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Publication Date: July 15th, 2026

What happens to a progressive town when NIMBY and YIMBY switch sides over public housing? See the coming Bliss Towers debacle.

Image remixed creatively from The Economist Magazine.

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The Briefing Box:

• The Slur: NIMBY is the last insult a progressive can use at full volume without an HR complaint. It was coined in 1979, for nuclear waste.[1]
• The Switch: Hudson’s housing establishment defends two subsidized projects, the proposed multi-phase HHA redevelopment at 41 North Second Street, whose public documents remain inconsistent about the exact final unit count, and the 70-unit Mill Street Lofts project on a dead-end street in the Fourth Ward. Most homeowners want them moved closer to their own streets.[2]
• The Record: The city’s own 2018 and 2021 housing plans call for spreading affordable housing across the city. Bliss 2.0 does the opposite.[3]
• The Ask: Most everyone in Hudson wants more housing. But they want it for existing residents, or for residents facing housing insecurity. The harder questions are whom the additional units are intended to serve, whether the scale is suitable, and whether the proposed sites are sound. Expect blowback. </aside>

Hudson runs topsy-turvy. It always has. So no one should be surprised that NIMBY and YIMBY, the two warring tribes of American housing, have swapped sides here.

There is a word that will get you cancelled in Hudson faster than any slur in the language. It is not the one you are thinking of. It runs five letters, and the city’s most enlightened residents may still use it at a dinner party, a Planning Board meeting, or in a blog comment, without a raised eyebrow.

The word is NIMBY.

The truly forbidden five-letter word, the one nobody prints, follows a rule everyone understands: you may use it, if at all, only inside the group it once wounded, never across the line. NIMBY has quietly grown the same etiquette, minus the tragedy. It gets fired from one affluent progressive at another, homeowner at homeowner, across the comment sections of the Hudson Valley like grapeshot at a very small, very well-catered civil war.[4]

The one person it never hits is the low-income resident everyone claims to be fighting for. Nobody calls a Bliss Towers family NIMBY. They are the group both armies claim to protect, and the only one the slur never touches.

“NIMBY really is a within-group weapon.”

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A Short History of Three Ugly Acronyms

**QUIMBY, Quality In My Backyard.** The quieter question, and the only honest one.[6] Not whether to build, but whether what gets built is any good. Means: build it well, wherever it goes.

**YIMBY, Yes In My Backyard.** San Francisco, 2014. A math teacher priced out of the Bay Area started a renters’ movement, and tech money followed. [5] Means: build it near me.

**NIMBY, Not In My Backyard.** Coined in 1979 in Virginia, for nuclear and hazardous waste dumps, not housing.[1] It crossed to Britain, picked up its sneer, and became a housing insult in the 1980s. Means: keep it away from me.

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The Slur Nobody Examines

The word was born a hypocrite. Nicholas Ridley, the British environment secretary who swung NIMBY hardest at his countrymen, got caught fighting a development near his own house.[7] The acronym has stayed in character ever since. It arrives pre-loaded with a picture, the selfish homeowner, and does its discrediting before anyone states a fact.

The YIMBY side hardened around the same trick. Building is holy, questions are selfish, and there are only two kinds of people. That leaves no room for the third and most sensible one, the QUIMBY position: a town can want housing and still ask whether this plan, on this site, is any good. In a captured town, the question itself counts as heresy.

Hudson Ran the Script Backwards