Mother Jones on NIMBYs

Mother Jones on "progressive" NIMBYs:

Bill Duane knows most people can't afford homes like his $1 million bungalow on a hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. That's why the Marin County attorney volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. Until recently, that is, when the group announced plans to build two affordable duplexes just down the street from him. "Habitat usually goes into a blighted neighborhood and enhances it," Duane says. "Here, they are coming into an enhanced neighborhood and blighting it." Housing advocates say Duane exemplifies a vexing irony: People support affordable housing with their labor, money, and votes—just so long as it's nowhere near them.

. . .

[F]ew development projects have been more enigmatically unpopular than the Marin project, where three luxury houses will be clumped onto a 17.5-acre hill in a way that preserves most of the land as open space. In accordance with county rules, the developer set aside an acre for low-income housing. There, Habitat will build four units, two melded together to look like one Craftsman-style home, which will be sold at below-market rates to families making $40,000 to $56,000 a year (a teacher in Marin earns on average $47,000).

Duane and I climbed into his Mercedes station wagon and drove to the project site, a hillside of chaparral and grass. He'd promised me it would be obvious that congestion was already bad. A lone Toyota Prius with a "Save Tibet" sticker silently cruised by. "Usually this whole area is packed with cars," he insisted. And if I researched the matter, he hinted, I might learn that the endangered Tiburon mariposa lily grows here (naturalists doubt it), and that an Indian burial spear discovered nearby might have belonged to the county's namesake, Chief Marin (a Marin anthropologist says Duane is "reporting things that are not there"). Duane next raised an environmental justice concern: Placing the affordable housing in the shadow of million-dollar homes fosters "a slave kind of mentality."

He restarted his car and pulled up the slope of Eagle Rock Drive, past gardens of salvia, agave, and bird-of-paradise, pointing out houses already owned by minorities; as if making a point, he waved to an Asian man checking his mail. "It's a very diverse community here," he said.

The commenters to the article are debating whether Duane is a racist/classist, or just a homeowner reasonably worried about his ($1 million) property value.  The underlying problem, though, is the artificial scarcity created by Marin County's legendary growth controls.  (Just three market-rate homes on 17.5 acres?)   Marin homeowners perfected the art of using land-use regulations to extract economic rents (inflated home prices) thirty years ago.  Now there is virtually nowhere to build affordable market-rate homes in the county, at least not without government intervention or non-profit assistance.  Individual homeowners or neighborhoods have to play "beggar they thy neighbor" to hold on to the economic rents enjoyed by everyone else.

Comments

[M1EK]

I always feel uncomfortable with the rhetoric when it veers this way - because I am an environmentalist, and single-family sprawl _is_ a huge problem for everybody downstream, as it were.

But if the county doesn't allow urban development _anywhere_, then, to me, they lose any right to prohibit sprawl, period. You want me to support your supposedly environmental-based restrictions on building up in the hills? Fine. Show me where you're allowing the market to build 10-story flats.

It's just way too easy to take this overreach and end up in Rush Limbaugh territory where we lose the ability to have any land use controls (or incentives/disincentives) whatsoever. Amazingly, the conventional wisdom in this country is that suburbs are somehow subsidizing cities, and that we're forcing high-rises on a population which only wants single-family use, when the opposite is 10000000 times more true.

[AC]

Everyone's an environmentalist when they're opposing growth. How do you tell the environmentally-motivated growth controls from the NIMBY-motivated ones? Your test apparently is, "Environmentally-motivated growth controls reasonably accommodate demand, while NIMBY-motivated controls don't." I'm OK with that definition as long as "reasonably" means "enough to keep prices from skyrocketing."

If I were dictator, I would handle it differently: I would let a county/town adopt whatever environmental growth controls it wanted to (subject to takings, etc.), but would tax the resulting windfall to property owners. That would discourage rent-seeking and separate the NIMBYs from the environmentalists.

I don't know Rush Limbaugh's views on land-use controls, but I'll bet he likes minimum-lot size requirements a lot more than I do.