RETHINKING NIMBY Robert W. Lake Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University Journal of the American Planning Association (1993) 59,1: 87-93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01944369308975847 Local opposition and protest have halted the siting of LULUs -- locally unwanted land uses -- not only throughout the United States but throughout the industrialized world (Popper 1987). The examples are virtually endless. In January 1988, authorities in the then-Soviet Union abandoned construction of a new nuclear power generator near the city of Krasnodar following an outpouring of what was described as "bitter opposition" by local residents in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident (Keller 1988). Continuing what is said to be the world's longest-running anti-nuclear protest, residents of the Swedish village of Kynnefjäll are maintaining a twenty-four-hour-a-day vigil begun in April 1980 to block access to test drilling sites for storage of high-level radioactive waste proposed by SKB, the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (Åhäll et al 1988; Lidskog and Elander 1991). Protestors in northern Minnesota reportedly dropped explosives into test wells to disrupt the Minnesota Waste Management Board's search for a hazardous waste disposal site (Gendler 1984). In response to growing public opposition, Texas, the largest producer of hazardous wastes in the United States, declared a moratorium last year on permitting new or expanded waste treatment facilities (Schneider 1991). New York State's Office of Mental Retardation and Office of Mental Health have encountered intense local opposition to their attempts to site group homes for nearly 30,000 disabled individuals (May 1986). New York City recently bowed to intense public protest and shelved plans to site 24 homeless shelters under its newly-adopted -- and award-winning -- "fair share" formula for distributing facilities across city neighborhoods (Roberts 1991; Purdum 1991; Gallagher 1992). Public opposition to unwanted facilities is conventionally ascribed to the NIMBY -- not-in-my-backyard -- syndrome. In the NIMBY framework, selfish parochialism generates locational conflict that prevents attainment of societal goals. NIMBYism is blamed for virtually all of our failures to solve pressing social problems. Our inability to eliminate environmental degradation, transportation congestion, homelessness, crime, and poverty is ascribed to NIMBY. We could make giant strides in all of these areas, it is claimed, if local communities would only abandon their selfish opposition to the waste incinerators, transit systems, housing projects, prisons, shelters, and clinics society needs to solve these pressing problems. Faced with seemingly intractable problems, we indict NIMBYism as the villain.