NIMBYs, BANANAs, CAVEs and DUDEs

Jesse Souki's post on his Hawaii Land Use Law blog, "NIMBY Group Stymies 700 Home Affordable Housing Project on Maui," about a state-court challenge to a housing project, brings up a topic that is fun to revisit every now and then: the cheeky acronyms that get tossed about in the land use business.

To start off, there's the Mother of All Land Use Labels, NIMBY, which is commonly used to describe opponents of LULUs (Locally Undesirable Land Uses).  But a host of others are used, including a few that express the same -- or more extreme -- thought as NIMBY:

• NOTE - Not Over There Either
• NIABY - Not In Anyone's Back Yard
• BANANA - Build Absolutely Nothing Anything Near Anyone [or Anywhere]
• CAVE - Citizens Against Virtually Everything
• DBTD - Death By a Thousand Days (do you really think the sole purpose of an EIS is to gather information?)

Just so you don't think that labels are used only to describe opponents of development:

• DUDE - Developer Under the Delusion of Entitlement
• BANY - Builder Against NimbYs

For our friends in the political business:

• NIMTOO - Not In My Term Of Office
• NIMEY - Not In My Election Year

There's more, of course. I remember a few years ago reading a web article by a planner that listed the above and more.  Unfortunately, I cannot now find it.  If your Google skills are better than mine, please post up a link in the comments.

Update: my thanks to a reader who referred me to the article I mentioned above: "From NIMBYs To DUDEs: The Wacky World Of Plannerese," by Ric Stephens, posted here.  Well worth a read, as are the comments.

Comments

[Aaron Stene]

Robert, thanks for blogging about this. I got a good laugh from reading about the different acronyms.