Wow, I guess it’s like Hollywood without the screenwriters, I’m only doing “sequels!”  In this case, another follow-up to a previous post about a story in The Atlantic.

Last week, Jerusalem Demsas was interviewed about her story on zoning reform efforts in Colorado, with some more good observations about the public processes we get so tied up in.  One thing that struck me in particular about the whole effort has been how people, when they are asked on a broad scale if they are in favor of doing things that will improve affordability, such as higher densities, reduced parking, mixed use, and so on, the majority say they are in favor of those measures.  But then, when it comes to a proposal to enact one of those measures in a given neighborhood, those same residents are now not in favor, at least not in their neighborhood.  We, of course, have taken to calling that NIMBYism.

This was just recently made obvious again in Envision Utah’s project on Land Use Review for Attainable Housing, where they are examining the land use codes for 35 local governments around the state to see what the barriers may be and what the most effective changes would be.  In the first step of that project, Cody Lutz, the project manager, found in a stakeholder survey that most favored the idea of increasing “missing middle” housing, smaller homes, and smaller lots.  And yet, most codes are written to make such outcomes difficult, if not impossible.

Demsas, in her interview, touches on this contradiction in what I think is a particularly clear way.  She says,

People are very unhappy with the lack of housing affordability. They’ll say in polls that they want there to be more types of housing available, that they want there to be more affordable types of housing available. They want their kids to be able to live near them. They want there to be senior housing. They want teachers to be able to afford to live in their communities; there’s concern about police officers policing communities that they’re not actually able to live in too. And yet, time and again, projects fail, because no individual development can check every single box for everyone.

A single development can’t balance all of the concerns people have about housing. If the question is “Should we allow this block to turn into duplexes?” community members who support the idea of building more housing in general might respond, “Why here?” And that response could be informed by reasonable concerns about housing that are broader than what that single development project entails. They may have concerns about gentrification, or about open space, or about the types of housing that are currently available.

… if you’re trying to build a new condo development in an area where increasing numbers of rich young people are moving for jobs, that’s not going to respond to the needs of people who have different kinds of concerns. And because no individual developments can check every single box, many projects end up falling through.

When you restrict a development discussion to a very hyperlocal level, then you can’t have necessary conversations to balance the wants of various interest groups. If you’re dealing with a very rich, white area whose residents are wedded to their exclusionary zoning, they’re always going to resist giving up their space for, for example, homeless housing. And even if these people want homeless housing to exist in general, they have no power to make that occur somewhere else. The only power they have is to exclude it from happening in their own place.

Well said, Ms. Demsas.  It argues for a more regional, cooperative approach to this kind of issue, housing affordability.