house? That’s pretty much the embodiment of partying, booze, loud music
  - jnwatson 4y ago
    Sure but that’s not how laws or zoning are supposed to work. A retirement home is zoned the same as a fraternity. It is like suing your neighbor because you’d rather they have 2 kids instead of 3. Or suing the corner business because they opened a coffee shop instead of a donut shop. The idea that you think you have a say in your neighbors private business is the real problem.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      As long as you tag your hypothetical neighbor's business as "private", saying that it's inappropriate to think you have a say in it is tautological. The idea that you have a say in your neighbor's business is not a problem, it's a fact. The fact that you have property at all is an agreement amongst your neighbors to respect that claim. If you want a place where your neighbors don't get a say in what you do, you should shop for another planet.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - actionfromafar 4y ago
        Wow, I almost never see a comment to this effect on HN. So very few people understand this, and that it also extends to all property, not just land.
seb1204 4y ago
I've heard of people moving next to schools and playground/sport field and then complaining to the council about the noise. Some take it even further to enforce restrictions on the use of the public grounds.

RajT88 4y ago

That's one flavor of NIMBY anyways. There's also the topically focused ones, like with a focus on crime or property values. (I have had a lot more experience with the latter) Case in point, Naperville, IL (quite wealthy suburb of Chicago) had a cell coverage problem in the late 90's. The NIMBY's shot down any proposal of putting up "ugly" cell towers because it could mar the view and impact property values. (I would love to know the overlap between the people complaining about cell coverage and property values) The compromise the city came up with was designing a commemorative bell tower which sneakily could house cellular equipment. This old article describes, conveniently, that the tower was designed to hold cellular networking equipment, and by total coincidence they found a cell company interested in paying to put equipment there: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-12-23-9912230229-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-12-23-991223... The project, initially termed "The Millenium Bell Tower" (later "The Carillon"), become known locally as "The Millenium Cell Tower".

the_only_law 4y ago
We got that issue here to mixed in with a bit of anti-5G. It pisses me because I can barely get LTE signal. For some reason, most carriers except version are dead where I live, which is odd because I live inbetween suburbs and a busy road. It's not like I'm in the middle of nowhere. Even with version the signal strength is crap.
- mark-r 4y ago
  Version? I assume you got attacked by auto-correct and really meant Verizon.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    Yes, sorry, that would be correct.
- seb1204 4y ago
  Hey, welcome to Germany.
4y ago

tshaddox 4y ago

That sounds like nothing more than a very straightforward description of conservatism.

el_nahual 4y ago
Agreed! Except in american (and increasingly global, english-influenced) vernacular the words "conservatism" and "liberalism" have begun to stray so far from their "original" meanings that they can no longer be trusted to accurately convey meaning.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > Except in american What? In America liberal is very much displaced from its "original meaning".
  - itsumoiru 4y ago
    I read the parent "except" as "the above is true, but..." not as "in all Englishes except American English"
  - tremon 4y ago
    > [alas], in american vernacular, and hence also increasingly global, the words [..] have begun to stray... Except is used more like an interjection there (agreed, except that...). They didn't mean to except the american vernacular from the rest of the sentence, just to clarify why they didn't write "conservative" in the first place.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

bigtex88 4y ago

This literally sounds like American "Conservatism".

rhacker 4y ago
Most city democrats are actually conservatives. They just don't believe it. They'll still vote "democrat" but typically the most conservative ones.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  The problem if you only have row options (liberal/democrat vs conservative/republican) is that totally unrelated things have to fit this incredibly coarse framework. If someone is against constructing anything and afraid "outsiders" will come into the neighborhood, but they are for tighter gun control are they conservative or not? It's just random labels now from a policy perspective.
- nightski 4y ago
  I feel like everyone should find a balance between being liberal and conservative. There is no one size fits all approach to life. Sometimes one needs to be conservative and other times progressive. Explore/exploit if you will. Moreover, I don't blame people for NIMBY. A house is extremely expensive. It only makes sense to be conservative and protect that investment. Not sure what the solution is, but I have found it very comfortable in smaller cities. Less commute and hassle than living in a big city, well worth the sacrifices.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    Not just the house, but the neighborhood itself. I get NIMBYism if only because i understand sticking with the devil you know
  - smolder 4y ago
    Not here to disagree, and I say this all the time, but I feel it bears repeating in this context: Left vs. right or liberal vs. conservative are ridiculously reductive ways of categorizing people's political opinions. Even allowing for people "in the middle" is reductive. That people are so attached to the idea of a single-axis political spectrum in the US plays into the two party system very well and helps keep voters from having any meaningful impact. We ought to be able to place ourselves independently on many axes, i.e. data privacy, gun ownership, taxation, consumer protection, energy policy, and so on. If we didn't lean so hard into the partisan tribalism then you might see movement on more of these issues where it's not such an even split of public opinion. My intuition is that the inutility of voting afforded by the left vs. right meme may be the end-goal for many reinforcing it, perhaps in support of those with the most money sloshing around in political spheres. If I intended to buy certain unpopular policy with political donations, I wouldn't want voters breaking out of their ideological silos and crossing party lines to oppose the candidates doing my bidding. Maybe that thinking is a bit too conspiratorial, though.

avar 4y ago

A more charitable description of NYMBY-ism would be that these people are mainly against the externalities that construction projects in their neighbourhood would cause, as opposed to being strongly for one end result over another.

quantified 4y ago
How do you distinguish between externalities and end results? Aren't both are the sum total of the outcomes?
- gonzo41 4y ago
  It's all about the commute and the noise, and if someone who's retired is staying home all day they have A LOT of time to dwell on the small stuff like hearing a jack hammer for a few hours one day.
  - freedomben 4y ago
    I've gotten more sympathetic to this over time. A few years ago I lived in a young (and constantly under construction) neighborhood. after weeks hearing jack hammers and other construction noise, it starts to get old. especially if you work night shift and try to sleep in the morning... If it ever stopped that would be one thing, but it never does. It just moves around a bit but never stops. The noise, the bad traffic, the unpredictability, the random power outages, etc start to get really old and for the several years we lived there, it was never "done." Maybe I'm just old now, but I really understand the appeal of an established and static neighborhood that doesn't change.
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      I'm not sure how likely you are to avoid this problem. Even in a static neighborhood, you need maintenance on utilities and change dealing with advances in energy and information transmission. That said, understandably there are benefits to staying in a constant neighborhood. The problem is that nobody wants to live in the static neighborhoods as there are few jobs or attractive businesses there. You can get a static area by moving to a rural area.

DoughnutHole 4y ago

My preferred term is BANANAs - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone. Here in my country you get people objecting to projects genuinely on the other side of the country. It's becoming a bit of a problem for getting approval of major project like data centres.

AlbertCory 4y ago
"BANANAs" -- I love it. As Groucho Marx once sang: "Whatever ya got, I'm against it.'
Dardania 4y ago
If it’s the case in Athenry, that individual had a competing data centre project shovel ready in Wicklow.

waste_monk 4y ago

>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 unguided "forces" can make things better either. I believe my local council do want to make things better, unfortunately what the council leadership consider better I would generally consider to be worse - they are constantly making trying to make the area become "trendy" and divert tourists and foot traffic from the richer suburbs nearby, but at the expense of the people who actually live here. For example, they "upgraded" a local park by adding a bunch of sheltered seating and an enclosed dog walking area, which does look quite fancy... but removed the skateboarding area and mountain bike jumps that were heavily used by the local kids as they did not "fit the image", and put the new seating and dog areas scattered around inside the park so there isn't enough contiguous area for sports. >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. We usually end up with the worst of both worlds and get awful combined parking / bike lane areas that force cyclists to weave between the road proper and the bike lane to avoid parked cars, and that often contain small oil leaks leftover in the parking spaces that can slip up the cyclists.

jasondigitized 4y ago

It's always easier to say no. Happens in orgs and happens in neighborhoods.

deeviant 4y ago

Or NOPE ("Not On Planet Earth") I began my career in solar system SCADA systems. My company wanted to build a solar plant in CA, it was picketed and sued by the Sierra Club. Yes, an environmental club suing to stop a solar power plant.

jandrese 4y ago
The Sierra club is more of an outdoorsman club than an environmental club. The interests overlap sometimes, but often they do not and you end up with situations like this. They want to preserve nature, not the environment. And no, this doesn't cause cognitive dissonance in them somehow.
- alvah 4y ago
  Maybe 100 years ago it was as benign as you suggest, but it's since been hijacked by other interests, including a eugenicist and a leader who was kicked out of Greenpeace for being too radical.
  - astrange 4y ago
    The Sierra Club is chapter-based, so it doesn't matter who its leaders are - they don't pay attention to them anyway. The SF Sierra Club is just a NIMBY front though: https://web.archive.org/web/20170620220237/http://thebaycitybeacon.com/32740/282282/a/the-sierra-club-fights-to-savea-parking-garage https://web.archive.org/web/20170620220237/http://thebaycity...

stainablesteel 4y ago

I've seen this term nimby float around a lot recently. You can tell it's the just the next wave of internet propaganda because the term is used as a subtle method of peer pressure to give advantage to whatever sugar daddy paid for all those blogposts and new articles that now reference the term. First off, it's not a bad thing to live without evangelizing their mindset on other people, the emphasis of "only caring about their own back yard". They're allowing other people to live life the way they want to, that's gracious. Emphasizing your status quo in only your own back yard is the opposite of entitlement. We live in a system of hierarchical social participation. Everyone has participation at the federal level, but each person's participation counts less there than anywhere else. As you move down the ladder to state, county, city/town the you have more control over what goes on in your locality. If you live in a neighborhood where you don't want something to change, you have every right to want that. Especially if you're rooted in the area while a demographic of transient transplants try introducing ground-changing legislation in the city they just moved to, and might leave within 10 years.

astrange 4y ago
If you want people to live in your neighborhood and not be "transient" (aka not homeowners), it might help to build enough houses to let them live in them. Although I don't know what being a homeowner has to do with being transient, as you can always sell the home again. This kind of opinion being popular suggests many Americans would love it if we had a China-style hukou system; if you could forbid other Americans from moving to your town you'd never have to see a younger person again.

oppositelock 4y ago

In the bay area of CA, where NIMBYs are really powerful, we call the super-NIMBYs BANANAs - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything

pessimizer 4y ago

> 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. I suspect that you're collecting all of the people that are against things that you support into one group, when they're really multiple, often opposing groups. NIMBYs just seem to be a bag that upper-middle class millennials store their resentments in. For a similar sentiment, see "haters." These terrible people whose deep cynicism causes them to hate everything that is new because they don't believe that anything is possible don't exist.

trgn 4y ago
> to hate everything that is new because they don't believe that anything is possible don't exist Painting these people as cynics is not the entirely right characterization imho. I think parent describes a certain class of people who are constantly in fear of getting done over. Everything new is an opportunity for them to take the short end of the stick. Their imaginary adversary is always a nebulous "they", generally people they suspect to be wealthier, either in money or cachet or political leverage. That pervasive fear of getting taken advantage of is hard to explain. To use the example of the parent, you can show CAVErs a popular bikelane addition in another neighborhood, and still they would block it in their own. I think that fear and distrust that animates the CAVErs (great term by the way, hadn't heard it), is because they really lack imagination. An almost physical inability to imagine something else, that's aspirational, outside one's own experience. I'm not sure why that is, why there is such a deeply seeped in mental sclerosis and solipsism, which at times can almost feel uniquely american.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > I'm not sure why that is, why there is such a deeply seeped in mental sclerosis and solipsism, which at times can almost feel uniquely american. Because, at least from an European POV, y'all are constantly getting the short stick in life. Rich people can do whatever the fuck they want with absolute impunity (remember Trump claiming he could shoot someone on 5th Ave [1]?), meanwhile the poorer you are the harder you can get screwed over. Even if you are in the upper classes of employment, such as a high-paid programmer, you can be fired effectively immediately in 49 states [2] for no reason at all. You can go bankrupt from hospital bills even if you have health insurance. Obviously that leads people to the desire to have at least one thing they control - their homes and neighborhoods. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/24/donald-trump-says-he-could-shoot-somebody-and-still-not-lose-voters https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/24/donald-trump... [2] https://www.betterteam.com/at-will-employment https://www.betterteam.com/at-will-employment

ehnto 4y ago

That's the nature of large open forums. It can feel like they are hypocritical, but actually it's just different voices from the same group.

bigDinosaur 4y ago

I can guarantee you that removing bike lanes to add in almost anything else will get almost zero resistance from a typical NIMBY. Until cyclists in a city reach a critical mass they have the least valued infrastructure out of any group.

offsign_p 4y ago

This won't be popular, but special interests play a far greater role in the chilling affect for modern urban infrastructure than the so called "NIMBYs" do... . Want to build a new housing complex? How many of the units are earmarked for 'affordable' housing, and you've got to have solar . Building a new bridge? Better ensure at least one lane is pedestrianized so that that <1% of potential traffic can use it as well . Want to extend public transit? Maybe, but you can't raise prices as it might affect the poor . Want to build a park? Will it be fully ADA compliant so everyone can enjoy it. . Want to install a sidewalk on a roadway? Have you also allocated space for a fully protected bike lane... can't get started without that.

Elinvynia 4y ago
Everything you listed sounds like a good thing to me. Infrastructure should serve the people.
- astrange 4y ago
  > How many of the units are earmarked for 'affordable' housing This one is called IZ (inclusive zoning) and is an extremely popular weapon with SF and Portland "left-NIMBYs". They know if the number is set too high, it will both make them look good and cancel literally every housing project in the pipeline (as noone can afford to build it anymore), so set it too high they have, and so their project pipeline collapsed. When it's used at low levels it can work, but only if you accept that it fundamentally makes the project more expensive, which means the more "luxury" projects are more likely to survive, and means the cost of the market-rate units goes up.
hgomersall 4y ago
I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion. In my experience the points you made are used as justification by those responsible for delivering those things as to why they are not doing so. Essentially, house builders want to maximise profit and not build parks. Neo liberals don't want public transport to be subsidised as a public good etc etc. When we build, to we absolutely must build the right thing because changing it later will be much harder. That does involve lots of hard work persuading people of the benefits.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

datavirtue 4y ago

There is a documentary about a guy in Michigan who had the idea to purchase all of the blighted, abandoned homes so he could tear them down and restore the area as a community farm (or something like that). The locals flipped the fuck out, apparently they didn't want anyone solving the blight and drug problems in the area. To them he was rich, and that meant he had to be stopped. Took him years to convince people that he wasn't the devil. Turns out their only real opinion was that change made them nervous.

myfavoritedog 4y ago

they don't believe people could consciously want to make things better The hard part is that often they're right, especially in California - as with the Sepulveda Pass Freeway Expansion Project, where TFA says that the commute times were actually increased. You can argue that it's a somewhat self-fulfilling belief... but the regulatory state is where it is. The CAVErs today are dealing with what exists.

ch4s3 4y ago

This really rings true for me in NYC. Any project get decried by Working Family partisans as being too pro developer, insufficiently full of affordable units, likely to cause gentrification(even in predominantly white neighborhoods), or doesn’t include enough “green jobs”. If they can’t stop it in review, they appeal to their council person to veto it. Failing that they call on the sainted congresswoman, PBUH, to intercede. If she leans on city council in public, the project dies. This is exactly how a locally popular rezoning of Industry City failed. These so called progressives are so myopic that they cement the status quo, and working people are being squeezed out of NYC as a result.

_fat_santa 4y ago
This video from Reason.com does a great job in explaining what is happening in these big cities[1]. I see it as the major downside to utopian thinking, you miss the bigger picture for the small, less significant details. They don't want an apartment project because of a litany of small, sometimes insignificant issues that get dragged out. I'm sure the activist feel righteous in thinking that they are keeping the big bad mega developer from building apartments that gentrify the community. This line of thinking misses big picture, if you want more affordable homes, you need more supply. On the one hand you can say that this is in fact a complex multi faceted issue and the activists may not be understanding the way their actions will backfire. But on the other hand you think there is no way, there is no way someone does not see the most basic of economic principles at work: supply and demand. [1]: https://reason.com/video/2018/12/27/san-francisco-mission-housing-crisis/ https://reason.com/video/2018/12/27/san-francisco-mission-ho...
- kcexn 4y ago
  It's shocking to me reading about some of the litigation involved in that case. While I can appreciate that there are interest groups that want to ensure affordable housing is built, all approvals should have come to a grinding halt until the special interest groups and the development company could come to a private contractual agreement. In the absence of an agreement, the appeals process should be one of arbitration, in which the court can enforce a compromise that makes neither party happy. Instead it seems like everyone is just submitting documents to approvals committees independent of talking to each other. And the judicial system is forced to deal with an overwhelming number of individual cases.

clint 4y ago

This is literally the Conservative ethos at play

kwatsonafter 4y ago

Another way of looking at this is as, "institutions tending towards prudence" which is an after effect of inheriting the anglospheric intellectual tradition (Hume, Burke, Adam Smith). This is classic empirical conservatism-- there must be a very good reason to implement new policy if the system tends toward stability, solutions must be vetted, and new policy should be, "test-driven" at small scales before being implemented more generally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke Here's my question-- without making an appeal to, "oughts" or ideals; what part of any of this is controversial or surprising given the highly capitalist nature of American civic life? People don't want their nice neighborhoods to change. I don't see this as unreasonable.

mr_gibbins 4y ago

Are you describing Twitter?