Hug a NIMBY

If there were an official NIMBY Party, you'd be in it.

We have to stop meeting like this, on Tuesday mornings before the rest of the decent people are up and about. Didn’t you know? The fate of the world is at stake, and the only way people would care enough to get out of bed is if it happened in their bedroom. People living in far-away places like Israel, Gaza, or Ukraine know what I’m talking about. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has averaged 88 rocket alerts and 11 UAV alerts per day, 271 in the past week. If you live in Gaza, they’ve lost count, but the IAF says they’ve struck over 30,000 targets. Ukraine has, according to air-alarms-in.ua, seen 63,953 air alerts since the beginning of the Russian invasion, and 1,262 in the last month; 46 in Kyiv. This continued while Messrs. Putin and Trump were discussing “peace.”

Though these things are important on their own, it’s not what I want to talk about today. My topic here is governance, and how we Americans derive our authority. Our president can summon the heads of Europe to the White House, and they come. But the French, Germans, British, and Italians get their authority from one place, and Americans get ours very differently. It might not be relevant to saving the world, but it important in the way we conduct ourselves to avoid the political hot pot of hyperbole pouring out of the internet.

One reason I married my wife is early one morning, a tree fell on my bedroom roof—if it had not broken into three pieces it could have fallen on my head—and she came over to my house in a storm at six in the morning and tarped my roof. I bought a ring the same day. That’s love.

Now if a tree had fallen on the neighbor’s roof and I called her, she might have come over and tarped their roof. That’s the kind of person she is, but you know, I wouldn’t have held it against her if she didn’t. I mean, a tree falling on the neighbor’s house is a terrible thing, but most of us would think, wow, I’m glad it wasn’t me. Not necessarily as a first thought (I’m no ghoul), but you know as well as I do, when something bad happens to someone living close, it kind of activates that “I’m grateful for what I have” reflex. When the tree falls on my house, it’s “why me?” and then “I better marry that girl before someone else does.”

The most important decision of a young man’s life, I always tell my boys, is who you marry. In the scheme of things that involve you, like concentric rings of concern, it starts with yourself, and the very next ring is your spouse. Which means for your spouse, you are the next ring, and they are really so close as to be nearly overlapping. What happens to one of you happens to both. I think the reason so many marriages end in divorce is that the two people in them never really admitted there is no self-interest in a marriage that doesn’t also lie with the other partner. “We’ve grown apart” is just psych code-speak for “we put ourselves first.”

I didn’t really want to write about family dynamics here, but I think the concept translates well into larger circles, like extended families, work, neighborhoods and associations of people like who you worship with, work out with, play sports with, go to school with, or simply hang out with. And beyond that, it moves into how we live in governments, cities, and nations. Self-interest and alignment of values is something people should put more thought into than their neighbor’s roof. Probably not as much as who to marry, but certainly more than what brand of potato chips to buy with lunch.

Really, that’s what separates us into tribes and nations and parties and such, is the stuff we care about, versus bad stuff happening to other people that doesn’t matter so much. If we could only all agree on what to agree on, we could solve a lot of problems that never get solved, like the wars still going on in those far-away places.

Image: Eddie Codel on Flickr

The problem is that governments have to deal with policies that affect people who are their own neighbors. And I thank God that in the United States, we have adopted a form of federalism that pushes most powers to the lowest political level, which means that Not In My Back Yard—NIMBY—is the biggest constituency the local authorities need to face once in office, but when they run, aspiring candidates do so on policy, like better schools, efficient government, public transportation, and global issues like climate change.

Trying to bring in natural gas-powered buses for public transportation? Trying to create a walkable city space to reduce cars in urban spaces? Trying to clean up homeless encampments by building housing? Trying to pursue sustainable development? There’s a NIMBY group opposing you. Want to add wind or solar installations on large tracts of land? There’s a NIMBY group saying the wind farms kill birds, create debilitating noise, and pollute the vistas of valuable properties. For solar, there’s a NIMBY group wanting to use the land for other purposes. Even in progressive circles, NIMBY takes otherwise lockstep liberal priorities and throws a monkey wrench in the gears.

The same with NIMBYs protesting zoning laws that allow mega-churches to open giant campuses in every residential neighborhood. Or placing all our nation’s nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain. Or building a giant Alligator Alcatraz in the Everglades of south Florida.

I say “hooray!” and “thank you!” to the groups protesting any kind of hive-minded progress because it affects their back yard. One of the best features of American government is the fact that we can associate with whom we please, and we are all able to own private property, meaning real estate. That means we get to choose our neighbors, to a large degree.

French academic Alexis de Tocqueville studied Americans and our form of democracy based on free association, and concluded it was a positive, given our nation didn’t have a built-in aristocracy, monarchy, or even a common ethnicity to push us in one direction. Two hundred fifty years later, if he were here he’d notice how embedded, self-serving and sclerotic many of our associations have become. Political pundits call such organizations “self-licking ice cream cones,” in that their primary original goal has been long realized, so they continue justifying their own existence by moving the goalposts, or picking at small wounds until they bleed.

The American Civil Liberties Union used to protect free speech because it was free speech, regardless of whether it was distasteful, hateful, or came from neo-Nazis. Now, they’re little more than a sock puppet for well-heeled liberals, choosing their cases based on ideology versus the absolute right to say things. The NAACP moved from an actual civil rights organization to a political arm of the Democratic Party, to a grievance mongering for hire lobbyist farm in search of institutional racism, and if finding none, educating our youth to believe it exists regardless (which, in fact, makes it exist). The self-licking ice cream cone advocates policies that highlight inequity in outcomes so that these can be linked to “institutional” policies for grievance groups to oppose and collect cash from corporate and wealthy individual donors.

I like to use the ACLU as an example because it’s an easy one and everyone knows it. There’s also the National Rifle Association, which morphed from a useful, safety-minded gun owners advocacy group into a political whore, shot through with self-serving and sometimes corrupt management. By any measure, gun ownership, gun sales, diversity of available firearms, the legal system, the NRA has “won” the fight for gun rights. But by the measure of gun violence, murders, school shootings, attempted mass killings in public buildings, malls, and supermarkets, the NRA has a horrible record. If the goal is responsible, safe ownership, the NRA exists only to perpetuate itself by pretending there’s a war on gun rights, when the war is on people killing other people using guns.

These two organizations are the opposite of NIMBY. They are national, well-organized fundraising machines who live on Capitol Hill and K Street more than in the neighborhoods and homes they purport to represent. I could go on with scores of examples of these kinds of political leeches on our society, but the disease is well known. I want to focus on cures.

NIMBY is a good cure because it’s totally local, and forces policy makers to come to terms with the consequences of their actions. Is it selfish to want a good view of the mountains and large wind farms ruin it? Oh, yes, it is. It’s also selfish to demand millions of dollars per acre in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, when you can buy 100 acres for the same price 50 miles away. Location matters and not in small part due to the natural beauty and views.

In Lake Oconee, Georgia, for many decades folks had summer homes, camp sites and hunting lodges on the lake. Regular folk, teachers at Georgia College (now GCSU) in Milledgeville, workers at the kaolin mines, mechanics, folks who built air conditioning units at the Rheem plant, they could live near the lake, and summer on its shores. Then the Reynolds family, who owned the Linger Longer hunting and fishing preserve, decided to sell to developers, who built golf courses and luxury homes. Now, good luck finding anything on the lake for under $2 million. Go 25 miles into Greene County, and you can still find something affordable. NIMBY couldn’t stop the Reynolds family from selling in the 80s, because they owned the land and in America most people who own land can do with it as they please.

There are people who take matters into their own hands, and results vary. Here’s the story of two “chicken men in Georgia, one in Cobb County, and one in Fulton. Joseph Pond wanted to keep backyard chickens in East Cobb in 2011, but the code enforcement guy showed up to tell him he couldn't. So he got 200 people to sign a petition, and formed the Backyard Chickens Alliance of Cobb County. “We are a group of Chicken Tenders in Cobb County, GA” the Facebook group describes itself. (That would mean something totally different in Manchester, N.H.) Two years later, Pond and his group had achieved victory in their chicken-tending quest, and expanded their role in keeping local politicians accountable.

On the other hand, Andrew Wordes just fought the law, even after he won his battle to keep chickens, goats and pigs at his property. In a long, sad story, Wordes’ non-compliance led to gun-barrel enforcement, and he spent three months at the Roswell Detention Center. Eventually, after years of conflict and piling up of violations, charges and fines, the city decided to foreclose on the property. When the Marshals showed up, Wordes poured gasoline in his home and set it ablaze rather than turn it over to the government. He died in the explosion.

There’s power in numbers, and victory in civil battles. Fighting the law for its own sake only has one ending. It’s the same ending the people who tried to stop Atlanta from opening a “Cop City” training center got. Professional activist Manuel Paez Teran drew a weapon on Georgia State Patrol officers who were attempting to clear the protesters, wounded one, and was shot 57 times in response. In April of this year, “Cop City” officially opened. Sometimes you can’t fight city hall.

This illuminates an important point. Our associations and NIMBY groups have immense power, but that power only reaches as far as the next election, and as wide as the politicians and elected officials who can gain or lose their positions through the issue itself. The City of Atlanta, and a majority of residents, thought the use of formerly forested land, as a city public safety training center, was a good idea. The Atlanta City Council endlessly debated the issue, and opposing voices had the chance to make their case. Through two city administrations, the call for safety outweighed the case for other uses of the land. But those opposed resorted to sit-ins, occupations, public disruption, and eventually violence. They lost.

There’s value in mass non-compliance—look at the failure of Connecticut’s gun registration law—but the major way American associations and NIMBY groups get things done is through the legal system, not by defying it. And when the legal system doesn’t produce the results they want, NIMBYs field their own candidates, align with one of the major political parties, and make the world their own, from the smallest neighborhood, to Washington, D.C.

“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” is a real thing, if we’re willing to keep that NIMBY spirit going. The consequences of letting it die are appalling: maximum lawmen against armed, professional agitators. Maybe that’s how France or Greece handles authority, but it’s not how Americans do it. We are NIMBYs. I’m proud to be one.

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