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Comment by irq11 | Hacker News Reader

I’m not a “NIMBY”, but I believe the YIMBY moniker is counter-productive to your cause.

It automatically frames the question in a sophomoric way, where the “other side” is an evil force to be mocked and dismissed. In reality, there is no such thing as a “NIMBY”, just a collection of people with differing - often rational - interests concerning any given project. Until and unless you address these interests, calling people names and yelling ”just build, dammit!” will not get you what you want.

I think, if you talk to most of these folks, you find that many/most abstractly support the idea that building is required. It’s the specifics where the problems lie, and calling people names doesn’t resolve fundamental issues. This is why the “Yes in your Backyard” line is such a devastating rhetorical criticism: everyone favors development of projects that don’t affect them.

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"not in my backyard" is exactly what you describe- the stereotypical liberal response of "yes, we should build affordable housing, but not HERE, where I live- put it somewhere else, where I'm not affected by them- can you imagine all the crime that the Poors would bring to such a nice area".

in other words, virtue-signalling about vague, general principles of increased development...buuut when that development actually impacts them, well! That particular project is just flawed for various reasons. The general idea is good! But it won't work here.

It's the equivalent of the boss who totally supports unions but, you know, a union just wouldn't be right for our particular company culture.

So, yeah, "yes in your backyard" is just the original definition of a NIMBY.

This is an issue that actually doesn't align very well on the liberal/conservative spectrum. Most of the YIMBY folks I've met tend towards the liberal end of things, but there are also "market urbanism" groups out there that are fairly libertarian. I've had great conversations with local politicians of all stripes. There are both liberals and conservatives who are very NIMBY.

In other words, it's not a very useful way to look at the issue in my opinion.

Just to clarify- I very much do not mean "liberal" as "the opposite of conservative", here.

Trying to map the high-dimensional "vector space" of political views onto a 1D line is very, very lossy, and definitely not useful outside of the very narrow context of general elections in a two-party system.

Yes In Your Backyard is literally everybody. That’s the point. It isn’t ideological. Most folks love the idea of building when it doesn’t affect their own lives!

Even most “YIMBY” supporters are actually “Yes In Your Backyard”, because nearly everyone has some local environment they want to protect. Don’t want a pork rendering plant or a sewage treatment center or a strip club next door to your home? Congratulations: you’re a “NIMBY” too! It’s a sophomoric epithet that makes you feel good and superior to fling around, but does nothing to convince people who don’t already agree with you.

If you don’t understand this, you are doomed to fail to achieve your goals.

> "yes, we should build affordable housing, but not HERE, where I live- put it somewhere else, where I'm not affected by them- can you imagine all the crime that the Poors would bring to such a nice area".

The caricature doesn't really help things.

> just a collection of people with differing - often rational - interests concerning any given project.

Well of course. It does not surprised me that a wealthy landowner would not want competition, and would not want housing to become more affordable.

Just because someone's self interest is rational, does not me that I cannot criticize it.

Creating more affordable housing, and lowering rents, is obviously something that some people out there would not want, because they make money from rents being high.

You're absolutely right. People are rarely self-consciously irrationally opposed to any given proposal to build housing. In theory, it should be possible to address any given rational concern!

Too tall? Make it shorter. Not enough public space? Make the area in front of it a parklet! Not enough subsidized housing? More BMR units and a donation to a neighborhood group will solve that one. Doesn't fit with the style or is otherwise ugly? Pay attention and design a building that fits, it's not that hard.

Although there might be tricky ones, like maybe the neighbors have been treating the lot as a park and would like to keep it that way or someone is afraid of losing the all-day sun on their backyard garden. Still, all of these should be solvable in principle, right?

Again, as you wisely point to, all of these possible concerns are individually eminently reasonable and addressable. Certainly insulting the people who are just trying to keep their homes and communities they way they like it isn't going to win them over!

With all that said, might there be problems in aggregate? When people are empowered to throw up essentially arbitrary roadblocks, no matter how reasonable their complaints, the result can be near-infinite stonewalling. This has happened enough that some people have lost trust in the process that enabled good, kind, compassionate people to get their perfectly reasonable concerns addressed.

So perhaps there's some room for subtlety here. How do you think YIMBYs should frame things, to avoid the issues you rightly point to?

Well, I think that pretty much anything is more effective than calling people names. But rhetorically, it’s probably a lot more effective to just be honest about what you want: shared sacrifice for lower rents.

It’s cynical to call it YIMBY, because a) it mirrors the name-calling, and b) anyone who is intellectually honest knows that YIMBY really means YIYBY for most people. So stop it. Own that you want something that will be at least a little bit painful for everyone. Then sell the positives.

That's a very helpful insight! Thank you for sharing. I appreciate your positivity and genuineness.

In my personal experience, I've often found it to be extremely difficult to sell shared sacrifice to people who are empowered to refuse to share. After all, why can't this building go in some other neighborhood? Away from them? If you're being honest, it probably can. The next neighborhood over will probably have the same question.

Also, SF has the wrinkle that a lot of people see building housing as pushing up rents, making the framing you suggest very difficult on multiple counts. Attempting to discuss this with people seldom goes as well as could be hoped. This belief seems to have become totemic, making it functionally impossible to discuss.

Perhaps you've had different results than I. I sincerely hope so.

I have found name-calling and coherent branding to be pretty effective at providing people a banner to gather under. It doesn't do anything for those it makes into enemies, but it does something for people who might be your allies. When the NIMBYs are already well organized and Californians For Lowering Rent Through Shared Sacrifice isn't, I can see where someone might make that calculation.

That's why it's "YIMBY" and not "YIYBY" :-)

The essence of NIMBYism is wanting to make the value of your own property increase, not by adding any value, but by restricting others from competing with you. That's a net harmful behavior so I think it's fair to describe it as "an evil force to be mocked and dismissed". Kind of like if Google lobbied the government to ban search engines which weren't Google Search. People would see that as evil too.

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