There are many things in life whose existence is desirable, or even essential to the society we live in, but that pople generally don't want to live
too close to. They might be noisy, smelly, polluting, dangerous, or just ugly. However as any
Sim City player will tell you, not everything can be in the middle of nowhere - for people to have cheap and convenient access to them, they have to be near to civilisation.
Fair enough. Just...
Not In My Back Yard, OK?
While it might be rather selfish to want the benefits of such amenities while declaring the downsides to be
Somebody Elses Problem, it can be justified - there is little to no reward for living nearby, and often the decrease in housing prices actually punishes the neighbours on top of the lowered quality of life.
The phenomenon is a major part of many
Simulation Games, where the player must balance necessary or lucrative buildings against residents' quality of life.
Also known as
NIMBY.
Examples:
- Erin Brockovich shows why most people have a NIMBY reaction: in the movie's case, toxic substances are leeching into the water supply.
- Real Life inversion: The town of Flora, IL lobbied to get a prison in their city, for the jobs. They went so far as to cut a rap video
and sent it to the governor.
- Similar things are happening in Upstate New York and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
- The term NIMBY is used in at least one Sim City game (makes sense, as you're playing a city planner).
- This ranges to many things, including to obvious, like prisons, toxic waste dumps, and casinos, to more subtle things like landfills, industrial areas, and commercial zones (more so in Sim City 4, where traffic noise becomes a factor to how desirable a zone is). Naturally, anything that humans wouldn't want sitting in their backyard in Real Life, Sims wouldn't want either.
- Law And Order Special Victims Unit often run into cases where they have to deal with former child molesters who face this problem when they get out of prison.
- Truth In Television: In Florida, during the hunt for Serial Killer Danny Rollings, police at one point suspected a man named Edward Humphries committed the murders and arrested him. It took almost a month to clear Humphries name, but eventually the police did release him with a statement that Humphries was no longer a suspect. Despite Humphries' innocence, residents of Humphries' home town came forward with statements that they did not want the police to release "a serial killer" back into their town.
- This is a major obstacle for cell phone companies wanting to put up towers to cover some areas. Nobody wants a big, ugly cell phone tower in their view, so companies typically offer deals, or dress up the towers to hide them from view.
- From musical RENT's number "Over the Moon": "Not in my backyard, utensils! Go back to China!"
