The Misunderstood Urban NIMBY

One of the most consequential political battles of the 21st century does not cleanly map onto our ordinary ideological lines. But it does lean heavily on easy cultural stereotypes — ones we need to get past if we’re going to build the housing we need to build and to understand the limits of “just building.”

Here’s a cursory sketch of the two ideological camps, purposely oversimplified. Spurred by ever-escalating housing prices in desirable urban spaces, the YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) movement — now seemingly absorbed into the prodevelopment, regulation-critical abundance movement incited by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book of the same title from this March — calls for a dramatic reduction in regulatory barriers to building, including an overhaul of our country’s Byzantine zoning systems and an elimination of rules that prevent development, such as mandatory parking minimums and height maximums for residential buildings. The YIMBY movement has taken fire from both conservative forces that seek to protect incumbent advantages and leftists who deeply distrust both deregulation and the corporate interests that build and own residential real estate.

YIMBYs’ foil are NIMBYs, those who might theoretically support new development somewhere, but, worried about neighborhood character and the spirit of the community and other vague things, supposedly say “not in my backyard” to essentially anything in their own neighborhood. NIMBYs have sometimes been caricatured as BANANAs (“build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone”). Sometimes that shoe fits.

In our current political imagination, the NIMBY is an all-too-familiar figure: a relatively wealthy, white, boomer-aged homeowner living in a leafy single-family neighborhood, jealously guarding property values and suburban tranquility by opposing any and all new housing development. YIMBY rhetoric, driven by a mix of economic analysis and moral urgency, has leaned heavily on this archetype. In this telling, the NIMBY is the villain of the housing affordability crisis, an avatar of privilege defending a grotesquely exclusionary status quo.

There is certainly some truth to this image, especially in affluent suburbs and exclusionary neighborhoods that are most often the site of NIMBY conflict. But this reductive view of who fights against development is also a simplification, one that fails to capture the full range of actors resisting new construction, especially in the dense urban cores of American cities.

In the neighborhoods experiencing the strongest NIMBY pushback, the politics of housing are not shaped primarily by rich white homeowners but by working-class renters, often people of color, who are mobilizing against development not to protect wealth but to defend themselves from displacement and gentrification. These are not reactionary property owners clinging to racial segregation but marginalized communities trying to hold on to the tenuous roots they’ve established in cities that have long underserved them.

The YIMBY movement, for all its valuable contributions to housing policy, has too often flattened this distinction. The image of the NIMBY perpetuated on social media, on podcasts and at conferences is of the wealthy white landowner who agitates against new building as a way to pull up the ladder, to protect and consolidate their own advantage. In conflating antigentrification resistance with suburban exclusion, YIMBYs risk alienating natural allies and obscuring the complexities of urban housing politics. The case they make for zoning reform and increased housing supply becomes less persuasive when we fail to account for the very real fears that underlie much urban NIMBYism.

If we are to have a real hope of building the housing we so desperately need, we must begin by understanding who NIMBYs really are and why some of them have good reasons to say no. The YIMBY critique of NIMBYism emerged in response to undeniable realities: In wealthy coastal cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, restrictive zoning, discretionary permitting and endless community veto points have made it virtually impossible to build enough housing. This shortage, coupled with the inelastic demand created by job-rich urban economies, has sent rents soaring and home prices into the stratosphere. The result is what scholars have called a “housing trilemma”: Cities are forced to choose between affordability, economic growth and the vague but potent factor of “neighborhood character” that many voters push for.

YIMBYs — who pick the first two options of the trilemma — rightly argue that breaking this impasse requires more housing, including dense, transit-oriented and market-rate housing, to absorb demand and stabilize prices.

To advance their case, YIMBYs often deployed a rhetorical foil: the suburban NIMBY who opposes development out of selfishness, nostalgia or racial animus. This figure is politically potent and often real. In places like Palo Alto, Marin County, Westchester County and Beverly Hills, organized homeowner groups have indeed spent decades fighting off apartment buildings, subsidized housing and even modest infill projects (that is, attempts to build more housing through greater density in already-developed spaces). The pushback to these projects tends to fall under the guise of “neighborhood character” and “quality of life.”

These rich neighborhoods and municipalities are the true bastions of exclusion, and the YIMBY critique has done well to puncture their pieties.

But when this critique migrates wholesale to cities and neighborhoods like Oakland, Boyle Heights, Crown Heights or the Mission District, it begins to lose coherence. In these places, NIMBY resistance often comes from people in low-income communities who do not own homes and who are acutely worried about, if not always vulnerable to, displacement. Their opposition to development is not rooted in greed or parochialism but in survival. To treat them as ideological equivalents of suburban homeowners is not just analytically wrong but politically self-defeating.

Making the oversimplification even worse is this fact: In the urban core, many development proposals wind up concentrated in neighborhoods where land is cheapest, zoning is more permissive and political resistance is weaker. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first big rezoning was in East New York. These happen to be low-income, often majority-Black or Latino neighborhoods that have long borne the brunt of disinvestment, environmental degradation and underpolicing.

When capital begins to flow back into these areas (often in the form of luxury condos, new restaurants or boutique retail), longtime residents fear they won’t be financially able to enjoy the benefits.

And they recognize the signs. Gentrification is not an abstract concept to them; it is a lived experience of rising rents, no-fault evictions, loss of cultural institutions and the sudden appearance of outsiders who reshape the social fabric. The very existence of gentrification as a widespread phenomenon is controversial, and its effects are far less obvious or certain than many fear. But there are undoubtedly neighborhoods that underwent a classic gentrification process, such as Williamsburg in Brooklyn, which went from being a working-class neighborhood to a wealthy enclave in less than a decade and a half, and it’s natural for local residents to fear the same result in their community. You can’t change their minds by calling them white and rich, especially when they’re neither.

In a context of ever-spiraling housing costs, opposing new development can be a rational political act even if its fundamental logic confuses YIMBYs. It’s a way of asserting community control over space, resisting economic forces that have never acted in the favor of these communities and attempting to slow down or mitigate displacement. These NIMBYs are not against “housing” in the abstract. They’re against the kind of housing that they believe is not for them — units that are too expensive, too unwelcoming to residents who look the way they do, too indicative of a city slipping out of their grasp.

This is not to say that every antidevelopment fight in the urban core is justified or constructive. But it is to say that the motivations are fundamentally different from those animating the homeowners of Atherton or Scarsdale. And when YIMBYs collapse this distinction, they invite understandable backlash.

In six years in tenant activism in New York City, I saw conflict after conflict between local communities of color and the whims of absurdly well-moneyed corporate interests that sought to helicopter in and start buying up land for luxury development. Prominent examples of neighborhoods that saw antigentrification fights that some would deride as NIBMYism include Inwood and Washington Heights, where the Northern Manhattan is Not For Sale movement fought tooth and nail against planned construction that they feared would displace incumbent populations; the “Fight for Sunlight” and similar conflicts in Crown Heights and Prospect Lefferts Gardens; and the successful opposition to an expansion of the Industry City megacomplex in Sunset Park.

The first campaign was dominantly led by Hispanic renters; the second by Black residential groups like Alicia Boyd’s Movement to Protect the People; and the latter by a coalition of Asian, Hispanic and white residents. None of these groups were made up primarily of rich people — in fact, they’re almost all working- and middle-class — and very few of those involved in them were homeowners. They had no property values to protect. Instead, they had legitimate fears of being displaced and seeing the neighborhoods they love taken out from under them by the kind of rootless white elites who have casually conquered so many other places in New York.

For an example from a different city, consider Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, a historically Mexican American neighborhood with deep roots and fierce community pride. In recent years, residents have opposed several art galleries, coffee shops and apartment projects, seeing them as beachheads of gentrification. I assure you, the Boyle Heights activists were not all wealthy white landowners of the NIMBY stereotype. Yet YIMBY critics were quick to denounce these campaigns as irrational or selfish. They failed to honestly reckon with the questions: What is it that people fear losing? And how might policy address those fears without dismissing them outright? The more the YIMBY movement has grown into an online social club, the less patience it seems to have for engaging in even basic political empathy for its foes.

The mischaracterization of urban NIMBYism as the same phenomenon as suburban exclusionism has real political consequences. It creates unnecessary antagonism, fuels distrust and makes coalitional politics around housing more fraught. Worse, it allows policymakers to dodge the hard work of designing development that actually protects vulnerable residents.

Yes, building is good. But the YIMBY mantra of “just build” is exactly the kind of slogan you come up with when you’re fighting for an abstraction; the antigentrification activists, meanwhile, are fighting for their homes. If all opposition to development is treated as reactionary, then the only acceptable response is to override it. That may be politically satisfying, but it is rarely sustainable. In places like Minneapolis or Oregon, where prohousing reforms have had some success, those wins have required building alliances, not dismissing local concerns. That means acknowledging that development can have both positive and negative consequences and that mitigation (through stronger tenant protections, community land trusts, inclusionary zoning and other measures) is essential to any serious prohousing agenda.

Moreover, painting all NIMBYs with the same brush obscures one of the central dynamics of urban development: Supply follows demand. Developers do not build housing where it is needed most; they build where it is profitable. That often means luxury housing in gentrifying neighborhoods, not affordable housing in underserved ones. Without aggressive public investment and planning, simply “unleashing” the market can reproduce inequality even as it adds units.

Yes, luxury development can drive down the cost of housing overall over time. But that process is slow, diffuse and necessarily hard to observe for long-term residents. Indeed, long-term residents will very likely see statistics point to average rent going up in their neighborhoods: After all, a brand-new building of any kind in a developing neighborhood with aging housing stock will almost certainly charge more in rent than the median existing apartment; charging more than the existing average raises the average, definitionally. Gentrification fears do not spring from nowhere.

Smarter YIMBYs have begun to acknowledge some of this nuance, and the movement is not monolithic. But the dominant narrative that all opposition to housing is bad, and all support is good, remains powerful. It simplifies the public debate and hardens opposition among precisely the communities most in need of affordable housing.

If a prohousing movement wants to succeed — not just on X, but in actual policy — it must broaden its moral and political vocabulary. That means moving beyond economic modeling and embracing a politics of solidarity. It means listening to communities that resist development and understanding their fears as legitimate, not pathological. And it means distinguishing between those who fight development to protect the asset price of their third vacation house and those who fight it to protect their homes. This does not require surrendering to every neighborhood demand or allowing the status quo to persist, but it does require humility. The housing crisis is not just a story of bad zoning and selfish boomers; it would be convenient if it were, but it isn’t. It’s also a story of decades of disinvestment, racism and top-down planning imposed on communities with little voice. If we are to build more housing (and by God, we must), we need to build it in a way that earns trust.