How do affordable housing seekers fare in the Nimby vs Yimby struggle? That depends upon whether we view shelter as a human right, or home ownership as a means to wealth-building.
The New York Times
Not in Her Backyard
By Conor Dougherty
June 5, 2022
Excerpts:
Susan Kirsch is a 78-year-old retired teacher who lives in a small cottage home in Mill Valley, Calif., on a quiet suburban street that looks toward a grassy knoll.
The cause that takes up most of her time is fighting new development and campaigning for the right of suburban cities to have near total control over what gets built in them. We met just before the pandemic, after Ms. Kirsch sent an email inviting me to coffee and in the note suggested that my reporting on the nation’s housing problems could benefit from her slow-growth perspective.
We know what we’re talking about, Susan Kirsch is a NIMBY. NIMBY stands for “Not in my backyard,” an acronym that proliferated in the early 1980s to describe neighbors who fight nearby development, especially anything involving apartments. NIMBYs who used to be viewed as, at best, defenders of their community, and at worst just practical, are now painted as housing hoarders whose efforts have increased racial segregation, deepened wealth inequality and are robbing the next generation of the American dream.
In a country with little national housing policy, the thicket of zoning, environmental and historic preservation laws that govern local land use are the primary regulators of a multi-trillion-dollar land market that is the source of most households’ wealth and form the map for how the nation’s economy and society are laid out.
Around the country, cities and states that have struggled to tame rising housing costs are now trying to wrest control from neighborhood activists like Ms. Kirsch. Their logic is that too much of the power over whether new housing and infrastructure projects get built is left to a relatively small band of activists who pack late-night city meetings to tell their city councils that whatever is being proposed is “out of character” and should be built somewhere else — not in their backyard.
To distinguish themselves from NIMBYs, the current generation of housing activists has adopted new “back yard” variants (YIMBY, “Yes in my backyard”) to declare how they are for things that a NIMBY presumably is not. Politicians have piled on: In California, homeowners who are used to being catered to with a host of regulatory and tax policies recently woke up to discover that their governor, Gavin Newsom, told The San Francisco Chronicle, “NIMBYism is destroying the state.”
Ms. Kirsch’s nonprofit, Catalysts for Local Control, opposes just about every law the California legislature puts forward to address the state’s housing and homelessness problem. In Zoom meetings with her members, she describes lawmakers’ intentions in dark terms and drives the message home with graphics that say things like, “Our homes and cities are under attack.”
The impulse behind NIMBYism is timeless: People who already live somewhere have always raised objections to newcomers. The feeling applies to renters as well as homeowners, crosses boundaries of race, class, and culture, and has been a part of urban life for centuries.
California is now a different place with a different struggle, and a lack of housing is at its center. It’s not just that the $800,000 median home price is too expensive, or that the 100,000 people who sleep outside are a daily tragedy, or that the outflow of cost-of-living refugees has helped steer it into population decline. It’s that those statistics have raised hard questions about the state’s governance and sense of self.
Ms. Kirsch does not deny that California has a housing problem but has a different narrative about why. In her telling the state’s problems have little to do with the lack of housing — a diagnosis that unites basically every liberal and conservative economist— but instead blames investors who buy single-family houses, big technology companies, and inequality generally.
She wraps her opposition to development in a conservative philosophy that a smaller local government is better and more responsive to its citizens than a bigger one further away. “It feels like huge forces conspiring to take away control from people at the lowest level at which they live,” she said.
Yimbytown vs. Nimbytown
Alan Durning, founder of the Sightline Institute, a sustainability think tank that pushes for dense housing, was feeling triumphant. He was on a stage in Portland, Ore., addressing the 2022 Yimbytown conference, which bills itself as a gathering of pro-housing activists and draws heavily from the ranks of embittered millennials who feel locked out of the housing market and under the thumb of rising rents.
Mr. Durning had just referenced a host of new state and local development laws — from California to Seattle, Minneapolis, Austin and Connecticut — that in the past two years have shifted the national conversation around housing. New rules that allow homeowners to build second homes in their yards. Sweeping legislation to discard single-family zoning restrictions that ban apartments in suburban neighborhoods.
He added: “We want abundance of housing.” The word “abundance” was not incidental. It refers to an emerging framework that says many of America’s deepest problems stem from shortages — too few houses, not enough colleges, a lack of wind and solar projects — and the only way to solve them is to build.
Susan Kirsch was partial to “Small Is Beautiful,” which was published in 1973 by the economist E.F. Schumacher. The book cast doubt on a growth-at-all costs mentality and was but one entry in what the historian Kevin Starr called “this developing genre of population and land use apocalypse.” “I think greater self-reliance and self-resiliency are qualities that keep a community or culture strong,” Ms. Kirsch said of the book.
“It became a politics of quality of life rather than a politics of prosperity,” said Jacob Anbinder, a Ph.D candidate at Harvard whose dissertation is on the emergence of anti-growth politics in the postwar period.
“We’re all getting clobbered”
In retrospect, 2016 was a turning point of a different sort. It marked the beginning of a blitz of state legislation that would force cities to accept higher density neighborhoods in the form of backyard units and duplexes that could no longer be prohibited by local governments, and even higher density in the future, after the state reformed a longstanding planning process to increase the amount of growth cities have to plan for. To make sure cities actually comply, Governor Gavin Newsom recently created an “accountability and enforcement unit,” a sort of NIMBY patrol that monitors whether or not localities are approving new housing.
When you ask a planner or policy wonk how this happened, they point to a series of dull but important bills that were modest in isolation. Stacked together, however, they’ve shifted power over housing away from city councils to state bureaucrats and local planning and building departments — a move intended to prevent activists like Ms. Kirsch from having so much influence over whether new housing gets approved.
They also got comparatively little press coverage or debate, because most of the attention was consumed by a more extreme series of bills proposed by Scott Wiener, a state senator from San Francisco, from 2018 to 2020. The bills had various forms — none passed — but would have forced California cities to allow four- to eight-story buildings within a mile of rail stations and bus stops, regardless of local rules.
“I’m a former local elected official and former neighborhood association president — I am a huge believer in making decisions at a local level and people passionately tending to their community,” Mr. Wiener said in an interview. “But we’re going over the cliff, and whatever the benefits of local decision making, and there really are benefits, it has failed to produce the housing we need.”
One afternoon in 2018, after traveling to San Francisco to hear Mr. Wiener talk about his plans at a police station, Ms. Kirsch and a group of furious attendees left the meeting for a nearby restaurant, where they founded a organization called Livable California. Its aim was to take the fight for local government to the statehouse.
“The whole thing was, we’re all getting clobbered, we’ll have greater impact if we unify,” she said.
Over the course of several interviews, many of the most active homeowners expressed a feeling of upper middle-class regression. It seems unfair to them that people who did exactly what society told them to do — buy a house, get involved in their neighborhood — are now being asked to accept large changes in their surroundings.
The Homevoter Hypothesis
Housing politics is driven by emotion, specifically the fear of losing what you have. The economist William Fischel, a professor at Dartmouth, laid out the financial dimensions in a theory — “The Homevoter Hypothesis” — that holds NIMBYism is a form of insurance. Since you can’t buy a policy that will protect you from the neighborhood going to hell, the thinking goes, people compensate by packing planning meetings to fight anything they perceive as a threat.
I asked the obvious question: With so many things to be angry about, why spend so much time fighting some condos?
“I suppose it is just that feeling of home,” Ms. Kirsch said. “Just that feeling of home and the safety and security and groundedness that goes with having a safe place to go to at the end of the day, where you can believe you can have security, you don’t need to worry about how are you going to have money for both food and insurance and dental care for your kids and all of those things, that metaphor of home as a place of comfort.”
The natural follow-up was what about the next generation, who say they are fighting for that too?
She defaulted to neighborhood control. “Local communities would do a much better job of solving these problems,” she said. “Using the language of centralized power is what charges me to do this — I think small is beautiful.”
Conor Dougherty is an economics reporter and the author of “Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America.” His work focuses on the West Coast, real estate and wage stagnation among U.S. workers. @ConorDougherty
Comment:
The Homevoter Hypothesis plays out across the nation. Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood is a similar case. A small group of the Wallingford Community Council loudly opposed the city’s efforts to expand the city’s proposed urban village boundaries, focusing almost entirely on restricting any type of housing beyond single-family homes. In 60 years the neighborhood went from one that was open to housing the diversity of Seattle residents, to one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city, where the median single-family home is valued at nearly $1 million.
As it stands now, the city’s zoning code is an exercise in opportunity hoarding: limiting the option of home ownership to the few who can afford to live in the central city. This in the face of an increasing need for homes of many types and sizes and prices across a growing city.
The process is driven by incumbent homeowner interests representing a minority of residents, packing organized planning meetings to fight anything they perceive as a threat. This is no different from what political observers also see on the national electoral landscape: a tyranny of the minority.
In August 2020, Portland City Council passed the Residential Infill Policy zoning code reform legalizing duplexes, triplexes, and backyard cottages. Before 1970 it was common to see these moderate density housing types interspersed within residential neighborhoods. By making it once again legal to build these small homes in predominantly single family areas, Portland has opened the option for residents who want something in between an apartment building and a freestanding house.
“The idea is for that extra square footage [of building space on an existing lot] to work like a sluice gate for Portland’s housing market, rechanneling investment away from luxury remodels and McMansions and toward new homes that are affordable to the middle class”.
Let’s be clear, making this option city-wide does not open a flood gate for higher density housing. This is not urban renewal, concentrated in a specific location. New construction of this type will be a trickle, a gradual process giving homeowners or developers who find it advantageous an opportunity to take this option. The RIP code amendment is one modest measure in the ‘abundant housing’ toolbox. A more potent policy is economic: unleashing the power of the market by enabling a land-weighted property tax, which lowers the tax on buildings and leads to greater city-wide supply of housing.
It is our opinion, however, that adopting these incremental measures has not necessarily “shifted power over housing away from city councils to state bureaucrats and local planning and building departments”. Local elected officials too are increasingly concerned about the housing affordability gap, and are taking actions to mitigate the crisis.
Are not the households seeking affordable housing now becoming the majority? In this Nimby vs Yimby struggle, it’s about time for the silent majority to raise the voice of reason. Fear is not a legitimate motivator. By pushing gradually and deliberately towards social inclusion, we can again reach a point where the fear of “losing what you have” will be behind us. With this effort must also come the acceptance of the premise that housing is a right, and home ownership is not the predominate means to wealth-building.
Tom Gihring, Research Director
Common Ground OR-WA
