Part of the reason I can speak openly about this is because I had a few convos with my parents and I think they “get” what I’m trying to do with the YIMBY stuff — but my mom flat out told me “sorry but this is all I know”. I don’t expect most NIMBY convos they have with their kids has gone over that smoothly.

It doesn’t excuse any of their behavior, of course, but for my parents homeownership was a way to pledge their “loyalty” to the US, so I see what they were trying to do. I think most people are open to reasonable changes in the zoning law (as the polls show) but it’s the ones that show up to the planning meetings that are acting irrationally for one reason or another.

I think I mentioned this somewhere but it’s easier to deal with those types of behaviors by treating them as victims rather than supervillians because the latter is honestly giving them too much credit. A lot of NIMBYs are paranoid and confused so if we take them at face value it might distract us from the real issues at hand — they can’t really be expected to stay on point so we need to make it our job to do that, I think.