NOT IN MY BACK YARD !?!?!

Thanks to Bold Italic for Aunt Anti (Use of) 

Did you hear the one about the man who bought a house overlooking a fishing harbour and then wrote to the local council complaining about the seagulls on his roof?  It is true. He wrote to the parking dept asking them to stop the gulls sitting there…

Or how about the people who bought luxury apartments overlooking the mouth of a busy commercial and military harbour and then raised a petition asking for the nearby car ferry to be moved because they did not like all the trucks loading at 4.15am. That’s true too.

Or the people on a new housing estate squeezed into the corner of a large industrial site who asked for trucks to be banned from the adjacent road which linked the industrial estate to the motorway? Also true.

Then there were the people who vetoed a futuristic monorail as it would obscure their view of the barren and dilapidated Victorian seafront and the ones who objected to the replacement of beach huts as the new ones would obscure the uninterrupted view of shingle for about 100m on the 6km seafront.  All true and all examples from the recent past in Portsmouth, UK – but in any city, anywhere, this resistance to change and imposition of unreasonable expectations about a peaceful idyll in an urban environment exist. Why is that?

Is it related to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? (First we need physiological security – food and water, then safety (shelter and employment) and when we have these we need love (family and friends) and after that we move onto self-esteem and finally, self-actualisation). Being one of the basic needs of an individual would explain the desire for control of the local environment and comfort within it, but it does not explain the resistance to change.

In all other walks of life we celebrate change – those photos of and the excitement associated with babies first steps or first words, the marks on the wall as growth miraculously occurs, the fervent baying on the terraces of fans dreaming of a better performance from their team leading to a move to a higher league or a win against superior opposition, the wish for a better, more expensive car or TV or holiday. Wherever we look, the human race is chasing change and trying to improve and hoping for better until we come to where we live – at which point some deep almost Luddite resistance to change takes over.

I guess it comes down to the old adage, “An Englishman’s Home is his Castle” – in France people volunteer for a new high speed train line near their home as they know they will get better compensation for losing their home than if they sold it on the open market with no risk of nearby trains…  Perhaps we need, as a population, to start pointing out 2 things:

• When you buy the freehold to a property you own that property but the Queen owns the land on which it sits and she is effectively leasing it to you forever, unless she (or her government) decide otherwise 
• When you buy a property, you are buying that property. You are not buying the view or any ability to decide what is built nearby

If we could make these 2 points clear as part of the completion of any purchase transaction and support them within the planning process, I am sure that much of the resistance to change could be seen for what it is and treated accordingly – an irrational desire to attain a Victorian style of life which was not real then and cannot be real now and, if not resisted, will continue to damage our society and hinder progress and the development of our economy.

So if you see a NIMBY, do me a favour and tell that NIMBY he/she is behaving irrationally and their resistance to change is damaging the development of our society.

Conversely, feel free to tell me where I am mistaken and why you, as an individual, expect to be able to exert disproportionate pressure on decisions affecting your local environment.