NIMBY

NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”) recurs across Kyle’s city-building notes as the local-interest force that blocks new development and is treated as a core obstacle to growth. In The New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida calls these blockers “New Urban Luddites” who “effectively limit and block the investments that are required for… further scaling” — less scaling means less clustering, lower innovation, smaller tax bases. Florida cites the calculation that eliminating San Francisco’s land-use restrictions could yield a 500% increase in jobs (and 800% in New York). His proposed fix is to co-opt rather than fight the opposition: “tax increment local transfers,” which let residents share in the tax revenue from new development (e.g., rebating their own property taxes over time) so they have a stake in building.

In The Build-Nothing Country, Noah Smith frames NIMBY opposition as one symptom of a broader American inability to build — housing, transit, transmission lines, and green energy alike. He notes that despite the IRA’s $400B allocation, solar and wind projects still face NIMBY resistance, arguing the failure is not a money problem but a broken permitting and land-use system exploited by entrenched local interests.

Context: NIMBYism describes residents who support development in principle but oppose it near their own homes, typically via zoning, permitting, and environmental-review processes. It is a central concept in the “abundance” / YIMBY (“Yes In My Back Yard”) policy debate over American housing and infrastructure scarcity.

Where this appears

• The New Urban Crisis — “New Urban Luddites”; the tax-increment-local-transfer mechanism to co-opt NIMBY opposition.
• The Build-Nothing Country — NIMBY resistance as one driver of America’s failure to build housing, transit, and green energy.