As Sussex County struggles with housing affordability, inadequate infrastructure and the consequences of rapid growth, homebuilders increasingly point to a convenient culprit: the people who already live here. Residents who bought homes in Sussex, many in communities built and marketed by those same builders, are now dismissed as NIMBYs when they question more development.

But who really created this cycle?

For decades, the homebuilding industry has done far more than simply respond to people wanting to move to Sussex County. It has actively marketed wooded homesites, pond views, low taxes, open space and peaceful living near the beach through advertising, websites and out-of-state billboards. One billboard near the Delaware Memorial Bridge even invites motorists to discover why “everyone retires to Delaware.”

There is nothing wrong with marketing homes, meeting demand or earning a profit. But there is something wrong with helping create enormous demand for a particular lifestyle and then blaming the people who bought that lifestyle when they object to watching it disappear.

The sequence is simple. Builders market Sussex County, thousands of houses are built, and then people move here. When development outpaces infrastructure, traffic, flooding and overcrowding worsen. Residents then ask government to slow down, plan better and make infrastructure keep pace.

Their objections didn't create the problems; the problems created the objections.

Yet calling those residents NIMBYs conveniently reverses cause and effect. Concern about dangerous intersections, flooding, overcrowded schools, disappearing forests or inadequate emergency services becomes selfishness or resistance to change. The label avoids answering whether growth is occurring in the right places and whether infrastructure can support it.

Perhaps we should embrace the term on our own terms.

If a NIMBY is someone who expects growth to be planned, infrastructure to keep pace, environmental protections to mean something and citizens to retain a voice in shaping their communities, Sussex County could probably use a few more NIMBYs.

I support housing and responsible growth. Sussex County cannot and should not be frozen in time. But “build first and fix the consequences later” is not sound housing policy.

Builders helped sell the Sussex County dream and have exercised considerable influence over the housing market and public policies shaping development. They should help preserve what made Sussex worth buying, and stop blaming their own homebuyers, today's so-called NIMBYs, for an affordability, infrastructure and quality-of-life crisis they did not create simply because they noticed the dream they bought is being built away.