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The US is large enough country and it should be possible to build DC far away from homes. That’s a rare case where I support NIMBY. I lived in 1km from a gas fired power station and did bot notice any noise at all. If a DC can be heard it is either too close or too loud.
It's kind of darkly funny that NIMBY ever came to refer to housing in the first place. The term was originally meant to apply to stuff exactly like this -- i.e. genuinely noxious uses that most people nevertheless agree are necessary somewhere. Almost everybody is a NIMBY in this sense.
Also, housing itself is often a genuinely noxious use of land for incumbent homeowners. In part because construction creates noise and dust and requires upgrading other local physical infrastructure - but also because more housing implies more new people living in an existing neighborhood, and additional people living somewhere can themselves cause problems for the incumbent residents.
Developers share an enormous role in this problem. They want to enshittify nice places to live with overdevelopment, because people with lower standards want to live there - which is perfectly fine. But they could happily live in residential zones built outward instead - however, that doesn't get the developers as much money, so they don't.
A state housing complex is just housing. Not wanting that nearby is NIMBYism because it's about not wanting it specifically near your home even though it's, by definition, going to need to be done in a spot zoned for homes.
The question around a e.g. jet engine test site is very different though - more like "why would we need the jet engine test site to be within a mile of anyone's back yard in the first place"? Usually the answer is "we don't, it just kinda happened that way as the city grew".
It makes me want to fucking cry, what's happening to my country.
Same. We used to be a country that could get things done. Stuff like power generation and transmission lines were built out well ahead of expected demand, with resiliency baked in. Negative impacts were there, but understood as part of the whole living in society thing. Reasonable minds came together and made the best choices possible at scale and mitigated negative externalities to individuals as much as possible. We understood spending a decade on impact studies and lawsuits helped no one.
We decided to protect the absurd, so we shall get the absurd as workarounds. Folks (collectively speaking) didn't want transmission lines running through their farmland or whatnot, so now we get absurd workarounds like standing up gas turbines in datacenter parking lots.
It's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better, since this has become the only way to get anything done.
I once lived across the street from a public park with a court. One day the judge burned her thighs on the hot metal slide, and now it's a parking lot.
I think this would be the greatest annoyance to me, the other stuff becomes background noise eventually