The Righteous NIMBYs

NIMBY — “not in my back yard” — is usually applied to locals battling selfishly against a nearby project that’s plainly in the wider public interest that doesn’t really harm them, such as the baseless hysteria of some in Westchester that actually forced the closure of the Indian Point nuclear-power plant. But there’s a good NIMBY, too: when people rebel against illegal impositions on their neighborhood that the powers-that-be refuse to stop.

We’re thinking, of course, of folks who live near Washington Square Park who now have to put up with loud late-night raves and of the mom-and-pop merchants of Fordham Road in The Bronx long besieged by illegal street peddlers (at least until Post coverage prompted Mayor de Blasio to act).

On a larger scale, the victims include the law-abiding majority in every neighborhood rocked by rising shootings and gang crime — violence that’s been enabled by years of city and state legislators passing laws that restrict policing and make criminal behavior easier to get away with.

Whether executives like de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo or legislators like Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and their Democratic majorities, New York’s electeds can’t (or won’t) stand up for New York’s stakeholders — the people who do right — against all those who threaten public order and safety.

As ever, the better-off see the least of it: High earners pay to live in doorman buildings to keep the chaos at bay; more-profitable businesses hire private guards to secure their ’hoods. Meanwhile, those with more modest stakes, like Fordham Road businesses, suffer most from government’s failure to do its most basic jobs.

It’s another Tale of Two New Yorks, but the people of this “other New York” find their backyards seized by outsiders because the officials who should serve and protect them simply refuse to protect their common good.