From Ecotopia to NIMBYland: Environment, Ideology, and the Antigrowth Style in California Politics

Join the Silicon Valley Archives in welcoming Jacob Anbinder and Michael Kahan on May 29, 2025, as they discuss Jacbob Anbinder's upcoming book NIMBY Nation: The War on Growth That Created Our Housing Crisis and Remade American Politics. This event is co-sponsored by The Bill Lane Center for the American West and The Stanford University Department of History. 

In 1975, a tiny Berkeley press published Ecotopia. Set in 1999, the novel told the story of a fledgling nation which had declared its independence from the U.S. out of disdain for America’s obsession with growth. Ecotopia ended up selling more than four hundred thousand copies and won author Ernest Callenbach praise in progressive circles for his visionary environmentalism.

For Callenbach and others, California was ground zero for the disasters wrought by unfettered urbanization. Yet it was also the place where an alternative politics focused on ecological protection and quality of life seemed most likely to emerge. In the seventies and eighties, California liberals embarked on an intensive effort to remake their political agenda in the Ecotopian mold. Whether expressing dismay about freeway traffic, forest fires, water use, overcrowded parks and beaches, the loss of scenic views, or the unsightliness of high-rises, environmental protection became the shared language through which they voiced their objection to growth. This “mood of revulsion,” as one journalist called it, permeated every level of politics and ultimately reshaped the state’s patterns of urban development and land use. Soon, however, the imbalance between people’s demand to live in California and California’s new inability to accommodate them produced one of the most severe housing shortages in American history. No longer the poster child of unchecked sprawl, the state instead found itself at the center of a new epidemic: NIMBYism.

Drawing on his forthcoming book NIMBY Nation, Anbinder tells a new history of California’s cost-of-living crisis that moves beyond simplistic caricatures of NIMBYs and their motives. Instead, he instead traces the origins of the housing shortage to a more fundamental shift in liberals’ ideas about whether urban growth could help effect social progress at all. This influential but largely overlooked political movement ultimately dismantled much of the “growth machine” that had built modern California. In doing so, however, antigrowth liberals created the conditions for the paradoxical problem that defines the Golden State today: namely, that America’s most ostensibly progressive place is too expensive for most Americans to live in.

Jacob Anbinder is a historian of the modern United States with a particular focus on the politics of cities and suburbs in the twentieth century. His research interests include the political economy of major infrastructure projects, movements for and against change to the built environment, and the ways in which sprawl and spatial segregation create social inequities. His writing has been published in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, Business History Review, The Week, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and other outlets.

Michael Kahan is the Co-Director of the Program on Urban Studies at Stanford University and a senior lecturer in Sociology at Stanford University.