The de Blasio Administration has recently embraced policies aimed at dismantling the entrenched dysfunction of two different city systems — jails and homeless shelters. Both decisions rely on moving these facilities into communities, on the theory that communities should take care of their own. But the new approach is raising an old problem — residents who don't want shelters and jails in their own backyards.

New York University historian Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City, a new book about New York's fiscal crisis in the 70's, said the term NIMBY was first adopted by lower- and middle-income people fighting for environmental justice.

"Although later it would become a term used critically to connote selfishness, at first people tended to use it to praise community efforts to stop the building of facilities that were thought to bring dangerous chemicals and contaminants into their neighborhoods," she said. 

The use of the term changed over time. In New York City in the 1980's, Mayor Edward I. Koch criticized working-class communities who protested against jails, shelters and methadone clinics, including a jail on White Street in Manhattan that today is known as The Tombs. 

"That was a time when many communities had only recently actually lost city facilities that they wanted to have, like firehouses [and] police stations, and there was a great anxiety about kind of rising poverty in the city," said Pillips-Fein.

She said the battles of today have more to do with gentrification and home-ownership than in the 70's and 80's. 

Click the arrow above to listen to the full interview with New York City historian Kim Phillips-Fein.