NIMBY – Not in My Back Yard
The sentiment behind NIMBY began with lower- and middle-income communities fighting for environmental justice and opposing industrial sites that would bring pollution to their neighborhoods. The phrase “not in my backyard,” shortened to “NIMBY,” seems to have appeared first in the mid-1970s. It was used in the context of the last major effort by electric utilities to construct nuclear-powered generating stations. In the late 1970s “NIMBY” was also used by residents of Love Canal in New York, who were experiencing cancer and other severe medical problems because their neighborhood and school had been built on a chemical waste dump.

By the 1980s, the term NIMBY came to describe concerns beyond environmental hazards, to include siting of things like jails, shelters, and what some people considered undesirable housing. Pro-development advocates, as a way to shape the narrative, started using the term as a pejorative to unreasonably claim that all opposition to growth was driven by concerns about home values, gentrification, race exclusion and wealth preservation. Despite its lofty beginnings, the term is now used exclusively as a pejorative. The success of this rebranding is shown by the fact there are no organized NIMBY groups involved in local, statewide, or federal politics driving policy, the way “Yes in My Back Yard” YIMBY groups have profitably done. It’s virtually impossible for individuals to fight the big money behind the YIMBY movement.

YIMBY – Yes In My Back Yard
This term started being used in the 1980s not as a statement about housing, but as a way of dealing with what to do with the waste from the toxic trash created by unregulated corporate power. It referred to the idea of “yes in many backyards” as a way of everyone taking responsibility to equitably site treatment facilities for this toxic waste, instead of doing it all in someone else’s community.

The modern pro-housing advocacy movement that popularized the term “YIMBY” emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 2010s to combat rising housing costs. Tech workers streaming into the city drove up housing prices, and Big Money wanted to quickly build housing for the massive influx of workers, and did not want regulations to get in the way. Early funding for YIMBY groups, particularly in California, came from prominent tech figures like Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna. In fact, Big Tech still provides much of the funding for CA YIMBY. The YIMBY movement is a well-organized, well-funded political force all over the country.

The YIMBY philosophy is aligned with the libertarian ideology that advocates eliminating restrictive zoning, building codes, and land-use regulations that they say artificially limit housing supply, and which they argue drives up costs. The YIMBYs emphasize building market rate housing, arguing that a “trickle-down housing” policy will ensure that today’s market rate housing is tomorrow’s affordable housing.

YIMBYs have joined hands with developers to fight rent control and block efforts to protect rent controlled properties from by-right demolition. New residences will likely be unaffordable for most renters. Currently affordable areas are ripe for redevelopment, and the resulting displacement is a disaster for tenants. The “trickle down housing” effect from increased development, or “filtering” as YIMBYs prefer to call it, is claimed to lower prices and ultimately reduce rents, but can take decades and may never occur. This doesn’t help renters who are paying higher rents now.

SIMBY- Sensible in My Back Yard (and yours, too!)
SIMBY refers to a movement advocating for expanding housing opportunities while maintaining a livable city; promoting development that balances community needs with growth using sensible and sustainable building practices. It contrasts with the positions of the NIMBYs (defined by YIMBYs as anti-all-development), and the YIMBYs (remove all governmental barriers to development and allow for much higher density) by emphasizing thoughtful planning and consideration for existing communities.

Key Principles
Community Focus: Emphasizes the importance of considering residents and their community needs in development projects.
Sustainability: Advocates for environmentally friendly building practices that enhance urban living.
Inclusivity: Supports affordable housing developments that cater to diverse populations, including low-income, multi-generational, and non-segregated communities.

YIMBYs today
Anyone who deigns to disagree with a YIMBY in any way is automatically labeled by them as NIMBY. The reality is that many YIMBYs, particularly from the Bay Area, really do believe that all housing market problems are due to overly regulated markets, and that costs of materials, labor, and capital play no role. But you can be pretty sure that the Big Tech and Big Money supporters of YIMBY will somehow make sure that the free market will never permit high-rise apartment buildings being built next to their homes. Or their summer homes. YIMBY for them really means Yes in Your Back Yard.

Other YIMBYs are bitter that they cannot afford homeownership like their parents were able to and that they feel entitled to. They believe that if we pack as many residences as possible into existing city lots and build high rises in thriving commercial districts without concern for current small business owners, the market will magically produce the kind of housing their parents lived in (single family homes with yards) for a price they could afford. This is highly unlikely. “Neighborhood character” is a four-letter word for these YIMBYs, and the idea that someone might want to preserve it, or preserve the small shops in the commercial districts, is considered to be “non-inclusive” and results in the pejorative NIMBY label.

Closely overlapping with YIMBY ideology is the beliefs that automobiles (regardless of whether or not they are electric vehicles) and providing parking for them are basically evil, and that everyone should be using public transit or riding bicycles. YIMBYs believe that if we build dense enough and make automobile use difficult enough people will be forced to use (currently inadequate) public transit or ride bicycles. They have no plans for how to manage the interim period until we reach the densities of Manhattan, which would make this feasible, or the logistical problems of families with multiple children and after-school activities, or of older or disabled people who are unable to function in this version of utopia.

More Information
Big Real Estate's Money Trails to Kill the Expansion of Rent Control in California, Patrick Range McDonald — This enormously long, but fascinating dive into the world of corporate ownership of housing, shows how corporate landlords and the California Apartment Association spent $135M in 2024 to defeat a proposition to remove statewide rent control restrictions and to stop the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s work on rent control and tenant advocacy. It exposes the money trail between the largest corporate landlords and elected officials, candidates, and political groups, including the YIMBYs. Note Key Discoveries 4, 6, 11, and 12 particularly.

The Real Dirt: Capital Realty Group, Billionaire Steve Schwarzman, Corporate YIMBYs, Patrick Range McDonald — A shorter article showing why billionaires find it necessary to make gazillions of dollars on the backs of tenants.

Further reading (and there is so much more!):
U.N. blasts Blackstone Group for worsening the U.S. housing crisis, Irina Ivanova — Outlines the tactics used by the world’s largest private equity fund, which owns the largest single-family rental operation in the U.S., to push low-income, and increasingly middle-income renters from their homes.

Modern-Day Robber Baron: The Sins of Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, Patrick Range McDonald — Exposes the sins of Trump pal (and one of the richest men on the planet) Stephen Schwarzman in leading the Blackstone Group to exert political leverage and worsen both the U.S. and world housing crisis.