"Their representatives point out that some of their streets are already so crowded with parked cars that there is only one through lane, so that adding housing without parking would worsen the situation. Our neighborhood was less NIMBY about adding housing."
NIMBY is not a good way to describe it*.
A concept I've introduced a few times here over the years to explain the distinction between "actual NIMBY" and "YIMBY - just please without ruining my life, or else I'll resist" is the urban building principle of "Conservation of Infrastructural Adequacy".
That is, sure, go ahead, buy that piece of real estate and you have a presumptive right to build whatever you want on it - subject- to the condition that your neighbors shouldn't experience a sudden deterioration in the quality of the neighborhood's amenities they've been enjoying for a long time in the reasonable expectation of stable continuance. Deteriorations such as an explosion of congestion on the road or in public transport, an increase the local rate of traffic-related harms, radical increase in the local cost of maintaining and using a private vehicle, etc. You may claim that these people are merely incumbents talking their book but who don't actually have any legal right to any of that. They will disagree with you, but more to the point, they will use politics to make sure that, one way or another, they do. That's how we got into this mess.
So, if you want to build a giant tower block on the plot that once contained a small number of single-family homes, then you should add a lane to the main road, and maybe you have to buy the road from the city to privatize it, and maybe you also have to buy a lane's worth of frontage from all the surrounding properties to do it.
"But the politics is impossible, the transactions costs too high, and that would make my project prohibitively expensive!" Yeah! Maybe! Maybe a lot of so-called obvious unlocked potential value that is being 'blocked' is, in fact, a value-losing proposition if one actually does the proper analysis. Or maybe not, it depends, but now you can't just pretend, "that's not my problem", you've got to price in mitigation for what would otherwise be externalities of infrastructural inadequacy. See, a lot of libertarian economists will go on about Shoup and "The High Cost of Free Parking", and tell people they should get used to paying for parking and tell cities they should adjust laws which mandate free parking spots. But they fail to extend that logic to "The High Cost of Free Externalities." These high costs are, after all, what those incumbent neighbors are worried about. So tell builders they should get used to paying for externalities, and tell cities they should adjust laws which let builders get away with it for free.
In what is a kind of quasi-Hernando de Soto point, real estate in urban areas is a bundle of sticks of property rights, but only -some- of those rights are formalized into explicitly legal rights and titles. The informal rights are built upon reasonable, investment-based expectations and so forth, and while it would be convenient for the BBB argument to pretend otherwise, they are in fact no less valid or legitimate that the formal rights, and they are certainly 'priced-in' to the fair market value of the local properties. It's just that, as with most property rights, value is related to one's ability to maintain possession when contested and someone is trying to take it away.
And the foundational basis for the value of these informal real estate rights is the ability to defend those rights, it's just, not in ways that are in court via traditional causes of action in property law with more-or-less orderly and socially efficient processes and predictable adjudications based on well-established caselaw. Instead, the regime we have now is what happens when people really want and act like they ought to have a right to the principle of conservation of infrastructural adequacy, but absent formalization, have to go about defending their just interests via the means of the craziest, least efficient, and most corrupt and politicized ways possible, such these zoning codes and planning board actions. The answer is not to replace these kludges and copes with nothing at all, but with something formal, so better.
*As I might have explained to Bryan Caplan had he taken up my offer to give him an actual challenge in debate over "Build Baby Build", as opposed to the "violent agreement" / "praising by faint criticism" he has typically received. (Note, this is not really fair, I know Caplan doesn't read the comments to his blog posts.) There is a funny scene on page 207 of BBB where Caplan as giant bear facepalms when being bested in a debate by a tiny mouse and, exasperated, asks, "How am I losing to this guy?" Caplan erroneously attributes this to what I suppose you could call his proposal for a cognitive bias - a tendency to mistake the number of arguments on each side for the relative weight of the overall cases. Not only is he not correct in this attribution, but unfortunately his intent was not well-adapted into illustration and comes off as David vs. Goliath, and one is inclined root for the underdog, er, "undermouse." It would have been better portrayed as a whole hive of bees who are not just the natural enemy of bears per the trope, but which can only defeat the bear not by merit of even their combined strength but only by massing the number of their stings.
The ideology that people need to live in higher density, mixed development communities may have a long history but the government insistence on it is bizarre. Sure, some people want to live in a high density community. Build for them. Other people want to live in a "village neighborhood" where they have a SFH and a small yard and a nice, compact neighborhood that is walkable. Build for them. And other people value space between themselves and their neighbors. Build for them. This is a very large country with lots of open space. Let people live in the community that works for their preferences!
The notion that government must impose on people their sense of community will not work. And as it concerns urbanization. If the high density community is unable to attract and keep high wage earners, that community will become a slum. Are the government planners able to acknowledge that risk? I doubt it. These "down the road" concerns do not matter to them.
It's not necessarily a matter of principle or impossibility. There are indeed places in the world (Japan) where such kinds of urban planning and coordination of development of housing, commercial activity, and public transit can be accomplished with impressive results. America just doesn't have the "state capacity", or "cultural capital", or "the right stuff" or whatever you want to call it, to get those kinds of things done well.
It is totally reasonable for the existing residents of any pleasant and desirable area to be -absolutely terrified- by a local government authority's announcement of some grand new radical plan or initiative and to rally together to fight against it with everything they've got, because of the completely reasonable prediction that these bureaucrats don't know what they're doing, but don't care because won't be held personally accountable for bad results, and so they are going to screw everything up terribly, which they've done over and over, all over the country.
Agreed 100% that government insistence on high density is unwarranted. And especially in the suburbs.
But that is not a complete defense of / excuse for all NIMBYism.
That some people prefer the aesthetics of single-family only, large lot sizes and would rather not see a condo complex built in their neighborhood because - incorrectly or correctly, it matters not - they believe it will harm their property values cannot alone be reason enough to deny almost all development. Because there are both regional and hyperlocal interests to be considered.
Skyscraper apartments in the suburbs make no sense, and “affordable housing” mandates are almost always bad (and always wrong). But allowing highER density housing than exists currently, so long as parking is properly addressed and road capacity is adequate, is necessary in places like Silicon Valley and elsewhere where the region overall needs and will benefit from more housing, even if some people don’t like that some of the costs are in their local neighborhood.
What appears to be happening is planners approve higher population density but they are loathe to support higher vehicular traffic. Or they respond to the higher traffic by imposing an increased cost of owning a car on the entire community! So legacy residents end up seeing their cost of living increased with no personal benefit.
NIMBYism is a very logical response. It is not as if people want to be contrary. People don't want to pay more and get less - and the reality of most Blue state policies is exactly this! To make the population pay more and get less benefit, all while counting on outsiders to accept the lesser offer and create demand for the increased housing.
I don't get that impression. The attitude I've seen from most of the people advocating higher density is that higher density, walkability, bicycle lanes, mass transit, and elimination of "sprawl" are not just esthetic preferences but imperatives to save the earth, because they also go with lower carbon footprint and environmental impact. This is an ideology in the sense that they rarely articulate it or justify it, because it is an understood requirement.
Some "15-minute city" advocates truly believe the idea so I agree with you. But as Arnold explains in the video, his community includes a diversity of people, many of which do not and cannot live the "15-minute city" principles. Planners who justify solutions because they work very well for younger, childless adults are exhibiting tunnel vision. They are blind to the costs of their ideas and how their ideas are unhelpful to the entire community.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all. My point is that the advocates neither know nor care about the diversity of people. All must adapt to the new urbanism. Because everyone wants it. Or should want it. And it's necessary anyway. I expect the planners have been educated and credentialed on these premises. And, as Roger Sweeny commented below, governmental bodies have to employ the credentialed planners if they want federal money.
But of course the average person in a *region* generally does benefit from the existence of more quality housing in that region - higher economic growth, diversity of restaurants, etc., etc.
So for any given development that involves a *major* “get less”, I agree with you.
The problem is that much of NIMBYism, at least in the suburbs, involves relatively minor costs. And yet we have systems where such minor costs are used to justify the lack of building. And so the hyperlocal community benefits in the short run, while the entire region loses in the medium and long-run.
I don’t have all the answers, but one good place to start is that “smaller” projects (e.g. a small condo complex where there were previously 4 single family homes) should have the presumption of being ok, and both communities and groups of neighbors can have the right to sue post facto if the development imposes large externalities, but cannot stop them a priori.
Larger housing developments should as now require review for MAJOR items like parking, road capacity, water infrastructure, fire safety, but cannot be stopped a priori for most other reasons, and again can be sued post facto but not stopped in advance for infinite reasons.
Yes, I know the above makes me just a classical liberal dreamer…
> mixed development communities may have a long history but the government insistence on it is bizarre
Quite the opposite! The local governments in the US have insisted on a regulation that disallows any mixed development from being built in a huge percentage of the country.
The issue is not the lack of vast open space, it's that even the parts of the country that attract high wage earners and can sustain high density, there are huge communities that want the benefits of access to high paying jobs and the artificially restricted supply that keeps raising the value of their homes. For example, 2 of the counties with the lowest housing built per capita are commuting distance from NYC.
The real “locked value” in real estate is a big investment into policing and keeping the insane and the criminal locked up away from society. Just look at what happened in El Salvador to see the potential wealth that could be unleashed in US blue cities
“…sudden deterioration in the quality of the neighborhood's amenities…”
So long as your standard for this is not 0.0% [perceived or actual negative] change, I think this is very well put.
To the extent that the standard is at or close to 0.0%, surely you can see that all you have done is an elaborate “justification” (the quotes around the word being the key point) for NIMBYism, yes?
You seem to be framing the proposal as one of petitioning a permit-issuance authority, or perhaps testifying at the public commentary portion of a hearing, and that if one can bring up a recognized objection, or one from an established list, then, regardless of the value or degree of harm, its mere existence will cause the authority to stop the project.
That's a forgivable misframing, since we've all become used to thinking about these things in that way, as it is indeed how a lot of the current insane system forces people to operate.
But we don't have to think insane. It's not what I'm getting at, which doesn't involve setting any kind of arbitrary standard for a de minimus threshold or whatever.
The point is market-valuation of (currently) informal property rights and either mitigation in kind or compensation in cash. If the negative change is near 0.01%, then it's not a "permit or not" Boolean situation, but one of paying a cost that one can presume is proportional and so also around 0.01%, and if so, then what's the problem? Yes, 0.01% costs shouldn't block a project, but neither should the prospect of having to pay 0.01% costs block the duty of builders to pay for them.
I'll give you an example from a situation I once experienced first-hand.
Imagine there is a neighborhood with a few small, independently-owned apartment buildings surrounding a pay parking garage with its own, non-landlord owner. As you might imagine, such a state of affairs in a major American city could only have come about if the structures at issue were erected in the haphazard style of the pre-civilized, chaotic, and lawless wild west days of the very early 20th Century, with what archaeologists assume could only be vines and crude stone implements at the disposal of those primitive craftsmen.
The situation was generally at capacity, full of the cars owned by the tenants of the buildings, who rented their spots. Pretty much everyone who wanted a spot got one, and the price was considered affordable and reasonable.
You can already guess what happened next. About a block away, a few old properties were torn down and replaces with a new giant tower block, but, Should would be happy to learn, a negligible amount additional parking "free" to the new tenants. Who wanted to own cars and park them nearby. So, naturally, this started a bidding war for the scarce spots in the old lot, which, by benefit of blessing of the modern building code regime, could not expand to meet the new demand (perhaps the builder of the new tower could have been considered to have "come to the nuisance" of a situation in which additional parking lot spots could not be built to accommodate new residents.)
Well, I'll save you the long story details, but bottom line, there was a fight, it lasted for years, and it got nasty and physical and the police were often involved but only very rarely were they able to deliver any justice to the new residents on account of the damage to their recurrently re-vandalized cars. The local tire and body shops reaped the windfall and were making a killing. Ah, such was once the flavor of a now-lost era before ubiquitous cheap video cameras, with its quaint cultural institutions and its colorful characters. After all, in response to what does one imagine all those Shoup-despised free-parking laws emerged? "The past is a foreign country" and "pressure from the public" meant a very different thing in the 60s and 70s when Alinsky-like agitators and tactics thrived.
Now, let's say the builder of the new tower was told, "Sure, build away. But you have to do something extra so that the people on the same block who are currently paying $50/month for parking spots should be able to continue paying the same amount for the same quality spot."
Maybe the builder could have built parking for his own new tenants, do demand wouldn't outstrip supply. Or he could have bought the parking garage business, and enter into long-term contracts with the existing tenants at the current price. Or instead of long-term contracts, he could have formalized what they thought of as their rights, and given them property rights to indefinitely-continuable leases, and those rights could be traded on the open market, and the new tenants of the new tower could try to buy those rights to lease from the old tenants of the old buildings. Or he could just pay them all off at the current estimates fair market value.
Or a million other things. The point is, it's not, "That's not my problem." If he has to internalize the externalities, what Friedman called, "neighborhood effects", then he can build baby build away, so long as his private benefits do indeed exceed his now private costs, which were formerly "imposed-on-the-neighbors" costs.
Well, you write a lot of words, making it less possible rather than more so to decide if yours is a reasonable position or just a thinly disguised NIMBY one.
Of course I, and any reasonable person, would agree with you on extreme examples where a new development has an insufficient number of parking spaces.
By extension, similar truly inadequate infrastructure like road capacity I’d agree with you as well. (AK’s initial story here where the all-knowing planners wanted to simultaneously increase housing while reducing the key road capacity is of course insane.)
But you imply that a) developers aren’t already expected to pay a “tax/fealty” of some amount already as the price of getting permission to build, and b) that there is an objective measurement of what the externalities are for all people.
This second is obviously false. Existing rich homeowners value their privacy and their convenience far more than others do, or than the median citizen/voter of a region or a neutral “reasonable” person would. And rich current homeowners in the suburbs usually explicitly value exclusivity.
And of course part of the problem in the NIMBY/YIMBY conflict is that there are legitimate hyperlocal and regional interests which means there are rarely any easy answers.
Do recall that the start of this AK discussion was explicitly in the suburbs and not a large developed city. FWIW, and it doesn’t mean I am correct, in big cities I think the NIMBY problem is primarily about the politicians, while in the suburbs, the NIMBY problem is disproportionately the rich homeowners themselves.
As I read you, you are basically suggesting that hyper local “property” interests dominate any other legitimate interests, and so must be compensated at close to full (objective or subjective; you are never clear) cost/value in order to permit building.
Which is in fact nothing more than gussied-up standard NIMBYism.
I hope I am wrong in my reading, and would love further enlightenment that doesn’t primarily involve extreme cases like grossly inadequate parking.
It reminds me of the Precautionary Principle. At the extreme, the PP means "never do anything new." At the extreme, this amounts to "never build anything new."
No. The Precautionary Principle is about the state blocking private projects if not satisfied that unforeseen harms don't exist. That's the kind of arbitrary threshold or "prove a negative" situation which is fraught with the possibility of abuse and exploitation as a cover story for the ulterior motive of stopping projects for other, less publicly-acceptable reasons.
The Infrastructural Adequacy Principle doesn't involve the state blocking anything, the choice is up to the builder, who only has to pay for the real full costs of the project to include those likely to be imposed on neighboring residents, and can assess and choose for himself whether or not the benefits exceed those costs.
Respectfully, you have to this point been unclear whether your Infrastructural Adequacy Principle really is primarily about delivering reasonably adequate infrastructure, as defined by a reasonable outside viewer, or not.
If it is, I agree with it 100%. 100%. And there can and should in the real world be fights/debates on the margin as to what is adequate infrastructure.
But if the term is merely code for something else - elsewhere in this thread you strongly imply that existing informal property rights holders should be “made whole” by any new development - then it is just another form of / justification for NIMBYism, where hyperlocal wants/needs/desires outweigh regional wants/needs/desires.
I meant that "at the extreme" it would work the same way. It would stop things dead. With the Precautionary Principle, "at the extreme" the entity that wants to do something new won't be able to prove that there will be no harmful results. With the Infrastructural Adequacy Principle, "at the extreme" the entity that wants to build something won't be able to "prove" that the "real full costs" won't be high enough to stop any project.
In both, there is the question of who gets to decide what the potential costs *really* are. If it's something like the California Coastal Commission ...
I didn't watch the video. I can easily imagine it. In my youth, not knowing where I was going, I took a position as a planning and zoning administrator for a small city. Woof....I lasted exactly 10 1/2 months. Small community zoning boards, land use commissions, planning committees, code enforcement officers, and all related such positions are a pox on humanity.
Heh. I knew of one in Southern Illinois that met semi-monthly in a locked room on the second floor of the county jail. One of my students had chosen to watch them for a class project.
Turns out the room was 'free' and hardly anyone ever attended the meetings, and the door locked automatically, because . . . jail.
The student knocked and gained entrance and was treated well, but was quite shocked at first.
Zoning Board it typically an unpaid job that no one really wants, so it is filled by those with something to gain from it (or, more accurately, who are in some way connected to those who can gain from it, like developers, other builders, and planners.).
So they tend to be, as I said above in dofferent words, pliable midwit authoritarian blockheads.
Sometimes the ZBA stiffs are just friends of the mayor that appoints them, the object lesson in unknowledgeable, moronic, and stultifying decision making.
In my neighborhood, there's a dead mall right next to a light rail station that a developer wants to turn into a mixed use, transit-oriented development with a couple hundred apartments. The NIMBYs are all dead set against it; they like the demographics of the area as is. They're winning thus far, but I don't imagine it'll last forever. The mall's too big an eyesore as is.
I don't really have a point, other than to say I kinda miss the days of being young, single, renting and not having to think about crap like this.
Down the hill from me, there's an abandoned outdoor sports complex. It was built 30-40 years ago by some people who run similar complexes in North Carolina. They hosted leagues for baseball, softball, volleyball, basketball, and probably some others. Players and teams would pay for use of the facilities. It seems the promoters hadn't fully accounted for the impact of shorter playing seasons in Connecticut, and it went out of business around the time I moved to town (28 years ago now). It still sits abandoned, overgrown by shrubs and weeds. Once every year or two someone goes through and clears the brush. It is not in a residential neighborhood, and is about 200 yards from an interstate exit. There have been proposals over the years to do something with it. The most serious was to use it as a distribution center, I think for Home Depot. It was blocked by environmentally conscious residents, who were afraid that runoff from the parking lot would cause problems.
Based on the history, I expect it to remain idle for a very long time. Especially because this part of Connecticut is in serious decline economically.
It was an old abandoned movie theater at the edge of my neighborhood. Closed about 8 years. It had been built in a sort of faux temple of cinema style so that as it returned to nature, it reminded people of that scene with the monkeys in The Jungle Book.
It was an education to me that no one else much considered it “blight”’ and resistance to its redevelopment was instant when that was finally on the table.
I employed some slightly devious means to get Council to move the project forward.
This was partly because I thought abandoned cinema was a poor permanent land use, and also because the developer was going to pay into a fund for open space, required to rebuild on the recharge zone.
The amount wasn’t much in the scheme of things but it was better than nothing.
The resulting development was certainly not to my taste and I thought it was ridiculous that they named it “The *****” for the road which was named for a family of old hill people, gussied up with a wholly fraudulent umlaut to make it seem Scandinavian modern. The trees planted along the street have thriven, oddly, and that’s the best part.
In my 30+ years of teaching Local Government Administration, I've noted that the average person appointed to, or elected to, such a board tends to be a midwit, authoritarian stump.
They get "played" or their strings are controlled by the people they interact with the most, developers and planners/
As someone decidedly lacking first-hand expertise, I can easily believe you are correct about the average small community.
But I doubt you are correct about the average mid-size suburb of a big city (or even small suburb if it’s California), and there is zero chance you are correct if we are talking about a large city.
Now to be very clear, I am arguing against the “they get ‘played’ by developers” point; not arguing at all about the “midwit, authoritarian stump” claim!
No, in mid-sized suburbs (I lived in a very nice one of some 100,000 for 22 years) they are pretty much full members of the club of those who make a lot of money developing/building things.
In large cities they tend to be part of the local party machine.
Good speech. Very concise. Kling hits the planners with an upper cut to their Costco vulnerability, and then knocks them down with a right cross to cause of sick children. Standing over them he accuses them of planning using “hipster buzzwords.” A 40 year veteran of the neighborhood, Kling cleaned up — a win by KO. The crowd cheers. Congrats.
Agree. Fantastic and effective response by Kling. Who is served by the "plan"? Who actually lives in the community? Why the refusal by community leaders to acknowledge the disconnect?
Alas, the Marxists have found a home in Maryland and especially in Montgomery County. Maryland government leaders are ideologues who are determined to implement an agenda regardless of the social and economic cost and the personal harm. Maryland is being Californicated and the shame is we don't even get to have nice weather as compensation.
I grew up in a huge boomtown within a county that was yet majority ag, land wise, until just a few decades ago.
Sometimes the most productive land in a region, has a city in the middle of it.
But what wasn’t noticed or foreseen - since planning is a 4-letter word! - was how all that ag and prairie soaked up the rain and prevented flooding. Until it was gone. Then it became noticeable, fast.
Montgomery County has 316,800 acres over 90,000 acres of which are used as federal, state, or county parkland. Hard to believe another 90,000 acres are required to prevent flooding.
"For the better part of the last few decades, California policy makers have increasingly steered housing development away from peripheral locations, where land is cheaper and local regulations generally less strict, seeking to drive growth to dense urban areas, where costs are higher and regulatory environments generally more difficult to navigate."
The YIMBY Action Network (https://yimbyaction.org/ ) might be the biggest name in the YIMBY business and they are quite clear about their goal to prevent housing development at the periphery:
“Building additional housing near transit, jobs, and existing infrastructure reduces sprawl, preserving wildlife habitat, preventing megacommutes, and lowering climate risk.”
It has nothing at all to do with creating affordable housing that people actually want to live in.
In other words, “No – You Can’t Build There. Urban Dystopia for the Little People Now!” is about as an accurate an interpretation of their agenda as one is likely to find.
Their EIN is 81-5140915 and you can look up their Form 990s on file here: https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/ Look at part IX. They are headquartered in San Francisco. Well paid astro-turf.
Montgomery County seems pretty typical in this regard. In my experience with city and county governments, the planners and developers always get their way eventually.
I started watching at the beginning of the hearing (4:42:32). I first noted that the county has a planning department - I presume they work at the direction of the Planning Board. The planning department representative who gave the opening remarks started with a listing of the county's plans. I counted 9 or 10 existing plans, starting with a 1989 master plan, most with subsequent amendments. I guess this is what you get when you have a planning department - lots of plans. I've heard of other communities with planning efforts. I wonder about cause and effect: Do communities identify a need for planning their future, and create planning departments which end up staffed by professionals with the appropriate planning credentials, or do people with university training in community planning create demand for their services by convincing governmental bodies of the benefits of planning future development?
I'm not any more surprised than you if the board doesn't listen to constituents but I will be surprised if this moves forward without coordination with the state road work.
Yet, as you write “the board has a reputation for blowing off the public.” Why would that be?
Perhaps if we ask “What Would Dan Williams Say?” we might sketch out the cultural origins of this sort of non-responsive governance. Williams regularly invokes Walter Lippmann’s arguments for a society in which specialized intellectuals apply scientific management to democracy to ensure it does not fall into irrationality. In this system, the intellectuals use journalism to manufacture consent within an irrational public. Public assemblies such as the board hearing are for the benefit of the intellectuals to inform them of what public misconceptions need to be attacked in order to manufacture that consent.
An alternative to Lippmann was offered by John Dewey in what became known as the Dewey-Lippmann debates. Dewey argued in favor of substantive and efficacious public participation in governance, despite the public’s shortcomings. He envisioned a participatory form of democracy, in which the public is an active participant in public discourse, and not a merely submissive body whose purpose is to respond to the guidance of specialized intellectuals using scientific management and the latest propaganda.
Dewey’s vision was of course entirely inconsistent with a US culture and political system gripped by an all consuming phobia of the “democratical” (See Madison’s Notes) and we continue to offer our patient sufferance to the foibles of managerialism. I must confess to not having read much Jaudith Butler but I have an inkling that she and her book Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly ( https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/book-review-notes-toward-a-performative-theory-of-assembly-by-judith-butler/ ) describe developments into which the Dewey-Lippmann opposition has been subsumed. So perhaps Dr. Kling’s contribution is useful in other ways than as a tool for the specialists to legitimize their per-ordained conclusions.
I happened to be pondering this question late last night watching the desfiles of the escolas de samba at the Rio de Janeiro Sambadromo with my wife as has been our annual ritual since we were married many years ago. The cultural contrast between my adopted homeland and the United States I think might illustrate the gulf between a real Dewey-world and the Lippmann-world of the United States When I met and married her, I was but a young bureaucrat in DC feeling the sting of the slings and arrows of office politics and political intrigue for the first time, feeling isolated and ineffectual.
But I married into a Umbanda practicing family which helped me fit into my role and identity and accept a reordered notion of possibilities. The first thing to know about Umbanda is that it is a wholly decentralized religion without any hierarchy, organized locally around worship centers each with their own idiosyncratic traditions. In our family, we recognize the common practice of associating a particular spirit called an orixa with each day of the week. Each orixa has their own special charactaristics much like a patron saint and indeed syncretism links most of the orixas to a particular Catholic saint. But there is no hierarchy. The day of the week on which you are born thus gives you a bond with a particular orix and patron saint. My orixa is Oshosi who is associated with St Sebastian who was a captain in Diocletian's Praetorian Guards but was tied to a stake and shot with arrows for concealing his Christianity. But he was healed by St. Irene only to have his head bashed in later when he returned to Diocletian reform. I found my St. Irene and she healed me but I’m still expecting to get my head bashed in eventually.
Brazilian syncretism and populist democracy is played out in the samba school parades in which thousands and thousands participate, each individual decked out resplendently, representing their neighborhoods and their complex historical and religious themes and origin stories. There is really no government funding for the schools and even the Sambadromo itself was built entirely privately. Globo does the broadcasting which frequently cuts to a reporter in the audience interviewing average people and sampling the home cooking they bring with them. Last night there were more frequent than normal interruptions with cuts to interviews with acting celebrities but that was because the celebrities were associated with the Brazilian film that had garnered some Academy Award nominations. Any Globo viewer might get the more or less accurate impression that they nation was united in hopes for their film (Brazilian twitter appeared similarly fixated – the US’s prestige is not entirely squandered apparently).
But this democratical levelling plays itself out in other important ways as well. Unlike the US professional baseball teams which go off to distant Florida to play practice games amongst themselves, the top level soccer teams in Brazil spend the off season playing in state tournaments where a Serie A national champ would travel to a small town with less than 10,000 population to play the hometown Serie D team on the equivalent of the local highschool field. And after the game, which is invariably hard fought and never a blow out, the kids flood the field and get autographs and photos, and the highly paid stars appear entirely relaxed and comfortable with it all. And the Serie A teams have to win to stay in Serie A. The lowest ranked teams are relegated each year to a lower level and new teams brought up. This occurs in volleyball as well.
Of course, the United States has an enormous advantage over Brazil in terms of GDP per capita, etc., and that is reason enough for most to summarily dismiss the John Dewey vision out of hand. But I suspect that there is a sizable share of expats who, having experienced the cultural difference, recognize it as more a trade off than cut and dried superiority.
I’ll assume these commissars (planners) are appointed. If they have a reputation for ignoring citizens, then is there not a pathway through the County Council? Though the Council might override Planning Board decisions, its willingness to do so probably depends on political calculus and electoral pressures. Regretfully, old-fashioned tar and feathering can’t be employed anymore, but citizens can always vote the bastards out. When I lived in Charlotte years ago, there was a plan to convert a house in a sedate, residential area to a drug rehabilitation facility. There was serious opposition, unsurprisingly, from the area neighborhood, but ultimately, the facility was opened.
"Their representatives point out that some of their streets are already so crowded with parked cars that there is only one through lane, so that adding housing without parking would worsen the situation. Our neighborhood was less NIMBY about adding housing."
NIMBY is not a good way to describe it*.
A concept I've introduced a few times here over the years to explain the distinction between "actual NIMBY" and "YIMBY - just please without ruining my life, or else I'll resist" is the urban building principle of "Conservation of Infrastructural Adequacy".
That is, sure, go ahead, buy that piece of real estate and you have a presumptive right to build whatever you want on it - subject- to the condition that your neighbors shouldn't experience a sudden deterioration in the quality of the neighborhood's amenities they've been enjoying for a long time in the reasonable expectation of stable continuance. Deteriorations such as an explosion of congestion on the road or in public transport, an increase the local rate of traffic-related harms, radical increase in the local cost of maintaining and using a private vehicle, etc. You may claim that these people are merely incumbents talking their book but who don't actually have any legal right to any of that. They will disagree with you, but more to the point, they will use politics to make sure that, one way or another, they do. That's how we got into this mess.
So, if you want to build a giant tower block on the plot that once contained a small number of single-family homes, then you should add a lane to the main road, and maybe you have to buy the road from the city to privatize it, and maybe you also have to buy a lane's worth of frontage from all the surrounding properties to do it.
"But the politics is impossible, the transactions costs too high, and that would make my project prohibitively expensive!" Yeah! Maybe! Maybe a lot of so-called obvious unlocked potential value that is being 'blocked' is, in fact, a value-losing proposition if one actually does the proper analysis. Or maybe not, it depends, but now you can't just pretend, "that's not my problem", you've got to price in mitigation for what would otherwise be externalities of infrastructural inadequacy. See, a lot of libertarian economists will go on about Shoup and "The High Cost of Free Parking", and tell people they should get used to paying for parking and tell cities they should adjust laws which mandate free parking spots. But they fail to extend that logic to "The High Cost of Free Externalities." These high costs are, after all, what those incumbent neighbors are worried about. So tell builders they should get used to paying for externalities, and tell cities they should adjust laws which let builders get away with it for free.
In what is a kind of quasi-Hernando de Soto point, real estate in urban areas is a bundle of sticks of property rights, but only -some- of those rights are formalized into explicitly legal rights and titles. The informal rights are built upon reasonable, investment-based expectations and so forth, and while it would be convenient for the BBB argument to pretend otherwise, they are in fact no less valid or legitimate that the formal rights, and they are certainly 'priced-in' to the fair market value of the local properties. It's just that, as with most property rights, value is related to one's ability to maintain possession when contested and someone is trying to take it away.
And the foundational basis for the value of these informal real estate rights is the ability to defend those rights, it's just, not in ways that are in court via traditional causes of action in property law with more-or-less orderly and socially efficient processes and predictable adjudications based on well-established caselaw. Instead, the regime we have now is what happens when people really want and act like they ought to have a right to the principle of conservation of infrastructural adequacy, but absent formalization, have to go about defending their just interests via the means of the craziest, least efficient, and most corrupt and politicized ways possible, such these zoning codes and planning board actions. The answer is not to replace these kludges and copes with nothing at all, but with something formal, so better.
*As I might have explained to Bryan Caplan had he taken up my offer to give him an actual challenge in debate over "Build Baby Build", as opposed to the "violent agreement" / "praising by faint criticism" he has typically received. (Note, this is not really fair, I know Caplan doesn't read the comments to his blog posts.) There is a funny scene on page 207 of BBB where Caplan as giant bear facepalms when being bested in a debate by a tiny mouse and, exasperated, asks, "How am I losing to this guy?" Caplan erroneously attributes this to what I suppose you could call his proposal for a cognitive bias - a tendency to mistake the number of arguments on each side for the relative weight of the overall cases. Not only is he not correct in this attribution, but unfortunately his intent was not well-adapted into illustration and comes off as David vs. Goliath, and one is inclined root for the underdog, er, "undermouse." It would have been better portrayed as a whole hive of bees who are not just the natural enemy of bears per the trope, but which can only defeat the bear not by merit of even their combined strength but only by massing the number of their stings.
The ideology that people need to live in higher density, mixed development communities may have a long history but the government insistence on it is bizarre. Sure, some people want to live in a high density community. Build for them. Other people want to live in a "village neighborhood" where they have a SFH and a small yard and a nice, compact neighborhood that is walkable. Build for them. And other people value space between themselves and their neighbors. Build for them. This is a very large country with lots of open space. Let people live in the community that works for their preferences!
The notion that government must impose on people their sense of community will not work. And as it concerns urbanization. If the high density community is unable to attract and keep high wage earners, that community will become a slum. Are the government planners able to acknowledge that risk? I doubt it. These "down the road" concerns do not matter to them.
It's not necessarily a matter of principle or impossibility. There are indeed places in the world (Japan) where such kinds of urban planning and coordination of development of housing, commercial activity, and public transit can be accomplished with impressive results. America just doesn't have the "state capacity", or "cultural capital", or "the right stuff" or whatever you want to call it, to get those kinds of things done well.
It is totally reasonable for the existing residents of any pleasant and desirable area to be -absolutely terrified- by a local government authority's announcement of some grand new radical plan or initiative and to rally together to fight against it with everything they've got, because of the completely reasonable prediction that these bureaucrats don't know what they're doing, but don't care because won't be held personally accountable for bad results, and so they are going to screw everything up terribly, which they've done over and over, all over the country.
Agreed 100% that government insistence on high density is unwarranted. And especially in the suburbs.
But that is not a complete defense of / excuse for all NIMBYism.
That some people prefer the aesthetics of single-family only, large lot sizes and would rather not see a condo complex built in their neighborhood because - incorrectly or correctly, it matters not - they believe it will harm their property values cannot alone be reason enough to deny almost all development. Because there are both regional and hyperlocal interests to be considered.
Skyscraper apartments in the suburbs make no sense, and “affordable housing” mandates are almost always bad (and always wrong). But allowing highER density housing than exists currently, so long as parking is properly addressed and road capacity is adequate, is necessary in places like Silicon Valley and elsewhere where the region overall needs and will benefit from more housing, even if some people don’t like that some of the costs are in their local neighborhood.
What appears to be happening is planners approve higher population density but they are loathe to support higher vehicular traffic. Or they respond to the higher traffic by imposing an increased cost of owning a car on the entire community! So legacy residents end up seeing their cost of living increased with no personal benefit.
NIMBYism is a very logical response. It is not as if people want to be contrary. People don't want to pay more and get less - and the reality of most Blue state policies is exactly this! To make the population pay more and get less benefit, all while counting on outsiders to accept the lesser offer and create demand for the increased housing.
I don't get that impression. The attitude I've seen from most of the people advocating higher density is that higher density, walkability, bicycle lanes, mass transit, and elimination of "sprawl" are not just esthetic preferences but imperatives to save the earth, because they also go with lower carbon footprint and environmental impact. This is an ideology in the sense that they rarely articulate it or justify it, because it is an understood requirement.
Some "15-minute city" advocates truly believe the idea so I agree with you. But as Arnold explains in the video, his community includes a diversity of people, many of which do not and cannot live the "15-minute city" principles. Planners who justify solutions because they work very well for younger, childless adults are exhibiting tunnel vision. They are blind to the costs of their ideas and how their ideas are unhelpful to the entire community.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all. My point is that the advocates neither know nor care about the diversity of people. All must adapt to the new urbanism. Because everyone wants it. Or should want it. And it's necessary anyway. I expect the planners have been educated and credentialed on these premises. And, as Roger Sweeny commented below, governmental bodies have to employ the credentialed planners if they want federal money.
We mostly agree.
But of course the average person in a *region* generally does benefit from the existence of more quality housing in that region - higher economic growth, diversity of restaurants, etc., etc.
So for any given development that involves a *major* “get less”, I agree with you.
The problem is that much of NIMBYism, at least in the suburbs, involves relatively minor costs. And yet we have systems where such minor costs are used to justify the lack of building. And so the hyperlocal community benefits in the short run, while the entire region loses in the medium and long-run.
I don’t have all the answers, but one good place to start is that “smaller” projects (e.g. a small condo complex where there were previously 4 single family homes) should have the presumption of being ok, and both communities and groups of neighbors can have the right to sue post facto if the development imposes large externalities, but cannot stop them a priori.
Larger housing developments should as now require review for MAJOR items like parking, road capacity, water infrastructure, fire safety, but cannot be stopped a priori for most other reasons, and again can be sued post facto but not stopped in advance for infinite reasons.
Yes, I know the above makes me just a classical liberal dreamer…
> mixed development communities may have a long history but the government insistence on it is bizarre
Quite the opposite! The local governments in the US have insisted on a regulation that disallows any mixed development from being built in a huge percentage of the country.
The issue is not the lack of vast open space, it's that even the parts of the country that attract high wage earners and can sustain high density, there are huge communities that want the benefits of access to high paying jobs and the artificially restricted supply that keeps raising the value of their homes. For example, 2 of the counties with the lowest housing built per capita are commuting distance from NYC.
The real “locked value” in real estate is a big investment into policing and keeping the insane and the criminal locked up away from society. Just look at what happened in El Salvador to see the potential wealth that could be unleashed in US blue cities
“…sudden deterioration in the quality of the neighborhood's amenities…”
So long as your standard for this is not 0.0% [perceived or actual negative] change, I think this is very well put.
To the extent that the standard is at or close to 0.0%, surely you can see that all you have done is an elaborate “justification” (the quotes around the word being the key point) for NIMBYism, yes?
You seem to be framing the proposal as one of petitioning a permit-issuance authority, or perhaps testifying at the public commentary portion of a hearing, and that if one can bring up a recognized objection, or one from an established list, then, regardless of the value or degree of harm, its mere existence will cause the authority to stop the project.
That's a forgivable misframing, since we've all become used to thinking about these things in that way, as it is indeed how a lot of the current insane system forces people to operate.
But we don't have to think insane. It's not what I'm getting at, which doesn't involve setting any kind of arbitrary standard for a de minimus threshold or whatever.
The point is market-valuation of (currently) informal property rights and either mitigation in kind or compensation in cash. If the negative change is near 0.01%, then it's not a "permit or not" Boolean situation, but one of paying a cost that one can presume is proportional and so also around 0.01%, and if so, then what's the problem? Yes, 0.01% costs shouldn't block a project, but neither should the prospect of having to pay 0.01% costs block the duty of builders to pay for them.
I'll give you an example from a situation I once experienced first-hand.
Imagine there is a neighborhood with a few small, independently-owned apartment buildings surrounding a pay parking garage with its own, non-landlord owner. As you might imagine, such a state of affairs in a major American city could only have come about if the structures at issue were erected in the haphazard style of the pre-civilized, chaotic, and lawless wild west days of the very early 20th Century, with what archaeologists assume could only be vines and crude stone implements at the disposal of those primitive craftsmen.
The situation was generally at capacity, full of the cars owned by the tenants of the buildings, who rented their spots. Pretty much everyone who wanted a spot got one, and the price was considered affordable and reasonable.
You can already guess what happened next. About a block away, a few old properties were torn down and replaces with a new giant tower block, but, Should would be happy to learn, a negligible amount additional parking "free" to the new tenants. Who wanted to own cars and park them nearby. So, naturally, this started a bidding war for the scarce spots in the old lot, which, by benefit of blessing of the modern building code regime, could not expand to meet the new demand (perhaps the builder of the new tower could have been considered to have "come to the nuisance" of a situation in which additional parking lot spots could not be built to accommodate new residents.)
Well, I'll save you the long story details, but bottom line, there was a fight, it lasted for years, and it got nasty and physical and the police were often involved but only very rarely were they able to deliver any justice to the new residents on account of the damage to their recurrently re-vandalized cars. The local tire and body shops reaped the windfall and were making a killing. Ah, such was once the flavor of a now-lost era before ubiquitous cheap video cameras, with its quaint cultural institutions and its colorful characters. After all, in response to what does one imagine all those Shoup-despised free-parking laws emerged? "The past is a foreign country" and "pressure from the public" meant a very different thing in the 60s and 70s when Alinsky-like agitators and tactics thrived.
Now, let's say the builder of the new tower was told, "Sure, build away. But you have to do something extra so that the people on the same block who are currently paying $50/month for parking spots should be able to continue paying the same amount for the same quality spot."
Maybe the builder could have built parking for his own new tenants, do demand wouldn't outstrip supply. Or he could have bought the parking garage business, and enter into long-term contracts with the existing tenants at the current price. Or instead of long-term contracts, he could have formalized what they thought of as their rights, and given them property rights to indefinitely-continuable leases, and those rights could be traded on the open market, and the new tenants of the new tower could try to buy those rights to lease from the old tenants of the old buildings. Or he could just pay them all off at the current estimates fair market value.
Or a million other things. The point is, it's not, "That's not my problem." If he has to internalize the externalities, what Friedman called, "neighborhood effects", then he can build baby build away, so long as his private benefits do indeed exceed his now private costs, which were formerly "imposed-on-the-neighbors" costs.
Shouldn’t the civil courts and tort law be the right place to solve those kinds of problems?
Well, you write a lot of words, making it less possible rather than more so to decide if yours is a reasonable position or just a thinly disguised NIMBY one.
Of course I, and any reasonable person, would agree with you on extreme examples where a new development has an insufficient number of parking spaces.
By extension, similar truly inadequate infrastructure like road capacity I’d agree with you as well. (AK’s initial story here where the all-knowing planners wanted to simultaneously increase housing while reducing the key road capacity is of course insane.)
But you imply that a) developers aren’t already expected to pay a “tax/fealty” of some amount already as the price of getting permission to build, and b) that there is an objective measurement of what the externalities are for all people.
This second is obviously false. Existing rich homeowners value their privacy and their convenience far more than others do, or than the median citizen/voter of a region or a neutral “reasonable” person would. And rich current homeowners in the suburbs usually explicitly value exclusivity.
And of course part of the problem in the NIMBY/YIMBY conflict is that there are legitimate hyperlocal and regional interests which means there are rarely any easy answers.
Do recall that the start of this AK discussion was explicitly in the suburbs and not a large developed city. FWIW, and it doesn’t mean I am correct, in big cities I think the NIMBY problem is primarily about the politicians, while in the suburbs, the NIMBY problem is disproportionately the rich homeowners themselves.
As I read you, you are basically suggesting that hyper local “property” interests dominate any other legitimate interests, and so must be compensated at close to full (objective or subjective; you are never clear) cost/value in order to permit building.
Which is in fact nothing more than gussied-up standard NIMBYism.
I hope I am wrong in my reading, and would love further enlightenment that doesn’t primarily involve extreme cases like grossly inadequate parking.
It reminds me of the Precautionary Principle. At the extreme, the PP means "never do anything new." At the extreme, this amounts to "never build anything new."
No. The Precautionary Principle is about the state blocking private projects if not satisfied that unforeseen harms don't exist. That's the kind of arbitrary threshold or "prove a negative" situation which is fraught with the possibility of abuse and exploitation as a cover story for the ulterior motive of stopping projects for other, less publicly-acceptable reasons.
The Infrastructural Adequacy Principle doesn't involve the state blocking anything, the choice is up to the builder, who only has to pay for the real full costs of the project to include those likely to be imposed on neighboring residents, and can assess and choose for himself whether or not the benefits exceed those costs.
Respectfully, you have to this point been unclear whether your Infrastructural Adequacy Principle really is primarily about delivering reasonably adequate infrastructure, as defined by a reasonable outside viewer, or not.
If it is, I agree with it 100%. 100%. And there can and should in the real world be fights/debates on the margin as to what is adequate infrastructure.
But if the term is merely code for something else - elsewhere in this thread you strongly imply that existing informal property rights holders should be “made whole” by any new development - then it is just another form of / justification for NIMBYism, where hyperlocal wants/needs/desires outweigh regional wants/needs/desires.
I meant that "at the extreme" it would work the same way. It would stop things dead. With the Precautionary Principle, "at the extreme" the entity that wants to do something new won't be able to prove that there will be no harmful results. With the Infrastructural Adequacy Principle, "at the extreme" the entity that wants to build something won't be able to "prove" that the "real full costs" won't be high enough to stop any project.
In both, there is the question of who gets to decide what the potential costs *really* are. If it's something like the California Coastal Commission ...
I didn't watch the video. I can easily imagine it. In my youth, not knowing where I was going, I took a position as a planning and zoning administrator for a small city. Woof....I lasted exactly 10 1/2 months. Small community zoning boards, land use commissions, planning committees, code enforcement officers, and all related such positions are a pox on humanity.
Heh. I knew of one in Southern Illinois that met semi-monthly in a locked room on the second floor of the county jail. One of my students had chosen to watch them for a class project.
Turns out the room was 'free' and hardly anyone ever attended the meetings, and the door locked automatically, because . . . jail.
The student knocked and gained entrance and was treated well, but was quite shocked at first.
Zoning Board it typically an unpaid job that no one really wants, so it is filled by those with something to gain from it (or, more accurately, who are in some way connected to those who can gain from it, like developers, other builders, and planners.).
So they tend to be, as I said above in dofferent words, pliable midwit authoritarian blockheads.
Sometimes the ZBA stiffs are just friends of the mayor that appoints them, the object lesson in unknowledgeable, moronic, and stultifying decision making.
Mr. Smith goes to Montgomery County
In my neighborhood, there's a dead mall right next to a light rail station that a developer wants to turn into a mixed use, transit-oriented development with a couple hundred apartments. The NIMBYs are all dead set against it; they like the demographics of the area as is. They're winning thus far, but I don't imagine it'll last forever. The mall's too big an eyesore as is.
I don't really have a point, other than to say I kinda miss the days of being young, single, renting and not having to think about crap like this.
Down the hill from me, there's an abandoned outdoor sports complex. It was built 30-40 years ago by some people who run similar complexes in North Carolina. They hosted leagues for baseball, softball, volleyball, basketball, and probably some others. Players and teams would pay for use of the facilities. It seems the promoters hadn't fully accounted for the impact of shorter playing seasons in Connecticut, and it went out of business around the time I moved to town (28 years ago now). It still sits abandoned, overgrown by shrubs and weeds. Once every year or two someone goes through and clears the brush. It is not in a residential neighborhood, and is about 200 yards from an interstate exit. There have been proposals over the years to do something with it. The most serious was to use it as a distribution center, I think for Home Depot. It was blocked by environmentally conscious residents, who were afraid that runoff from the parking lot would cause problems.
Based on the history, I expect it to remain idle for a very long time. Especially because this part of Connecticut is in serious decline economically.
It was an old abandoned movie theater at the edge of my neighborhood. Closed about 8 years. It had been built in a sort of faux temple of cinema style so that as it returned to nature, it reminded people of that scene with the monkeys in The Jungle Book.
It was an education to me that no one else much considered it “blight”’ and resistance to its redevelopment was instant when that was finally on the table.
I employed some slightly devious means to get Council to move the project forward.
This was partly because I thought abandoned cinema was a poor permanent land use, and also because the developer was going to pay into a fund for open space, required to rebuild on the recharge zone.
The amount wasn’t much in the scheme of things but it was better than nothing.
The resulting development was certainly not to my taste and I thought it was ridiculous that they named it “The *****” for the road which was named for a family of old hill people, gussied up with a wholly fraudulent umlaut to make it seem Scandinavian modern. The trees planted along the street have thriven, oddly, and that’s the best part.
In my 30+ years of teaching Local Government Administration, I've noted that the average person appointed to, or elected to, such a board tends to be a midwit, authoritarian stump.
They get "played" or their strings are controlled by the people they interact with the most, developers and planners/
As someone decidedly lacking first-hand expertise, I can easily believe you are correct about the average small community.
But I doubt you are correct about the average mid-size suburb of a big city (or even small suburb if it’s California), and there is zero chance you are correct if we are talking about a large city.
Now to be very clear, I am arguing against the “they get ‘played’ by developers” point; not arguing at all about the “midwit, authoritarian stump” claim!
No, in mid-sized suburbs (I lived in a very nice one of some 100,000 for 22 years) they are pretty much full members of the club of those who make a lot of money developing/building things.
In large cities they tend to be part of the local party machine.
Good speech. Very concise. Kling hits the planners with an upper cut to their Costco vulnerability, and then knocks them down with a right cross to cause of sick children. Standing over them he accuses them of planning using “hipster buzzwords.” A 40 year veteran of the neighborhood, Kling cleaned up — a win by KO. The crowd cheers. Congrats.
Agree. Fantastic and effective response by Kling. Who is served by the "plan"? Who actually lives in the community? Why the refusal by community leaders to acknowledge the disconnect?
Alas, the Marxists have found a home in Maryland and especially in Montgomery County. Maryland government leaders are ideologues who are determined to implement an agenda regardless of the social and economic cost and the personal harm. Maryland is being Californicated and the shame is we don't even get to have nice weather as compensation.
In a sane world, the plan here for more housing would get both consideration and critique. As it deserves.
The plan re “transportation” only scorn, ridicule and wholesale replacement of the planners and the people who hired them.
In a sane world, Montgomery County of all places in the world would not have a 93,000 acre "agricultural reserve" in which development is proscribed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_County_Agricultural_Reserve
But YIMBY's would rather disembowel themselves than ever take note of this absurdity.
I grew up in a huge boomtown within a county that was yet majority ag, land wise, until just a few decades ago.
Sometimes the most productive land in a region, has a city in the middle of it.
But what wasn’t noticed or foreseen - since planning is a 4-letter word! - was how all that ag and prairie soaked up the rain and prevented flooding. Until it was gone. Then it became noticeable, fast.
Montgomery County has 316,800 acres over 90,000 acres of which are used as federal, state, or county parkland. Hard to believe another 90,000 acres are required to prevent flooding.
Cities are better when they have an edge.
Maybe that’s the idea with the ag land.
Or maybe they like having those employers, or a local food supply.
Identical housing developments everywhere doesn’t town make.
??
Why is it that YIMBYs are the ones you say are “denying” this? I truly don’t get it. Can you explain for the uninitiated?
As Joel Kotkin observed early on:
"For the better part of the last few decades, California policy makers have increasingly steered housing development away from peripheral locations, where land is cheaper and local regulations generally less strict, seeking to drive growth to dense urban areas, where costs are higher and regulatory environments generally more difficult to navigate."
https://joelkotkin.com/housing-report-blame-ourselves-not-our-stars/
This is the YIMBY agenda in a nutshell. If there are any pro-sprawl YIMBYs out there I have yet to encounter them.
Ok, at least now I understand what you are saying.
I completely disagree with you.
(Though be clear the one thing I am definitely NOT doing is defending California planners!)
YIMBYs want to build everywhere, both in the currently built places and in the ones not currently built in.
It seems to me yours is simply another NIMBY claim. And it’s positively Orwellian to call it a YIMBY one.
For your claims is a decidely unsubtle one:
Go build over there, not here in my backyard.
The YIMBY Action Network (https://yimbyaction.org/ ) might be the biggest name in the YIMBY business and they are quite clear about their goal to prevent housing development at the periphery:
“Building additional housing near transit, jobs, and existing infrastructure reduces sprawl, preserving wildlife habitat, preventing megacommutes, and lowering climate risk.”
It has nothing at all to do with creating affordable housing that people actually want to live in.
In other words, “No – You Can’t Build There. Urban Dystopia for the Little People Now!” is about as an accurate an interpretation of their agenda as one is likely to find.
Their EIN is 81-5140915 and you can look up their Form 990s on file here: https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/ Look at part IX. They are headquartered in San Francisco. Well paid astro-turf.
There is a reason YIMBY’s are not popular among people trying to hold onto their residences: https://www.housingisahumanright.org/selling-off-california-exposes-corporate-yimbys-ties-to-big-tech-and-big-real-estate/
https://missionlocal.org/2024/02/explore-big-money-san-francisco-growsf-togethersf-neighbors-larsen-moritz-tan-web/
The notion of YIMBY’s as advocates for some sort of common good might actually be what is truly Orwellian.
Montgomery County seems pretty typical in this regard. In my experience with city and county governments, the planners and developers always get their way eventually.
Montgomery County seems like a nice place, to me. What I’ve seen of it.
I’ve noticed that places that are already pretty nice, tend to be the places that get fiddled with.
Seldom do people interest themselves in making a really bad place better.
So the one upside for AK, is that he may consider himself lucky as to where he lives.
Most of America doesn’t look anywhere as pleasant as Montgomery County.
I started watching at the beginning of the hearing (4:42:32). I first noted that the county has a planning department - I presume they work at the direction of the Planning Board. The planning department representative who gave the opening remarks started with a listing of the county's plans. I counted 9 or 10 existing plans, starting with a 1989 master plan, most with subsequent amendments. I guess this is what you get when you have a planning department - lots of plans. I've heard of other communities with planning efforts. I wonder about cause and effect: Do communities identify a need for planning their future, and create planning departments which end up staffed by professionals with the appropriate planning credentials, or do people with university training in community planning create demand for their services by convincing governmental bodies of the benefits of planning future development?
When I took urban government courses long ago, I learned that to get various federal funds, a jurisdiction has to have a certified planner.
Now, that would be a requirement for Trump to go after. If only Trump were interested in doing something useful.
I'm not any more surprised than you if the board doesn't listen to constituents but I will be surprised if this moves forward without coordination with the state road work.
Impressive. Congratulations.
Yet, as you write “the board has a reputation for blowing off the public.” Why would that be?
Perhaps if we ask “What Would Dan Williams Say?” we might sketch out the cultural origins of this sort of non-responsive governance. Williams regularly invokes Walter Lippmann’s arguments for a society in which specialized intellectuals apply scientific management to democracy to ensure it does not fall into irrationality. In this system, the intellectuals use journalism to manufacture consent within an irrational public. Public assemblies such as the board hearing are for the benefit of the intellectuals to inform them of what public misconceptions need to be attacked in order to manufacture that consent.
An alternative to Lippmann was offered by John Dewey in what became known as the Dewey-Lippmann debates. Dewey argued in favor of substantive and efficacious public participation in governance, despite the public’s shortcomings. He envisioned a participatory form of democracy, in which the public is an active participant in public discourse, and not a merely submissive body whose purpose is to respond to the guidance of specialized intellectuals using scientific management and the latest propaganda.
Dewey’s vision was of course entirely inconsistent with a US culture and political system gripped by an all consuming phobia of the “democratical” (See Madison’s Notes) and we continue to offer our patient sufferance to the foibles of managerialism. I must confess to not having read much Jaudith Butler but I have an inkling that she and her book Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly ( https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/book-review-notes-toward-a-performative-theory-of-assembly-by-judith-butler/ ) describe developments into which the Dewey-Lippmann opposition has been subsumed. So perhaps Dr. Kling’s contribution is useful in other ways than as a tool for the specialists to legitimize their per-ordained conclusions.
I happened to be pondering this question late last night watching the desfiles of the escolas de samba at the Rio de Janeiro Sambadromo with my wife as has been our annual ritual since we were married many years ago. The cultural contrast between my adopted homeland and the United States I think might illustrate the gulf between a real Dewey-world and the Lippmann-world of the United States When I met and married her, I was but a young bureaucrat in DC feeling the sting of the slings and arrows of office politics and political intrigue for the first time, feeling isolated and ineffectual.
But I married into a Umbanda practicing family which helped me fit into my role and identity and accept a reordered notion of possibilities. The first thing to know about Umbanda is that it is a wholly decentralized religion without any hierarchy, organized locally around worship centers each with their own idiosyncratic traditions. In our family, we recognize the common practice of associating a particular spirit called an orixa with each day of the week. Each orixa has their own special charactaristics much like a patron saint and indeed syncretism links most of the orixas to a particular Catholic saint. But there is no hierarchy. The day of the week on which you are born thus gives you a bond with a particular orix and patron saint. My orixa is Oshosi who is associated with St Sebastian who was a captain in Diocletian's Praetorian Guards but was tied to a stake and shot with arrows for concealing his Christianity. But he was healed by St. Irene only to have his head bashed in later when he returned to Diocletian reform. I found my St. Irene and she healed me but I’m still expecting to get my head bashed in eventually.
Brazilian syncretism and populist democracy is played out in the samba school parades in which thousands and thousands participate, each individual decked out resplendently, representing their neighborhoods and their complex historical and religious themes and origin stories. There is really no government funding for the schools and even the Sambadromo itself was built entirely privately. Globo does the broadcasting which frequently cuts to a reporter in the audience interviewing average people and sampling the home cooking they bring with them. Last night there were more frequent than normal interruptions with cuts to interviews with acting celebrities but that was because the celebrities were associated with the Brazilian film that had garnered some Academy Award nominations. Any Globo viewer might get the more or less accurate impression that they nation was united in hopes for their film (Brazilian twitter appeared similarly fixated – the US’s prestige is not entirely squandered apparently).
But this democratical levelling plays itself out in other important ways as well. Unlike the US professional baseball teams which go off to distant Florida to play practice games amongst themselves, the top level soccer teams in Brazil spend the off season playing in state tournaments where a Serie A national champ would travel to a small town with less than 10,000 population to play the hometown Serie D team on the equivalent of the local highschool field. And after the game, which is invariably hard fought and never a blow out, the kids flood the field and get autographs and photos, and the highly paid stars appear entirely relaxed and comfortable with it all. And the Serie A teams have to win to stay in Serie A. The lowest ranked teams are relegated each year to a lower level and new teams brought up. This occurs in volleyball as well.
Of course, the United States has an enormous advantage over Brazil in terms of GDP per capita, etc., and that is reason enough for most to summarily dismiss the John Dewey vision out of hand. But I suspect that there is a sizable share of expats who, having experienced the cultural difference, recognize it as more a trade off than cut and dried superiority.
I’ll assume these commissars (planners) are appointed. If they have a reputation for ignoring citizens, then is there not a pathway through the County Council? Though the Council might override Planning Board decisions, its willingness to do so probably depends on political calculus and electoral pressures. Regretfully, old-fashioned tar and feathering can’t be employed anymore, but citizens can always vote the bastards out. When I lived in Charlotte years ago, there was a plan to convert a house in a sedate, residential area to a drug rehabilitation facility. There was serious opposition, unsurprisingly, from the area neighborhood, but ultimately, the facility was opened.