Looks like there is a cost to all those cheap industrial goods made in China after all. This article from McClatchy discusses the problem of pollution from Asia hitting the West Coast:
“By some estimates more than 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia — ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone — reach the U.S. annually.”
That’s a hard number to visualize. It does, however, bring home the global problem of pollution.
Do you know who is funding your local candidate? Most of them are probably not from your district, as Lee Drutman at Miller-McCune points out after looking at the results of new report by two University of Maryland professors. Lee writes:
Increasingly, they’re not bothering to ask the folks whom they are actually paid to represent for campaign cash. Instead, they are flocking to a handful of super-wealthy ZIP codes in places like Hollywood; the Upper East Side of Manhattan; Greenwich, Conn.; and suburban Washington, D.C. – the “political ATM’s” of the campaign trial.
Moreover, as of 2004, only 1 in 5 congressional districts provided the majority of contributions for the candidates seeking to represent that district. And in 18 percent of congressional districts, more than 90 percent of money now comes from out of district.
The professors write in their analysis that the new donor class is “disproportionately wealthy, urban, highly educated, and employed in elite occupations.”
If you’re interested in where the small donors are coming from in the presidential race, check out the interactive map at Huffington Post’s Fundrace. It’s a great tool to use as a proxy to visualize which way your state or metro area might lean, or maybe you just want to spy on your neighbors.
For instance, it’s pretty easy to see instantly which parts of the Los Angeles may be pockets of Republican influence, or to see Obama’s fund raising success in the Chicago region.
Perhaps the Republicans should move this week’s convention out to the western Minneapolis suburbs for a warmer reception?
Miller-McCune link via NewsAlert.
On his way to Denver, Barack Obama has been trying to mainstream his campaign. The selection of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate was intended to be a steadying force as the historic nature of his campaign as a candidate of change remains unsettling for some. But so much has been said about his status as a candidate of racial change, that his status as a candidate of generational change has been little noticed. The torch, as JFK might say, is passing to a new generation.
Obama is the first Gen X Presidential candidate — for better and for worse.
He’s the son of a baby boomer — his mother, Anne, was born in 1942 — and although his birth in 1961 puts him slightly ahead of the textbook mid-1960s start date of Gen X, he is the same age as the man who coined the term “Generation X,” author Douglas Coupland.
Like many Gen Xers, Obama is a child of divorce. His anthropologist mother embodied the restless drift and countercultural curiosity of the baby boomer generation. His grandparents’ lives were more typical of the “greatest generation” — with struggles through the Great Depression and then the Second World War, followed by a more conventional, even conservative, life.
His mother married a Kenyan; his grandparents voted for Nixon — Barack tried to bridge the divide.
Reconciling these generational tensions has been the unwelcome responsibility of Gen X. We have been living in the wake of the Boomers all our lives. We’ve benefited from the civil rights struggles and enjoyed the opening of our culture, from rock music to the sexual revolution.
But we’ve also experienced the fallout from their excesses — drug abuse, racial strife, fractured families, homelessness, AIDS, a decaying environment and dangerous inner cities. Gen Xers have been left to clean up after the Baby Boomers’ party, to put up with the societal growing pains, and try to reconcile the warring factions.
Obama voiced this frustration in “The Audacity of Hope,” writing, “In the back and forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”
His antidote is the rhetorical post-partisanship and professed belief in political pragmatism that are central to his political appeal amongst younger voters. His style of problem-solving — a cool assessment of the problems associated with predictable positions on both sides, and then an attempt to synthesize new solutions — fits Gen X perfectly.
Jeff Gordinier, author of “X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking,” told me. “Obama’s talk about going beyond the old politics of ‘red’ and ‘blue’, liberal and conservative, and building a third way does resonate. Gen Xers tend to be pretty post-ideological, there is less allegiance to any one party or any one way of thinking. … Our political pragmatism comes as a result of growing up in the shadow of the Boomers’ idealism and seeing it fail miserably.”
But there is another aspect of the Generation X experience Obama must overcome: They are the first American generation to come of age without a draft.
While McCain entered military service as a young man, Obama opted for a combination of higher education and community service. At the age when McCain was a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton, Obama was at Harvard Law. To be fair, McCain is a legendary military hero because his experience was uncommon. Obama’s experience — inevitably cushy by comparison, both liberal and elite — is more common to contemporary Americans.
But biography is at the root of what pollsters clinically call “character attributes,” and this does not help in the commander in chief test.
Obama’s college years were full of generationally recognizable rites of passage — detailed with disarming candor in his first book, “Dreams from My Father” — smoking cigarettes and some pot and drinking beer while listening to ’70s and ’80s rock and soul. There were the confusing cross-currents of yuppie culture and multicultural identity politics — particularly resonant to a biracial student like Obama — and protests against the evils of apartheid while the evils of communism were comparatively ignored on campus. Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the civic demands of John McCain’s pre-Boomer generation experience of personal sacrifice and physical courage were largely limited to debate amongst Gen Xers.
The generational fault lines under this campaign are rumbling right below the surface. It’s no accident that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s strength in the late Democratic primaries came overwhelmingly from older white Americans who have now begun to shift their allegiance to one of their own, John McCain. This is not just about race; it is also a generational judgment — the sense among older voters that Obama is a self-possessed smooth operator who is light on real world experience, and hasn’t earned the office.
Obama, in turn, runs strongest among his contemporaries — voters under 50 and African-Americans. The younger the voter, the more likely they are to support Barack Obama.
The so-called enthusiasm gap — and the pop-culture fascination with Obama — parallels other famous first-in-their-generation presidential candidates, Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton. The younger Millennial Generation’s reverence for Obama may have fueled the “celebrity” ads, but it’s because he’s made politics (briefly) cool again. With the Jay-Z “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” riff during the primary and pioneering use of YouTube and Facebook, Obama speaks the language of our contemporary culture and he looks like what’s next — the first high-tech, hip-hop president.
After four decades and two administrations dominated by the Baby Boomer echo chamber, it’s understandable that we’d want to turn the page and get a president who has learned from their debates but is not held hostage by them.
The promise of Obama is in transcending outdated labels and bridging old divides, but beneath that promise there is also a dash of democracy’s vanity — we like him because he is like us. As Gen X humorist Joel Stein wrote in Time magazine, “The truth is that I like Obama because he’s young, he eats arugula, and knows who Ludacris is. Because he’s the closest thing to the person I’d really like to vote for: me.”
John P. Avlon is the author of “Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics.” He served as chief speechwriter and deputy policy director for Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This article first appeared on www.politico.com.
© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC
To read the popular press, one gets the impression that the collapse of the housing market is concentrated largely in the suburbs and exurbs, as people flock back to the cities in response to the mortgage crisis and high gas prices. A review of mortgage meltdown “ground zero” California indicates the picture is far more nuanced.
California’s metropolitan areas have seen the greatest median house price decreases in the nation. Each of the four largest metropolitan regions, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego and Sacramento have experienced median house price decreases of more than 25 percent over the past year (see Methodology Notes below). These decreases have not been distributed in a way that belies much of the ‘Back to the City’ hype.
Los Angeles: In the broader Los Angeles metropolitan region, the smallest house price declines have been in the inner suburbs — generally those jurisdictions between 10 and 20 miles from downtown. The inner suburbs have seen a median house price decline of 20 percent. These include wide swaths of employment-rich areas like West Los Angeles, the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys.
Somewhat surprisingly — particularly given the hype — the central areas of LA have suffered a somewhat higher rate of decline, at 22 percent. This includes areas close and around downtown Los Angeles, which has been among the ballyhooed “renaissance areas.” These numbers, significantly, do not include the many new units that were supposed to become condos but, due to lack of qualified buyers, have been thrown onto the rental market.
It is true, however, that, if the condo-to-rental trend is left out, an even higher decline has taken place in the outer suburbs, at 30 percent. The outer suburbs include eastern Los Angeles County, eastern Ventura County, much of Orange County and the Riverside-San Bernardino area. The largest declines of 34 percent were in the “exurbs” — areas generally far from LA’s archipelago of employment centers and often over mountain ranges. The exurbs include the Antelope Valley, southwestern Riverside County, and the desert areas of Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
San Francisco Bay Area: The situation is somewhat different in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to one of the nation’s most vibrant urban cores, the city of San Francisco. House prices declined less than five percent in the city, a remarkable affirmation of the place’s continued appeal for affluent people.
Overall, the central area — generally within 10 miles of San Francisco City Hall — experienced a median house price decline of 15 percent. However, central areas outside San Francisco experienced a price decline of 24 percent, which is only marginally less than in either the inner or outer suburbs. The inner suburbs, which include much of the East Bay, including Oakland and most of the peninsula, experienced a decline of 28 percent.
Outer suburbs — those beyond 20 miles from city hall, including eastern Contra Costa and Alameda counties and Santa Clara County — experienced the second lowest decline, at 26 percent. Overall, the largest decline was in the exurbs — the counties in the San Joaquin Valley to which so many households had fled seeking affordable housing. There, the decline was 44 percent.
San Diego: The San Diego area indicates a fairly constant rate of decline, regardless of distance from downtown. The lowest decline was in the inner and outer suburbs, at 26 percent, while the central area experienced a median house price decline of 27 percent.
Sacramento: Sacramento indicates the most unexpected results, with the central area experiencing by far the largest house price declines, at 42 percent. The lowest house price declines were one-half that rate, in the outer suburbs (generally more than 10 miles from downtown), at 21 percent, while the inner suburbs experienced a decline of 29 percent.
Overall, within the central areas, inner suburbs and outer suburbs of the major metropolitan regions, price declines have been consistent, all at minus 26 percent. The major exception has been the city of San Francisco. However, it is well to keep in mind that the city represents barely 10 percent of its metropolitan region population and is a unique case.
What does all this indicate? Perhaps most of all, it is a further demonstration of the growing irrelevance of what economist William T. Bogart calls the pre-Copernican view of the cities. Most people no longer work in the urban core and living in the suburbs does not necessarily mean longer commutes. This was evident in our previous analysis of metropolitan New York, where the greatest jobs-housing balances are in the suburbs. In fact, the price declines throughout the principal urban areas making up California’s largest metropolitan regions have not been materially different.
Things have been tougher n the far flung exurbs, where the greatest price declines have occurred. This was to be expected. These are places that people fled to find lower-cost housing that had often been precluded in the over-regulated jurisdictions in the principal urban areas. Many such households bought their houses in the most recent cycle, largely because of the unprecedented relaxation of credit standards. The difficulties in the exurbs been exacerbated by the fact that employment bases there have not yet had a chance to catch up with their residential gains.
Notes on Methodology: The data is calculated based upon the change in median house prices from July 2007 to July 2008, based upon data published by DQNews.com. Sector medians are is weighted by the number of house sales. All jurisdictions or geographies are included that had 25 or more house sales in July 2008. Generally, the data is based upon municipal jurisdiction, except in the city of Los Angeles, where geographical data is available and in the case of counties wholly within a zone (central, inner suburbs, outer suburbs or exurban).
The central areas of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area are considered generally to be located within a radius of 10 miles from downtown, the inner suburbs are between 10 and 20 miles from downtown and the outer suburbs are more than 20 miles from downtown. The exurban areas are described in the sections on the particular areas above. In San Diego and Sacramento, which are considerably smaller, smaller geographic radii are used. The central areas are up to 5 miles from downtown, the inner suburbs from 5 to 10 miles from downtown and the outer suburbs are more than 10 miles from downtown. Because of their smaller geographic sizes, exurbs are not considered in this analysis for San Diego and Sacramento. The city of San Diego is excluded from this analysis because major parts of it are in each zone.
Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris since 2002. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey.
Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002).
It may be home to Google, Cisco, Oracle and the other gleaming companies of the New Economy, but times are tough for the Silicon Valley’s working class.
“Working people in Silicon Valley are walking an economic tightrope, and any unexpected medical bill or even a car breakdown can push them over the edge.”
What happens to a community like this when the working class can no longer afford to live there?
I don’t know about you, but I’m still pretty astonished that aging white men – especially working class, blue-collar workers – have become “Hillary voters.” Who could have predicted that? Once upon a time, Hillary was a card-carrying member of the liberal elite, a corporate lawyer who didn’t stay home to bake cookies and have teas, who ruthlessly fired travel office workers and carted off loot from the White House, who carpet-bagged her way to a Senate seat in New York, and got booed by firefighters in the wake of 9/11.
It just goes to show how true the old cliché is: politics makes strange bedfellows. Run a young(ish) upstart black man with Harvard Law degree against Mrs. Clinton, and next thing you know she’s doing shots of whiskey with a beer chaser, eating pizza and talking about manufacturing jobs in Crown Point, Indiana – and not getting laughed out of the joint!
A little more understandable are the die-hard Hillary women – Hillraisers – mostly older white feminists whose day had finally arrived. They rallied, they fund-raised, they phone-banked, and now they are angry! As one editorial writer put it mildly, “these women are trying to get used to the fact that a new generation is taking center stage here: one represented by Michelle Obama.” I feel ya, sisters, I really do.
But ya’ll are flirting dangerously with becoming this election’s Naderites — that is to say, political suicide bombers. It’s not just your bras that are going to be on fire, ladies. It’s going to be planet earth. Hyperbole? Think back to the 2000 election when Naderites argued there was little difference between Bush and Gore, and even if Bush won, it would be by such a narrow margin he would have to govern from the center. Really. Think. About. That.
I don’t hold out much hope that Obama is going to vacuum up the blue-collar vote. Nor will Obama get a plurality of the white vote; a Democrat hasn’t done that since LBJ. But the white baby-boomer’s lack of support for Obama is nothing short of shocking. Charlie Cook – hands down the best political analyst working today, and you won’t see him bloviating on The Countdown with Keith Olberman – revealed the nasty truth back in June.
“It finally dawned on me that white Baby Boomers are the group that is really hurting Barack Obama,” Cook wrote in his National Journal column. “Of all people, the generation that brought us the Vietnam War protests and the Summer of Love is proving to be a very tough nut for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to crack.” Cook pointed out that among whites between 50 to 64, Obama is losing by a whopping 18 points, 51 percent to 33 percent. I don’t know if the numbers have moved much since June, but that was after Hillary “suspended” her campaign.
Cook concludes, “By doing very well among African-Americans and reasonably well among Hispanics, Obama could easily overcome his deficits among whites under 50 and over 65. But losing whites born between 1944 and 1958 — pretty much the lion’s share of the Baby Boomers — by 18 percentage points? Wow. That’s a burden.”
Obama, of course, brought some of this on by positioning himself as the post-boomer candidate, repeating the mantra that it’s “time to turn the page.” About the elections of 2000 and 2004, Obama wrote in his second book, The Audacity of Hope: “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”
But I suspect there’s something more going on here than simply a generation gap, which Charlie Cook also hints at: “Is [Obama’s] difficulty that these are voters in their prime earnings years, when they are most sensitive to the issue of taxes?” Hmm. I wonder.
Like politicians confirming their own worst characterizations – Bill Clinton the narcissist, Hillary the ruthless, Edwards the smarmy lawyer – boomers as a whole are living up to their worst stereotype: selfish, greedy, self-absorbed, and worse – willing to bequeath to younger generations an economic and environmental disaster of global proportions, just so long as their assets are protected.
I can forgive the misguided Naderites who were too young to know better – hell, I’ll admit to having been one. But when it comes to boomers, age does not seem to equal wisdom. It’s like a Dennis Hopper retirement commercial writ large, as The Onion brilliantly satirized: “Retirement planning means a lot of decision making, and thank God I have the soothing presence of that amyl nitrite–huffing, obscenity-screaming, psychosexual lunatic from Blue Velvet to guide me through it.” Substitute “retirement planning” for “voting,” and that approximates how I’m starting to feel about Election 2008, thanks to the soothing presence of bra-burning, man-hating, post-menopausal ‘feminists’ to guide me through it.
Lisa Chamberlain is the author of “Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction.” She lives in New York City.
Baseball and football, America’s great everyman sport, won’t be that way much longer for fans in the Big Apple. Glittering new stadiums for the Yankees, Mets and one which the Jets and Giants will share aren’t exactly meant for the “dollar dogs” crowd.
The Giants have said they will charge from $1,000 to $20,000 a seat for their personal seat licenses; once fans buy the seat licenses, they will still have to pay from $85 to $700 a ticket… Tickets for the best seats at the 85-year-old Yankee Stadium, which sold for $1,000 a seat this season, will jump at the new ballpark to $2,500; in other areas of the stadium, they will range from $135 to $500 for season tickets.
Never mind the fact that the $3.7 billion being spent on the three new stadiums means that New York’s pressing infrastructure needs – particularly in wastewater –will be parried away for a while (Center for an Urban Future has a piece on all of New York’s infrastructure needs).
There’s also a wonderful segment about increasing ticket sales on “HBO Real Sports” this week. Bryant Gumbel interviews long-time New York sports fans refusing to go along with the ticket increases out of “self-respect.”
The retiring of the vast sect of the population collectively known as Baby Boomers has several economic alarms going off. Due largely to this phenomena, by the year 2030, the number of people in the U.S. age 65 and above will double in size.
Concerns abound about whether there will be enough Social Security funds to cover retirement and what the impacts on the economy will be with this large group leaving the workforce. While these concerns are real, making an accurate assessment of the future requires going beyond analyzing demographic data by also taking into consideration cultural tendencies.
The Baby Boomer generation covers an immense swath of the population making it difficult to generalize much about them. If one is to look at the 1960s and ‘70s, the social movements reflected an earnest attempt to manipulate the future into one where peace would be king. The optimistic spirit of the time led a small but influential group of Boomers to join communes and relinquish traditional American values altogether.
By the time the 1980s rolled around, many Boomers had no problem reneging their oft-stated egalitarian values. Conspicuous consumption became the order of the day and newly christened Boomer parents became preoccupied with gaining an advantage over one another by vicariously living through the achievements of their young children — a notion parodied in the 1989 Ron Howard directed movie ‘Parenthood.’
Yet, ironically, Boomers still often clung to the values and culture of their youth. Even Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs, who created a technological empire based on marketing of the idea of individuality, cites the use of the hallucinogenic drug LSD as ‘one of the two or three most important things he has done in his life.’
So now, we have the ultimate irony. Boomers have tended to think of themselves as ‘forever young,’ either in spirit or by heading down to the local Botox clinic, but they are becoming as elderly population. Of course, many will put off the acknowledgement of aging. Often self-defined by their work, many will retire much later or not at all. In addition, with concerns about Social Security, some will continue working in order to support their accustomed lifestyle.
Not surprisingly, real estate speculators and developers are taking aim at predicting where Baby Boomers will retire. Much has been talked about a mass ‘return to the city’ by empty nesters. The amenities that are offered by a cosmopolitan lifestyle will most likely appeal to some, but the fast-paced nature of the big city — and high prices in the most attractive urban cores — will probably keep the majority seniors out in the suburbs or moving to the countryside.
Similarly, Boomers generally will avoid living in an ‘old-folks’ home — unless totally necessary. The idea of not being self-sufficient, even in old age, contradicts core Boomer values. Many hope, rather, that their children will reciprocate the years of generous financial support and let them live with them.
The previous generation has shown that if indeed retirees are to move away from where they have spent the previous years of their lives, there is a propensity to go to where the climate is warm. This leads me to believe that, although both Florida and Arizona, are suffering from the mortgage crisis, these and other warm-weather states will retain their attractiveness. Indeed, the lower prices now offered could spark a resurgence of retirees in the coming years.
But the main place for aging boomers will be precisely whey are now: the suburbs. While the suburbs are definitely not the same place characterized by Ozzie and Harriet, Baby Boomers show a preference for places where neighborhood and community are of high importance. This would partly explain why suburban college towns, even in states with dwindling real estate values, are showing strong resilience. College towns, despite their transient student populations, have a tendency to foster communities based around the functions and cultural amenities offered by a University. College towns also tend to have ‘traditional’ downtowns that remind Boomers of the kinds of places where they grew up.
The only sure thing about the Boomers is they are a generation rife with contradictions. They can be seen as the beginning of the postmodern era, where America began the descent from its cultural apex in history. To Boomers, hard work and manufacturing was passé. Largely because their parents had come out victorious in World War II, they started in their early years to think it was party time. Even as Boomers got older and started having children, ridding themselves of platform shoes and polyester suits, they carried on some of their social values. As Boomers enter the next phase of their life, retirement, values — like a quest for independence and a search for authenticity — will continue to inform their choices.
Opposition to new development is fraught with so many acronyms that you need a lexicon to decode them. The catch-all term is NIMBYism, sufficiently well known to merit an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, which identifies its first use in a 1980 Christian Science Monitor story. The term arose to describe opposition to large infrastructure projects undertaken by public agencies or utility companies, such as highways, nuclear power plants, waste disposal facilities, and prisons. (These are known as LULUs, Locally Undesirable Land Uses) It has now extended outward in concentric circles of opposition, each with its own acronym: NOTEs (Not Over There Either), NIABYs (Not In Anyone’s Backyard), BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone), and even NOPEs (Not On Planet Earth!). It is also possible to find references to CAVE people (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) and NIMTOOs (Not In My Term Of Office).
In any event, opposition to development has long since entered its second phase, targeting not just LULUs, but also ordinary development projects. It is now a standard feature of the development landscape, a form of ritual performance art. As a citizen activist and author of a NIMBY handbook unapologetically observes, “Everyone is a NIMBY, and no one wants a LULU.”
The neighborhood meeting
There are good reasons why NIMBYism is so pervasive (more about that later), but it is hard to witness firsthand, say at a neighborhood meeting about a proposed condominium project. First, people complain that they did not get notice of the meeting – yet they are in attendance, so what are we to make of that? Others voice complaints that seem embarrassingly trivial to air in public in a voice quivering with outrage: the developer’s trucks are muddy or the project description misspells the name of their street. General complaints emerge about neighborhood-wide conditions that are somehow now the developer’s responsibility to address. These throat-clearing denunciations are a way to limber up for the main event, which is to dismantle the actual proposal and its proponent in any way possible.
The project-specific complaints follow familiar patterns too. The traffic in every neighborhood is, apparently, already intolerable, no matter what the transportation consultants say about “level of service.” The project will only worsen it, infringing upon residents’ inalienable right to uncongested streets.
For large-scale urban projects, the second most prevalent objection is against building height, which often becomes the currency in which trades are made. For the neighbors, height is a signifier of all other impacts. For the developer, height is directly proportional to financial feasibility. So it rapidly becomes a zero sum game, which in turn leads to gamesmanship. The developer leads with a proposal which is taller than needed, to have something to trade with; the neighbors come to understand and even expect this and accuse the developer of duplicity. Sometimes the developer overplays the opening hand by asking for a height which is deemed scandalous, thereby lighting a fire that can never be extinguished.
A third leitmotif is view. Virtually all residents believe that the Constitution protects the view from every window of their homes. Sometimes the developer (or a public official in attendance) will note that views generally are not protected as a matter of property law or by zoning ordinance, but this only further inflames the aggrieved party. The neighbors often elevate their personal views and lifestyle preferences to universal policy imperatives and are incensed if public agencies do not vindicate them. They view public officials as complicit if they express support for the developer’s position, so the officials retreat to the sidelines until the combat subsides.
Length of tenure in the neighborhood often shapes the neighbors’ advocacy. Longer-term residents will recite their credentials: “I was born and raised on _______Street” or “I’ve lived here since____.” to give their views more weight. Their opposition is often poignant: they seem to want to preserve their immediate surroundings in the condition in which they first encountered them, maybe in childhood. Newcomers, with the zeal of recent converts, are often the most vocal in resisting change to the neighborhood they have just discovered.
Some projects attract attention from advocacy groups concerned about affordable housing, historic preservation, open space, waterfront access, or sustainable design, but most opposition comes from those with a close geographic interest. While issue-oriented advocates tend to be progressive in their politics, NIMBYs come in every political stripe. Some are progressives who see their advocacy as a form of environmental protection they are bestowing on their unempowered neighbors. Some are middle-class burghers protecting the safety and stability of the neighborhood. Even libertarians justify opposing development as an infringement on their right to be left alone. It is rare to encounter vocal neighbors whose political views or personal values counteract the visceral sense that their very way of life is being threatened. Nobody, it seems, is precluded from principled opposition, no matter what their principles are.
The overwhelming majority are homeowners. If the project includes large-scale retail uses, neighborhood business owners will join the chorus. Renters rarely feel they have enough at stake, and those outside of the project’s zone of immediate impact may show up to the first meeting or two out of curiosity and then stay home, letting their more vigilant neighbors continue the fight. So eventually, the field is left to the opponents, and the most strident voices prevail. Public hearings become forums for the chronically aggrieved; in an increasingly fragmented culture, they are what pass for community.
Ironically, while the neighbors often feel helpless against sinister forces, developers lament how influential the neighbors are, even when their complaints are not factually accurate or are not encompassed within the zone of interests protected by the land use regulation at issue. The result is a shrill, dysfunctional, and seemingly interminable public conversation. Nobody seems to learn anything from the last experience, so it gets repeated with each new project. As planning shrinks in importance as a means to establish advance consensus about growth, the public approval process has become the crucible in which cities are actually shaped, one project at a time, in the most laborious way imaginable. How did it get this way?
Historical roots of NIMBYism
NIMBYism is, in a sense, just a modern manifestation of the larger phenomenon of civic engagement, a part of our national foundation narrative remarked on as long ago as de Tocqueville. Its contemporary expression arose in the second half of the 20th century, and each decade has made its own contribution to its rise. After the complacent prosperity of the 1950s, the 1960s saw the rise of citizen activism, exemplified by crusaders such as Ralph Nader, Saul Alinsky, and Jane Jacobs. The epic battle between Jacobs and Robert Moses over urban renewal in New York City (whose battle lines are still being redrawn) was based not only on their divergent views of how cities work and how to accommodate their changing physical needs, but perhaps more fundamentally on how such decisions should be made, with Jacobs pioneering citizen activism as an antidote to “top-down” planning and development decisions.
In the 1970s, environmental activism re-framed growth not just as an engine of progress but as a competition for resources and, most importantly, as a potential threat to human health and natural systems. Educated opinion leaders began to distrust technology and fear the future. This spawned landmark federal legislation, including particularly the National Environmental Policy Act, which in turn spawned many state and, eventually, local impact review programs. These institutionalized two important ideas: (1) that development projects are generators of impacts that must be assessed before development decisions are made, and (2) that citizen participation is an essential component of such reviews. Along with other protections for wetlands, endangered species habitat, air and water discharges, and, in particular, comprehensive zoning administered by local officials who are obliged to be responsive to citizen participation, these regulatory processes have created many more opportunities for public involvement. If, as its detractors say, NIMBYism is the last lawful blood sport, it is one which is not only permissible but explicitly encouraged by our legal system.
The 1980s was the decade which gave birth to NIMBYism as an art form – the break-out decade. By glorifying private initiative and sowing distrust of government, the era saw the rise of grass-roots anti-development activism as a necessary counterbalance not only to government-initiated projects like prisons and highways, but particularly to private initiatives unrestrained by government. In the 1990s, the environmental justice movement, aiming to ensure that low-income communities are not disproportionately burdened by high-impact uses, added a progressive arrow to the NIMBY quiver. Also, revenue-strapped local government began to pursue privatization strategies in earnest, creating additional impetus for citizen activism as a counterbalance.
Finally, the first decade of the 21st century has established that the shift from manufacturing to “knowledge” as the driving economic force in American cities, and the reurbanization and gentrification this has spawned, have actually increased land-use friction in many ways. It is inherently contentious to graft new uses onto existing urban tissue, where there are so many incumbents whose rights are affected. Those incumbents, especially if they are knowledge workers, tend to have wider awareness of the power of the built environment to affect their own quality of life, have a reduced tolerance for development impacts, and are sophisticated about using public processes to vindicate their concerns.
The scale of new development projects and our ability to measure their impacts have also increased over time. As the burgeoning land use regulatory regime has gradually supplanted planning, the effectiveness of public agencies in establishing publicly accepted templates for growth has also diminished. Perhaps more importantly, we have come increasingly to rely on private actors to build public infrastructure as a component of their large-scale development projects.
These factors combine to almost mandate wider citizen participation in development decisions. While civic engagement may be dwindling generally, it has undoubtedly risen in the development arena. Filling the vacuum left by minimalist government, atrophied land-use planning, and an eroding social contract, NIMBYism is the bitter fruit of a pluralistic democracy in which all views carry equal weight.
Emotional roots of NIMBYism
NIMBYism starts with identification with one’s personal surroundings. “A sense of place” is of course not a bad thing, but it spawns a deep-seated resistance to changes to those physical surroundings. This at first seems based on a boundless sense of personal entitlement: People not only place their own needs above the public interest but come close to reframing the public interest as a social organization that vindicates their personal needs. No individual wants to accept the incremental burden of meeting a broader societal need. General reciprocity—the notion that I will accommodate your wishes because I know that someday I will want someone somewhere to accommodate mine, and that’s the only way society can move forward—has been replaced by specific reciprocity: I will accede to your wishes only in exchange for your agreement to accede to my wishes (for compensation or mitigation). So a general lubricating agent in society devolves into a series of negotiated (usually contentious) transactions.
But, on closer inspection, this is not so hard to accept. Most people experience the world as an increasingly complex and bewildering place where most issues are well beyond their ability to influence and the pace of change seems to accelerate continually. This powerlessness leads them to yearn to control those things that they can, their immediate home and neighborhood being foremost, and to be tetchy if their efforts seem fruitless. But it is important to recognize that NIMBYs are not just reflexively change-averse; average Americans will move twelve times in their lifetimes, and, according to the National Association of Homebuilders, Americans have been spending record amounts in home renovation projects in the recent housing boom. The environmental change that NIMBYists resist is change imposed by others. This crucial distinction underlies virtually all opposition to development.
It is also important to recognize the role of increases in homeownership – clearly a good thing insofar as it engenders economic security, personal autonomy, and community investment. As I noted above, the overwhelming majority of project opponents are homeowners. Their home is often their largest financial asset, unprotected by diversification of risk and subject to changes in value due to neighborhood circumstances over which the homeowner has little control. While many homeowners frame their objections to development with references to larger issues such as traffic impacts on the neighborhood or broader environmental consequences, if you listen carefully, there is an implicit calculus at work: will this project tend to increase or diminish the value of my house? Since the answer to the question is often unknowable or at least not commonly understood, homeowners’ rational impulse to protect their investment shades into an irrational fear of the unknown. As behavioral economists have demonstrated, most people fear losses more than they value gains, even reasonably certain ones. So it is only natural to fear the risk of the unknown more than you value the uncertain benefits of unasked-for change.
Even when any reasonable calculus would suggest that property values would rise, say from a neighboring luxury residential development, neighbors want to capture that rise in value without suffering any impacts. After having been encouraged time and again by advertisers and public office seekers to expect greater benefits than the incumbent brand or officeholder offers without making any personal sacrifice and having been told by personal-injury lawyers that every wrong has a remedy, they have come to expect a kind of immaculate conception: zero-impact development. This is especially true when the neighbors are suburban migrants who have returned to urban neighborhoods in search of vitality and edginess, but, being used to their large-lot, single-family house, they find the density of urban life jarring. They want to lose the isolation of suburbia but not the insulation it provides from their neighbors.
The fact is that the benefits of development in the form of jobs, real estate tax revenue, or housing production are diffuse and general, but the impacts are specific and local. Satisfying housing demand by building a new apartment or condominium building is inarguably a public good, but its tiny incremental benefit to the abutting homeowner is just as inarguably outweighed by its increased traffic, noise, and other impacts. In a world in which personhood is paramount, it does not warrant support from abutters.
Constructive engagement
So where does this leave us? Though shrill anti-development sentiment is beginning to seem quaint at a time when planners, public officials, and even project proponents are more likely to embrace the ideas of Jane Jacobs than those of Robert Moses, expecting public officials to “slay the NIMBY dragon” by standing up to their constituents is naive. Stealth, misinformation, bullying, and a host of other stratagems employed by frustrated project proponents generally backfire, deepening the sense of barely submerged outrage that fuels NIMBYism in the first place. It is possibly worthwhile and certainly laudable to work to rebuild public consensus about the broader societal benefits of development, but this is at best a long-term effort.
In the meanwhile, any effective solution to NIMBYism must address its root causes: perceived powerlessness and actual impact risk. The time it takes to resolve development controversies is, in some measure, the time it takes abutting homeowners to evaluate the risk to their largest investment and adjust to impending changes to their personal domain imposed by others. The laboriousness of this process can be reduced by measures which address these root causes: control and compensation. First, although it goes against the grain of every project proponent’s deepest instincts, to overcome their sense of oppression, the neighbors must be invited to actually influence development outcomes within the bounds of feasibility. Ceding some measure of control over the design of the project eliminates the “zero sum game” negotiation that characterizes most approval processes. It often leads to creative solutions and empowers the problem-solvers and constructive participants more than the extremists.
A second element is compensation. Every project has impacts, and most fall disproportionately on an identifiable subset of people within a narrow geographic radius, who generally believe, whether they state it publicly or not, that they are entitled to some special consideration for allowing some broader social need to be met at their expense. Since government often cannot or will not play this role, it falls to the project proponent to do so. Such compensation is generally indirect: the improvement of a neighborhood park, a contribution to a local charity, support for neighborhood crime watch efforts, and the like. It is better if there is some connection between the compensation and the area of impact (e.g., owners of the tall building that will shadow a park will contribute to park maintenance, owners of the fast food restaurant will augment the neighborhood litter patrol). Reasonable people could differ about whether it’s fair, but some specific benefit is generally necessary.
NIMBYism serves many social functions. In an improvised and very democratic way, it forces mitigation measures to be considered, distributes project impacts, protects property values, and helps people adjust to change in their surroundings. It is a corrective mechanism that, if allowed to function properly, can even help to preserve a constituency for development. We owe the continued existence of many memorable places, from Washington’s Mt. Vernon to the Cape Cod National Seashore, to the efforts of past NIMBYs. In fact, if the forces that animate NIMBYism – attachment to place, increases in homeownership, and public participation in government decision-making – were waning, we would lament this more than we now bemoan NIMBYism. Though it’s not so easy to do, the only constructive approach is to accord development opponents the presumption of good faith and to engage with them. If it helps, think of it as Jane Jacobs’ revenge.
This article originally appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Spring/Summer 2008.
Matthew J. Kiefer is a partner in the Boston law firm of Goulston & Storrs, P.C., practicing in the area of real estate development and land use law. A 1995-1996 Loeb Fellow at Harvard University, he teaches a course on the development approval process at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is an active board member of private non-profit open-space, preservation, and design organizations.
Photo by Leah Franchetti.