In the past few weeks, I’ve gotten involved with a group of neighbors who are fighting against the development of a new Amazon “last mile” delivery station facility adjacent to our neighborhood.
Now, there are plenty of typical “NIMBY” reasons to not want a 24/7 logistics facility on this site—increased traffic, light and noise pollution, decreased home values, negative impacts to nearby open space and wildlife, poor neighborhood planning, etc.—but there’s a worrying hypocrisy at the heart of our NIMBYism, a having-and-eating-cake problem:
We don’t want this delivery station in our neighborhood, but we still want to buy things from Amazon—and we want those things fast.
For me, the classic NIMBY opposes development that has greater public good or necessity. Think of a garbage dump or highway or power plant. This person says, “I don’t want a highway running through my backyard,” with the implicit understanding that the development is fine if it runs through someone else’s backyard.
If we stand by this sense of NIMBY, accusing my neighborhood of NIMBYism feels a bit odd. Does fighting back against the development of one of thousands of logistics outposts of (at writing) the world’s most valuable company really represent opposition to something that is a public good or necessity? We’re not talking about a garbage dump here—we are talking about what is effectively a monopoly with interests that are hardly represented within the local community.
Or are they?
Remember, there’s a mean little hypocrisy at work here. While we do not want this 24/7 delivery station, we do want to keep ordering toilet paper and diapers off of Amazon, and we want those items on our doorsteps as soon as humanly possible.
How can we erase this hypocrisy? It is straightforward enough: stop buying things from Amazon.
In a sense, my neighbors who are both Prime members and opponents of the delivery station have found themselves with a having-and-eating-cake problem. (I’m at least safe from hypocrisy—I haven’t ordered anything from Amazon for years! But with more than half of Americans households holding Prime memberships, it stands to reason that at least half of my fellow neighbors are regular Amazon customers.) The tragic problem with the NIMBY defense of my neighbors—I don’t want a highway running through my backyard—is that our backyards is exactly where Amazon wants to be. Amazon just wants to be close to their customers! Someone else’s backyard just wouldn’t work. (Although, let’s be honest, they’re probably developing a delivery station for someone else’s backyard, too.) If the neighborhoods surrounding the development site had no Amazon customers, they wouldn’t bother.
After all, Amazon’s success isn’t due to sadism. Their company mission doesn’t have any language about ruining suburban neighborhoods across the US. They aren’t placing a delivery station near us because they’d like to stick it to the local HOAs and disrupt the area’s wildlife. They’re doing it because they make a lot of deliveries to our neighborhood, and placing a delivery station nearby is just plain common sense.
So, while I’m hopeful that we can still push back against the development, the base level hypocrisy of our neighborhood at large leaves a sour taste in my mouth. My advice to neighborhoods out there? If you don’t want an Amazon delivery station in your backyard, stop feeding the beast!
Taylor Coe 