NIMBY Defined

 A NIMBY is someone who understands that the financial benefit of development to someone else outweighs any price they would be willing to pay to prevent that development and so attempt to achieve the same ends more cheaply by making nebulous claims of public harms. This inevitably entails claims of 'It could happen everywhere!', until it alarms enough people to gather sufficient political support to cause sufficient public clamor at a public meeting to intimidate council members. (This essential NIMBY tactic is my chief dispute with Missing Middle advocates. Upzoning everywhere threatens a lot of people with change).

A second standard NIMBY talking point is "Skyscrapers!" and "Manhattanization! and "East Coast!". Anyone who has actually traveled around the East coast can tell you that the pre-war urban core is dwarfed in scale by the surrounding suburbs, and that average density metropolitan density is quite low. But it's designed to cause fear, and it's almost always coupled with cries of "Crime! Renters!" like it's still 1980.