How to Build NIMBY-Proof Homeless Shelters? Make Them Mandatory.

Last month, members of San Francisco’s waterfront Embarcadero neighborhood launched an online crowdfunding campaign to stop the city from building a 24-hour support center for homeless residents nearby. Opponents of the facility said that, while they supported addressing homelessness, they feared that the navigation center would usher drug users and crime into the affluent area. Many live in a condo with a rooftop pool overlooking the proposed site. On Nextdoor, one commenter likened the center to a cancer on the community.

The backlash to this NIMBY backlash was swift. “The optics around very wealthy condo owners opposing a place for the very poorest most destitute people to sleep at night  …  was pretty disgusting,” Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, told CityLab. Almost 2,000 people—including tech magnates Mark Benioff and Jack Dorsey—donated to a rival GoFundMe launched in support of building the navigation center, which has now exceeded its fundraising goal of $175,000.