As someone who sat on stage during the infamous Ballard town hall of 2018 — “the day Seattle Nice died” — I’ve spent a fair amount of time reflecting on why people feel the way they do about the homelessness crisis. More specifically, I’ve done some thinking about the enraged NIMBY, a specimen that was out in force that evening. Although I hope and believe this specimen is still rather rare, even in Ballard, it’s worth examining as a kind of archetype; NIMBY rage is the distillation of a set of feelings and opinions that also resonate, if less strongly, with a much broader swath of the population. This broader group is not all older, or all white, or all homeowners, but that’s their core demographic, and the archetypal enraged NIMBY is most definitely an older white homeowner. And this core demographic shares a core experience, which is in many respects a generational experience.

Many people born into the postwar decades of the last century developed a sense of living in a world defined by a set of rules and expectations, a sense of what one owes and is owed by society. You got a job (or got married), worked hard, bought a house and a car or two, abided by the law, saved money, put your kids through college, and after 35 years or so you were free to enjoy a comfortable retirement. The middle-class American Dream, if you like. Not a transcendent existence, maybe, but one that has its rewards.



To call this a social contract would be to misrepresent the way this state of affairs came about — the imperialism and the wars, the class struggle, the racial oppression — and also to ignore that this arrangement was available only to a relatively privileged and mostly white part of the population. Still, for the many who enjoyed this life, it must have been possible to experience it as a kind of social contract, with all the solidity and sense of deserving that implies. It must have seemed eternal, immutable. But it wasn’t. In retrospect it was an anomaly, a temporary and tenuous détente. We don’t live in that world anymore.