NIMBY was born in the nuclear waste business. It was a label for the public, coined by people who wanted to build things the public did not want nearby.
The letters stand for "not in my back yard." For years the standard first citation, the one the Oxford English Dictionary used, came from the Christian Science Monitor of November 6, 1980. In an article on hazardous waste, Emilie Travel Livezey wrote: "It's an attitude referred to in the trade as NIMBY." Her phrase "in the trade" already suggested the word was older than her article.
It was. The etymology site Word Histories traced it to the Daily Press of Newport News, Virginia, on February 13, 1979. The report, datelined Williamsburg, covered a meeting on radioactive waste disposal. It closed with the line that "the 'nimby' (not in my backyard) syndrome must be eliminated."
Who said it is less clear. The keynote speaker was Joseph A. Lieberman, a 20-year veteran of the Atomic Energy Commission, and Wikipedia says the article may have been quoting him. In the excerpt Word Histories prints, though, the nimby line is the reporter's narration, outside his quoted words.
That origin explains the word's sting. NIMBY was used first by promoters of projects, about the residents who opposed them. It implies that objectors do not mind a dump or a plant in principle, only near their own homes. Opponents resented the label early. In 1985 the press officer of the Druridge Bay Campaign, writing in a Newcastle newspaper, mocked it: "NIMBY here, NIMBY there, NIMBY, NIMBY everywhere."
The word spread fast. NIMBYism appears in a New Jersey editorial by 1983. In Britain the Conservative environment secretary Nicholas Ridley helped popularize it in the 1980s, and the OED added it in 1989.
It also spawned a family of acronyms. Planners and critics now speak of BANANA, "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything," and CAVE, "citizens against virtually everything." On the other side, the pro-housing YIMBY movement turned the insult inside out: "yes in my back yard."