A new desktop city-building game has been launched which takes aim at the slow pace of housing construction in U.S. cities. Sim Nimby was developed by Brooklyn-based copywriters Steve Nass and Owen Weeks as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on what they view as 'NIMBYs' (Not In My Backyard neighbors) opposing new urban housing developments.

“We have people living on the street or people paying ridiculous amounts in rent for tiny apartments, and people are complaining about preserving their views and worrying about the local character?” Nass told Bloomberg in a recent interview on the game, which the pair planned one evening while in a New York City bar. “The idea for it came up in conversation, like, ‘Oh, what if we made a city-building game that’s run by NIMBYs?’”

The game draws inspiration from the SimCity video game, where users construct a city environment while confronted with absurd obstacles such as alien invasions. In Sim Nimby, such otherworldly obstacles are replaced by satirical NIMBY refrains, such as “Housing? Surely there must be other ways to deal with the unhoused,” or “We can’t tear down that historic brownstone. It’s where Gene Quintano wrote "Police Academy 3: Back in Training” or “Housing is a human right! Just why does it have to be here?”

Such quips occur any time the player seeks to create a new building or demolish any existing buildings dotted across the map, resulting in perhaps the first city-building game where nothing is, or will ever be, built.

Despite its satirical attitude, Nass and Weeks developed the game to channel their serious frustration at the forces which undermine housing construction, such as strict zoning laws and local politics that Nass experienced first-hand when living in San Francisco. Such impasses come despite various analyses which put the U.S. national housing shortage at between 1.1 million and 5.5 million homes.

“Usually you want a joke to transcend boundaries and culture, but in this case, it’s a bit depressing,” Nass told Bloomberg. “It turns out it wasn’t just a San Francisco issue.”