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.

Related Reading:

NIMBYism and Existence Value

Everyone’s a Little Bit NIMBY

NIMBYs and Neocons

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