As advertised, I’m going to continue the citizen input dogpile today with a discussion of a story from last month in the DCist, a community news blog for Washington, D.C., underwritten by the area’s NPR-affiliate radio station WAMU. Titled In Montgomery County, ‘Neighborhood Defenders’ Fight To Maintain The Suburban Status Quo, the story uses the Neighborhood Defenders book (by Katherine Einstein, et. al.) as an organizing framework, but is really more a series of anecdotes about how new housing development is being stymied by citizen involvement in the Silver Springs and Montgomery County areas.
While I was intending to write about this today all along, things got even more “relevant” on this for me after what happened last night in my Kaysville City Planning Commission meeting (I’m on the Commission), where a rezone proposal for housing was heard. The parallels between that meeting and the descriptions in the Montgomery County story were striking.
The DCist story begins with a telling of a proposed zone change near downtown Silver Spring. The plan by the developer was to build 76 townhomes on the site of a former private school near a Metro transit station. Not unexpectedly, neighboring homeowners turned out to object.
“There is a lot of pressure on our neighborhood to become more dense,” said a leader with the Seven Oaks Evanswood Citizens Association. “We want to stop this trend now.” “We invested in a single-family home neighborhood,” testified a homeowner. “If we wanted townhouses to be a part of that equation, we would have purchased elsewhere.”
Almost eerily, I heard almost the exact same language from some homeowners at the Kaysville hearing last night, except in this case, the objection was to a proposal to rezone a small (1.6 acres) parcel fronting on a major collector road to allow for 8,400 sq. ft. single-family lots (8 lots in total), in an area that was primarily zoned for and developed with homes on 10,000 sf-to-acre size lots. The rezone proposal was supported by language in the city’s general plan, which, while it generally says this area of the city should have densities around 2 units per acre, should allow for some diversity of housing and modest densities along major roads and adjacent to transit stops. But according to the majority of public comments on this proposal, the future character of the area and even the entire city would be in jeopardy if these kinds of developments were allowed to go forward, because a precedent would be set (despite the limiting language in the general plan, as pointed out by some commissioners).
In the Silver Spring case, at the conclusion of the hearing, the Planning Board Chair made the comment:
“I understand that there’s a lot of emotion behind this, and a lot of folks that think that townhouses will be damaging to your neighborhood,” Carrier said. “I think you will decide — if this goes forward, five years from now — you’ll decide it’s OK.” Homeowners in the hearing room began to protest.
Again, a similar thing happened in the Kaysville meeting. After a couple of commissioners (myself included) pointed out the limited size of this proposal, the close similarity to development allowed by the current zoning, and past experience where projects that were approved over the objections of neighbors ultimately turned out to be fine additions to the neighborhood, one resident said (I’m quoting now): “We’re not assholes, we know the people that would live there would be fine people.” This development would just upset the entire character of the area, the resident went on, the whole reason why people moved here in the first place.
This to me epitomizes the characterization made in the study by Einstein and co-authors that neighborhood residents these days are not so much NIMBYs, concerned with just the effect on their individual property values and desires, but are more the defenders of the character of the entire neighborhood/community. This likely makes those arguments more acceptable to the ultimate decision-makers, the elected officials, but the end result is still the same – new housing development is reduced or stymied, adding to the current crisis. The examples given here are just small, individual actions that by themselves don’t really shift things that much. But when such small actions are repeated again and again, well, it adds up.
From the Montgomery County story:
“We have this system where local governments are the gatekeepers for new housing production,” says Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who examines the national housing shortage in her book Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems. “Local governments, in turn, have outsourced a lot of their authority to existing residents, so existing homeowners in particular have essentially veto power over proposals to build new housing.”
Who then speaks for or represents those who will be looking for affordable housing and communities in the future? That should be the role of those appointed and elected to guide their communities – to look at what’s needed in the future, as well as today. No question, the residents of our communities should be involved in making those decisions, but it must be more broadly based than the current system we have in place to get such input.