Fear And Anger In The Heart of NIMBY

Elaborating on my first Young Voices op-ed

A crowd of NIMBYs chanting “no upzoning” at an Arlington County Board meeting June 18, 2022. Folks looking straight ahead capture how everyone else felt.

Zoning reform opponents generally want people to be confused, angry, and fearful. Zoning reform supporters generally want people to be informed. We believe information is on our side. Maybe NIMBYs believe on some level that they would benefit if regular people knew more about how the housing market actually works … yet they say plenty of things they know are false. That crystalized for me early in 2024.

Please understand, I do not want to be self-serving. I do strongly believe in avoiding a Manichaean ‘we are so good and they, our opponents, are so evil’ mindset. Especially during Arlington’s missing middle housing debate, I expended a lot of energy keeping YIMBYs and our allies positive, which was sometimes challenging, and civil, which was hardly ever an issue. I come by my cynicism honestly and begrudgingly.

A lot of the challenge came from how negative and nasty our opponents are. They relish making things personal. I or YIMBYs of NoVA have been attacked in print almost half a dozen times, in local newspapers or on the websites of opposition groups. After Alexandria’s zoning reform fight at the end of 2023, we added an FAQ section to our website. We were accused of being paid (I wish) out of towners (no) who donated to political campaigns (never). I was able to share the most toxic behavior I observed in my first op-ed as a Young Voices contributor, in Washington Examiner:

[B]y the time one of them challenged my city’s mayor to a fistfight, I knew that housing reform opponents had no interest in compromise. I witnessed many attempts by reform opponents to intimidate elected officials, as Arlington County and Alexandria opened up single-family neighborhoods to new duplexes and other denser housing.

During a public meeting in Arlington, I watched a crowd of zoning reform opponents shout down a county board member while she was pleading for civility. Five days later, an anonymous anti-reformer posted a picture of another Arlington County Board member’s house online.

Alexandria’s zoning reform debate was no less toxic. One housing opponent began her public testimony by telling City Council members, “You deserve to be spanked.” Another yelled obscenities at the police officer escorting him from the council chamber.

This lowlight reel captures reform opponents’ consistent message that they would not accept any increase in density. … Fortunately for newcomers to this national conversation, there is plenty of respectful disagreement within the growing YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) movement to fix the housing shortage and affordability crisis.

WashEx kept the working headline, “Housing reform opponents don’t want compromise,” which I have concluded is a simple statement of reality. I started YIMBYs of NoVA in August 2021 with dreams of finding common ground with opponents to zoning reform, maybe even changing some hearts and minds: A less intense version of Daryl Davis, the black honky-tonk piano player, befriending and converting KKK members. I certainly would not compare NIMBYs to grand wizards, or myself to the incredibly patient and disciplined Mr. Davis. Unfortunately, my dream was short-lived. A few months in, I asked a local NIMBY Facebook group, ‘Do you agree there is a housing affordability crisis? And if so, how do you think we should solve it?’ About half of the repliers denied there is a problem. The rest said it was not worth trying to solve. We would only succeed in crowding our city, basically. Our quality of life would be much worse, and housing would still be expensive.

Then my group started actually doing housing advocacy, and I immediately saw how nasty our opponents were. At first they were simply outraged that we existed. Housing opponents in my area routinely claim that they support affordable housing. I have never heard of them advocating for it. (Please comment if you have witnessed that!)

My big realization over time was that a profound, visceral fear of change was the root motivation of NIMBYism. Density opponents believe new housing and new residents will radically change their neighborhood and significantly alter and damage their every day lives. As I fell into urbanism over the summer of 2021, one of my early insights, which I still believe, was that medium density could blend into the background. So can high density! I glance out the back window of our townhouse and am greeted by a massive apartment block whose residents walk to and shop at the same Aldi grocery store as my family. My neighborhood has hardly any traffic too.

But reform opponents are deeply afraid. They think we are naive. They call us ignorant or uniformed. They say we are too young or idealistic to understand. Or that we are bought and paid for, so really we are just lying. There is a generational divide in housing debates, yes, but also a surprising gulf of emotionality. It is our older, purportedly wiser counterparts who raise their voices, threaten, lash out. It is the younger, generally more liberal advocates who typically (I have my moments) maintain our composure. NIMBYs are palpably angry and demonstrative even where they dominate politics. Highbrow claims that NIMBY and YIMBY are two sides of the same extreme, unreasonable coin ring hollow for me. I never try to intimidate anyone.

I do still firmly believe in the power and promise of respectful dialogue and persuasion. I still think it is possible. But I have accepted that it is, for housing reformers, not feasible. I do think the YIMBY movement should professionalize (not just for my own sake), but we are simply not there yet. We are all volunteers, so we must focus on changing policy directly, through advocacy targeting political decision makers. We also face an acute and still-growing housing shortage and affordability crisis, right now. We do not have time to get everyone to sign onto to our policy platform. We have to go through some people. I do not enjoy that reality.

To be fair, changes of heart have happened. A friend on my team converted a former skeptic he knew, who ended up speaking at a rally for missing middle housing reform. That makes me smile. Yet my friend is an exceptional person.

For more about housing and compromise, do read my Washington Examiner op-ed.

If you enjoy this blog or want to work together, please contact lucagattonicelli@substack.com. I would love to write about a topic suggested by a reader. Visit YIMBYs of Northern Virginia, the all-volunteer grassroots pro-housing organization I founded, at yimbysofnova.org.