"Not-in-my-backyard" attitudes

SIGNIFICANCE: Not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) attitudes may lead to failures of social justice, prevent the construction of facilities in the most effective and efficient locations, and limit the availability of needed services to client populations.

The NIMBY syndrome develops when members of a community say they support a policy or project so long as it is located where others bear the social and economic costs of the project. They claim their neighborhood is not suited for the proposed project because of the size of the facility, the clients to be served, or some other issue.

The earliest reference to the term "NIMBY" appeared in a 1980 article referring to citizen opposition to locating landfills anywhere nearby. The term was originally associated with opposition to environmentally sensitive facilities but has been expanded to include the location of power lines, rental housing, public housing, homeless shelters, halfway houses for troubled teens or drug abusers, medical facilities for diseased patients, housing for those on parole, and any other facilities deemed undesirable. Opposition may be directed toward the nature of the facility, the administration and procedures of the facility, or the nature of the clients being served, including race, criminal background, or income status. The term "locally unwanted land use" (LULU) refers to all types of socially beneficial developments opposed by locals.

Three major concerns expressed by potential neighbors of unwanted facilities are reduction in local property values, decreased personal and neighborhood security, and increased social fragmentation and community disorganization. Related concerns include to the appearance and size of the facility, parking and traffic patterns, noise and odor, and lax operating procedures and supervision. Tactics used by neighborhood residents to actively oppose such projects include creating petitions, letter writing and media campaigns, lobbying public officials, staging demonstrations, forming opposition groups, and packing zoning hearings with opponents. These residents are generally supporters of no- or slow-growth policies, dwellers in rural or pleasant neighborhoods, and earners of middle or high income who are educated and professionally employed. They often show a strong social concern but are also motivated to protect what is theirs.

Social Justice and Inefficiency Issues

The NIMBY attitude, when successfully integrated into law or government decisions, forces people and communities without political or economic clout, or without the persistence and stamina to last the course of the battle, to bear the costs of social goods desired by those with political and economic clout. Social justice requires that all those who play a part in creating the problem or need, and in deciding the policy, must share in the subsequent burden. This includes paying the taxes, suffering the economic or commercial loss, and sharing in the siting of the facilities.

While Benjamin Chavis was executive director of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racism and Justice, he created the term "environmental racism" to describe a correlation that he saw in the 1970s and 1980s between the racial composition of neighborhoods and the siting of unwanted facilities, especially ones for storing hazardous waste. Subsequent studies proved that 76 percent of landfills were located in predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods. Social and environmental facilities were located in areas where the geology, geography, low land values, zoning laws, and political climate allowed the siting. These factors were also correlated with low incomes, depressed communities, and the homes and businesses of racial and ethnic minorities.

NIMBY attitudes also can lead to siting social facilities where they are less efficient than they could be in meeting needs. For example, new, environmentally sound landfills are often sited on preexisting, already contaminated sites in depressed neighborhoods where their use is grandfathered into zoning, but the facility is bound to suffer the effects of the earlier abuse of the land. Some facilities are located in geographically remote locations where they cause problems related to traffic, fuel, and trucking or make access difficult for less mobile citizens.

Because the NIMBY attitude makes siting facilities so difficult, construction of needed facilities is delayed and sometimes abandoned. Communities go without hospitals, prisons, waste disposal facilities, or services for the most needy citizens.

Implications for Criminal Justice

Delayed or abandoned construction of prisons in particular has meant a continuation of prison overcrowding and early release of unrehabilitated offenders, denial of rehabilitation and education services to incarcerated youth and adults, delay in the introduction of new incarceration and alternative sentencing methods, and the continued housing of mentally ill, substance-addicted, or homeless persons in facilities intended for criminals.

Perceptions of social injustice that are a consequence of the NIMBY syndrome lead to social dissatisfaction, racial and social class animosities, and subsequent criminal behavior. The concentration of social facilities in already depressed areas leads to further economic and social depression of the neighborhood and to other social problems. On the positive side, some depressed communities have benefited from increased employment and the development of secondary service industries as a consequence of siting large-scale social projects like penitentiaries, secure hazardous or nuclear waste facilities, power plants, and mental hospitals.

Bibliography

Davy, Benjamin. Essential Injustice: When Legal Institutions Cannot Resolve Environmental and Land Use Disputes. Wien, N.Y.: Springer, 1997. Print.

Dear, M. J. “Understanding and Overcoming the NIMBY Syndrome.” Journal of the American Planning Association 59, no. 3 (1992): 288-300. Print.

Horah, Jan. NIMBYs and LULUs. Chicago: Council of Planning Librarians, 1993. Print.

Inhaber, Herbert. Slaying the NIMBY Dragon. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1998. Print.

McAvoy, Gregory. Controlling Technocracy: Citizen Rationality and the NIMBY Syndrome. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1999. Print.

Munton, Don, ed. Hazardous Waste Siting and Democratic Choice. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996. Print.

"The NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) Phenomenon and Renewable Energies." Vector Renewables, 15 Dec. 2022, www.vectorenewables.com/en/blog/nimby-not-in-my-backyard-renewable-energies. Accessed 8 July 2024.

O’Looney, John. Economic Development and Environmental Control: Balancing Business and Community in an Age of NIMBYs and LULUs. Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 1995. Print.

Piller, Charles. The Fail-safe Society: Community Defiance and the End of American Technological Optimism. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Print.