NIMBY

NIMBY is the acronym for “not in my backyard,” a characteristic (if stereotyped) slogan of neighborhood and community groups opposed to locally unwanted land uses (LULUs). Typically, NIMBY movements arise in opposition to perceived environmental threats such as toxic waste dumps, trash incinerators, recycling centers, and landfills. At the state level, they may oppose nuclear power plants and potential transportation routes for trucks or trains carrying dangerous chemicals. During the 19th century, urban locational conflicts erupted over the siting of slaughterhouses, rendering plants, and saloons. NIMBY movements may also form as coalitions against social (as opposed to environmental) categories of land uses that they deem as undesirable such as shopping malls, prisons, bridges or tunnels, low-income housing projects, transit systems, homeless shelters, drug rehabilitation centers, and halfway homes for retarded people. NIMBY movements reflect the spatial distribution of[Page 338] undesirable effects on people's welfare, such as impingements on their health, noise, and fears of crime or visual and aesthetic blight (typical concerns of low-income NIMBY movements), or negative effects on their property values (a frequent motivator of middle-class NIMBY movements). Other NIMBY arguments are that LULUs will destroy small-town environments or strain local public resources. NIMBY tactics may include lawsuits, working the legislative and judicial machinery, protests and demonstrations, public relations campaigns in the media (e.g., letters to newspapers), and behind-the-scenes pressure on elected officials.

The strength of NIMBY movements varies largely in accordance with the socioeconomic status, educational level, and financial resources of its members. Low-income minorities generally have less access to political power in most municipalities, whereas white middle-class communities are more likely to have the ear of city government officials and be better positioned to oppose unwanted land uses through the courts or bureaucracies. Because decision makers siting noxious land uses (i.e., large real estate developers) are more likely to attempt to locate them in predominantly minority and low-income areas, such communities are more likely to give rise to NIMBY movements, often under the banner of environmental justice. Because local issues affect people's everyday lives, often in profound ways that speak to their deepest hopes for and fears about their future quality of life, NIMBY movements can attract members who are otherwise usually disengaged from formal politics such as housewives.

Critics of NIMBY movements maintain that they are elitist and parochial, hamper necessary development, exhibit a so-called drawbridge mentality, and/or covertly attempt to maintain neighborhood racial homogeneity under the banner of opposition to other unwanted aspects such as noise and pollution. Some argue that NIMBY movements are ethically inconsistent, simply attempting to displace LULUs to less politically powerful areas; that is, NIMBY movements displace the problems rather than solve them. In this reading, NIMBY movements are irrational, selfish, misguided, and obstructionist, and they prevent the attainment of societal goals by privileging local interests over social needs. After all, facilities such as waste incinerators must be built somewhere. Thus, critics of NIMBYs maintain that they elevate local benefits over broader social ones.

A structuralist interpretation of NIMBYs points to the inequalities inherent between the production and consumption of urban space, particularly the spatial distribution of negative externalities in the forms of locally concentrated costs and dispersed social benefits. Rather than viewing local resistance as irrational opposition to land developers, some view it as an inevitable outcome of the urban development process. NIMBYs represent consumers of land who are invested in a particular landscape under the threat of change, and their opposition to new facilities is a means of constraining the behavior of capitalists, who often enjoy the backing of the state. Thus, they can be no more annihilated than can private capital investments in the landscape, and they provide a necessary countervailing measure to land developers who would otherwise proceed unchecked.

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