Our NIMBY Democracy

A moral rot has been spreading through the politics of our cities and our suburbs for the last few decades, a rot dressed in earnest language about “community character,” “environmental review,” and “local control.” This is the rot produced by the ethos of NIMBY — Not In My Backyard — a rot that has been the relentless force methodically hollowing out our democracy, all while its perpetrators proclaim themselves nothing less than its last hope and final rampart.

NIMBY Democracy is a civic order in which the very people who posture as progressive, virtuous guardians of the public good (those who live in the upper middle class suburbs of metropolitan areas, and those who are energetically gentrifying large stretches of our inner cities) devote their political capital not to championing the material betterment of the least among them, but to assiduously undermining and crippling that very public good by defending exclusive neighborhoods, protecting property values and blocking homes for the working poor. The result of their tenacious “civic engagement” (they will proudly post on their LinkedIn in that they are unpaid volunteers in non-profit boards and local civic organization) is as plain and as tangible as it is morally ugly: Fewer affordable homes, rising homelessness, a working class squeezed into precarity and a political backlash so deep that cynical demagogues have been able to harness it and unleash it to their own grim political ends.

Let’s start with some basic math, because moral vocabulary and loud sloganeering cannot paper over simple arithmetic.

In 2023, the United States reached a record 42.9 million cost-burdened households [1], including 22.6 million renter households paying more than 30% of their income for housing [1]. Worse still, 12.1 million renter households spent more than half their income on rent and utilities — the highest figure ever recorded [1][2]. These are not abstractions; they are cashiers, teachers, nurses, delivery drivers — millions forced to choose between food and medication because housing has become a manufactured luxury.

And it is manufactured. These pressures do not emerge from natural scarcity; they are the direct output of policy — specifically exclusionary zoning and elite neighborhood obstruction. For decades, scholars have shown that restrictive land-use rules throttle housing supply, drive up regional prices, entrench segregation and limit access to opportunity [3][4]. Single-family zoning, parking minimums, environmental-review abuse, “historic preservation” pretexts and discretionary permitting all operate as legal barricades against lower-cost housing.

And here lies the grotesque hypocrisy: Many of the fiercest defenders of these barricades call themselves progressive. They are the die-hard watchers of “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the planters of the Ukraine flag outside of their two-car garage houses, and the happy organizers of well behaved “protests” such the No Kings rallies. They attend climate marches, donate to civil-rights groups, and praise inclusivity in public, but then when they turn to what they consider far more serious matters (the ceaseless betterment of their socio-economic condition), they mobilize homeowners’ associations, real-estate lawyers and their lawmakers to stop duplexes, eliminate multi-family zoning and block affordable housing in their neighborhoods. They wrap private privilege in public-interest rhetoric, insisting they are merely protecting “neighborhood character.” The rhetoric is moral, but the behavior is feudal.

When the professional-class NIMBY bloc deploys zoning boards and procedural weapons to veto modest housing, the consequences are devastating and tragic. Working families are pushed into longer commutes and lower-opportunity neighborhoods. Children lose access to better schools. Employers struggle to hire teachers, nurses, and service workers who can no longer afford to live near their workplaces. This is not progressive governance: It is the quiet and smooth machinery of an urban aristoctracy that makes good use of its disposable time, financed by its healthy disposable income, which it shrewdly invests in consultants and lawyers and lawmakers who understand how the system works and will deliver the goods in the form what laws and regulations are passed, what laws and regulations are blocked, and what laws and regulations never even see the light of a debate.

And this is not only an economic tragedy: It is political dynamite.

Economic distress, declining mobility and perceived cultural exclusion are strongly correlated with support for populist, revanchist, anti-establishment movements across democracies [5][6]. When working people are displaced, disrespected, relentlessly frustrated in cold blood, and locked out of opportunity by a credentialed elite that, rubbing salt into exposed wounds, preaches virtue while hoarding privilege, they become easy targets for demagogues. NIMBY progressivism, in other words, has fertilized the soil from which MAGA-style movements have grown.

Look around: In city after city, well-connected neighborhoods with powerful homeowners’ associations and high civic participation block multi-family housing with ease. This happens routinely. And so, housing supply remains artificially constrained in precisely the places with the best schools, transit and job access. The winners are property-owning elites whose wealth compounds through scarcity. The losers are overwhelmingly working-class households priced out, pushed out and locked out.

But here is the central fact the NIMBY elite hopes the public never internalizes: They, the NIMBY tribe, are a tiny minority: The top 9.9%. (The 0.1%  are the oligarchs who are playing the exact same game as the 9.9%, except on a far grander scale.). This 9.9% class are affluent, credentialed, hyper-organized and structurally powerful, but in raw numbers they are minuscule. The working class — the renters, the laborers, the service workers, the teachers, the young families — is the 90% crushing super-majority.

In any functioning democracy, a 90% super-majority would have its core priorities enacted automatically. Yet our political reality is the opposite: The super-majority gets nothing it wants. Not almost nothing – but literally nothing. Not affordable homes. Not stable rents. Not dignified neighborhoods. Not short commutes. Not representatives who prioritize their interests. Nothing. Not even the hope that perhaps one day things will get better. ‘Let them eat despair’ seems to be the message coming down from the upper towers, the more likely that they, the unwashed, never think beyond surviving the day, let alone gather and organize.

The call to action here is not to sound an appeal for progressive elites to grow a conscience: They have had decades to do the right thing, and the record is plain and atrocious. They are heedless, blinded by their greed for more.

The call to action here is for the working class to recognize its own immense sovereign power and to stand up and assert itself.

Renters, teachers, tradespeople, service workers, gig workers, young families – the people who keep this country functioning — must understand they are the decisive voting bloc in America. No money can match the power that they hold in their hands.

If they organize around shared material interests rather than culture-war distractions, they can elect officials who represent them and only them and only their immediate interests. They can break the NIMBY veto. They can dismantle the political machinery that allows the 9.9% and their 0.1% masters to rule over the 90%. They can force a transformation of land-use policy, housing production, public transportation, tenant protections and democratic accountability.

When the super-majority stops apologizing, stops asking and pleading, refuses to be used cynically by people driven by crass self-serving, self-dealing greed, and starts acting, NIMBY Democracy collapses and real democracy finally begins.

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References

[1] Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. Housing Cost Burdens Climb to Record Levels (Again) in 2023.

[2] Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. Renters’ Affordability Challenges Worsened Last Year.

[3] Lens, Michael. The Impact of Housing Supply Regulations on Inequality and Opportunity. UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

[4] Brookings Institution. How to Make Housing More Affordable.

[5] Gidron, Noam & Hall, Peter. The Politics of Social Status: Economic and Cultural Roots of Populism. APSR.

[6] Autor, David; Dorn, David; Hanson; Gordon & Majlesi, Kaveh. Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure. National Bureau of Economic Research.