Was Jane Jacobs the first NIMBY?

For this month's book club, Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias read The Death and Life of Great American Cities , the 1961 classic that changed how everyone thinks about neighborhoods. Rereading it as YIMBYs, they find a book that's right about what makes a street feel alive and wrong about almost everything that followed: Jacobs's push to devolve power to the neighborhood level became the veto…