This acronym isn’t strictly new, but it was new to me when I saw it in the subject line of an email from California State Senator Scott Wiener, co-sponsor of SB 899, known as the Affordable Housing on Faith Lands Act. (Wiener, a Democrat, doesn’t represent my district, nor have I donated to his campaigns, but I get his emails anyway.)
The body of the email spelled out the acronym: “Yes in God’s Back Yard.”
Image via Giv4 Homelessness in San Diego
YIGBY is a trademark of San Diego Grantmakers, which funds Yigby.org, a San Diego nonprofit. The trademark was registered in 2020; the name has been in use since at least 2019. The earliest news coverage I’ve found is a June 6, 2019, story on Bay Area public broadcaster KQED that reported on early San Diego efforts: “‘Yes in God’s Backyard,’ or YIGBY: Group Aims to Build Affordable Housing on Religious Land.”
The movement hasn’t been confined to Southern California, and neither has the acronym. A June 17, 2019, article in the Vallejo Times-Herald – “Bay Area churches are building housing in ‘God’s’ backyard”– led with this sentence: “There’s a new acronym floating in the alphabet soup of California housing parlance: YIGBY, or ‘yes in God’s backyard.’”
Before you ask whether God actually has a back yard, or a backyard--or whether there’s actually a God at all—you should know, if you haven’t already guessed, that YIGBY is patterned after two older and better-known housing acronyms: NIMBY and YIMBY.
NIMBY came first, and is the only one of the three words to be found in the OED, which calls it “originally U.S.” and “frequently depreciative.” It stands, of course, for “not in my back yard,” and has been around long enough that it’s often spelled as a regular word: Nimby. The OED defines it as “An attitude ascribed to persons who object to the siting of something they regard as detrimental or hazardous in their own neighbourhood, while by implication raising no such objections to similar developments elsewhere” and traces its earliest appearance to a February 13, 1979, article in the Newport News-Hampton (Virginia) Daily Press: “Agencies need to be better coordinated and the ‘nimby’ (not in my back yard) syndrome must be eliminated.”
By then, the “not in my backyard” attitude had already been around for a while. The OED cites a 1976 report by the Brookhaven National Laboratory, “Issues in Nuclear Siting,” that observed: “The difficulty arises when the group that is benefiting from the electric power from a given plant is..different from the group that is bearing the social costs of the plant. The typical manifestation of this phenomenon is the expression, 'sure we need nuclear power plants, but not in my backyard'.”
From rational concern about nuclear fallout, NIMBYism eventually expanded to encompass opposition to low-income housing, multi-family housing, and even a large public university (UC Berkeley, which after a 2018 lawsuit by Save Berkeley Neighborhoods was forced to cap its enrollment to avoid “wreaking havoc” on the city).
YIMBY—“yes in my backyard”—represents the opposite view. As a Wikipedia entry puts it: “YIMBYs often seek rezoning that would allow denser housing to be produced or the repurposing of obsolete buildings, such as shopping malls, into housing.” It originally appeared in a 1993 essay published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, “Planners’ Alchemy, Transforming NIMBY to YIMBY: Rethinking NIMBY.”
There isn’t yet a Wikipedia entry for YIGBY. But the term is becoming genericized—I found YIGBY movements in Hawaii (where there’s a ! after the Yes) and in San Jose. And if Sen. Wiener’s SB 899 becomes law, I’m predicting that trademark protection won’t stop this acronym’s spread.
YIGBY PASSES THE SENATE!!!
— Senator Scott Wiener (@Scott_Wiener) May 31, 2023
Thank you, colleagues, for passing our legislation to allow faith institutions & nonprofit colleges to build affordable housing on their land.
This bill will open up tens of thousands of acres of land for affordable housing. It’s a game-changer.
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