Teens’ film on NIMBYism earns honors
The video documentary that won Alexander and Oliver Boesch honorable mention in C-SPAN’s StudentCam competition may last only five minutes, but it tackles a meaty and touchy topic in the wealthy Peninsula suburbs where the brothers attend private schools: affordable housing and NIMBYism.
Their documentary, “NIMBYism: Why Affordable Housing Is So Difficult in California,” addresses the battle over affordable housing and the opposition it attracted in the affluent town of Atherton, where Alexander, 18, attends Menlo School, a private college preparatory school. Oliver, 16, attends another private college preparatory school, Crystal Springs Uplands School in upscale Hillsborough.
Both towns feature more mansions than multifamily homes and are among the communities where mandates by California state officials to build denser, more affordable housing have engendered fierce and sometimes emotional pushback from residents who argue that they want to protect their privacy.
Those opponents included Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry and his wife, actress, cookbook author and entrepreneur Ayesha Curry, who live with their three children in Atherton. Early last year, the Currys wrote a letter to the city complaining that plans to allow dense housing near their home would adversely affect their lives.
“We hesitate to add to the ‘not in our backyard’ (literally) rhetoric,” the pair wrote. “Safety and privacy for us and our kids continues to be our top priority and one of the biggest reasons we chose Atherton as home,” they added.
The Boesch brothers, who live in San Mateo, start their documentary with the Curry letter, then delve into the issue with a series of clips of an Atherton City Council meeting packed with community members objecting to the housing plan.
“Who in the world wants Atherton to encourage the cluster of multifamily developments?” one unidentified man said on a call into the meeting. “There are other cities to move to.”
In an interview with the Chronicle just after a recent swim practice, Alexander said he wanted to point out the hypocrisy of people who decry homelessness and talk of the need for more affordable housing, then fight against it when it’s near their homes.
“I tried to focus on the hypocrisy,” he said. “For me, my documentary focuses on NIMBYism.”
The documentary explains the concept of NIMBYism — the acronym stands for “not in my backyard” — and shows how it played out in Atherton’s state-ordered planning for future development.
A section of the documentary focuses on a letter from billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and his wife, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, demanding the town remove all multifamily zoning from its housing plan in a letter last year. It points out that Andreessen two years earlier wrote an essay criticizing the nation for not building enough housing.
“This sort of hypocrisy often causes people like Andreessen to be labeled NIMBY or not in my backyard,” the documentary states.
Alexander said he first developed an interest in issues surrounding housing after befriending a homeless man who lived near the doorstep of his apartment in New York City a few years ago.
“With homelessness, the biggest issue is the lack of affordable housing,” he said, adding, “There really needs to be housing for people of all income levels. The crux of the issue is the ability to build affordable housing.”
Alexander said people don’t often take the time to understand homelessness or get to know homeless people.
“I would really just hope people understand the complexity of the homelessness problem,” he said. “It’s not just one monolithic problem and there’s not one monolithic solution. Everyone’s story is different.”
This is not Alexander’s first foray into researching homelessness and housing — he studied it during a two-week project at the end of his junior year, and the five-minute video is a short version of a 45-minute documentary on homelessness in the Bay Area.
And it won’t likely be his last. Alexander is headed to college in the fall, possibly to Duke University, he said, where he would study public policy.
More than 3,200 students in grades 6 through 12 entered short documentary films in the 20th annual C-SPAN contest, which organizers say “encourages students to think critically about issues that affect our communities and our nation.” The theme this year was “Looking Forward While Considering the Past.” The contest awarded cash prizes totaling $100,000 to the student filmmakers of the top 150 documentaries.
As honorable mention winners, the brothers received $250.