I don't think it's controversial that NIMBYism is bad for society. It is controversial that society, rather than local or hyper-local (block-level) residents, should write zoning policy.

There's no obviously correct geographical unit for zoning. Placing a major industrial plant is county-level (or even above), a mall probably affects people in about a 2-3 mile radius, an 6 story apartment building maybe a few hundred yards, while fence regulations should be decideable on a block level. Perhaps the solution is to flip the problem around, define (tightly) the geographical boundary of residents that will be non-trivially affected by a change, and require a vote (perhaps even of a super-majority) in that area for the planning permission to be approved. Developers who want to build an apartment block will have to convince or compensate a few dozen residents in a certain radius (or buy their properties outright) to get their assent, but residents across town don't get a say. If you want to build an airport near a city, you'll be smooching a lot more people.

While a single project might only materially affect its immediate neighbors, the pattern of land-use decisions in aggregate harms the region as a whole (housing shortage, astronomical rents, displacement) much more than an apartment building could harm its single-family neighbors. This is why something like regional housing needs allocation is a good idea: let local communities control the how and where, but don’t let them screw over the rest of society on the “whether or not.”

The entire planet is nontrivially affected by creating and preserving car-dependent settlements; this sort of thing needs to be handled at the level of international climate treaties.

The entire country is nontrivially affected by the inaccessibility of moving to where there are jobs. Shadows on your garden don’t come close to being stuck in a place with no opportunity.

Imagine if other law was made at such a hyper-local level. Should residents of the 1200 block get to write themselves a murder statue that says residents of the 1100 block are fair game?

Good government is an antidote to the patchwork of small-scale actors making decisions in their own interests but dumping the downside of those decisions on society.

"I don't think it's controversial that NIMBYism is bad for society."

I disagree. I think that NIMBY has its place. Maybe not in Berkeley or 101-corridor Marin or in (insert miles and miles of shitty two story residential in SF) ... but I can quickly think of examples where NIMBY created tremendously valuable outcomes that were worth fighting for.

Here are a few, from places I live or have lived:

- West Marin County, with the accompanying Pt. Reyes National Seashore, is an incredible, awe-inspiring example not just of nature, but of the foresight and the hard work that a small community of people had to keep out development and large roadways.

- Boulder, CO, with all of its flaws and idiosyncrasies, is a quite impressive achievement that has grown up over many decades - starting with the original open space ring circling the city and continuing with height and density restrictions, etc.

Those are very expensive places to live with a fairly high bar for entry (and certainly for home ownership) ... and that is OK. It's OK that not everyone can live in Aspen. It's OK that we can't afford a home in Gstaad. It's OK that ranches in West Marin are expensive.

The world does not owe you these things.

Sure, yes, fine, but it’s not OK that most Americans have been priced out of the nation’s largest, most productive urban centers. It’s not OK that even the “middle class” is spending an unsustainable portion of its income hanging out to these areas with what are basically speculative and ill-advised real estate investment schemes. And it’s not OK that we’re still letting the automobile dominate regions where fixed public transit is the obviously better choice.

The world doesn’t owe anybody anything. You’re right about that. The few white families lucky enough to buy cheap subsidized housing at just the right time in history as new highways ripped through existing (many times conveniently black) neighborhoods didn’t deserve to get rich off that decision.

But here we are.

It’s almost as if deserve’s got nothin to do with it.

TLDR version: "Fuck you, I got mine" is not good for anybody.

Parks and recreational areas aren’t really NIMBYist, more like “this should be everyone’s backyard.” Regardless, I should be more specific, NIMBYism is bad for society when it effectively locks people away from economic opportunity. If you want an exclusive resort town in the wilderness, knock yourself out. (As long as your staff have somewhere to live).

There should not be zoning policy. It exists out of racist midcentury policy to keep "those sorts of people" out of the neighborhood

There are plenty of industrial uses that it's perfectly sane to segregate from residential neighborhoods.

I might agree that zoning should be all-or-nothing with respect to residential uses, and that there should not be such a thing as a "luxury residential only" (i.e. single family home only) zone.

Interestingly, this is what NIMBY used to mean (i.e. we all agree there should be industry/prisons/landfills/etc, just please not near me).

But this is something totally different.

This is just urban incumbents opposing further urban developments in their neighborhoods on the grounds that they’ve got theirs and there’s no upside to making it any easier for other people to move there, too.

This isn’t about keeping the oil refinery out. This is about keeping other people out.

That’s a fundamentally different thing. NIMBY isn’t even the right word for it.

>That’s a fundamentally different thing. NIMBY isn’t even the right word for it.

"Fuck you, I (literally) got mine"?

Or to keep an oil refinery out of the neighborhood.

You are talking about covenants, which is concerned with what types of people live in an area. Zoning has to do with the types of buildings.

I’d suggest “The Color of Law” for a better rebuttal to your argument than I can provide here. Zoning absolutely has been an important tool in establishing and maintaining segregationist housing aims where more explicit policies like restrictive covenants were rejected by the courts.