What People Misunderstand About NIMBYs

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Housing-policy experts largely agree that the solution to a housing-affordability crisis is to build more housing. Many residents support this notion in theory, until they’re faced with the possibility of new housing developments in their own backyard—in other words, NIMBYs. But Atlantic staff writer Jerusalem Demsas argues in a recent article that maybe these presumed villains of progress aren’t the problem. Instead, they’re a symptom of an approach to housing development that’s doomed to fail.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Local Control

Kelli María Korducki: You’ve written extensively about the national housing shortage and how it’s making housing unaffordable for many people across the country. Why do new building projects often get held up or shut down, over and over again, by residents who say they want more affordable housing in their communities?

Jerusalem Demsas: People are very unhappy with the lack of housing affordability. They’ll say in polls that they want there to be more types of housing available, that they want there to be more affordable types of housing available. They want their kids to be able to live near them. They want there to be senior housing. They want teachers to be able to afford to live in their communities; there’s concern about police officers policing communities that they’re not actually able to live in too. And yet, time and again, projects fail, because no individual development can check every single box for everyone.

In the story that I write, I’m zeroing in on Denver and Colorado. But a lot of the point that I’m trying to make is that you could replace those geographical names with basically anywhere and see the same story playing out. The promise of localism, of local control, is that you are responding to the particular needs and concerns of the people who live in that specific area. But if municipalities across the country keep reaching the same roadblocks—which ultimately lead to anti-development, anti-growth outcomes—is that actually a response to particular concerns? Or is that a structural problem?

Kelli: You make a bold assertion in your article: “Sometimes NIMBYs have a point.” What do you mean by that?

Jerusalem: A single development can’t balance all of the concerns people have about housing. If the question is “Should we allow this block to turn into duplexes?” community members who support the idea of building more housing in general might respond, “Why here?” And that response could be informed by reasonable concerns about housing that are broader than what that single development project entails. They may have concerns about gentrification, or about open space, or about the types of housing that are currently available.

If I’m representing a city, and I’m trying to convert one hotel into homeless housing, it’s not going to respond to green-space concerns. It’s not going to be able to speak to that, or to senior housing, or to teacher housing, or anything like that. Similarly, if you’re trying to build a new condo development in an area where increasing numbers of rich young people are moving for jobs, that’s not going to respond to the needs of people who have different kinds of concerns. And because no individual developments can check every single box, many projects end up falling through.

Kelli: So what you’re saying is that when hyperlocal political players are given too much power in these development plans, the bigger picture of a municipality or state’s housing needs can get lost. And this can end up sabotaging progress in actually building the new housing that people want and need.

Jerusalem: Exactly. We live in a pretty segregated society, both by class and by race, and on a variety of other different measures. When you restrict a development discussion to a very hyperlocal level, then you can’t have necessary conversations to balance the wants of various interest groups. If you’re dealing with a very rich, white area whose residents are wedded to their exclusionary zoning, they’re always going to resist giving up their space for, for example, homeless housing. And even if these people want homeless housing to exist in general, they have no power to make that occur somewhere else. The only power they have is to exclude it from happening in their own place.

When you expand the development process beyond a very hyperlocal level, then you can actually have broad conversations about what the state needs, and not just what this one locality says they want because they happen to live there right now.

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P.S.

If you’re looking for a more narrative perspective on the social and economic divisions feeding America’s development deadlocks, check out Atlantic staff writer George Packer’s National Book Award–winning 2013 book, The Unwinding. In it, George traces the nation’s descent toward a modern era in which “winners win bigger than ever, floating away like bloated dirigibles, and losers have a long way to fall before they hit bottom, and sometimes they never do.”

— Kelli

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.