Opposition to Housing, Growth

Opposition to Housing: NIMBY and Beyond

In this article by Rolf Pendall, he explores opposition to housing in the San Francisco Bay Area. He sets out to answer two explicit questions:

1. What distinguishes controversial from non-controversial projects?
2. What factors associate with NIMBY protests (where the user is an adjacent land owner) and what factors associate with anti-growth protests more generally?

In light of the discussion with Will Travis earlier this week, it seems like the biggest difficulty facing downtown Berkeley is not a decision about “what it should look like” but a political arena that appears to have moved beyond rationality. I was curious if this empirical study of the Bay Area would offer any advice.

First, Pendall identifies some of the main reasons that people protest new development. Among them are a reflection of racial or class antagonism, an ideological commitment to home ownership (rather than rental housing), a desire to protect neighborhood ambiance, and a fear of decreased home value. Though Pendall doesn’t mention it, it seems as though there should be a category for fear of change more broadly – a fear that might be categorized as emotional or irrational.

Next, Pendall identifies a wide array of characteristics of various housing proposals in the Bay Area in order to correlate them to signs of protest and success in getting approved and built. According to the planners that he surveys, the vast majority of protests come from adjacent uses, especially single-family residences, and anticipated effects on the environment. Again, I wonder if in Berkeley these are legitimate concerns, or as Will Travis mentioned, just the “politically correct” way of characterizing a more generalized dislike of change.

From his statistical correlations, Pendall lays out some interesting findings. First, he notes that affordable housing projects with streamlined approval processes generate less controversy that the average non-affordable process. This suggests that the process, rather than the project itself, plays a significant role in whether or not facially “controversial” projects get approved. Second, and again on the process point, Pendall notes that projects that required layers or permits and or approvals tend to generate more controversy that projects with a less burdensome approval process – even when size and density are held constant. I find this argument to be a bit of a chicken-or-egg question, as longer approval processes will generate more controversy on their own, but it does suggest that the relationship between approval steps and controversy might not be linear. Last, Pendall suggests that the level of controversy correlates with the type of public forum in which the final decision is made. Projects that are approved by planning commissions (with appointed members) are less controversial than those approved by City Council (with elected members.

When I think about how these lessons might apply to Berkeley, however, they don’t point to very productive ends. Process certainly matters, but it is difficult to change the process when the people controlling it seem to be the ones who want to create the opposition. Until we have a political system that wants to see the downtown look different, I think it will be hard to change the system such that it generates less controversy.

Citation: Pendall, Rolf. “Opposition to Housing, NIMBY and Beyond.” 31 Urban Affairs Review 1 (1999).