NIMBYs

The acronym surfaced around 1979 in nuclear-waste circles, describing the "NIMBY syndrome" of communities that wanted radioactive material stored anywhere else. The term's career since is a study in scope creep: it began with plutonium and now applies, with identical intensity, to a four-story apartment building with a bike room.

San Francisco gave the word its final form. The civic ritual is fixed: someone proposes housing on a parking lot, the Planning Commission meeting fills to capacity, and three hours of public comment establish that the building would be too tall, too dense, out of character with the neighborhood (a parking lot), and, in the decisive blow, that its shadow might touch a park for forty minutes in December. The shadow study is a real document. People commission them. The city also produced the countermovement: Sonja Trauss's 2014 renters' federation seeded the modern YIMBY movement, meaning SF invented the villain and the hero of the same story and scheduled them into the same public-comment queue forever.

The comedy is that nobody identifies as one. The median SF NIMBY is a self-described progressive with a housing-justice sign in the window of a home they bought for the price of a sandwich in 1981, and the pipeline runs in one direction: the tech workers priced out by NIMBYism eventually buy homes and discover, the morning after closing, a sudden deep concern about parking. See SF is cooked for the general verdict, permanent underclass for who pays for it, and nuke sf for the only construction project everyone approves.