By Mike Lewis
If you’ve spoken up at a city council meeting lately, you may have noticed something strange.
If you raise questions about fire safety, infrastructure or water supply, you’re not met with dialogue, you’re met with a label: “NIMBY.”
Not a neighbor. Not a taxpayer. Not a citizen. Just a “NIMBY.”
This label is more than lazy rhetoric. It’s a calculated attempt to discredit residents who dare to question the wisdom of Sacramento’s high-density housing mandates. And it’s part of a larger strategy to make it politically toxic to care about your neighborhood.
The YIMBY movement, short for “Yes In My Back Yard”, and now also known as WIMBY (Wall Street In My Backyard) likes to claim the moral high ground. They speak of equity and affordability while pushing policies that, in practice, produce thousands of market-rate rental units, often in cities already grappling with overburdened infrastructure.
The promise is affordability. The result is investor-friendly projects that produce mostly rentals owned by Wall Street corporations or billionaire landlords, with the intention of supporting their vision of a renter society.
In comparison to apartments, few real homes for real families are being constructed, and even fewer that are affordable.
Meanwhile, local communities are left holding the bag. Let’s talk about that bag.
When hundreds of units are fast-tracked into a built-out city like Encinitas, someone has to pay for the expanded sewer systems, stormwater drainage, road maintenance, increased fire protection, water reliability upgrades, and school capacity.
But under many of these “by-right” development policies, developers aren’t required to fund those upgrades proportionally, or at all. They walk away with their profits, while residents are left with the consequences.
Prudent inquiry isn’t opposition. It’s common sense. And calling it “NIMBYism” doesn’t make the problems go away.
Worse, these labels shut down nuanced discussion and vilify anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the state’s central government approach to planning. It’s a dangerous precedent: disagree with the orthodoxy, and you’re morally suspect.
But here’s the truth: Opposing poorly planned density is not immoral. Pretending we can pile people into high-cost rentals with no investment in schools, infrastructure or public services — that’s what’s immoral.
It’s time we stop letting name-calling drive public policy. Residents aren’t against housing. They’re against being steamrolled by policies that ignore ground truth realities.
A community’s ability to say, “This project doesn’t fit here, for these reasons,” is not obstruction, it’s stewardship.
And let’s not forget the irony: The very people calling for dense rental development in the name of affordability are often the same ones fighting to block single-family starter homes in other areas, because they don’t align with the ideology of “build up, not out.”
In doing so, they’re not fighting for ownership opportunities or long-term affordability. They’re fighting for density as a virtue in and of itself.
But density isn’t a moral category. It’s a planning tool, and one that must be used thoughtfully, not ideologically.
Communities deserve a seat at the table when it comes to shaping their future. Local input is not the enemy of housing; it’s the key to getting housing right.
We can build more homes and protect the character, safety and integrity of the places people already call home. But we’ll never get there if we continue to demonize those who speak up.
So, the next time someone calls you a NIMBY, ask them this: Who benefits from them shutting you up?
Mike Lewis is an Encinitas resident
