Numlock News: Taylor Orth on the NIMBY-YIMBY fault lines

Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Taylor Orth, who wrote “Many Americans say not in my backyard to prisons and homeless shelters” for YouGov. Here's what I wrote about it:

A new poll asked Americans how they felt about new kinds of development, but split the sample in two and asked half of them how they felt about building more things — playgrounds, hospitals, malls, stadiums — in their country in general, and then the other half asked the same questions but specifically asking locally, as in would they like those things in their local area. People like playgrounds (90 percent support nationally and 86 percent locally), grocery stores (86 percent and 84 percent, respectively) and bike lanes (77 percent/74 percent), but they don’t necessarily care for casinos (38 percent/34 percent) or strip clubs (26 percent/24 percent). What’s particularly fun to look at is amenities with a large gap between whether they want…