BEYOND NIMBYISM

How real-estate snobs shut down development.

It was 2005, and I was covering a zoning hearing in Darien, Connecticut, an outwardly refined suburb known for its preppy, membersonly mentality.

This was a public hearing, meaning that the public was invited to come and complain about the development proposal under consideration. Rare is the human anywhere who shows up for one of these hours-long, weeknight meetings because they wish to compliment the developer. The citizens who do turn out are usually the handful of neighbours who live within view of the building site. But on this particular fall evening, the project in question apparently was objectionable enough to have drawn a crowd of nearly three hundred.

Businessmen fresh off the train, older women settled in with laps full of knitting or magazines, serious-faced young couples in hushed conversation — the chairs in the Town Hall auditorium were nearly full by the time I arrived. I had an inkling of how the evening was going to go before I even stepped through the door.

Throughout the developers’ presentation, the audience loudly snickered and hissed. Now, this might not have been so surprising in some scrappy blue-collar suburb. But this was Darien. The audience was made up of people who live in one of the most highly educated, exceedingly affluent communities in the country. These were people who had presumably learned their manners early on and refined them over time at one of the eight membersonly clubs in town. And yet, here they were, receiving a scolding from the commission chairman for their discourteous and disruptive behaviour.

What made them feel so threatened? A proposal to drop some affordable housing for seniors into an expensive neighbourhood of single-family homes.

Some readers might just file this fury as “NIMBY” — Not In My Backyard — and call it a day. But the reaction that night seemed so out of proportion to the project at hand — 20 condominiums, just six of them reserved for moderate-income seniors — that writing it off as simple NIMBYism felt disingenuous. Were people really this incensed because, as they claimed, traffic might increase or because emergency vehicles might have a hard time getting in and out of the housing complex?

In the years since that night, I have delved much more deeply into the circumstances surrounding this conflict, and numerous others like it, in towns rich and not-so-rich. I have waded into the hysteria surrounding a proposal for high- density cottage housing in a bedroom community more comfortable with 5,000-squarefoot colonials. I have picked through the past of a quiet lake town that, despite its “live free or die” leanings, put a blanket ban on construction of multifamily housing. I have overstayed my welcome in a summer resort community where moneyed interests use their control of shore properties to keep fishermen and beachgoers at bay.

These sorts of dramas play out with such regularity in what real estate agents refer to as “desirable” communities that the term “NIMBYism” has become a cliché. They are a reflection of the widespread belief among homeowners that they have the right to restrict access to “their” community.

In the broadest sense, zoning authority is a useful planning tool for safely and efficiently separating land uses for the good of the community. It prevents a slaughterhouse from opening up shop next to a school. It keeps developers from jamming in houses on every available vacant lot. But there is a point at which controls on growth and development cross the line into unnecessary, purely self- interested exclusion. And what I found in town after town is that many homeowners are more than willing to cross that line — and feel fully justified in doing so.

They move to a place because they like the neighbourhood or the schools, and then they expect that it will never change. They choose a place for the “people like us” factor, a place where they can feel comfortable that their kids will grow up around kids of the same class. And then when development challenges those expectations, as it inevitably will, they go straight to the local zoning code to shout “We don’t allow for this type of thing.”

These were the exact words of a woman in a sparsely populated lake town I visited, where a small affordable-housing complex was proposed for the village centre. This woman said that before she’d moved to town, she’d checked out the zoning and was reassured to see that it did not allow for construction of any type of multifamily housing. This, she decided, was a place she wanted to be. Here was a place where the zoning was, in her words, “strict.”

Strict zoning is less politely known as “snob zoning.” Homeowners in these towns tend to view multifamily housing proposals as an attack on the sanctity of local control — hence, the overwrought scene in Darien’s town hall. Homeowners have conflated the right to regulate land uses for the public good with the right to exclude — not just uses, but people.

As income inequality has widened across the United States, the impacts of snob zoning have become more stark, such that in many areas, town lines all but double as class lines. Decades of hostility toward affordable housing have gradually squeezed out people of even average incomes from the most prosperous areas, which also have the most employment potential and the highestperforming schools.

These mean constraints on housing development are also a drag on future economic growth. The cumulative consequences include loss of young people, suburban sprawl, concentrated urban poverty and costly highway congestion.

The widely held notion that the housing bust resolved the affordability crisis that has plagued many parts of the United States is a fallacy. The bust did not compensate for the short supply of cheaper housing options in many areas; and, in fact, the accompanying recession and spike in unemployment further upped the demand, as hordes of Americans were forced out of their homes and into the rental market. Nationally, one in four renters now forks over more than half of his income just to cover rent and utilities.

Demand is so high in Greater Boston relative to supply, for example, that the average rent reached an all-time record high of $1,665 in 2011. When it comes to truly affordable rentals — those that are subsidized in some way to keep rents below the market rate — the supply runs so far short of need that when a new development opened last year in the shoreline community of Old Saybrook, CT, more than 200 families requested applications for one of 16 townhomes.

New England, as the original incubator for civil society and democratic values in the United States, proved a particularly poignant arena in which to explore the use and abuse of local control. But the stories I saw unfolding in these places are windows on ways of thinking that have become common in many communities all across the United States.