Deconstructing NIMBYism

March 19, 2019 by Fred Allebach

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of mankind’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” – J.K. Galbraith

Why are there NIMBYs? What drives them to resist greater social goods? The answer is simple. Selfishness and unwillingness to sacrifice. The costs of such sacrifice are seen as unfair; this breeds righteousness. Righteous pushback then grasps at any straws to fight with.

To NIMBYs the fight becomes about how to highlight and leverage proxy issues, while deftly avoiding the central issue. NIMBYs say they are for the central issue “but… just not in my back yard.”

NIMBYism rests on a fundamental conservative impulse. People have incentive to protect their nests and territory. If people claw their way to a stasis and some comfort in life, they don’t want that to change or to be taken away. Ironically, current societal arrangements are all based on changes past NIMBYs didn’t want.

One core issue to explain NIMBYism is that people are a very successful species. More and more people keep on being made, and they all clamor for a piece of the pie. The more people, the less pie. Zero and negative population growth would be super adaptive from a resource conservation standpoint, but then we would need to buy into sustainability rather than growth as our prime economic directive.

NIMBYs are about protecting their piece of the pie. In primogeniture inheritance, very common in human history, only the first born gets the goods, the rest have to out-migrate. Growing population makes pressure, for people to keep moving to find a place where they can hopefully enjoy some prosperity. Frankly, in a world of finite resources, it is simply not possible for all to live like middle class Americans, not enough pie for that. The cold hard facts are that more people in the world are going to have to make do with less per capita.

Yet, no one wants to give up what they have gathered, or share their place, hence, NIMBYs. Those who have power and control but who might lose it? They want to build walls.

If a collective sacrifice is needed for example, to address a public problem like lack of affordable housing, this sets up a dynamic of protectionism, which is the genesis of NIMBYism. What some might gain, NIMBYs might lose. Zero-sum game. This is basic game theory, people are always calculating what is in their interests, and if they see something as unfair, they take steps to mitigate that perceived unfairness, and to protect their interests.
An issue for social equity (sharing) in housing is that of public and private space, and who controls such space.

Most spaces where housing can go are privately owned yet the overarching land use and provision of public goods such as utilities, streets, zoning, is controlled by government, a public-serving entity. We can debate the role of government; we may agree that it is primarily in place to manage the collective needs of society and to protect against individual and business excesses.

Who government serves is a point of ideological contention. All citizens are putatively equal, but are current property owner’s interests more equal than renters? This was the case in US history, when only property-owning white men were citizens, however, since that stage, non- property-owning men, women, slaves and indentured servants have also become citizens. All of the latter can vote, and presumably shape public policy to address their interests, yet we know that groups with more power have more political say.

For housing, the default system of privately owned space plus highly desirable Bay Area location, plus obscene Bay Area/ Silicon Valley excess wealth, adds up to an inflation of prices and of real estate values. This real estate property is disproportionately owned by white people. Builders and homeowners all have incentive to see these values go as high as possible; the consequence of this is the creation of exclusivity, unaffordability, and segregation.

People have little incentive to be inclusive towards non-relatives. This gets back to game theory: zero-sum game, you win, I lose. Finding win-wins is hard too, because the bottom line is that for the pie to be shared, individuals must get less each, i.e. they must sacrifice. To level the playing field towards mote inclusivity necessarily means government having to deflate exclusive incentives. It means the whole game of government serving and protecting exclusive, high property values, needs to be broken down, more sharing of the pie, more win-win, needs to be
the new meme.

Sharing at this stage of the game of human history is adaptive and sustainable. There are very good reasons supporting sustainability with a capital S, (triple bottom line, full cost accounting) to which most reasonable people would agree. The only hitch? If such sharing and inclusivity happen to be in your back yard.

NIMBYs want government to protect the integrity of their neighborhoods, have-nots want government to create an equal playing field, so they even have a place. This opens up another key driver for understanding NIMBYism, evolution. At the intersection of population growth, desirable location, and evolution, is dynamic change. There are demographic, sustainability, and climate protection pressures for changes to, or adaptations to mitigate exclusive and excessive resource use.

NIMBYs want things to stay the same, to monopolize a good thing; in effect they are fighting destiny. They want to preserve a snapshot of the past, say “I got mine and too bad for yours,” and stave off the inevitability of change and the need to adapt.

What this means for Sonoma Valley and for coastal California, is that there is a cohort of landed, vested stakeholders who fight to keep things the way they were. But as in evolution, there never was a time when things were stopped. A “species” is an arbitrary snapshot in time of an evolving gene pool; evolution is a process, not a fixed outcome.

Rural feel, and small town character in Sonoma County is exactly the snapshot of the past trying to be preserved and protected by NIMBYs. But since every vested stakeholder wants no changes, this means that even in a place with lots of land, none of it can serve for new area median income housing. No land outside of urban growth boundaries, no land in green separators, no land in low density neighborhoods, no land anywhere, because everywhere you
go there are NIMBYs to have to fight. Checkmate.

The area where NIMBYism really plays out is in fights to control zoning and land use. Zoning is like “the wall”; it acts to keep interlopers out. Interlopers are those who may be allowed in through the provision of high density zoning by government planners. Planner’s job is to properly provision social goods and to serve all the people. Provisioning equitable social goods would be the job of a progressive government, which we would expect in the Bay Area, but unfortunately, in many cases, government here has come to primarily serve the wealthy. Another checkmate.

This all circles back to what high density incentives there are for uses of private land. Land can be zoned a certain way but at the end of the day, the use is decided by the owner; zoning is not a requirement, more like a suggestion. High density zoning usually has a density bonus too, that will allow even more units, and allow the developer to make more money. Many lots in Sonoma could have been high density, with a bonus, but the threat of having to fight East Side NIMBYs for years was enough deterrence to turn projects into low density McMansions instead.

As for fairness, the Springs Specific Plan is proposing multiple lots as high density (in the Plan area), and NIMBYs there are saying, “it’s not fair for Sonoma to externalize its housing nexus onto the Springs; why should we take three story, high density projects when Sonoma takes none?”

Well, NIMBYs are adept at finding arguments to elide the central issue; somebody has to act for the greater good, if the Ace protectors and government in Sonoma won’t allow it. And, Sonoma with HHH is on the move to address housing equity issues with an innovative Housing Action Plan; then they can take on Sonoma NIMBYs head to head, given that HHH keeps its hand on the wheel and drives the deliverance of social goods over limited scope government business as usual.

We currently have two different high density, potential inclusive/exclusive NIMBY situations here “in town”, i.e. the lower Sonoma Valley. One is in the Donald Street/ Robinson Rd. area, and the other is in the Paul’s Field/Splash property area. In the Donald area, high density zoning is proposed on three lots, two owned by Steve Ledson. No one knows what Ledson might do, but since he is a for profit, market rate developer, chances are he will go with the county 15% inclusion of area median income (AMI) affordable units, and have the rest be market rate, and maybe “affordable by design”, which is to say, 400 square foot units. 90% of AMI people cannot afford market rate, so the potential max social goods are not guaranteed with the potential Ledson high density project. Or, what would happen would be all existing stakeholders remain with large shares of the pie, and all new ones get drastically smaller shares.

For the Paul’s Field/ Splash property, Mid-Pen Housing, a non-profit developer, has a chance to build some 80 units of dedicated AMI housing. This will be in conjunction with a Norman Krug hotel. On the face of it, this looks like two unlikely bedfellows working for a greater good. This is interesting! Got to like it, this could be redemption for Tourism Improvement District actors.

The high density housing here is opposed, ironically, by neighboring mobile home stakeholders who are already the beneficiaries of high density zoning. This goes to show that people you might think would be allies turn against each other when NIMBY pressures are at stake.

This all gets back to people’s selfish interests in seeing their land appreciate as much as possible, and to keep the flavor what it was when they bought. Land values are the cash cow of modern America, especially post-WW2 America. This was contingent in many ways on inclusive social programs like the GI Bill and GI mortgage. All of a sudden, due to a combination of factors you can read about in Richard Walker’s book Pictures of a Gone City, people’s houses in the Bay Area were worth millions; neighborhoods were then gutted through sales to second home owners and vacation rental purveyors; the housing stock for the erstwhile middle class was taken away, the working class no longer able to afford rent, or to even shop in the valley for food and gas.

This has been happening for years, as Chamber, TID, SVVB and government actors all went along for the fun ride while the little guys were ruined and trickled unnoticed out of town. The rise of wine tasting on the Plaza is a prime indicator of the way things are going, all serving the very top end.

This top end trend is evident in all the strip and flip speculation happening, particularly on Sonoma’s east side. This is a shame of excessive resource use, as you take a perfectly good, functional home, tear it down and send it all to the dump, and then consume a whole big house worth of new materials resources. This is why wealth itself is a prime indicator of unsustainability.

Then it became de rigueur for government planners to try and mitigate the demographic displacement with infill, higher density affordable housing projects around transportation hubs. Old-style “sprawl” land grabs at the municipal edges had been foiled by the Urban Growth Boundary and green separator movements. Government funds for housing were tanked by the loss of redevelopment money, itself a consequence of me-first, Prop 13 taxpayer’s revolts where public resources became less and less until all you can expect is police, fire and Public Works, with no real active backstop to the vagaries of the market.

This is the evolution to government to serve selfishness. No longer then, was there an overall sense of community. Neighborhoods, with the aid of social media, became proscribed NIMBY tribes defending against tourism intensification on one hand, and high density housing on the other, while the speculative market replaced one middle class home after another with vacation rentals and second homes. For example, the Donald Street neighbors don’t want to be in the Springs Specific Plan, to have high density housing that would include “locals” displaced by all of the above, even though they are in a Census Tract that includes a trailer park, neighbors who need AMI housing. Yet Springs NIMBYs, trailers and mobile homes are seen as “blight” because of the effect on gentrifying property values. Trailer and mobile home people are not “neighbors”, they are blight. It’s the incentive for zero-sum personal gain that leads to exclusivity, by NIMBYs and by landowning developers seeking to maximize their property values.

Only government/non-profit developers can bring the level of social goods necessary to make an inclusive society. Even here, the money needed by non-profit housing developers is gotten from vampire squid Wall Street investors seeking tax write-off incentives, the same incentives that have been blocked by Trump, because Trump and Republicans are all about benefiting white men who already have all the power and control, and not about anything that benefits the little guy. So much for that populism bait and switch.

It all gets down to who has and who controls the money, and unfortunately, when it comes to money and pie, people can’t seem to get enough in their own larder, so this NIMBYism and greed is a fault of human nature at bottom. Anyone is susceptible to it. NIMBYs and greedy investors, look in the mirror; it is you and me! A zero-sum game of survival in a cruel world, where sharing and inclusivity is a naive give-away.

And who are the advocates of inclusivity? The faith community, people who value more than money as life’s highest purpose. Here, inclusion is a moral value, not a naïve give-away. It’s true enough that in Sonoma there are probably more investment advising outfits than churches, and money has become the new American religion, yet there are enough people still here steeped in traditions of compassion and inclusivity to put moral wind in the sails for fighting for greater social goods for all. This moral motive force for sharing and inclusivity is exactly what is needed to counteract the NIMBY tendency we all have.

And while we increasingly share space, it’s a good time to get used to having and wanting less, this is what sustainability calls for (and to prepare to have your hamburgers seriously limited if not gone).

The cure for NIMBYism? Everyone in Sonoma Valley take the SRJC Philosophy 5 course on critical thinking and writing. One semester, a small ask, will change the world. If you don’t have time to take the class, here’s an abstract: actions that cause more harm and suffering than good can’t be justified. The responsibility for changing behavior rests squarely in our own back yards.