People Versus Places
If cities were alive, would they be NIMBY or YIMBY?
First things first: most of you probably know what NIMBY and YIMBY mean, but I should probably explain. NIMBY, short for “not in my backyard,” is a characterization of people who oppose almost anything new in their neighborhood. This frequently goes along with the idea that when you buy a home, you’re “buying the neighborhood,” and often there’s an attitude that any changes are illegitimate, or a violation of some promise.
YIMBY—“yes in my backyard”—is a response from people who welcome more people, or businesses, or housing, or whatever is opposed by NIMBYs, often in a kneejerk fashion. YIMBYs argue that change is inevitable, and if it isn’t welcomed and planned for, it will occur anyway but in a worse manner. For example, suburban sprawl that nobody really likes.
This is a simplification, of course, and it’s really just to make sure you get the gist of this next bit. Sometimes I keep a long list of notes and ideas to write about, and I sometimes scroll through it and see if something jumps out at me. I did that the other night, and this time it was this line:
NIMBY is more natural for people, YIMBY is more natural for places.
This gets at the way I think about this tension. It’s basically pretty normal for people to like what they know, and be skeptical of change. But I also think you can’t really have successful places if the dominant view is that nothing should ever change. Towns and cities don’t thrive that way. The churn of people and enterprises, of construction and demolition and restoration and replacement, is the heartbeat of life for a place. It can be sad and it can be painful. There can be a sense of loss. But it’s just the way that places become worthy of love.
No small town or big city in America looks right now the way it did when it was first incorporated or founded. All of them grew over time. Almost all the buildings standing now replaced earlier buildings, some of which some people at the time must have liked. Those feelings are normal and natural. They just should not be given veto power.
For whatever reason, many American settlements reached a point where that churn stopped. Maybe it was a downturn in economic fortunes. Maybe it was that as land use shifted away from classic urbanism, the growth still occurred but took a more spread-out suburban form. Or, in many cases, the demand is there for growth but the people already there shut it out.
So for whatever reason, a lot of people are sort of naturally NIMBYs. But I think that if cities and towns were people, they would be YIMBYs. That doesn’t mean opposing or supporting everything anyone proposes. It’s more of a guiding attitude, or a question of who has to prove something: do you see it a needing to prove the change is needed, or that it is not needed?
I don’t have much more to say at the moment in terms of expanding on this. I just think it’s an interesting way of validating both viewpoints in a way, while arguing that change is an inherent part of building and doing things.
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I like this way of framing the issue; thanks for sharing it. It also helps to explain why NIMBYism has been so successful; after all, places don't vote, people do. I guess that's the key question: how do we get the interests of the places into the discussion?
As a veteran of community debates over density and land use, this has always been the challenges: the people who are already here and don't want change show up at meetings and complain, while the people who would move into the new development aren't here yet, so they aren't represented.)
Your writing constantly reminds me of this (in a good way!): https://press.uchicago.edu/books/excerpt/2011/hayek_constitution.html
An excerpt from
The Constitution of Liberty
The Definitive Edition
F. A. Hayek
Why I am Not a Conservative
'This brings me to the first point on which the conservative and the liberal dispositions differ radically. As has often been acknowledged by conservative writers, one of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such, while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead. There would not be much to object to if the conservatives merely disliked too rapid change in institutions and public policy; here the case for caution and slow process is indeed strong. But the conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals to the more timid mind. In looking forward, they lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment which makes the liberal accept changes without apprehension, even though he does not know how the necessary adaptations will be brought about. It is, indeed, part of the liberal attitude to assume that, especially in the economic field, the self-regulating forces of the market will somehow bring about the required adjustments to new conditions, although no one can foretell how they will do this in a particular instance. There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people’s frequent reluctance to let the market work as their inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control. The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change “orderly.”'