From the Calgary Herald – June 5, 2008

Can we talk about a dirty word today? It’s a word that is coming up more and more lately, usually preceded by “This is not . . .” and always followed by “but . . .”.

The word I’m referring to is NIMBY: an acronym for Not In My Backyard. Using this word is almost reflexive amongst those of us who think of ourselves as urbanists. Anytime anyone complains about anything being built, we tend to call them NIMBYs. Sometimes we go further and call some of them (OK, maybe just the people in Sunalta and Scarboro) BANANAs — that’s Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

Before the Sunaltans and Scarberians come after me, I must point out that these terms are pejorative and oftentimes unfair. Nonetheless, they strike to the heart of what it means to live in a community — about individual rights versus community good.

The west side of the city provides some interesting examples this month.

The first is, of course, the proposed extension to the west LRT. The Best West LRT group and Aldermen John Mar and Joe Connelly insist they are not NIMBY, but are merely pushing for what’s best for the whole city.

This is a ridiculous argument. Of course they’re NIMBY. None of them have had much to say about the north east LRT, for example. They care about the areas in which they live or represent.

But being NIMBY doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong. Indeed, as a friend told me recently, “what the north east really needs is a lot more NIMBY.” I don’t think that’s right in all cases (I certainly think the Best West group hurt their case with their ridiculous renderings demonizing the homeless and the poor, for example) but he has a point. People organizing to improve their quality of life isn’t always a bad thing.

There is danger, here, though. Dr. Mark Warren at UBC has written of some of the dangers of community associations gaining power that perhaps more rightly belong to government: lack of public accountability, inequities and inequalities in service provision, and inequality of voice. This is the real problem: too many citizens no longer trust the city to always do and build what’s best for everyone. Rather, those who have the capacity to organize (money, time, human resources) seem to get better services than those who do not.

Resolving this means city hall must strive to bring every community to a similar standard of services — rather than announce the cheap inefficient solution for everyone and then improve it only for those who complain, it must recognize all citizens deserve beautiful train stations, great libraries and inspiring parks.

Similarly, no one gets a pass from shouldering the burdens that we all share from living in a big city — we all need to work to gain from diversity, to reduce the debilitating impacts of poverty and to improve our natural environment.

On this front, the City does deserve some credit, and the other two west side examples show this nicely. In one, some residents of Springbank Hill have been quite concerned about the city buying a condominium building for affordable housing, and in the other, some Aspen Woods residents have complained about a day care centre proposed for their neighbourhood.

(This last one is perhaps the most interesting of all — the classically-mocked NIMBY argument is “but think of the children!” In the case of Aspen Woods, it seems to be “please don’t inflict us with children!” I’ll be fascinated to see what happens when those citizens start agitating for more schools in their neighbourhood.)

In both of these cases, the benefits to the city as a whole outweigh the costs, if any, to the immediate community. The lack of affordable housing and decent child care spaces is something that should concern us all, despite minor inconveniences to neighbours.

Indeed, the city should do more to ensure that these kinds of services go into more kinds of neighbourhoods. The single most powerful tool to combat negative NIMBYism is one the city could enact with the stroke of a pen — mandatory inclusive zoning, in which every neighbourhood would have some proportion of affordable housing.

The best argument I heard was from Brent Mielke, president of the Springbank Hill Community Association, who suggested that his neighbourhood was not a great location for affordable housing, because it has poor transit service and poor services — no grocery store, no recreation centre. He’s right — not that we should move the housing, but that we should stop building any neighbourhood with poor transit and no services, those that exclude diversity by design.

Naheed Nenshi teaches at Mount Royal College and volunteers with the Better Calgary Campaign.

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