Tyranny Won’t Get Us More Housing

The Bronx, NY. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

At an April meeting of Community Board 10 in the Bronx, New York, one resident stood up and said while Ukraine was fighting against the tyranny of Russia, she and her neighbors in Throgg’s Neck were “fighting against the tyranny of the developers” in their stand against an affordable housing proposal in her neighborhood. 

She and hundreds of her neighbors came to the hearing and shouted down a couple representatives of a New Jersey developer and some planners who were asking for a zoning variance. 

I don’t blame her one bit. 

If an out-of-state developer wanted a zoning variance to build 339 units of multi-family housing in my mostly single family and two-family neighborhood, I’d be at the public meeting, too. 

The Throgg’s Neck project, in four different buildings with designs ranging in height from three to eight stories, was to be sited on properties right next to the drone of the massive, sunken Bruckner Expressway, incorporating a Foodtown grocery store. It proposed about 100 affordable housing units, including hard to find three-bedroom apartments. The rest were to be market rate and the whole project was to be privately funded, with no public subsidies. 

To be fair, there are multi-level apartment buildings in the area. But most of the homes in this part of the Bronx are two- to three-story, brick, single-family or two-family homes with tidy, securely fenced yards and a lot of carefully negotiated street parking. A 2004 rezone keeps it that way. The “6” train subway is far away and bus service is not great. No one wants a huge sudden influx of new neighbors to make it even harder to find a parking spot.  

So, folks at the meeting were ready to fight. In a related sidewalk press opportunity, speaker after speaker opposed the project as an affront to their way of life. 

“Let this variance go through and see what happens,” said one impassioned speaker. “Next thing you know, they’ll be popping up like Skittles…your $700,000 house will be worth $300,000.” 

Many commentators have made reference to this fight in the Bronx, holding it up in several reports as a classic and wrongheaded NIMBY public meeting response to multifamily proposals in the neighborhood. Where builders can’t develop “as of right,” and need a variance or other public process, meetings can get wild. In The Atlantic, staff writer Jerusalem Demsas makes a case for eliminating this kind of public process completely, one which she called “whoever yells the loudest wins.”

In her article, “Community Input Is Bad, Actually,” Demsas also talks about other impediments to development in North American real estate markets with established housing values. Whether the goal is more housing, renewable energy facilities, or new transit infrastructure, public meeting aggression has sidelined many projects before their benefits can be evaluated. 

Demsas’ arguments in The Atlantic follow comments she made last July on the Ezra Klein Show called “How Blue Cities Became So Outrageously Unaffordable.” In both publications, Demsas posits—among other things—American government is deferential to the interests of upper-middle class, engaged voters. 

On Klein’s show, Demsas also explains the difficulty of building big new projects by offering key insights into very high costs of development in the United States, especially the blue states, compared with other places in the world. One of the most common expenses are legal challenges made complex by ever-lengthening National Environmental Policy Act evaluations, often used by entrenched residents with the means to hire lawyers to stall development proposals.

She is not wrong, but I don’t think eliminating opportunities for NIMBY-ist reactions will open the floodgates and get us more affordable housing in tight markets—or help us build stronger towns. In the end, local communities and the smallest possible tier of local governments will have to decide what they want in their neighborhoods. I hope they’ll look to incremental solutions like gentle upzonings to make room for a few more families over time, instead of big sudden changes. Otherwise, we end up fighting the same battles ad infinitum. 

Strategize and Build From the Bottom Up 

When I was heavily engaged in community politics as a community council leader in a working-class neighborhood in Anchorage, Alaska, we got a lot of notice from assembly members by turning out 50–70 people at our regular, non-controversial meetings. They had previously been attended by less than 20 people. We just went out and invited people who didn’t normally come. We served homemade cookies and coffee and we were friendly when new faces showed up, no matter what. And we gave away free gas coupons—at the end of the meetings. 

The attendance we inspired gave us enough juice to get elected leaders to show up at meetings and answer questions and, crucially, to return phone calls later and trust the information they were getting from local people.

A developer asked us to support an upzoning that would have added almost 500 low- to moderate-income apartments in four towers, each seven stories tall, on the site of a defunct mobile home court in a wetlands area. The surrounding neighborhood was predominantly single family and duplex, with a scattering of three- and four-plexes and the occasional larger (6–12 units) multifamily. There was a retail corridor nearby and an international airport was a couple miles away. 

The local streets and schools could have probably handled the influx of neighbors and their vehicles, but we ultimately voted against it because it became clear the landowners just wanted a speculative upzoning and didn’t have a real proposal to build anything. But we agonized over it because many of the folks wanted our neighborhood to be a little bit more densely populated, enough to justify new corner grocery stores and daycare centers and cafés connected by a complete network of sidewalks. We wanted a more walkable place. 

There are many places in North America, especially streetcar suburbs like the one I live in now in West Hartford, Connecticut, which are on the cusp of being classically walkable—with just a little more incremental development like what we advocate for on these pages. If the streets of Throgg’s Neck had a few less cars, a few more corner grocery stores, a few more third places, it might be an easier place for longtime residents to live and also make room for new neighbors. The maintenance on infrastructure required for a large mixed-use development might cause tax increases to further pressure residents in the neighborhood. Slower incremental changes with no big infrastructure maintenance liability are more manageable.

Hip hop star Queen Latifah. (Source: Flickr.)

What if Queen Latifah Developed Affordable Housing?

What if the Throgg’s Neck affordable housing proposal had been brought by a developer who lived in the neighborhood? Would it have landed differently? Instead of being viewed as a “tyrannical” invasion by developers from New Jersey, maybe it would have received a better hearing? Perhaps it might have been modified, pre-proposal, by local knowledge to be more acceptable to the neighborhood. 

Hip hop star Queen Latifah went back to her hometown of Newark in late April to break ground on a new, affordable housing development she is building with partners. It’s been in the works for more than a decade, according to a post on the NorthJersey.com website. The mixed-use development, Rise Living, sits just outside downtown Newark and will have 76 units including 20 three-family townhouses for rent starting at $1,800 per month, the post says.

Born and raised in the neighborhood as Dana Elaine Owens, Latifah started looking to invest in the properties in 2006, according to the post. “I’m proud to be from here,” Latifah told the crowd—according to NorthJersey.com. “I grew up around here playing in West Side Park, a block away. My grandfather’s hardware store was blocks from here. I drove past this block. I saw what was needed on this block, houses that weren’t lived in. Some were really dilapidated, and so I thought, 'Why not here?'”

Seventy-six units in a mostly low-status neighborhood, built by a local hero, is a lot easier to sell than the Throgg’s Neck proposal. What if a Bronx local hero, like Jennifer Lopez or Majora Carter, had proposed the 339 units of multifamily, mostly market rate housing to Community Board 10? Would it have changed the reaction? 

Home Values: All the Eggs in One Basket 

In the end, perceived threats to a home’s value—often the biggest asset a middle-class family possesses—will stop these discussions quickly whether or not they are based in fact. It’s not a foregone conclusion that any $700,000 homes in Throgg’s Neck would lose half their value if eight-story apartment buildings were built nearby. But fear of losing a basket containing most of their eggs motivates people. 

Kevin Klinkenberg, a friend of Strong Towns, writes about the new importance of home values compared with employment income and how it has shifted in the past few generations in his latest post on his Messy City blog:

As we altered our systems to legally and administratively favor single-family houses on purpose, we changed the entire dynamic of how people build wealth. Prior to this era, wealth in real estate was largely created through income. Subsequent to it, wealth is "created" by the value of a house going up, and capturing that value through buying and selling or sometimes with creative financing. When wealth is created primarily by income, it encourages a fairly entrepreneurial approach to the asset, and all sorts of positive side effects: more people are better (more customers), more variety is welcome (diversity of product), and wealth is created more typically at the local level through lots of small actions.

When wealth is created as we've done the last 100 years, you tend to see the opposite. Restricting supply becomes important, so your asset becomes rarer and thus more valuable. People become more exclusionary, and start to force exclusion through regulations. Variety isn't a good thing, because you're likely to sell and move on at some point, and more regularized assets are easier to buy and sell. They're also easier to package for Wall Street into commodity-like funds, no different than buying or selling live cattle. Eventually, the asset becomes so easy to standardize, package and sell to large investors as we're now seeing all over the country, and wealth gets shifted upwards to larger corporations.

As my colleague Daniel Herriges has often written, it’s not easy to ask other people to let you gamble with their home’s value, no matter the odds. Even something as small as asking for a slightly denser infill of middle housing, like two- to four-unit developments, can inspire a lot of fear and loathing in a tight market. 

In his article, “The Duplex Next Door is Normal, the One Net Yet Built is a Threat,” Herriges notes that most people when they speak of a “historic pattern of varied (middle) housing, with which they had firsthand experience, (they do so) in terms of opportunity. But they spoke of the prospect of re-legalizing this same pattern in terms of risk.”

Resilient, interesting and walkable neighborhoods can’t be one dimensional. They have to change and evolve into being—or become stagnant. But they don’t become dynamic and resilient by some miracle. They incrementally and consistently morph, in sometimes unpredictable and imperfect ways, toward becoming resilient and highly valued places to live. 

Strong Towns has created an action guide and a short action lab course from the 2022 Local Motive webinar series. This course speaks to ways community members can work together to bring new increments of housing options in neighborhoods like mine, which are a corner grocery store away from being much more walkable. “Four Zoning Reforms for a Strong Town” has practical and tested ideas for getting there. 

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