Left-NIMBYs are Categorically Worse than Suburban NIMBYs
Dissecting America's fear of market-rate multifamily
I became interested in urbanism 13 years ago. At the time, affordability requirements were purely hypothetical, and any new building that brought people into the city from suburbia was considered progress. Our city centers were neglected and people were excited to see historic buildings renovated, sidewalks repaired, and neighborhoods spring back to life.
Slowly, though, I saw a rift form, where inner-city residents actively fought against investment in their neighborhoods. I saw self-proclaimed "urbanists" show up to city council meetings to protest walkable, transit-oriented development and I scratched my head. Every time a developer wanted to build something decidedly urbanist, only one person had the accelerator and 5,000 people had the brake. How did we get here, and how do we get out?
American Urbanism and the Housing Shortage
One of urbanism’s biggest gripes with American post-war land use is that it prohibits most affordable types of housing: single-family zoning means you can’t build anything besides single-family detached houses, which require a lot of resources, making them inherently more expensive than apartments (which share a wall and don’t require a yard on all sides).
Obviously, the solution to this problem is to allow the construction of multifamily housing in more areas. Seems simple, but Americans of all stripes have become married to a certain ideal of their neighborhood and they don’t want new, different buildings filled with new, different people occupying their familiar spaces.
In the suburbs, homeowners fear any multifamily in their neighborhoods and adamantly oppose any rezonings to allow it, mainly because they think it will bring in a lower-income class of residents and create a lower-income neighborhood with lower property values. In urban areas, we have the opposite: residents fear new apartments will bring in higher-income residents and turn their neighborhood into something trendy, gentrified and expensive, therefore pricing out the existing residents.
This fear of higher-income residents carries a certain progressive cachet that lends the fearful a sense of entitlement: “I’m on the side of the small guy against the rich guy, therefore I don’t have to verify if what I’m saying is true. I just know it is.” To borrow a phrase from Noah Smith, let’s call these people “left-NIMBYs”.
There have been a slew of great articles debunking the left-NIMBY philosophy, but I wanted to point out one glaring flaw that no one else has: the urban, progressive NIMBYs who protest and block new apartment buildings are doing quantifiably more damage to our housing crisis (and our environment) than the conservative, suburban NIMBYs who block a few townhomes. The urbanites are blocking more units, and the units they block are more sustainable and economical than suburban housing.
There are a plethora of reasons that suburban homeowners are ethically wrong to oppose multifamily. But those suburban developments are a tiny drop in the housing bucket compared to the urban infill projects that progressives often oppose.
To be clear, I’m a huge supporter of upzoning the ‘burbs (and especially Sen. Scott Wiener’s work in California). It’s a necessary step forward. It’s incremental progress and I really enjoy seeing ADUs and rowhouses in a neighborhood, they remind me of quaint European suburbs. But these housing types don’t add much housing and, no matter how much you retrofit suburbia, it will never be walkable. They will not create the pedestrian-friendly, beautiful city centers I know America is capable of building.
So let’s frame the goal of urbanism in the clearest terms: the chief problem in America’s built environment is suburban sprawl (and the car-dependency it creates), and urbanism is about reforming that sprawl. Suburban sprawl is cooking the planet. It’s causing a massive housing crisis that disproportionately hurts minorities and the poor. It’s causing drunk driving deaths, asthma, obesity and heart disease and it’s disproportionately killing minorities. The antidote to suburban sprawl is multifamily housing near transit. That’s it. That’s what we need more of.
The Left-Nimby Process: What’s Happening?
First, a developer proposes an apartment building in an urban area. Because America neglected its city centers for so many decades, our inner cities are generally lower-income than the suburbs and are occupied by marginalized people. Some of these residents see the developer as a privileged group of businessmen building something for a privileged group of hypothetical occupants, so they go to city council meetings and public input meetings to voice their opposition to the project. The project gets stalled in committee, often for years, while neighbors make a series of demands on the development called “concessions”. Typically the concessions demanded are affordable housing, public space, and community centers like schools, or something specifically relevant to the neighborhood (like a theater).
The builders usually foresee these community concerns so they start with a proposal that has concessions built in: when Innovation QNS was proposed in Astoria, Queens, the developers initially offered to build a school and provide 2 acres of public green space, with the legally required 25% affordable housing rate. At this point in the negotiations, NIMBYs will slow the project as much as possible, often by requiring an unrealistically high percentage of affordable housing or setting a new affordability requirement that is higher than what they previously agreed to, or demanding more rounds of community outreach and public input.
Many times, a developer drops the project altogether or significantly reduces the amount of housing units. Progressive NIMBYs would often rather see 0 units of housing get built with a 100% affordability component, than 1000 housing units with a 25% affordability component, because they claim that supply and demand do not affect the price of housing.
Furthermore, they maintain that new development causes displacement. When I speak to progressives opposed to new development, I’m amazed at how they know for a fact that any new development will force nearby residents out of their homes, even though empirical evidence tells us that new development slows rent growth.
The Issue with “Left-NIMBYs”
There are a number of problems created by blocking new urban housing, and I can’t address them all in one article. But I’d like to focus specifically on why these urban NIMBYs are even worse than suburban NIMBYs.
1. The housing blocked by progressive NIMBYs would have funded transit and other public services
To me this feels like a “duh,” but I never see it brought up: everyone in urbanism is here to improve America’s transit systems, fund our schools and rehab our sorely-neglected public housing. If you are an “urbanist” who opposes all market-rate construction in your city, you are hurting your city’s transit funding, public housing, schools, parks, and public services.
Perhaps the MTA and BART would not be in such massive budget crises had their cities allowed a decent amount of market-rate housing to be built. The power of cities is that you can tax wealthy residents to fund services for everyone else. Therefore, it’s advantageous to get as many net tax contributors to invest in your city as possible, to increase quality of life for the less fortunate.
When you block a new housing proposal near transit because you think it’s “not affordable enough,” you are pushing many hypothetical residents into suburban areas where they don’t contribute to city infrastructure and hurting urbanism overall.
2. The housing blocked by progressive NIMBYs would be good for the environment
This sin is particularly egregious and I feel left-NIMBYs just get a slap on the wrist for it. When people move from the suburbs to occupy those new $2500/month one-bedrooms in America’s trendy downtowns, they make significantly less car trips and cause significantly less emissions.
When suburban NIMBYs block a row of 9 townhomes in their neighborhood, they’re doing a little damage, sure. Doors are doors, and America needs more doors to make it out of our housing crisis. But the residents of those townhomes were going to drive for almost every trip out of their front door. The potential residents of any urban infill project are going to walk, bike, take transit, and possibly get rid of their cars. And the urban infill project was going to have occupants in the hundreds or thousands.
Urban NIMBYism is bad for the environment. Ne’er let it be said otherwise.
3. The housing experts who disagree with progressive NIMBYs are progressive themselves. And they’re getting frustrated.
Paul Krugman. Matt Yglesias. Noah Smith. The Center for American Progress. The Biden Administration. The Brookings Institution. The New York Times. The Atlantic.
These are the sources telling progressive Americans that our house price problem is, in fact, a matter of supply and demand, so please stop killing new housing proposals because you’re making the housing crisis worse. None of these sources are right-wing or free-market in spirit, and progressives agree with them on the vast majority of other issues. But progressive NIMBYs are disagreeing on this issue because, this time, the sources didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.
Last year, Tiffany Caban approved the Halletts Point North development in Astoria, when given a choice between “housing that will clean up a sorely neglected waterfront” or “distribution center that pays low wages and runs trucks that pollute the local air night and day”. Caban had received the notoriously competitive endorsement of the New York DSA, but many DSA members immediately attacked her for allowing the project to go forward (even though it contained higher than the required amount of affordable units and the developers built a public waterfront park). I felt bad for this woman who subsequently had to defend herself against her own party members for doing something smart.
Having talked to many a progressive about housing, I’ve found many of them simply don’t believe we’re in a housing shortage. They prefer conspiracy theories about landlords “warehousing” empty apartments, and they start to remind me of anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, creationists and flat-earthers, but with an added dash of self-righteousness.
4. New Urbanism has always supported the development of market-rate apartments in city centers.
New Urbanism, the left-leaning segment of urbanism that is largely responsible for the growth of the movement thanks to organizations like CNU, was started by a group of architects who advised developers on how to make their developments more pedestrian-friendly. The CNU has always worked with developers to design private, market-rate housing in city centers near transit.
And guess what? We have plenty of room in our cities to build that market-rate housing. 79% of Chicago’s residential land is zoned single-family. Half of Tulsa’s downtown is asphalt parking lots. The lack of multifamily housing overall is a much bigger problem than some people getting displaced by new multifamily.
5. Left-NIMBY arguments undermine many of the central tenets of urbanism
If supply and demand have no effect on housing prices, then there’s no reason to upzone suburbia and allow more housing there. If all new development causes displacement and pushes people out of their homes, I guess the only acceptable development to them is single-family detached suburban sprawl (that’s the only way to guarantee we won’t gentrify any BIPOCs).
Many left-NIMBYs moved to major cities, and now they fight to stop those cities from becoming more city-like (their favorite term here is “overdevelopment”, which is totally not subjective at all). Many left-NIMBYs preach the benefits of transit and density, but prohibit anyone moving in from the suburbs to enjoy transit and density.
They agree that our urban centers have suffered from decades of neglect, but they’ll actively fight against investment in underprivileged neighborhoods. Meanwhile, they are absent from suburban city council meetings where the City discusses a new suburban project that involves dynamiting a mountain and chopping down acres of woodland to build a subdivision. Out of sight, out of mind.
What you can do:
The most effective thing you can do to address the housing crisis is to show up to your city council meetings and voice your support for new building proposals. Only 15% of people in city council meetings voice support for new development, while two-thirds of people grabbing the mic to voice opposition and protect their inflated property values.
You can also email your city councilors and even drop off paper letters to their offices.
Does this mean developers should have free reign over our neighborhoods? Absolutely not. We should be enacting strict pedestrian-oriented design standards, stricter construction standards, aesthetic regulations that block all-glass walls, and even some small element of affordable housing requirements are fine. But claiming “lack of affordability” trumps all the other good things an urban building brings is counterproductive.
Conclusion
I think we experience so much NIMBYism simply because it’s easier to complain about something than to build it. The commonly-accepted view of a NIMBY is a suburban homeowner who is scared that apartments or transit access will hurt his property values. But it also encompasses urban residents blocking new housing proposals in their neighborhood.
I would urge you to see the high price of urban housing as something we can harness to build stronger cities: if people are willing to pay a lot to live in walkable neighborhoods, that means we should build a lot more walkable neighborhoods. Don’t fight transit-oriented development, wear it out. Keep it going in every neighborhood of every major American city until urbanism is the norm and you forgot cars even existed.