Kaid Benfield

NIMBY into YIMBY

Director, NRDC Smart Growth Program, Apr 22, 10.

Tagged with urban planning, environment, cities, earth day, new orleans

As I write this, I am attending the annual conference of the American Planning Association, where I was invited to speak. We are in New Orleans, one of the world’s most welcoming and culturally rich cities, the horrors of Katrina and limitations of longtime poverty notwithstanding. It is also a city rich with historic, walkable neighborhoods. This is a well-suited venue for experiencing, contemplating and sharing the ingredients of community and how to make a better built environment.

What’s a YIMBY?

APA’s membership is composed largely of city and town planners, working for municipalities across the country. They are, at least in their 21st-century incarnation, ‘accidental environmentalists’ whose traditional intentions may not be explicitly environmental but whose current (and in many cases longstanding) causes of thoughtful placemaking, great communities, and efficient transportation almost by definition reduce the weight and scope of our human footprint upon the earth. They get it, intuitively.

In fact, I would argue that they get it better than many environmentalists did for a long time, given our movement’s traditional distrust of cities, development, and commerce. One would have been hard pressed to find a self-identified environmentalist at the time of the first Earth Day, in 1970, who supported land development of any kind, orderly or not. But this is no longer the case, and I and many of my colleagues in the environmental community are living proof.

We now think of ourselves as passionate advocates of development done well, no longer NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) but YIMBYs for smart, green urbanism. We know that land development – residential, commercial, civic – is going to happen with our country’s population growth and cannot (and should not) be wished away. We absolutely must say yes, especially in our back yards, to making it as beneficial for the environment and as nurturing to the human spirit as possible.
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I didn’t really become a YIMBY until I read of uber-architect/planner/thinker Andres Duany’s pioneering work in creating a nonsprawling community in Seaside, Florida, and of equally uber-architect/planner/thinker Peter Calthorpe’s work in articulating (and naming) ‘transit-oriented development,’ walkable communities built around neighborhood conveniences and public transportation stops. New Orleans provides a template for beautiful, walkable communities. These templates addressed land use and transportation at once, and made for convivial neighborhoods, too. That was something positive to advocate. It was good for developers, good for residents, and great for the environment, compared to sprawl. (In a lot of ways, they were actually working on emulating the historic neighborhoods of New Orleans and other older cities.)

As I was soon to learn, I wasn’t alone. There was a growing group of us, arriving at the same conclusions at the same time. Well, frankly, some were already ahead of us, including Duany and Calthorpe, and a whole bunch of enlightened people in Oregon. But now the enviros and advocacy organizations were getting on board – elements of the solutions were being developed not just within architectural and planning circles but also at places like the Environmental Defense Fund, Center for Neighborhood Technology, EPA, Sierra Club, American Farmland Trust, Conservation Fund, Surface Transportation Policy Project, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Enterprise Foundation and more.
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Our movement became, and remains, much more about making friends and building alliances than slaying enemies. There are still folks within NRDC and other organizations who fight the bad stuff and don’t back down in fierce legislative battles, and you should be very glad of it. (We need them even to fight preservation battles in New Orleans, where important neighborhoods are at risk as I write.) And there are still some folks in the environmental movement who don’t quite know what to make of us YIMBYs, even though one of the better-kept secrets is that we’re winning: central cities are growing again after years of decline, driving rates are declining, sprawl developments are losing money, all this even before the recession, and nearly every community in America wants to jump on the smart growth bandwagon, one way or another. Zoning ordinances are being reformed left, right, and center to support walkable and transit-accessible neighborhoods. California now has a smart growth planning law to reduce carbon emissions, and so many jurisdictions are adopting complete-streets laws to make sure that walkers, cyclists, and transit users are accommodated fairly alongside cars that I can’t keep up. There is no question that market forces are trending our way.

Collaborating for solutions works. And it’s not just we smart growth advocates, of course. NRDC’s energy program is still leading the way in its realm. Our water program is working on solutions, too. Our urban program is working on green jobs. We even have a Center for Market Innovation, whose sole purpose is to work with industry on win-win approaches to environmental challenges. Our sister organizations in the environmental community also have solution-oriented agendas. The environmental movement has grown up.

Full story: Contemplating Earth Day at 40: A Journey for the Environment, from NIMBY to YIMBY
Source: NRDC Switchboard Blog, April 15, 2010

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