By Cade Cannedy : sfgate – excerpt
Columnist Cade Cannedy argues that everyone is missing the real power player in housing: DWIMBYs
YIMBYs and NIMBYs, a tale far less old and far more annoying than Cain and Abel, is a perfect fit for a post-pandemic, cyberurbanized California.
For those unaware, a NIMBY is an aging white couple in a coastal community using racially coded arguments to oppose an affordable housing project that threatens to bring in “ruckus.” A YIMBY, on the other hand, is someone on Twitter yelling indecipherably about how legalizing 5-over-1 single staircases is the only way your children will avoid homelessness in California.
The thing they have in common: You’ve never really met either…
Surely, cartoonishly racist NIMBYs exist, as do YIMBYs who would tolerate a firing range in their backyard if it kept them feeling smugly superior to their narrow-minded neighbors. But in reality, the vast majority of people fall somewhere in between, in a category called the DWIMBY: Depends What’s in My Backyard.
While DWIMBY decidedly lacks panache, it is the most accurate way to describe approximately 80% of people yelling about Bay Area housing on Twitter. Take the notorious Sunset-dwelling NIMBY: The very neighbors disgusted by the Sloat Tower, a 50-story phallus built over reclaimed sand dunes in a veritable transit desert, were the same folks who came together two years ago to support 135 units of affordable teacher housing, just a few blocks away.
But nuance leaves no room for moral superiority, which is the real point after all. So DWIMBYism recedes to the shadows, and the NIMBY and YIMBY labels are deployed mostly as political insults rather than anything honestly indicating anyone’s policy positions…(more)
There are some rather good comments made in the article that look at the housing issue from a neutral lens.