Title: Backyard politics: A tour of evolving IMBY coalitions and rights frameworks supporting (and eroding) social inclusion

Abstract: NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) movements have been a longstanding concern for all housing developers, but especially those engaged in non-profit and low-income housing construction. Frequently NIMBY movements dominate and mobilize neighbourhood associations against developments that might “change the character” of “their” neighbourhoods. Recently a variety of YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) movements have been organized to support developments in response to a variety of concerns, including the exclusionary aspects of NIMBYism and its failure to represent the diversity and interests of both local neighbourhoods and cities as a whole. Other IMBY movements, like PHIMBY (Public Housing In My Backyard) or QIMBY (Quality in My Backyard), shift between more general NIMBY and YIMBY coalitions depending upon what’s being built or proposed. In this paper, I provide a brief tour of the IMBY zoo and also attempt to decipher how rights claims and concerns for social inclusion get built into or left out of different kinds of coalitions. Where possible, I draw upon examples to illustrate claims and coalition-building dynamics both in BC and abroad.

Summary: Theoretically, condominium developments offer a relatively new and exceptionally flexible form of housing stock. By legal innovation and subdivision of land costs, they enable a broader range of people to enter home ownership. This makes condominiums competitive with purpose-built rental buildings in high land-value areas, but when rented out by investor-landlords condominiums can also contribute to rental markets. Yet the flexibility of condominium housing stock comes at the cost of making the rights associated with both ownership and rental tenures more precarious. Moreover, condominiums are often vilified in debates over development. In the urban imaginary, new condominium developments are often assumed to bring only gentrifiers, fail to meet the needs of families, or go empty, serving merely as safety-deposit boxes in the sky. It’s useful to establish who lives in condominiums, both in terms of understanding who’s at risk of condominium-induced forms of precarity and how condominiums respond to housing needs more broadly. In this paper, we explore the socio-legal flexibility of condominiums and draw upon a mix of Canadian census data and administrative data to investigate how who lives in them has varied through time and across different Canadian cities. Where possible, we provide comparisons with other forms of development (e.g., freehold, purpose-built rental), holding other features constant (e.g., age, structure, location, number of bedrooms), to evaluate how condominium residents differ from others.