Dog pile! I’m going to add to the stack of evidence about how the public input received in land use meetings is generally not representative of the community, nor well informed. This applies even to meetings for such opinion-centered actions as general plans and rezones.
I want to highlight a book that came out in 2020 by three Boston University political scientists, Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis. The book presents research on who participates in local land use hearings on development proposals and uses a number of cases studies and anecdotes from around the Boston area to make its points. I’m writing about this in support of the previous posts I’ve been doing about the need to consider the restructuring of how we do public participation in our land use actions community meetings. The evidence that we currently have a problem seems to be pretty solid, which jibes well with my own personal experiences of being engaged in the local land use arena some 40 years.
First, let’s talk about the term used in the book title, neighborhood defenders. The more common phrase we all hear for the subjects of this book is NIMBY- Not In My Backyard. According to the lead author, Katherine Einstein (what a name – how can any research done by someone with such a name not be taken seriously? 😊), the reason for using “neighborhood defenders” is because:
… the term NIMBY implies sort of a selfish motivation. It implies, not in my backyard, a very individually motivated view. In our research, we actually find that the folks who show up to oppose the construction of new housing often view themselves as representing their community’s interests and are motivated by protecting their neighborhood, their surroundings. So, their motivations are not so individualistic.
The second reason that we think neighborhood defenders is a helpful terminology, is it helps us to understand why these folks are so successful at persuading planning board officials, zoning board official, city counselors. If those public officials saw these opponents of new housing as just purely selfish, individualistically motivated, they might be unlikely to hold the same political impact as a group of folks who representing the neighborhood’s interests. (from interview on Econotalk podcast)
The book starts with “several case studies to introduce the central argument…: that land use institutions ostensibly designed to empower underrepresented neighborhood groups actually amplify the power of neighborhood defenders to stop and delay the construction of new housing.”
The authors present their research in the book to show the general unrepresentative nature of those who participate in public hearings on land use:
…we combine a novel data set of all citizen participants in planning and zoning board meetings in the greater Boston area with the state voter file to describe the demographic and attitudinal attributes of meeting attendees. We demonstrate that these individuals are overwhelmingly opposed to new housing and demographically unrepresentative of their broader communities across a number of important domains.
In his review of the book, Michael Lewyn of the Fuchsberg Law Center in Long Island notes:
The traditional justification for public meetings about zoning is that commenters represent the public. The authors disprove this idea: commenters at zoning meetings are much more likely to be homeowners as opposed to renters, and are whiter, older and more male. In the towns surveyed, 73 percent of commenters were homeowners, as opposed to 46 percent of all voters. Only 5 percent of commenters were nonwhite, as opposed to 13 percent of all voters. Nonwhites were generally more pro-housing than whites; just under 15 percent of white commenters supported new housing, as opposed to 45 percent of blacks.
Lewyn goes on to demonstrate the apparent variation from public sentiment at large as shown by a public vote in Massachusetts on the issue of housing:
The authors suggest that the opinions of neighborhood defenders are not representative of the public as a whole. They rely on the results of a 2010 referendum in Massachusetts on repealing Ch. 40B. Most voters voted no—that is, they supported affordable housing. By contrast, only 15 percent of commenters spoke in support of new housing at zoning hearings (studied by the authors). On the other hand, it could be argued that voters were happy to support new housing as long as it was likely to be in someone else’s neighborhood, or that they preferred low-income housing to market-rate housing.
Thus, zoning creates a collective action problem: what might be good for each individual neighborhood (preventing new housing) is bad for the city or region as a whole. To solve this problem, the authors favor citywide and statewide zoning reforms, as well as more federal support for low-income housing.
There’s lots here worth stewing over, as we think about how we can make our public involvement processes better and more representative. Read the book!
Next up: a similar study in Montgomery County, Maryland (gotta keep that dog pile going!)