Maybe in my backyard: MIMBY

A call to focus on fixing California's underlying broken planning processes

California has quietly sorted itself into two housing modes. There are the homeowners -- disproportionately Boomers -- sitting on assets that have appreciated beyond all reason in suburbs that have calcified around their preferences and their property tax bills. And there is deeply subsidized housing for people who have fallen all the way through: the chronically homeless, foster youth aging out of the system, the most vulnerable. Both of these populations have political constituencies. Both have policy.

The proposed five-story, 80-unit building around the corner from my house is in the second category. A significant portion of the units are reserved for foster youth, with a single program coordinator. My heart genuinely goes out to those kids. The program may be excellent. I hope it is.

But I work in downtown Los Angeles, near Union Station. I see every day what happens when ambitious housing promises meet thin implementation capacity. The open-air disorder, the broken windows, the accumulated evidence that the public sector's track record in LA on supportive housing is, to put it charitably, uneven. That's not an unreasonable thing for my neighbors not to want in our little town. To be honest, I fear importing problems I see littered around downtown LA into La Crescenta.

And none of it -- not the 80 units, not the foster youth program, nothing in the proposal that has my neighborhood up in arms -- addresses the actual crisis for the family that earns a normal income and wants to raise kids in the suburb where they grew up. That person has seemingly no constituency these days. The California dream -- that a working family could put down roots here, that the suburbs could be places where ordinary people built ordinary lives -- is at best on life support, and the current housing debate on both sides mostly isn't honest about that. The suburbs are slowly becoming retirement communities for people who got in early. The rest of the region has pockets of subsidized housing for people who fell all the way through, with nothing in the middle for everyone else.

Here is what most participants in the NIMBY/YIMBY debate treat as permanent backdrop: the regulatory framework within which all of this plays out. It isn't.

Zoning as we know it is barely a century old. CEQA -- the California Environmental Quality Act, the procedural machinery that makes virtually every significant development project an invitation to litigation -- was born in 1970. It was designed to slow California's rampant postwar growth, which had genuinely run roughshod over communities and ecosystems. That was a reasonable response to a specific moment. What it became is a general obstruction machine, a legal structure that any organized interest can weaponize to delay or kill almost anything.

The fees, the discretionary review, the public notice requirements, the layers of required process: none of it was designed as a coherent system. It accreted over fifty years of well-intentioned responses to specific local grievances. So much of California's existing system is absolutely insane, like conducting environmental review through the courts adjudicate hypothesized impacts rather than look at objective scientific standards of actual wholistic impact on our planet. And critically, all of it was designed for a pre-internet world -- physical mailers, newspaper notices, in-person hearings on weeknights.

The entire civic architecture of California planning assumes a participation technology that was already obsolete by the time most Millennials finished high school. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has been running experiments. The vTaiwan platform brought together civic hackers, government officials, and citizens to build genuine consensus on contested policy questions -- not through comment periods but through structured online deliberation that actually shaped legislation. Helsinki built a participatory budgeting platform that engages nearly a tenth of the city's residents in deciding how public money gets spent. Cities from Dubai to Montreal are piloting AI-assisted visualization tools that let residents see proposed development in context, in real time, and shape it before it hardens into a one-page mailer.

California, historically a pioneer, is largely absent in this picture. Both NIMBY and YIMBY politics take California's kafka-esque, pre-digital planning apparatus as given. They argue about outcomes while accepting the broken, obsolete operating system that produces those fights. That's the argument I want to step outside of.

What the flyer in my mailbox actually revealed wasn't whether 80 units is too many or parking requirements are too high. It revealed that La Crescenta has no shared vision for what it wants to become.

La Crescenta is unincorporated county. There's no city council, no mayor, no locally accountable body whose job is to hold a long-term vision for this valley. There was a general plan update, a specific plan, assorted wonky urban planning documents that nobody but professional advocates and committed gadflies reads. One public meeting, at a weird hour. A one-page notification. Then: everyone up in arms.

This is not how you build trust. And the parking and density arguments that erupted -- those aren't really about parking and density. They're proxy wars for something deeper: the absence of civic vision, the corrosive suspicion that decisions are being made at and around communities rather than with them, the accumulated distrust of institutions that have made big promises and delivered broken windows.

I'd like to believe there's a better way. Not NIMBY, not YIMBY. Maybe In My Backyard -- MIMBY -- as a position that takes both the housing crisis and the legitimate desire for community voice seriously enough to ask harder questions about process.

What if communities had real deliberative tools before the flyer hit the mailbox? What if augmented reality let you see a proposed building in actual context on your actual street, and then gave neighbors a structured way to say "not that, but why not this?" What if permitting reform meant not just faster approvals but genuine community co-design -- streamlined enough that building good things was the easy path, deliberative enough that communities felt like authors rather than subjects?

La Crescenta was built by people who built things. Flag lots, DIY additions, families who looked at a piece of hillside and figured out how to make it work. That spirit is still here. What's missing are institutions worthy of it -- planning processes that produce shared vision instead of cryptic mailers, that make the normal family's aspiration to put down roots here as legible to policy as the Boomer homeowner's interest in protecting property values.

Maybe In My Backyard. Not a slogan for blocking things, and not a blank check for Sacramento to override the people who actually live somewhere. A bet that if we burn through the procedural brush that has accumulated over fifty years -- the discretionary review, the litigation tripwires, the one-page mailers -- we can pioneer new protocols for approving housing that are faster and simpler and genuinely democratic, protocols that the rest of the world is already building. What we'd find underneath is something worth trusting: communities that know what they want, and are capable of choosing it.

California has quietly sorted itself into two housing modes. There are the homeowners -- disproportionately Boomers -- sitting on assets that have appreciated beyond all reason in suburbs that have calcified around their preferences and their property tax bills. And there is deeply subsidized housing for people who have fallen all the way through: the chronically homeless, foster youth aging out of the system, the most vulnerable. Both of these populations have political constituencies. Both have policy.

The proposed five-story, 80-unit building around the corner from my house is in the second category. A significant portion of the units are reserved for foster youth, with a single program coordinator. My heart genuinely goes out to those kids. The program may be excellent. I hope it is.

But I work in downtown Los Angeles, near Union Station. I see every day what happens when ambitious housing promises meet thin implementation capacity. The open-air disorder, the broken windows, the accumulated evidence that the public sector's track record in LA on supportive housing is, to put it charitably, uneven. That's not an unreasonable thing for my neighbors not to want in our little town. To be honest, I fear importing problems I see littered around downtown LA into La Crescenta.

And none of it -- not the 80 units, not the foster youth program, nothing in the proposal that has my neighborhood up in arms -- addresses the actual crisis for the family that earns a normal income and wants to raise kids in the suburb where they grew up. That person has seemingly no constituency these days. The California dream -- that a working family could put down roots here, that the suburbs could be places where ordinary people built ordinary lives -- is at best on life support, and the current housing debate on both sides mostly isn't honest about that. The suburbs are slowly becoming retirement communities for people who got in early. The rest of the region has pockets of subsidized housing for people who fell all the way through, with nothing in the middle for everyone else.

Here is what most participants in the NIMBY/YIMBY debate treat as permanent backdrop: the regulatory framework within which all of this plays out. It isn't.

Zoning as we know it is barely a century old. CEQA -- the California Environmental Quality Act, the procedural machinery that makes virtually every significant development project an invitation to litigation -- was born in 1970. It was designed to slow California's rampant postwar growth, which had genuinely run roughshod over communities and ecosystems. That was a reasonable response to a specific moment. What it became is a general obstruction machine, a legal structure that any organized interest can weaponize to delay or kill almost anything.

The fees, the discretionary review, the public notice requirements, the layers of required process: none of it was designed as a coherent system. It accreted over fifty years of well-intentioned responses to specific local grievances. So much of California's existing system is absolutely insane, like conducting environmental review through the courts adjudicate hypothesized impacts rather than look at objective scientific standards of actual wholistic impact on our planet. And critically, all of it was designed for a pre-internet world -- physical mailers, newspaper notices, in-person hearings on weeknights.

The entire civic architecture of California planning assumes a participation technology that was already obsolete by the time most Millennials finished high school. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has been running experiments. The vTaiwan platform brought together civic hackers, government officials, and citizens to build genuine consensus on contested policy questions -- not through comment periods but through structured online deliberation that actually shaped legislation. Helsinki built a participatory budgeting platform that engages nearly a tenth of the city's residents in deciding how public money gets spent. Cities from Dubai to Montreal are piloting AI-assisted visualization tools that let residents see proposed development in context, in real time, and shape it before it hardens into a one-page mailer.

California, historically a pioneer, is largely absent in this picture. Both NIMBY and YIMBY politics take California's kafka-esque, pre-digital planning apparatus as given. They argue about outcomes while accepting the broken, obsolete operating system that produces those fights. That's the argument I want to step outside of.

What the flyer in my mailbox actually revealed wasn't whether 80 units is too many or parking requirements are too high. It revealed that La Crescenta has no shared vision for what it wants to become.

La Crescenta is unincorporated county. There's no city council, no mayor, no locally accountable body whose job is to hold a long-term vision for this valley. There was a general plan update, a specific plan, assorted wonky urban planning documents that nobody but professional advocates and committed gadflies reads. One public meeting, at a weird hour. A one-page notification. Then: everyone up in arms.

This is not how you build trust. And the parking and density arguments that erupted -- those aren't really about parking and density. They're proxy wars for something deeper: the absence of civic vision, the corrosive suspicion that decisions are being made at and around communities rather than with them, the accumulated distrust of institutions that have made big promises and delivered broken windows.

I'd like to believe there's a better way. Not NIMBY, not YIMBY. Maybe In My Backyard -- MIMBY -- as a position that takes both the housing crisis and the legitimate desire for community voice seriously enough to ask harder questions about process.

What if communities had real deliberative tools before the flyer hit the mailbox? What if augmented reality let you see a proposed building in actual context on your actual street, and then gave neighbors a structured way to say "not that, but why not this?" What if permitting reform meant not just faster approvals but genuine community co-design -- streamlined enough that building good things was the easy path, deliberative enough that communities felt like authors rather than subjects?

La Crescenta was built by people who built things. Flag lots, DIY additions, families who looked at a piece of hillside and figured out how to make it work. That spirit is still here. What's missing are institutions worthy of it -- planning processes that produce shared vision instead of cryptic mailers, that make the normal family's aspiration to put down roots here as legible to policy as the Boomer homeowner's interest in protecting property values.

Maybe In My Backyard. Not a slogan for blocking things, and not a blank check for Sacramento to override the people who actually live somewhere. A bet that if we burn through the procedural brush that has accumulated over fifty years -- the discretionary review, the litigation tripwires, the one-page mailers -- we can pioneer new protocols for approving housing that are faster and simpler and genuinely democratic, protocols that the rest of the world is already building. What we'd find underneath is something worth trusting: communities that know what they want, and are capable of choosing it.

>200 subscribers

>200 subscribers