Why Are There a Million NIMBY-Themed Movies and No YIMBY-Themed Ones?
There's a reason, it just isn't good
NIMBYism surely benefits from the fact that anti-development themes are common in TV and movies. Underdog narratives often involve an evil developer who wants to bulldoze the protagonists’ beloved home/summer camp/enchanted forest full of talking animals voiced by second-tier celebrities. We see this dynamic all the time — here it is in the movie Up:
The lovable old coot is clearly the good guy and the suit-wearing developer is clearly the bad guy. The writers know that vanishingly few viewers will consider that the old guy is actually quite rich — he has an asset that he could borrow against or sell for a large profit — and the developer is creating jobs while expanding the housing supply.1 The “homeowner good/developer bad” dynamic is so hard-wired that writers universally consider it to be the starting point for madcap hijinks, not a nuanced situation that needs explaining.
Why are things this way? Why can’t the good guy be a poor-but-plucky striver who is thwarted by a rich-and-powerful person defending what they have? This happens in real life — people get stuck in bad neighborhoods, stuck with long commutes, and stuck in shitty environmental situations because housing/transportation/clean energy gets blocked by powerful people. I wondered, so I attempted to write a YIMBY-oriented script. But I ended up confronted by the fact that YIMBY narratives aren’t compatible with screenwriting principles or with human psychology, generally.