I'm coming very late to this (540 comments and counting), but I do want to make one point about the term "NIMBY". While it's a reasonable observation about hou

I'm coming very late to this (540 comments and counting), but I do want to make one point about the term "NIMBY". While it's a reasonable observation about housing politics, it does invite potentially false equivalence. A kind of equivalence is built into the term itself - "not in my backyard" means everyone recognizes something is needed, but nobody wants it near them. In this case, everyone wants to live in the low density section of a high density area. Still, this term encompasses everyone from bernal heights hippies who want to keep density at 18,311/sq mi to atherton billionaires who want to keep it at 1,400. It includes noe valley "activists" who don't want to tear down 100 year old houses and mountain view city council members who voted to allow massive new corporate construction bringing tens (hundreds?) of thousands of new workers to their region but specifically banned new residential construction near those places of business. All in all, yeah, I hear you on the noe/bernal/mission activists. They are a bit nimbytastic, no doubt. But to me, the actions of the anti-housing forces in some peninsula towns are such an order of magnitude worse (and are causing many of the problems you see in SF) that simply applying the NIMBY label to both without further analysis is an exercise in false equivalence.