Austin Contrarian

The social function of NIMBYs

Matthew Kiefer is a Boston real estate and land use lawyer who obviously has spent a lot of time in the trenches of the development wars.  The man knows NIMBYs.  Newgeography has published his piece on the social function of NIMBYism, and it contains one of the best clinical descriptions of NIMBYs that I've read.  Read the whole thing, but here is a sample:

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.

But Kiefer ultimately concludes that, despite its ugliness, NIMBYism serves an important social function by mediating between new and old development:

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.

He argues that giving neighbors some control (where feasible) of project design, in order to mitigate the worst impacts, and requiring developers to provide neighbors in-kind compensation (e.g., park improvements) is the best way to assuage NIMBYs' fears.  

This is where Kiefer and I part ways.  NIMBYism would be efficient in a world where developers enjoyed all the benefits and neighbors bore all the costs of new development.  In such a world, bargains between developers and neighbors would ensure that only projects with a net benefit got built.  When a project's benefits to the developer exceeded the cost to the neighbors, the developer would modify the design as necessary and offer compensation to the neighborhood.  When the project's costs to the neighbors exceeded its benefits to the developer, the neighbors would reject all offers, and the project would not get built. 

We don't live in that world.  New development often has important social benefits that are not captured in the developer's pro formas.  A steady supply of new housing keeps homes cheap, or at least keeps home prices from spiraling upward.  New development means more room for more people.  More people means a larger, deeper market that permits more specialized retail, restaurants, music and arts.  More office space means more room for firms and workers to cluster together; these cluster make both firms and workers more productive.  A software developer will be more productive in Austin or San Jose than in San Angelo because a lot of learning takes place just by hanging around with other people in the same trade.

There are increasing returns to growth.  This isn't to say that all growth is good.  But there is good evidence that some cities are much smaller than they ought to be, thanks to the limits on growth imposed by institutionalized NIMBYism.

Developers worry about their bottom line.  That bottom line does not include the spillover benefits to the city of an additional office building, warehouse or housing development.   If we rely soely on bargaining between developers and neighbors to decide what gets built, we guarantee that too little gets built.  This is how a city like San Francisco ends up with a median home price of $750,000 (even in 2008's market).  Cities like San Francisco and New York (and probably Austin) are too small, and institutionalized NIMBYism is mostly to blame.  

Apartment complex mentality

I've written about Zilker's Vertical Mixed Use opt-out application before, mainly to illustrate why Council made a mistake by amending the ordinanceto let neighborhoods gerrymander the VMU districts through opt-out requests.

Zilker's application is scheduled to go to Council on Thursday.  I imagine Council will approve it, perhaps with minor modifications.

The map below depicts Zilker's opt-out application, which the Planning Commission approved with only minor modifications.  Here's the code for your color wheel:  purple = "complete opt out"; yellow = "VMU but with no parking reductions"; light blue = "VMU with all incentives and parking reductions."

Zilker identified a number of concerns -- e.g., iconic business, lack of infrastructure, encroachment on single-family neighborhoods -- to justify its opt-out requests.  But I think one can get the gist quickly enough just by looking at the map:  (1) They are fine with VMU, as long as it is across South Lamar on the land backing up to the railroad track; (2) they will accept VMU on "their" side of South Lamar as long as it is a large parcel that does not intrude into the neighborhood and it doesn't get any parking reductions; and (3) otherwise, no.  (The one exception is to (2), where Zilker approved VMU for the Lamar Plaza/Alamo Drafthouse tract (#51) even though it abuts single--family homes.  Alamo already creates a lot of overflow parking for them, so I'm sure they believe a VMU development without parking reductions might improve the parking.)

I won't rehash my longstanding objections to this practice of gerrymandering VMU districts on busy commercial arterials.  I'll limit myself to two observations:

1.  The "apartment-complex" mentality.  Zilker is still stuck in it.  Vertical Mixed Use developments are supposed to be an alternative to hulking apartment complexes, cut off from the street and sidewalk grids and surrounded by moats of parking.  They are supposed to be a sensitive method for reintegrating commercial and multi-family into traditional neighborhoods.  The Zilker Neighborhood Association has relegated Vertical Mixed Use to large commercial lots isolated from the rest of the neighborhood, at least on the west side of South Lamar.  They have foreclosed the option of small-scale developments; we'll be stuck with the large "pocket" multi-family development.

2.   Protecting iconic businesses.  It's crap, and it's the most offensive part of their application.  Why does the Horseshoe Lounge deserve "iconic" protection while the Saxon Pub does not?  Who says La Feria is more beloved than Maudie's?  Personally, I care a whole lot more about my pharmacy (South Lamar Plaza Drugs), Suzy's Chinese Kitchen, and the Alamo Drafthouse than any of the businesses they've slated for protection.  I didn't get a say because I live on the other side of the street.  (It wouldn't have mattered anyway -- what matters is not how "iconic" they are; what matters is how close they sit to a single-family home.)

For now, my criticism is largely academic.  Zilker has out-waited this building cycle; I doubt there will be any new VMU developments (or significant developments of any other kind) for the next few years until the credit crunch has resolved and the Austin market absorbs the current inventory. But Zilker's VMU map has likely set up some fierce battles when the market recovers.

Street View of the Hyde Park "no walk-or-bike" tract

For the curious, here are shots of the Hyde Park tract that will be gated and locked to keep pedestrians and cyclists from using 50th St. (clipped from Google's Street View).  First, the overhead shot of the 50th St. entrance to the tract (the tract is on the left):

View Larger Map

Next, the street-level view of the 50th St. entrance (sorry, just a jpeg -- you can get to the Google street view using the link immediately above):

50th Street, of course, is a public right-of-way.  As you can see, there is already connectivity for cars as well as for walkers and bikers.   The neighborhood plan, presumably, will require the developer to replace the chain-link fence with a lockable gate  capable of blocking foot and bike traffic.

Seriously, don't blame last weekend's parking fiasco on neighborhoods

I'm frequently critical of Austin's neighborhood associations, but even I don't blame the Bouldin Creek neighborhood for last weekend's parking fiasco, when simultaneous events (Carmen at the Long Center, a convention at Palmer, and the Reggae Festival at Auditorium Shores) snarled traffic for hours and caused patrons to miss their events.

The City's line is, "Hey, we wanted to put more parking there but the neighborhood associations objected."

Even doubling the Palmer parking garage's 1,200 spaces would not have dented the demand for parking last weekend.  Regardless, the City cannot, and should not, build the parking necessary to accommodate the "perfect storm."  That's a horribly inefficient use of money and space.  And, frankly, who wants to line one of our premiere parks with 5-6 story parking garages?

It's not even clear to me that the neighborhoods were acting selfishly.  Neighborhood associations usually demand more parking than is necessary because the spillover ends up on neighborhood streets.  I'm sure Bouldin Creek knew at the time that less parking on site would mean more parking in the neighborhood streets.

Austin Lyric Opera's patrons and others who use Long Center, Palmer and Auditorium Shores need to know they can get to their events.  (I'm sure the opera lost subscribers last weekend.)  The solution is better traffic management, more shuttles, more buses on Cap Metro's regular routes, and better publicity of alternative parking.  We can't build our way out of messes like last weekend's. 

Ed Wendler Jr. on Austin development

Wendler's column in this morning's Statesman had something to irritate (or please) everyone. 

He proposes in jest a charter election to settle all development issues once and for all.  Some of his "ballot propositions" are spot on; some are just perplexing.

Proposition No. 2: Whereas the City of Austin has determined that democracy is the best form of government, and whereas democracy depends on individual participation, and whereas local control, the more localized the better, is democracy at its purest, and whereas neighborhood groups represent localized democracy, therefore, be it resolved that neighborhood groups will hold an election on every zoning case or building permit and it shall take six of seven votes of the City Council to overturn the neighborhood decision. And that includes remodeling permits for every house.

Yep.  Call this the "RG4N philosophy" of development.  All development rights belong to the "community." In practice, this means those with a vested interest in opposing change, since those without a vested interest don't have any incentive to participate.  Bad idea.

Austin's philosophy right now is to specify in advance, in excruciating detail, what's ok and what's not.  It's an inflexible and cumbersome system.   I suppose if Austin's neighborhoods had absolute control over development within their boundaries, the developer could just pay them off at the beginning, and save a lot of time and trouble.  (Seriously, there are some land-use experts who claim that this system would be more efficient.  But since getting neighbors to agree on controversial land-use issues is like herding cats, in practice this would mean no new development ever.)

Better Austin Today PAC

Several local activist groups, including ANC, RG4N and the Sierra Club, have banded together to form a local PAC:

As Austin starts gearing up for municipal elections in May, a new political action committee is hoping to turn discontent into dollars for candidates and issues.

The committee, Better Austin Today, plans to pull support from neighborhood groups, environmental and civil rights activists, social and environmental justice groups, and the small-business and local business communities.

The committee's board consists of members of some of the city's most politically active groups: the Austin Neighborhoods Council, Save Our Springs Alliance, Sierra Club in Austin, and the Central Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.

It also includes more recent additions to the city's political scene, including Responsible Growth for Northcross, which was organized in response to plans to convert part of Northcross Mall in North Austin into a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

The committee says City Council members aren't listening enough, that they act in opposition to those who speak before them and who worked on neighborhood plans. The committee says there is a lack of growth management in the city. It is also concerned about the disputes over Northcross Mall and the placement of the animal shelter in East Austin, as well as issues of perceived inequality in how the city deals with East and West Austin.

Group members hope that by banding together, they can effect some change.

"It's just this feeling that everything gets done piecemeal in this city," said board member Hope Morrison of Responsible Growth for Northcross. "There is no vision.

"It's a failure of vision and leadership." 

ANC's call for action

ANC has revised the draft growth management resolution I wrote about here.  (Even some ANC supporters had trouble stomaching that one.)  It's calling the new resolution, "A Call for Action to Manage Austin's Growth."

The new resolution manages to avoid patent contradictions, such as bashing sprawl in one sentence and bashing density in the next.  But the upshot is the same:  The City Council should capitulate to ANC/neighborhood association demands, including demands to opt out of VMU.  (If only ANC would practice what it preaches by respecting the "positions of the affected . . . Neighborhood Associations."  How many times has ANC ignored the Downtown Austin Neighborhood Association's position on downtown development projects?) 

Let me give you the flavor of the "Call for Action":

A healthy future for the City of Austin that achieves our shared vision requires a viable and living growth management policy.  The ANC identifies the following as essential to success:

• Engage diverse stakeholders and the general public.
• Identify and articulate long-term goals that reflect community values.
• Develop a strategy on which to implement policies.  [AC:  ???]
• Ensure that the policy provides an equitable balance of gains and losses for all stakeholders.
• Secure the citizenry's endorsement of the policy.

"Living" is not the first adjective I would use to describe a growth management policy, although I understand why ANC prefers it to, say, "stifling."  But my main objection to this paragraph is the claim that there are "community values."  There aren't, at least not where land-use regulations are concerned.  There are people who value the status quo, and who believe it is City Council's job to maintain it.  Then there are people who value a dynamic environment, even if it means occasional friction or inconvenience.  There are people who believe that SF-3 zoned property is sacred, and those who believe the city should be making more room for multi-family.  There are those who like density because of the vitality and variety it brings, and those who hate density because of the congestion it brings.  It is no use pretending that there is any such thing as a "shared vision" or "community value"; there are profound differences among us, and we're not all going to get what we want.   

California-style zoning

Michael Barone on recent demographic trends: 

This is something few would have predicted 20 years ago. Americans are now moving out of, not into, coastal California and South Florida, and in very large numbers they're moving out of our largest metro areas. They're fleeing hip Boston and San Francisco, and after eight decades of moving to Washington they're moving out. The domestic outflow from these metro areas is 3.9 million people, 650,000 a year. High housing costs, high taxes, a distaste in some cases for the burgeoning immigrant populations--these are driving many Americans elsewhere.

The result is that these Coastal Megalopolises are increasingly a two-tiered society, with large affluent populations happily contemplating (at least until recently) their rapidly rising housing values, and a large, mostly immigrant working class working at low wages and struggling to move up the economic ladder. The economic divide in New York and Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo.

As I've pointed out before, California-style zoning is a bad, bad thing to imitate.  Incumbent homeowners, through strategic NIMBYism, strangle the supply of new housing.  The high-income types bid up the price of the existing stock.  Skyrocketing prices push out the middle- and low-income classes.  The incumbents, professing alarm over rising inequality, push new regulations (inclusionary zoning, for example) that burden new development, further dampening supply.  Prices predictably continue to rise until enough people decide the city's amenities just aren't worth the price.  (The initial price peak is probably not an equilibrium since housing demand is inelastic in the short run but elastic in the long run; i.e., people won't abandon the city immediately in response to high prices.  This may partly explain the housing bubble in California and the East coast.) 

If you think that places like San Francisco and LA are already "built out" and simply can't do anything to increase the supply of housing, you're wrong.  Here's a recent example via the San Francisco Chronicle:  A developer wanted to convert an abandoned hospital just inside the Presidio National Park into 350 apartments.  The developer did not even propose expanding the building; it just wanted to subdivide the existing structure into apartments.  Thanks to the opposition of local neighborhood groups, the project has been scaled down to 186 apartments.  As part of the agreement, the developer will demolish two wings of the building.  The justification for the neighbors' demand?  These wings were "architectural blunders."  That these "blunders" have been in place since 1952 apparently was irrelevant.

Now repeat the same story twenty or fifty or a hundred times.  That's a lot of housing lost to incumbent protectionism.   

NIMBYist neighborhood plans

There are two problems with Austin's neighborhood plans:  (1) Neighborhoods don't know what ought to go on a piece of property; and (2) they don't have an incentive to care.

What I mean by "ought" is, "What use will produce the most value for the City as a whole?"  NG's just ask, "What use will benefit us the most (or harm us the least?)"   Neighborhood plans naturally end up as obstructionist documents, tailored to satisfy the "stakeholders'" most trivial preferences and concerns.    

Take the recent battle over the Time Insurance property at the corner of East Riverside and IH-35.

Special interest politics

CCosart posted this comment:

The . . . problem with NAs is that they aren’t necessarily representative. It tends to be the same small group of people rotating through the offices. In some sense, that’s a classic problem of democracy. That small group is willing to invest hours and hours, and until a large group gets motivated to unseat them it’s hard to do anything about it. The current BCNA elections are all uncontested, for example. I could re-run for my former sector rep position, but 1) I’d lose and 2) even if I won, I’d spend a lot of time tilting at windmills in meetings. It wouldn’t really be worth it unless I had a slate of similar minded people running. I’m really not sure what the answer is...

I agree it's a classic special-interest problem.  NA officers, and ANC officers in particular, tend to be single-issue kind of people.  The rest of us aren't, so our mild preferences don't register with Council.

You see the same thing with trade subsidies.  We pay more for our sugar than we ought to because US sugar producers care only about sugar tariffs, while the other 299,999,000 of us don't spend enough on sugar to care very much. (As with too-restrictive zoning, there's a large, politically unrepresented pool of victims.  With zoning, it's the future residents who will pay more for housing than they otherwise would.  With tariffs, it's third-worlders who can't make money producing sugar even though that's where their comparative advantage lies.)

It might shake things up to focus more attention on the barriers to participation put up by the neighborhood groups.  I know my NG charges a fee to join which must be paid at least ten days before any vote.  And then the meetings are scheduled erratically, with poor notice.  Real decisions are made in the planning process anyway, which as CCosart notes is run by the die hards because of the huge time commitment needed.   

Perhaps we should insist that the City planning staff meet with dissenters, rather than just the neighborhood association's planning team.  Why should the neighborhood association have the exclusive right to bargain over neighborhood planning?  The City can't say they're representative;their elections aren't up to snuff.  (It'd be like an employer giving exclusive bargaining rights to a handful of union members just because they complained the loudest.)  If nothing else, the City might force neighborhood groups to run real elections and give opposing views a fighting chance.