The Planners: NIMBYism across the Pond

To give myself a respite from my flailing attempt to write a personal “Intro to Urbanism”, I’ll jump across the Atlantic Ocean and check out another episode of the BBC show “The Planners”, along with another couple of videos more or less pertinent to urbanism.

One aspect I love about British television is that the producers and directors don’t feel compelled to drive a point home.  They’re content to offer a vignette or two, leaving it to the discerning viewer to connect the dots.  It’s a lesson from which I could learn something for my own writing.

Thus, in episode six of season one, “The Planners” covers several land-use planning controversies in which NIMBYism plays a key role, without once pointing out the mirror images between two of the storylines.  (I’m probably being overly pedantic here, but I guess I should explain that NIMBY is an acronym for Not In My Backyard and refers to people who only participate in the land-use process when they fear that their own ox is about to be gored.)

In one storyline, neighbors, who themselves live in single-family homes recently built on former greenfields, argue against further single-family homes in the adjoining greenfields.  To offer an alternative, they identify an abandoned site in the village center, arguing that the community would be best served by putting new homes closer to existing density.

In another storyline, located elsewhere, neighbors, who live in urban flats, complain that student apartments proposed for the underused commercial site next door should go elsewhere because their neighborhood is already dense enough.  (Plus they suspect that students wouldn’t be good neighbors.)

So the folks who live in suburbs argue that growth should happen downtown and the folks who live downtown argue that growth should occur in the suburbs.  It’s typical of the illogic that results when NIMBYs get involved.

From years of working in the land-use field, I have a split perspective toward NIMBYs.  On one hand, I support the principle of everyone having a say in land-use decisions.  I don’t think that single-issue democracy is a good strategy for land use, but the adoption of community land-use standards followed by a broad and inclusive discussion of whether a particular project conforms to those standards is a fine approach.

But NIMBYs often make arguments that are irritating and unhelpful to either their own case or the overall process.  Rather than admitting the truth that is obvious to all, that they’re involved only because they have a personal interest in the particular decision, they try to invoke broad standards, usually in a way that is laughably wrong.

An example from the greenfield storyline is the neighbor who argues that approval would set a precedent that would inevitably result in numerous other parcels also being developed.  He’s forgetting that he lives in a relatively new home in a former greenfield.  If precedent were an inviolable principle, then his own home would have set the precedent and he wouldn’t have any opportunity to comment on the current proposal.  So invoking a concern about precedent only shows his naiveté.

But the BBC, in their understated British style, doesn’t make this point, instead leaving it to the viewer to connect the dots.

The episode contains two other storylines.  The first also pivots on NIMBYism as neighbors argue that a final proposal for a zoo expansion is sufficiently different from the earlier plan that the earlier preliminary approval should be overturned and the process started anew from the beginning.

Unfortunately, the point is one of English planning law that those of us on this side of the Atlantic can’t judge.  However, it was ironic to watch a zoo struggle with the English equivalent of an endangered species act.

The final storyline was about a grand old 18,000 square foot estate house with a historical designation that had been largely surrounded by the town.  The result of the encircling growth was that there were no buyers at a price that would allow the owner to avoid foreclosure.  At least that was the position that the owner was taking.

The owner’s proposed solution was to divide the existing home into flats and to add several new homes on the remainder of the estate grounds.  Although compliance with the historical preservation standards for the existing home would be expensive, the profit on the new homes would allow the overall project to proceed.  Overall, it seemed a fine solution, following a nearby precedent where an old army barracks had undergone a similar transformation.

However, the plan required the approval of the local historic preservation officer, who has appeared several times previously in “The Planners”, always with a strict, non-problem-solving approach.  Once again, he took the hard line, denying the conversion to flats and perhaps leaving the property closer to foreclosure.  Not having more than a few minutes of familiarity with the situation, it’s hard to know if the historic preservation officer was wrong in this case, but he strikes me as someone who is overly enamored with his authority.

As always, “The Planners” offers intriguing and nuanced looks at the world of land-use planning.  At least to us land-use geeks, it’s always a joy to watch an episode.

As long as we’re viewing videos, allow me to offer another couple of links.

If one considers parallel parking to be an essential skill in an urban setting, then the setting of a new world record for parking with the smallest bumper-to-bumper gaps would seem to be an urban sport.  Check out this video of the new record-holder doing the Tokyo drift with barely more than three inches to spare.

The video raises four questions.  Is parallel parking truly a spectator sport in Japan?  How come we don’t get to see the failed attempts at the world record?  Are the failed attempts the reason that parallel parking is a Japanese spectator sport?  And lastly, who has the contract for the auto body work that must go along with the failed attempts?

Finally, check out this video of a walk/don’t walk sign with dancing figures.  Using a temporary motion-sensing video studio, the dance moves of volunteer pedestrians are shown real-time in place of the standard walk/don’t walk figures.

It’s a fun and compelling video.  If the technology were to come to an intersection near me, I could settle on a bench and watch for hours.  It’s absolutely unscalable to the real world as ennui would soon result, but that’s okay.  Sometimes the most fun comes from one-off ideas.

Next up, I’ll return to my Intro to Urbanism, buttoning up my arguments on fiscal urbanism.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

The Google Bus Issue Triggers Insightful Urbanist Talk

One of the great things about the urbanist community is that high-profile social issues will always elicit cogent and insightful comments from active urbanists.  It’s partly that a cohort of good critical thinkers has become attached to urbanism and partly that urbanism is a good solution to many contemporary social ills.

To be clear, urbanism isn’t a panacea to every issue that might need improvement, but it’s one of a half-dozen building blocks that can make the world a better and more sustainable place in the 21st century.

So I’ll return to the Google bus issue and sample some of the best thinking that has bubbled up around it.

Of course, the North Bay doesn’t yet have its equivalent of the Google bus issue.  Because of the historical happenstance of Silicon Valley continuing to burgeon while the North Bay’s equivalent, Telecom Valley, stagnated, the North Bay doesn’t yet have as much of the young demographic segment looking for an urban lifestyle.

But the North Bay is a good place to live that is eager to remain economically vital, so will soon attract the young and affluent who are roiling other areas of the Bay Area.  The Google bus issue should be studied in the North Bay so we can be smarter when our time comes.

On the Google bus issue, several commenters have noted that San Francisco and Oakland aren’t alone in their failure to anticipate and to prepare for the coming flood of young adults looking for an urban lifestyle.  Fingers are being pointed at Peninsula and South Bay communities for failing to facilitate the type of development that would have been attractive to techies.

I agree with the finger-pointing.  A more far-sighted residential program around the Silicon Valley would have defused much of the Google bus issue.  In an odd coincidence, I found myself in conversation over the weekend with someone who owns a large chunk of land in the South Bay which now has a low-density land use.  The landowner is intrigued by the possibility of creating a higher-density, urbanist use, but finds daunting the prospect of tackling the public, city, regional, and state issues that would be raised.

Others have concurred with me that blaming the tech buses is akin to blaming the messenger.  As Michael Coyote noted on Twitter, “I can totally understand why people are mad, but who does it help of you are mad at a tech worker versus some NIMBY?”  While NIMBYism certainly had a role, I'd also add CEQA and ponderous land-use processes to the list of wrongdoers.

But perhaps the most interesting thinking was put forth by Noah Smith in an article published on Quartz.  Dusting off the work of Henry George, a long-dead economist from San Francisco, Smith suggests that a property tax that focuses more on the land, especially the land that has an increased value because of public facilities such as street and sewer, is more fair than the current system which focuses on appraised value.

Early in my urbanist reading, I came across a suggestion that property taxes should use a sliding scale, with taxes in the urban core based solely on the value of land, taxes in surrounding rural land based solely on the value of the improvements, and taxes in between based on a combination.  My memory is that it was James Howard Kunstler who put forth the concept, but I haven’t yet come across it in my rereading of his work.

 The Henry George and the sliding scale concepts are largely similar.  And I see value in both.  But I also see points of discomfort in both.

As currently constructed, property taxes are intended to ensure that a uniform standard of public facilities and services are available across the community, while also keeping cities solvent.  Those are valid goals that must be preserved.  Modifying the property tax system to encourage urbanism while maintaining the first two goals would be a tricky endeavor.

Also, one of the greatest benefits conveyed to land isn’t public improvements, but zoning.  If we’re to tax the property owner for having a public street across the front of his land, taxing him for higher zoning seems reasonable.  Indeed it seems only fair.  Changing zoning from rural to residential can be a windfall of a million dollars or more per acre to the property owner. 

But what if a city does rezoning on its own initiative, perhaps as the result of a new General Plan, and not at the request of the land owner?  And what if it’s likely to be a decade or more before the land is developed?  Is the property owner liable for the higher tax burden over that decade, even if it pushes him toward bankruptcy?

Lastly, I’ve often argued that many of our current institutions, including property taxes, lending practices, judicial rules, etc. have been inadvertently slanted toward drivable suburban development and that urbanism would do fine if we could just rebalance the rules to be closer to a free market.  To now argue that we instead must bias the rules toward urbanism is philosophically uncomfortable to me.

None of this is intended to reject the Henry George concept, only to note that it would be a deep pool with tricky currents that should entered only after careful thinking and planning, neither of which are strong points of our political system.

I’ll look at more Google bus thinking in my next post.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)