Monday Morning Thoughts: On NIMBYism

Reading the column by Llewellyn King this week (How NIMBYism is strangling America (link)) is a reminder to me that slow growth advocates have lost the rhetorical debate.  While some have argued that the term is a pejorative, NIMBY, just like its antecedent phenomenon, has grown roots and planted itself deep into our discourse.

Personally I am not a big fan of labeling people—it tends to divide and forces people to dig in deeper rather than reconsidering their perspective.

Nevertheless, the term, which literally means “not in my backyard,” is particularly apt for this debate.  Housing, after all, has to go some place, and if not here, then somewhere else.  In our community, that means forcing people to move further away from things like UC Davis where they work and therefore to clog the roads and increase VMT and thus GHG.

As I have argued, building housing doesn’t mean there are more people, it merely relocates where those people are.  Thus, if you don’t put them in your community, you are de facto putting them somewhere else.

We know from the housing crisis in California, and increasingly nationally, that we have not built enough homes to keep up with population growth and that has led to rising housing costs that threaten to create a further discrepancy between rich and poor in this nation.

I appreciate King’s column this week not because it offers some new and deep insight into the problem, but rather because of its potential to bring this debate and discussion to new portions of the country and new readers.

King calls it a “modern plague” and describes its manta as that of “everyone who wants wherever they are to remain as it is — in perpetuity.”

NIMYism, King writes, “has also contributed to the housing crisis. It makes it so hard to build anything that disturbs the serenity of those who live in leafy suburbs with manicured lawns, and, perhaps, designer dogs. Yes, people like me — even though I can’t afford one of those homes or dogs.”

He adds, “If you are living the American Dream — two cars, swell house, well-tended garden — you are almost certainly a passive NIMBY contributor.”

He reminds us, “Active NIMBYs, abetted by the local ordinances that make life pleasant for the urban and suburban elites, fear that new housing will bring things they abhor: traffic, crowding, pollution and people of a different social class.”

This is a subtle point.  We see embedded in our local debates over land use—concerns about traffic.

We will also see a debate over “pollution” often in the form of “VMT” and “GHG” that new projects will produce environmental impacts.  As I have long pointed out, environmental impacts are a two-edged sword here.

On the one hand, adding more local traffic will in fact increase local carbon emissions.  But at the same time, globally, building in housing in one location does not add people and therefore vehicles to the global system.  Therefore if we think globally, the impact of housing should be neutral at worst.

Then there is the fact that putting more people closer to their jobs decreases VMT.  And building more efficient housing also helps on the margins.

One question I think a lot of us wonder about is how much housing restrictions, especially in affluent communities, are less about other impacts and more about keeping people of different social classes out of the community.

Historically, phenomena like “white flight” and its converse “gentrification” are real processes that are at work.  Upper middle class communities fear that population growth will lead to things like blight and increased crime.

Sunday Commentary: Rothstein, the Housing Issue, and Discrimination in Davis

Recall the discussion from 2019 when Richard Rothstein came to Davis in the pre-pandemic days.

One question that was asked—and I think it is the key to the entire NIMBYism phenomenon: “How can we maintain that small-town feel and still deal with our housing issues?”

His response was that “small-town feel is a euphemism for segregated community.”

This was heady stuff at the time.  I remarked at the time that the “audience roared with approval.”

I wrote a “small-town feel has been for years, probably decades, the rallying cry of slow growth Davis. It embodied the construction of Measure R, our ethos. And now at least someone on one night took the moment to call it for what it was—or what it seemed to be to an outsider.

“I guess a critical question then, which underlies our policies and our politics, is whether the whole movement for growth control is linked to issues like small town feel, safety, preserving our character and the like—a racial issue.”

One of the major themes of Rothstein’s work is that the segregated patterns of the north—far worse in terms of housing than at any time in the south—is the result not of accident but of deliberate governmental policy.

“This doesn’t sound to me much like de facto segregation,” Richard Rothstein argued as he described concerted efforts to keep neighborhoods segregated.

But the other problem—the worse problem—is that we keep this community segregated because we have so constrained a supply as to drive up prices.

Here’s the thing Mr. Rothstein has said: “[U]nless we confront the history of this country… we are not going to be solve this problem.” And he added that “decreasing density is not going to desegregate this community.”

But he claims: “Policymakers know how to fix this.

“There is nothing mysterious about how to redress segregation in this country,” he added.

Rothstein offers a whole range of solutions including abolishing zoning ordinances that prohibit building multi-family housing, but I think we have to start taking away the tools that NIMBYs utilize to block housing projects—whether that is at the local level or the state and national level.

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