After considering several recent NIMBY cases in the Chicago region (a football stadium, addiction treatment facility, waste transfer station), I had an idea: could a region develop a central zone where important but less desirable land uses could be placed and everyone in the region could benefit without having to live near them? Noisier, dirtier, and busier facilities could be separated from residences and a central location could mean more people in the region could access them.
I suppose this could happen now without the need for a NIMBY zone. Municipalities might put less desirable land uses on their edges or against certain barriers, like bodies of water or transportation corridors. Or some communities are willing to pursue industrial and commercial land uses rather than single-family homes.
But, one big advantage of a zone managed for the whole region is that the overseers could be freed from the concerns of residents. Balancing land uses in suburbs is often tricky as existing residents and leaders often have strong opinions about what and who they think might fit. And because local government officials often need to be elected or are appointed by elected officials, there are certain consequences for land use and development decisions.
Take the Chicago region as one example. Imagine creating a zone around O’Hare Airport where a number of less desirable land uses could be clustered. It would take time to develop this and address the concerns of people who live there. But, a location near highways and a busy airport means this could be a site where clustering certain facilities could benefit the entire region.
The McCaskey family is in love with Arlington Heights? Well, me, too. I pay every nickel in property taxes I owe and am quite happy with the services I receive in return. I suggest Da Bears be required to do the same. In addition, they can build the infrastructure required at their own expense. With the full oversight and approval of the village of Arlington Heights, of course. If this is unacceptable, then please, by all means, head to Naperville. Best of luck to all…
The McCaskey family will plop a 70,000-seat domed stadium, plus sportsbook (that’s a casino, folks) on a portion of the property and sell off pieces to the highest bidders who will quickly turn the place into a national party destination. And it won’t just be eight Sundays a year. I’m quite certain they envision March Madness, Super Bowls and Taylor Swift concerts. Trains will back up through downtown; Euclid Avenue, Wilke Road and Northwest Highway will be jammed; and our perfect little town will be overrun.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I can hear them say. “All stadium traffic will be routed to the expressways.” Uh-huh. Ever been to Wrigley Field? I have. What a cool place. What a legendary sports destination. But I don’t want to live anywhere near it. Nor do I want to live next door to the Airbnb rental on the weekend the Packers are in town.
What if the Bears back out? What will we do with a 326-acre lot? Here are some ideas: walking, running and biking paths. Lakes and paddleboats. Horseback riding would be a nice touch. Skate parks for the skateboarders in the summer, a wandering ice-skating path in the winter with a warming house. A nine-hole golf course — walking only, kids-only.
I’m sure the numbers are daunting, but why not be creative? Not every use of land has to be about growth, development and profitability. We are rushing into the arms of the first suitor that has presented us with a ring. I suggest we get it appraised. It feels like cubic zirconium to me.
On one hand, this is a specific response to a particular proposed land use. A major stadium plus surrounding development is a big deal. In mature suburbs where big pieces of land become available only rarely, decisions about this land can be very consequential. Additionally, residents of suburbs often feel they should have a say in how land in their community is used. This is one of the reasons they like living in suburbs: they are closer to local government officials and processes. After all, they pay taxes, they live in the community, and they will be affected by the new development.
On the other hand, the sentiment of “not wanting to live anywhere near it” is a common one across suburbs. This could refer to affordable housing or waste transfer stations or drug treatment facilities or religious buildings or other uses suburbanites feel will threaten their way of life. Residents may not like the idea that growth is good yet this part of the appeal of many suburbs where growth signals continued residential and business demand.
The Chicago Bears will end up somewhere and there will likely be some residents who do not like the decision to have a stadium near them. Given the billions of dollars and status at stake here, they might not be able to do much about it.
Perhaps the opponents are beginning to accept that their community is not, has never been, exclusively their own domain.
Who owns a neighborhood? In many American communities, the people who live there might feel this way. They expect to provide input and exercise some oversight of what happens in their neighborhood. They want to exercise control over their own properties and those around them.
But, they do not do this on their own. They interact with other property owners and also engage with local governments. These local governments typically represent a broader community and have regulations about what can and cannot be done in neighborhoods.
Or, here is another way to address the same questions: if every neighborhood will change over time, who gets to street this change and/or benefit from this change? Those with means and vested interests will have their own perspective and goals while a broader community might have another point of view.
Racial discrimination is abhorrent and should be prosecuted. But as a Brookings Institution analysis of the 2020 census shows, race isn’t a barrier to suburban living. Blacks are moving to the suburbs at a faster pace than whites. Anybody can be suburban. It just takes money — especially in Connecticut. In 2017, developer Arnold Karp purchased a colonial house on tree-lined Weed St. in small, ultra-wealthy New Canaan. There are no commercial or multifamily buildings on the street. He now wants to build a five-story, 102-unit apartment complex with 30% set aside for affordable housing.
This analysis of suburban and primary city portions of the nation’s major metropolitan areas shows that these big suburbs are more racially diverse than the country as a whole. Moreover, in contrast to how white flight fueled growth there in the past, most big suburbs have shown declines in their white populations over the 2010-20 decade. Their greatest growth came from Latino or Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, persons identifying as two or more races, as well as Black Americans—continuing the “Black flight” to the suburbs that was already evident the 2000-10 decade.
Today, a majority of major metro area residents in each race and ethnic group now lives in the suburbs. And for the first time, a majority of youth (under age 18) in these combined suburban areas is comprised of people of color.
But, as a sociologist of suburbs, here is what is missing from the critics’ analysis: people of different racial and ethnic groups are not evenly distributed across suburbs and not all racial and ethnic groups have the same wealth, income, and resources to obtain suburban homeownership.
In other words, because social race and race and ethnicity in the United States are connected, it is not just about money in reaching the suburbs.
What is really at stake? From the critic:
Local control will be obliterated. Albany will call the shots on what your town looks like, how much traffic there is and ultimately what your home is worth…
Ensuring a supply of affordable housing within a region is more reasonable than demanding every town alter its character.
Suburbanites like local control and local government. These arrangements allow leaders and residents means by which to decide who can live in their community. This is often done through housing values and prices; ensure the land and homes or rental units expensive enough and the community can be exclusive.
Additionally, one of the problems of affordable housing – and other land uses less desired by suburban homeowners (including drug treatment centers and waste transfer facilities) – is that few suburban communities want it. Communities with means and political voices will keep affordable housing out. This means affordable housing is not plentiful often and is often clustered in particular locations. One reason states are pursuing this at a metropolitan level is that there is not enough affordable housing in the current system that prioritizes local decision making over what is good for the region.
Suburban residents may not like the idea of affordable housing arriving in their community. However, the legacy of housing in the United States is often one of exclusion and restriction, not about communities and residents coming together to provide housing for all.
Atherton is a small suburb – under 7,000 residents – with a median household income of over $250,000. In question is a California effort to increase affordable housing.
Are there any or many communities in the United States where the wealthy do not pursue NIMBY policies?
Could it be different in places where wealthier residents can escape by living high up in the air? I am thinking of residences like the pencil skyscrapers just south of Central Park or the new condos south of downtown LA.
Or, could it be different in places that are more rural? According to Wikipedia, Atherton “has very restrictive zoning, only permitting one single-family home per acre and no sidewalks. This policy that prohibits homes from being on less than an acre.” But, imagine a place with even bigger lots and more room. Would denser housing in part of the community be perceived as less problematic by neighbors?
I am open to hearing about wealthy communities where affordable housing is desired and pursued.
Imagine an even-simpler version of the original late-’80s “SimCity” video game: a crude digital map dotted with a handful of pixelated single-family houses. But try to click on the screen — like, say, on the icon of a bulldozer or a factory, or just anything — so you can start laying out commercial blocks and parks and creating your pretend metropolis, which is the objective of most city-building sims, and you’ll be met with a jarring sound effect and a pop-up message: “ERROR. CAN’T BUILD IN NIMBYVILLE.”
Below that is one of many snarky excuses: “Housing is a human right! Just why does it have to be here?”
Such are the Sisyphean pleasures of “Sim Nimby,” a new desktop city-building game where more clicks just lead to more error messages, and nothing ever gets built. The only winners in Nimbyville are the ones programmed to prevail: Not In My Backyard neighbors, or NIMBYs, who block new housing developments at every turn…
So Nass and Weeks hunkered down in a Park Slope bar one evening and hashed out the litany of anti-development NIMBY-isms — more than 50 in total — that the game spits back at prospective builders as a jazzy 8-bit music theme plays. There’s some comic hyperbole at the expense of preservationists (“We can’t tear down that historic brownstone. It’s where Gene Quintano wrote ‘Police Academy 3: Back in Training’”) and some dad-joke-grade gags (“The only thing urban I want to see here is Keith Urban”). Other one-liners — “This is a NICE neighborhood,” “Will someone please think of the property values?” and “Affordable housing? What, you gonna build them an affordable country club too?” — are perhaps less fanciful to housing advocates.
How realistic should city building games be? I have wondered this for years starting with playing Simcity in the late 1980s. How much does the game reflect actual city planing practices and urban outcomes versus presenting a glamorized experience where it is easy to plop in properties, development happens easily, and issues are quickly addressed (as long as the player has enough money and a little bit of sense). Overall, it is pretty easy to build a thriving city.
This version might be too realistic. Players of video games want some level of difficulty or obstacles to overcome but not ever-present problems that make it difficult to do anything. Random disaster? Okay, a player can deal with that. A never-ending chorus of NIMBY concerns? It is too much to handle. The concerns of residents in Simcity are usually addressable; for example, move the residence further from industry, quickly put a park nearby to quiet the criticism, or find another way to improve the quality of life.
I do not know if the player gets some extreme options to address the NIMBY concerns. Have them annex themselves into their own community and build in a neighboring community? Remove all of the residences via eminent domain? Wage a political battle against them? If this is a Simcity where the residents do not want anything new, then growth is not possible and that does not work even in video games.
Palatine Township Elementary District 15 Superintendent Laurie Heinz said that if the special taxing mechanism is implemented — where property taxes above a certain level would be diverted away from schools, as well as other taxing bodies, and into the Bears’ proposed mixed-use project — the district would need financial assistance to add classroom space to schools in nearby Rolling Meadows, or potentially even build a new school within the 326-acre site…
The Bears’ preliminary site plan suggests a significant residential component, from higher-density, multifamily properties of four to eight stories closer to the Metra train station, to lower-density townhouses and multifamily units of two to four stories further south and east through the site.
Heinz said the housing could generate hundreds or even thousands of students.
“We want a seat at the table,” Heinz said at a recent community meeting. “We’re going to fight against it all being TIF’ed because we will need money.
The superintendent is saying that the school district will need money to serve the influx of students that would come through new residential units. Other school districts, residents, or leaders have gone further when considering other suburban projects: they do not necessarily want school students to live in new residential units. Fewer school-age children would save money for school districts and communities in the long run due to not having to provide educational services.
In some ways, this is an odd stance for suburban leaders and residents to take. Much of the suburban sprawl in the United States involved providing spaces and success for children. Property values and a sense of community status are often tied to the performance of local school districts.
But, this focus on children comes with costs. Particularly for mature suburbs, they can struggle to fund schools or residents and leaders push back against the costs of schooling compared to other preferred priorities (such as taxes not going up).
For this particular project, who will adjust: the city not provide a TIF? The developer change the residential units in ways that appeal to certain kinds of residents and not others? The school district finding ways to fit this into particular confines? Stay tuned.
The affordable end of the market has been squeezed from every side. Land costs have risen steeply in booming parts of the country. Construction materials and government fees have become more expensive. And communities nationwide are far more prescriptive today than decades ago about what housing should look like and how big it must be. Some ban vinyl siding. Others require two-car garages. Nearly all make it difficult to build the kind of home that could sell for $200,000 today…
Nationwide, the small detached house has all but vanished from new construction. Only about 8 percent of new single-family homes today are 1,400 square feet or less. In the 1940s, according to CoreLogic, nearly 70 percent of new houses were that small…
But the economics of the housing market — and the local rules that shape it — have dictated today that many small homes are replaced by McMansions, or that their moderate-income residents are replaced by wealthier ones. (A little 1948 Levittown house on Long Island, the prototypical postwar suburban starter home, now goes with a few updates for $550,000.)…
The costs – financial, regulatory – are too high for the construction of lots of starter homes. The proposed solution is to try to reduce those costs by placing multiple residents on one lot and/or increasing density in communities and developments.
I wonder if the best path forward is for certain communities to pursue starter homes successfully and show that it is possible. Of course, one danger is that even if it works well in some communities, other communities might leave the burden of such housing to a small number of communities. However, if starter homes can be constructed in such a way that they are perceived as an asset to the community and not a threat to property values, they might catch on. Are there several communities that would fit the bill?
It will mean taking land long zoned for offices, and allowing townhomes to be built among them, or permitting apartments or industrial-scale warehouses for the first time. Amid a nationwide housing crisis, many obsolete office parks could be ideal sites for denser housing.
However, this is a very pertinent issue:
The problem for some suburban officials: “It’ll be, ‘Oh, what do you mean we can’t just zone for single-family homes and offices? That’s our thing. That’s why we exist,’” said Tracy Hadden Loh, a researcher at the Brookings Institution. “So now it’s like an existential crisis.”
This is an issue that comes up for numerous kinds of large suburban properties, whether they are shopping malls, golf courses, or grocery stores: how to convert a vacant property into a useful long-term use? The number one goal is probably to generate significant property tax and sales tax revenue. In other words, to keep it at its original as approved by the community years before.
However, single-family homes can bring more children to local schools and add to the loads of local services. They do not necessarily produce the revenues that offices and retail do. Denser housing is even less desirable because it adds even more residents, which can add to community services and traffic, and some suburbanites are concerned with apartment dwellers.
My guess is that mixed-use redevelopment will be a popular path a number of these communities will try to pursue. Replace that office park with a “metroburb.” But, it remains to be seen how many such developments are viable and how eager suburban leaders and residents are to pursue them.
To distinguish themselves from NIMBYs, the current generation of housing activists has adopted new “back yard” variants (YIMBY, “Yes in my backyard”; PHIMBY, “Public housing in my backyard”; YIGBY, “Yes in God’s backyard”) to declare how they are for things (everything, subsidized housing, building on church parking lots) that a NIMBY presumably is not. Politicians have piled on: In California, homeowners who are used to being catered to with a host of regulatory and tax policies recently woke up to discover that their governor, Gavin Newsom, told The San Francisco Chronicle, “NIMBYism is destroying the state.”
YIMBY has the advantage of being a clear and obvious alternative to No opinions on development and housing. PHIMBY looks better spelled out but could confuse hearers about whether it is FIMBY. YIGBY sounds like a religious or spiritual version of YIGBY.
A catchy and clear acronym could help make the anti-NIMBY case but it will not be enough on its own to combat the common NIMBYism present in the United States.Even with the concerns expressed about NIMBYs, they likely have the decided advantage in numbers and sentiments across American communities. Many residents want to protect their properties, views, neighborhoods, and investments from a variety of perceived threaters. It will be on actors who have the opposite point of view than NIMBYs to push sentiment and regulation in other directions. This is not an easy task, and this is true even in a state like California that needs a lot of affordable housing.
