According to Eater San Francisco, one patron summed up the idea on social media: “Don’t move to a nightlife area then complain about the businesses coming into the area.This year's Nobel Peace Prize has been given to the United Nations World Food Program for its efforts to fight hunger and prevent the use of starvation as a weapon of war. The irony for the bar’s supporters is that they claimed the building, home to million-dollar condos, is partly valuable because of its proximity to nightlife. The subsequent legal battles caused the bar’s owners to shut their doors amid a pile of debt. Despite the establishment’s popularity among patrons, residents of the mixed-use building where the bar was located banded together to complain to local community boards about the noise and late hours. One recent case that illustrates both the good and bad of NIMBY movements involves a controversial cocktail bar, Here’s How, which opened in the nightlife-rich neighborhood of Uptown in Oakland, CA, last year. Rampant NIMBY movements often harm the greater good of the community and lead to higher taxes from lost revenue, lost jobs from construction, and lost opportunities.” “And every year we see billions and billions of dollars of economic losses as a result of this opposition. “Every year we see tens of thousands of community oppositions and special interest groups opposing development,” Slevin continues.
Plus, residents may find that barring the construction of new or lower-cost housing in their area can result in labor shortages that, in turn, may cause beloved local businesses to shut down. For one, quashing developments for new businesses and housing can undermine an area’s economic health. While NIMBYs often aim to protect the value of their properties, their efforts can sometimes backfire. “In some ways, it’s shutting off an opportunity to achieve the American dream.” Are NIMBYs good or bad for communities? “Throughout our history, you’d see people migrating from rural areas in search of better work, but now we’re seeing the fact that people can’t afford these areas,” says Reiss. Plus, given this nation’s current housing shortage, NIMBY efforts against new construction can effectively bar all but the wealthiest from buying homes in certain areas at all. “It underwrites the status quo attitude that you see in many NIMBYs.”
“The fear of change is very prevalent,” Slevin adds. On the flip side, though, many NIMBYs are seen as having racist or classist overtones in their zeal to keep housing or services for low-income or marginalized groups out of their neck of the woods. “The little guy being the homeowner who’s protecting the character of his or her community against the greedy developer, that’s a persona that the development community really struggles with,” explains Patrick Slevin of public affairs consulting firm SL7 Consulting in Tallahassee, FL. NIMBY groups often fight for years to halt plans they oppose, and they are often successful because they create a “David versus Goliath narrative,” which resonates and rallies their community behind them. Even the architectural style of the proposed plans have been a point of contention in Phoenix, where residents railed against a new apartment complex that wasn’t midcentury modern enough to match the surrounding properties. In Los Angeles, NIMBYs have battled to stop the construction of a high-rise that would block views. In San Jose, CA, NIMBYs fought a proposal to build tiny houses on public land to house 5,000 of the area’s homeless. Put simply, many NIMBY folks today balk at anything being built that could lower their own property values.Īs for what exactly could cause their property’s prices to plummet, that could take the form of a wide variety of projects and plans. “Although later it would become a term used critically to connote selfishness, at first people tended to use it to praise community efforts to stop the building of facilities that were thought to bring dangerous chemicals and contaminants into their neighborhoods,” Phillips-Fein said in an interview with WNYC.įast-forward to more recent times, however, and Phillips-Fein says the NIMBY battles “have more to do with gentrification and homeownership.” According to New York University historian Kim Phillips-Fein, the first iterations of NIMBY appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with residents battling against environmental dangers near their communities, including the Love Canal toxic dumpsite and the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island.
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