I was on ABC radio afternoons with James O’Loghlin last week and we were musing about when it was that Nimbys – “Not In My Backyard” opponents of high-rise developments – went from heroes to villains.

There was a time when they were lauded as the community minded zealots who went to the barricades to protect us against rapacious developers.

Now, according to none other than NSW Premier Chris Minns, people who defend their suburbs against the development of apartment blocks are virtually responsible for homeless families sleeping in cars.

Later he decried ‘Toxic Nimbyism” at the same conference where Federal Housing Minister Clare O’Neil said Nimbys were denying a generation of young Australians the chance to own their own homes.

Nimbys’ transmutation from goodies to baddies was crystalised last week when Premier Minns announced that a railway station in the leafy, upmarket Eastern suburb of Woollhara, abandoned unfinished in the 1970s due public pressure, would be completed and finally put to work.

That, coincidentally, would trigger the element in planning laws that allows permissions for high rise apartment blocks near transport hubs to by-pass normal council restraints, purportedly fast-tracking the development of 10,000 new homes in the area.

Inevitably, the well-heeled denizens of Woollahra will fight this tooth and nail, just as they did in the 70s. This time, however, the stats are stacked against them. In the interim, according to the Premier, while greater Sydney’s population has increased by 74 per cent, Woollahra’s has reduced by 10 per cent.

Not even trying to carry your fair share of the population burden will be enough to shift Woollahra’s Nimby’s – and those from other salubrious burbs like Mosman and Rose Bay – from the hero to villain column in many observers’ eyes.

Back in the 1970s, when Woollahra station was being reduced to merely a flash of daylight for rail passengers between the city and Bondi Junction, the Green Bans were in full swing.

Then, builders unions refused to work on projects that reduced parklands and open spaces and forced ordinary people out of their homes so that ugly apartments could be built.

Kings Cross activist Juanita Nielsen sacrificed her life to the movement but earned a small plaque in the pavement outside her little terraced house in Victoria St.

Later, in 1998, thousands of locals in Bondi Beach, led by The Castle star Michael Caton, protested against a plan to link the Eastern Suburbs rail line from Bondi Junction to the beach itself.

They claimed rents would rise and crime would increase as thousands of additional people poured on to the iconic beach. That plan also withered and died, but without so much of a turf being turned, let alone a station being built.

No one is going to march down Woollahra’s leafy lanes to demand the right to live in an area with soaring rents and property prices but dwindling numbers of residents. That said, there will be plenty of lawyers and judges prepared to take up legal cudgels to defend their privileges.

And that’s the line where the shift from hero to villain occurs. When you are representing the underdogs against powerful forces, your halo will shine brightly, like the people in Juanita Nielsen’s old stomping ground trying to prevent affordable units from being demolished to make way for considerably fewer luxury pads.

But once you become the rich and the powerful, and ordinary people are seen to be suffering from your actions, you can go from goody to baddy faster than hands go up at a.

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