"Neither Hypocrite nor 'Homevoter': The Ideological Origins of the Liberal NIMBY," Jacob Anbinder, Cornell

Event Time

Monday, November 9, 2026

4:10 to 5:10 PM

Open to the Yale community and invited scholars.

Location

Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Room A002
77 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511

Speaker

Jacob Anbinder, Postdoctoral Fellow, Cornell University

Description

Government Effectiveness Working Group Speakers Series

Abstract

NIMBYism has received a surge of recent attention from political scientists, sociologists, urban planners, journalists, and legal scholars. Yet our understanding of its root causes — particularly when progressives espouse NIMBY views — is still in its infancy. Based on my forthcoming book, NIMBY Nation, this talk examines the history of liberal NIMBYism, tracing its origins to the party realignment of the postwar decades and, specifically, to the ideological transformations that took place within American liberalism around the issue of urban growth. In places like Boston, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area, environmentalists, preservationists, and neighborhood activists began to question the previously unassailable idea that “the good life” demanded the unfettered development of the cities and suburbs in which they lived. By the late 20th century, their work had forged a new antigrowth liberalism which appealed to disillusioned New Dealers, lapsed leftists, and moderates abandoning the Republican Party. This generation of Democrats was much more skeptical of — and in many cases downright hostile toward — not only urban growth itself, but also the idea that such growth was in any way compatible with liberalism as they now defined it.

Biography

Jacob Anbinder is an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow, a visiting scholar in the history department at Cornell University, and the manager of academic engagement and impact at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a nonpartisan think tank. A historian of the modern United States with a particular focus on the politics of cities and suburbs in the 20th century, he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2023 and a B.A. from Yale in 2014. Jacob’s book NIMBY Nation: The War on Growth That Created Our Housing Crisis and Remade American Politics will be published by Bloomsbury in late 2027.