NIMBY (“Not in my Back Yard”)

Good for the World, Bad for the Neighborhood

The purest, most literal example of the NIMBY attitude is opposition to something that virtually everyone (including the opponents) agrees ought to be built somewhere, but virtually everyone would prefer not to live near. Examples include airports, jazz clubs, superhighways, slaughterhouses, prisons, and wind farms. These are all developments that offer significant benefits to the overall community at the expense of their nearest neighbors. They bring with them noise, odor, pollution, traffic, crime, or other undesirable side effects. Opposing them is certainly not irrational, though it is demonstrably selfish (that is, rationally self-interested).

Rutgers University Planning Professor Frank J. Popper coined the term LULU (Locally Unwanted Land Use) to refer to developments of this sort. His 1981 article “Siting LULUs,” published in the journal Planning, had a major influence on planning professionals. Unlike NIMBY, LULU isn't pejorative; the term captures the reality that some projects are genuinely good for the world but bad for the neighborhood. That's probably why it did not catch on the way NIMBY did. In the contentious environment of siting controversies, there wasn't much demand for a neutral term.

Developments that are good for the world but bad for the neighborhood tend to get built in the end. The big question is how and where such developments are sited. The following are among the options:

• 1.
  Oppression. In the normal course of events, LULUs end up in neighborhoods too weak to oppose them successfully. That usually means poor neighborhoods and often means minority neighborhoods. The environmental justice movement is thus inextricably tied to the NIMBY concept. In 1987, the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice published a landmark study entitled “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” concluding that race—even more than income—determined what communities ended up with hazardous waste sites. Few would argue that the leaky and poorly regulated “hazwaste” facilities of the past were “good for the world,” but they were surely bad for the neighborhood—and they tended to wind up in predictable neighborhoods.
• 2.
  Market mechanisms. A variety of market mechanisms have been devised as possible replacements for oppression. A “reverse Dutch auction,” for example, requires the siting authority to “buy” the site from whichever community offers the lowest “selling price.” Market siting is voluntary by definition; communities that do not bid are assured [Page 516]of not getting the development. Like oppression, market mechanisms usually end up putting LULUs in neighborhoods with desperate needs, simply because their price is likely to be lower than the price of affluent neighborhoods. But at least they are paid their price.
• 3.
  Greenfields development. Because rich neighborhoods have the power and poor neighborhoods have the moral high ground, siting authorities sometimes try to put LULUs in nobody's neighborhood. That does not usually work very well either. For one thing, greenfields are increasingly hard to find, especially if the development in question needs to be near population centers and infrastructure. And ruining pristine territory is hardly the ideal solution. Nor is it guaranteed to succeed; in many places the constituency for protecting untouched land is nearly as powerful as the constituency for protecting affluent neighborhoods.
• 4.
  LULU trade-offs. People who have thought hard about siting often wind up proposing some sort of scheme to balance which neighborhoods get which LULUs. If you accept the airport, you get a pass on the power plant and the prison. Some have described elaborate point systems, grounded in empirical data on how undesirable people say various LULUs actually are. Neighborhoods that exceed the point quota are out of the running for new LULUs (perhaps even if they want one—thus preventing poor neighborhoods from selling their quality of life the same way we prevent poor people from selling their organs). Neighborhoods below the quota are vulnerable.

It is not that hard to come up with a combo that makes sense: LULU trade-offs to determine which neighborhoods are fair game; a market mechanism to choose among the neighborhoods that are below the point quota; a special dispensation to keep pristine land pristine. But nobody has come up with a way to turn such ideas into public policy. The dominant LULU siting strategy today is still oppression: coercing the weak.

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