How NIMBYs Made ‘Back Yard’ Mean ‘Entire Neighborhood’

The nefarious NIMBY is one of the stock characters in today’s urban crisis. The local opposition that rises up to protest neighborhood change has become one of the familiar obstacles for ambitious planners and builders alike. Consequently, some urban reformers have argued that we need to flip the NIMBY’s negative “N” into a more enthusiastic stance towards development, joining together in so-called “YIMBY” movements that seek to clear the way for faster, bigger, and less stringently regulated urban change.

And yet simply swapping the “N” for a “Y” runs the risk of depoliticizing substantive, conflictual questions about who gets to decide how cities transform. Instead, the part of the NIMBY acronym that deserves the most scrutiny is the part which represents geographic small-mindedness: the “BY.”