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The earliest reference to "NIMBY" that I can find in the Washington Post is from Feb. 13, 1983, in a Jack Eisen MetroScene column. Helpfully, I also screenshotted, for you, the illo. 
This April 9, 1986 letter to the editor from a, uh, representative of the prison industrial complex?? lambasts D.C. for being NIMBY af about jails and suggests, literally, all eight wards.
ooh
Eisen wrote about the jail thing and how it was representative of NIMBYism at large a few days later, on April 13, 1986.
Everyone else is better at this than me.
A proto-YIMBYism of sorts begins to emerge in 1988, 1989. First clipping, which has YIMBY in the headline (!), is more about the defense budget, not necessarily spatial politics. The second clipping is about a clapping-for-Tinkerbell I-didn't-fight-the-thing "IMBY award" in Ffx.
Yeah, most of these earliest mentions are about locally unwanted land uses—jails and landfills and such.
Here's the good stuff: July 20, 1991, on affordable-housing barriers: "Local land use decision makers in my district have told me they want some sort of political cover to deal with NIMBY pressures." (Lots in here gets at why we have zero tradition of public housing, also.)
Nov. 4, 1991: o man is this the first diagnosis of the brain virus!!!: "Institutions will go with a tried-and-true pattern, what's least expensive. Often NIMBY reactions give us a stimulus to re-think, change the way we do things. A lot of progressive action has come from this."
A
LOT
OF
PROGRESSIVE
ACTION
HAS COME
FROM THIS
LOT
OF
PROGRESSIVE
ACTION
HAS COME
FROM THIS
I'm not doing this carefully enough to pinpoint the exact date that we changed over from NIMBYism toward LULUs to NIMBYism toward our neighbors (and there's still mixing of this—I'm screenshotting articles selectively), but this Nov. 12, 1991 piece seals the deal.
Brief interstitial to support the good people of Fairfax who, in 1993, and since 1989, were rightfully acknowledged by the United Way for welcoming their neighbors.
May 27, 1994 seemed like a simpler time, in which you could lambast people for being against whatever. Opposition to stadiums and train stations and basically everything is collapsed into "anti-growth" here. Also, the information superhighway makes an appearance.
Hi, my laptop died and I went to have something of a Friday (note: North Berkeley outdoor cats are all very good), but I'm back and THERE'S MORE. We're into the late '90s now! Soon I am going to run into stuff I remember reading when it was written!
This Nov. 29, 1998 piece is a pretty humane self-reflection on what's a little more than busybodying—what I've been calling the brain virus. And there's some highway-opposition-was-a-black-swan. Broken-windows policing is bad, and mowing triangle parks isn't like stopping roads.
March 19, 1999 letter to the editor: "On growth myths—and AOL": This lambasts Stephen Fuller and, uh, growth. (Can't believe we keep getting hung up on defining gentrification when we never sussed out what growth means.)
March 18, 1999: Story about Metropolitan Baptist Church's school, opposed by neighbors: "Neighbors say idea is fine, NE site isn't," haha, sounds so fucking familiar. List of churches paying up because of salty neighbors at the end.
May 5, 1999: An absolute trove here, in "Growing out of growth"!!!!!!! I extra-special screenshotted the part where this lady is just flouncing about how increased supply benefited her and now she wants people to go away. (This is 4 u @TribTowerViews.)
March 29, 2001: haha people in Vienna feel weird about development around Metro stations that their tax dollars paid for so we should cave to them lol (remember, today the Post wrote about why people still drive a lot in the D.C. region)
July 19, 2001: Duany comes to Fairfax, everyone is skeptical, the Post asks, "Is bigger better?" and lands on that it is not. You know the drill: "It's the extra traffic, the slipping in of a high rise where there used to be a grassy area and so many more lights to go through."
Dec. 16, 2001: Eric Brennan are you #onhere? This is the YIMBYest screed I've read, could've come out last week.
Feb. 28, 2002: These people in Howard County, opposing daycares and high schools and crisis centers, seem nice and genuine and like they really deserve to be sincerely called "defenders of the neighborhood."
Aside: The majority of stories about development are in the suburbs, not in D.C., because even in the early 2000s, D.C. was still left for dead by most people. (The Year of Zero Building Permits was 1996 but early aughts still rocky!)
I think this is really important. It seems like central cities have been contested spaces wrt to development and growth forever because our dumb brains keep tiny timelines, and to a degree that's true, but the anti-dev senitment that I'm looking for rn seems to kick up where...
middle- to upper-class people were buying homes and wanted to protect their investment. That was Fairfax and Loudoun and Howard County for awhile (I'm running Montgomery stuff in a bunch of separate tabs because it reads a little differently). And now it's inside D.C.'s lines.
Reminder from June 9, 2002 that we don't do shit about housing, market-rate or affordable, in America
July 4, 2002: People in Fairfax NIMBY bees. NimBEEism, if you will, sez the Post.
Marc Fisher, YIMBYing hard about development around Metro, August 4, 2002
This Nov. 7, 2002 story is both the last thing I am finding in this cursed search and *the only* story that sounds like our contemporary language and concerns around displacement-by-redevelopment.
What to make of it? The way we are talking about growth not being equal or fair or inclusive now is *really* new. I think the Post gave too much favorable airtime to suburban assholes, but it was also batting for normcore smart-growth stuff like TOD—and we *still* didn't get TOD.
The D.C. region's best opportunity to make itself more affordable was by building more decades ago, and you can see that we are having the same fights, with the same words, now. I know this and I still have to remind myself that I do what I do because I *do* know this.
Homevoters are hell.
