How Do We Design and Build a Modern City To Benefit Everyone? The Battle of NIMBYs and YIMBYs

The great debate wages on: how do we design and build a modern city in a way that everyone will benefit? Traditionally, you’re on one side of the urban war. You’re either a NIMBY, which stands for “Not In My Backyard”, meaning you oppose new development in your neighborhood, or you’re a YIMBY, who says “Yes In My Backyard”, and are pro-development, for one reason or another. But these blanket acronyms don’t describe the real issues that cause people to position themselves on one side of the never-ending tug-of-war between “No! Don’t build that!” and “Yes! Build that!”

As YIMBYism has grown in recent years, so has its opposition, in the derogatorily named NIMBYism movement, which in many places, grew from a desire to keep people out of cities and property values up. But this binary and adversarial dynamic is starting to blur, and become more cooperative, especially as cities continue to face the need for more public amenities and dense, yet affordable housing. Those who once protested new high-rises are now looking more favorably upon them if it means that more supply of homes means that prices will go down, and people from different socio-economic backgrounds can thrive and share the benefits of urban life- at least that’s the ultimate goal. Where YIMBYism shines is where NIMBYism is often times seen as short-sighted. In cities like Los Angeles and New York City, where the number of cranes that dot the sky will seemly never keep up with their projected population growth, more development rarely turns into too much development.

YIMBY and NIMBY is a very narrow lens that was created in response to how we have discussions about how we want to create the future of our cities. People who feel directly impacted by a project might be quick to align themselves as a NIMBY, while those who feel little personal stake in a project might call themselves a YIMBY. While it’s not ideal to build everything everywhere, it’s counterintuitive to not build anything. We live in the modern day somewhere in between, but many people acknowledge that their voices are hard to be heard when you want to pick and choose a little from each side.

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One of the best examples of how NIMBYs and YIMBYs came together was the rezoning of neighborhoods in Minneapolis. After a long campaign to educate the city, including showing how to improve racial quality and how single-family housing exacerbates, Minneapolis voted to overhaul its zoning to allow for two, three, and four-family homes across the city. Today, the city is praised for its approach to solving what is called the “missing middle”, or homes that are neither single-family nor hyper-dense. Unlike the frequent impromptu city-council votes where issues are decided upon almost as quickly as they are discussed, comprehensive, long-term plans are key to getting NIMBYs and YIMBYs to come to a middle ground and swap out their “No” or “Yes” for a “Maybe”.

Other cities have allowed more grassroots movements to take hold, by allowing certain communities to propose what they felt would work best for them, whether it be more housing, public spades, new high-rise buildings, or low-rise developments that aesthetically represented the existing conditions. New York City is one place that tried this, with the invention of 197-a plans. Nearly 20 plans were ultimately approved, most of which sought to preserve the character of their respective neighborhood. However, nothing much came of them, and almost all of them were overturned by aggressive rezoning plans which made way for high-rise housing. Today, New York City is one of the more well-known cities that has a strong divide between NIMBYs and YIMBYs, proving that the right solutions are hard to discover. While it’s unclear what the future will hold, a step in the right direction might look something like “maybe in our backyard.”