“Not in My Back Yard”: Democratic rhetorics in spatial gatekeeping

ABSTRACT

When officials in a community try to site locally unwanted facilities, they often encounter a rhetorical double bind: neighbors call for action, but also respond by saying, “ … but not here.” These “Not in My Back Yard” (NIMBY) arguments often claim the democratic process and its ideals are being violated. Examining a controversy over housing for homeless people in Boulder, Colorado, I offer an expanded understanding of the forms of NIMBY argument. Additionally, I demonstrate that, while community members may have legitimate claims regarding democratic process, their arguments undermine democratic values by blocking access to material and discursive spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Democratic deliberation
• homelessness
• NIMBY
• public policy
• rhetorical exclusion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Benjamin Oreskes, “L.A. County Is Counting Homeless People This Week. Here’s Everything You Need to Know,” Los Angeles Times, January 21, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-01-21/homeless-count-los-angeles-county-faq.

2 “Basic Facts About Homelessness: New York City—Coalition For The Homeless,” accessed September 11, 2020, https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-homelessness-new-york-city/.

3 “States Are Moving Vulnerable Homeless Populations to Hotels Amid Coronavirus Outbreak | Best States | US News,” accessed September 11, 2020, https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2020-04-20/states-are-moving-vulnerable-homeless-populations-to-hotels-amid-coronavirus-outbreak.

4 “Upper West Siders for Safer Streets,” Facebook, accessed September 11, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/groups/3199698486785596/

5 Daniel E. Slotnik, “What Happened When Homeless Men Moved Into a Liberal Neighborhood,” New York Times, August 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/nyregion/uws-homeless-hotels-nyc.html.

6 “What Happened.”

7 “What Happened.”

8 “Upper West Siders for Safer Streets.”

9 Carissa Schively, “Understanding the NIMBY and LULU Phenomena: Reassessing Our Knowledge Base and Informing Future Research,” Journal of Planning Literature 21, no. 3 (2007); Peter A. Groothius and Gail Miller, “Locating Hazardous Waste Facilities: The Influence of NIMBY Beliefs,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 53, no. 3 (1994): 335–46; Belinda Creel Davis and Valentina A. Bali, “Examining the Role of Race, NIMBY, and Local Politics in FEMA Trailer Park Placement,” Social Science Quarterly 89, no. 5 (2008): 1175–94; Benjamin Davy, Essential Injustice: When Legal Institutions Cannot Resolve Environmental and Land Use Disputes (New York: Springer, 1997).

10 Davy, Essential Injustice, vii.

11 Tiffany Karalis Noel, “Conflating Culture with COVID-19: Xenophobic Repercussions of a Global Pandemic,” Social Sciences & Humanities Open 2, no. 1 (2020): 100044, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2020.100044.

12 Benjamin Ross, Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism (Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

13 Troy A. Murphy, “Romantic Democracy and the Rhetoric of Heroic Citizenship,” Communication Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2003): 192–208.

14 Whitney Gent, “When Homelessness Becomes a ‘Luxury’: Neutrality as an Obstacle to Counterpublic Rights Claims,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 3 (2017): 230–50.

15 See, for example, Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187, Mapping Racisms (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Lisa A. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 4 (2003): 362–87; J. David Cisneros, “Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of ‘Immigrant as Pollutant’ in Media Representations of Immigration,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 4 (2008): 569–60; D. Robert DeChaine, ed., Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexico Frontier, Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012); Josue David Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity, Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2014); KC Councilor, “Feeding the Body Politic: Metaphors of Digestion in Progressive Era US Immigration Discourse,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 2 (2017): 139–57; Amy N. Heuman and Alberto González, “Trump’s Essentialist Border Rhetoric: Racial Identities and Dangerous Liminalities,” Journal of Intercultural Communication Research 47, no. 4 (2018): 326–42.

16 Jeffrey A. Bennett, Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance, Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009); Michael K. Middleton, “Housing, Not Handcuffs: Homeless Misrecognition and SafeGround Sacramento’s Homeless Activism,” Communication, Culture & Critique 7, no. 3 (2014): 320–37; Bryan J. McCann, The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era, Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017); Stephanie Gomez, “‘Not White/Not Quite’: Racial/Ethnic Hybridity and the Rhetoric of the ‘Muslim Ban,’” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 8, no. 1/2 (2018): 72–83.

17 D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, “She Gives Birth, She’s Wearing a Bikini: Mobilizing the Postpregnant Celebrity Mom Body to Manage the Post-Second Wave Crisis in Femininity,” Women’s Studies in Communication 34, no. 2 (2011): 111–38; Carly S. Woods, “Repunctuated Feminism: Marketing Menstrual Suppression Through the Rhetoric of Choice,” Women’s Studies in Communication 36, no. 3 (2013): 267–87; Cheryl Thompson, “Neoliberalism, Soul Food, and the Weight of Black Women,” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 5 (2015): 794–812; Benny LeMaster, “Discontents of Being and Becoming Fabulous on RuPaul’s Drag U: Queer Criticism in Neoliberal Times,” Women’s Studies in Communication 38, no. 2 (2015): 167–86.

18 Faber McAlister’s study may be considered an examination of NIMBY discourse, though it focuses on convenants themselves rather than NIMBY protests. Joan Faber McAlister, “Good Neighbors: Covenantal Rhetoric, Moral Aesthetics, and the Resurfacing of Identity Politics,” Howard Journal of Communications 21, no. 3 (2010): 273–93; Joshua P. Ewalt, “Visibility and Order at the Salt Lake City Main Public Library: Commonplaces, Deviant Publics, and the Rhetorical Criticism of Neoliberalism’s Geographies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (2019): 103–21.

19 Ralph Cintron, Democracy as Fetish (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020), 35.

20 Cintron, Democracy as Fetish, 35.

21 Scott Welsh, The Rhetorical Surface of Democracy: How Deliberative Ideals Undermine Democratic Politics (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013).

22 Jorge Valadez, Deliberative Democracy, Political Legitimacy, and Self-Determination in Multi-Cultural Societies. (Boulder: Routledge, 2018), https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=5323311.

23 Jon Elster, “The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory,” in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, eds. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 3–33; Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy?, 2009, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400826339; Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2010).

24 Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72.

25 Joshua Gunn, “Death by Publicity: U.S. Freemasonry and the Public Drama of Secrecy,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 2 (2008): 243–78.

26 Catherine Squires, “The Black Press and the State: Attracting Unwanted (?) Attention,” in Counterpublics and the State, eds. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 111–36; Catherine Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres,” Communication Theory 12, no. 4 (2002): 446–68.

27 Cintron, Democracy as Fetish, 40.

28 Ross, Dead End; JoAnne Myers and Suzanne Bridges, “Public Discourse: Property Rights, Public Good, and NIMBY,” in Contested Terrain: Power, Politics, and Participation in Suburbia, eds. Mark L. Silver and Martin Melkonian (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 133–48.

29 Myers and Bridges, “Contested Terrain.”

30 Prashan Ranasinghe and Mariana Valverde, “Governing Homelessness through Land-Use: A Sociolegal Study of the Toronto Shelter Zoning By-Law,” Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie 31, no. 3 (2006): 327.

31 Lynn M. Harter et al., “The Structuring of Invisibility Among the Hidden Homeless: The Politics of Space, Stigma, and Identity Construction,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 33, no. 4 (2005), 307, 324.

32 Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford Press, 2003), 9, 51.

33 A number of other advocacy groups have developed such tools, as well. I cite these two to illustrate a national recognition of NIMBYism’s prevalence. “Nimby Assessment—HUD Exchange,” March 24, 2016, https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/nimbyassessment/; ABA Steering Committee on the Unmet Legal Needs of Children and American Bar Association, eds., NIMBY: A Primer for Lawyers and Advocates (Chicago, IL: American Bar Association, 1999).

34 Lois Takahashi, Homelessness, AIDS, and Stigmatization: The NIMBY Syndrome in the United States at the End of the Twentieth Century, Oxford Geographical and Environmental Studies (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 63.

35 Alicia Wallace, “Regional Rental Market Tightens, Rents Rise,” Daily Camera, April 28, 2011.

36 Shay Castle, “Fast-rising Colorado Rents Outpace National Gains,” Daily Camera, August 5, 2015, http://www.coloradodaily.com/business/ci_28587405/fastrising-colorado-rents-outpace-national-gains.

37 This estimate is based on information from the 2010 census and 2009–2013 American Community Survey. See Statistical Atlas, “Household Income in North Boulder, Boulder, CO,” accessed March 8, 2016, http://statisticalatlas.com/neighborhood/Colorado/Boulder/North-Boulder/Household-Income; Statistical Atlas, “Household Income in Boulder, CO,” accessed March 8, 2016, http://statisticalatlas.com/place/Colorado/Boulder/Household-Income.

38 Metro Denver Homeless Initiative, “Homelessness in the Denver Metropolitan Area: 2011 Homeless Point in Time Study,” 2011, http://mdhi.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/2011-PIT-Report-including-Appendices.pdf.

39 Sam Tsemberis, Housing First: The Pathways Model to End Homelessness for People with Mental Illness and Addiction (Center City, MN: Hazelden, 2010); Sam Tsemberis, “Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Promoting Recovery, and Reducing Costs,” in Ingrid Gould Ellen and Brendan O’Flaherty, eds., How to House the Homeless (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2010), 37–56.

40 Boulder Housing Partners, “Our History,” accessed March 8, 2016, https://www.boulderhousing.org/our-history; North Boulder Alliance, “North Boulder Alliance: 1175 Lee Hill Community Open House Meeting (September 29, 2011),” November 3, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW4ra5d6Oe4.

41 City of Boulder City Council Agenda Item, “Proposed Housing First Project at 1175 Lee Hill Road,” March 20, 2012, https://www-static.bouldercolorado.gov/docs/1175_Lee_Hill_Public_Hearing_20_March_2012-1-201405081428.pdf; Heath Urie, “Boulder Leaders Get Earful on Homeless Project,” Daily Camera, April 3, 2012, http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-county-news/ci_20218974/north-boulder-leaders-homeless-project-lee-hilll.

42 North Boulder Alliance, “Community Open House Meeting.”

43 Shannon Cox Baker, interview with Whitney Gent, November 16, 2015.

44 Baker, interview; Bruce Goldstein, interview with Whitney Gent, March 18, 2016; North Boulder Alliance, http://northboulderalliance.org.

45 North Boulder Alliance, “Community Open House Meeting.”

46 Shannon Cox Baker, interview with Whitney Gent, November 16, 2015.

47 Baker, interview; Greg Harms, interview by Whitney Gent, November 2, 2015; Bruce Goldstein, interview by Whitney Gent, March 18, 2016; Bill Hussey, “Guest Opinion: The Other Side of the Story: Housing at 1175 Lee Hill,” Daily Camera, March 21, 2012.

48 Shannon Cox Baker, interview with Whitney Gent, November 16, 2015.

49 Greg Harms, interview by Whitney Gent, November 2, 2015.

50 Betsey Martens, “Ending Chronic Homelessness in Boulder,” Daily Camera, October 9, 2011, http://www.dailycamera.com/guestopinion/ci_19065179.

51 Shannon Cox Baker, interview by Whitney Gent, November 16, 2015

52 North Boulder Alliance, “Attachment to Packet, December 13, 2011 Study Session—City Council,” December 1, 2011, http://www.northboulderalliance.com/uploads/9/5/6/4/9564218/north_boulder_alliance_attachment_to_city_council_study_session_packet_on_1175_lee_hill.pdf.

53 Heath Urie, “Boulder Leaders Get Earful on Homeless Project.”

54 Erica Meltzer, “City Supports Apartments for Homeless,” Daily Camera, April 18, 2012, http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-county-news/ci_20420996/boulder-supports-homeless-apartments-lee-hill.

55 Boulder Housing Partners, “Lee Hill: A Housing First Community,” accessed April 13, 2016, https://boulderhousing.org/property/lee-hill-housing-first-community.

56 All participants consented to non-anonymous interviews. This research was approved by the Institutional Review Board at University of Wisconsin–Madison. # 2014-1422

57 Dick Hilker|, “Hilker: Ranking Colorado Cities on a Political Scale,” The Denver Post (blog), September 12, 2014, https://www.denverpost.com/2014/09/12/hilker-ranking-colorado-cities-on-a-political-scale/.

58 “Voter Registration Statistics,” Boulder County (blog), accessed August 28, 2020, https://www.bouldercounty.org/elections/maps-and-data/voter-registration-statistics/.

59 Mitchell Byars, “Boulder: Heaven for the Homeless, or a Town That’s Short on Services?,” Daily Camera, March 24, 2012, http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-county-news/ci_20249235/boulder-heaven-homeless-north-boulder-housing-project/.

60 North Boulder Alliance, “Community Open House Meeting.”

61 Heath Urie, “Boulder Reaffirms Support for Homeless ‘Housing First’ Program,” Daily Camera, December 13, 2011.

62 North Boulder Alliance, “Attachment to Packet, December 13, 2011 Study Session—City Council.”

63 Erica Meltzer, “City Supports Apartments for Homeless.”

64 David Accomazzo, “Writing a New Ending for Boulder’s Chronically Homeless,” Boulder Weekly, December 22, 2011, http://www.boulderweekly.com/print-article-7205-print.html; Erica Meltzer, “Boulder Homeless Shelter Reconvenes Neighborhood Group,” Daily Camera, November 8, 2012; Mitchell Byars, “North Boulder ‘Chronically Homeless’ Housing Project Delayed,” Daily Camera, November 18, 2011.

65 Mitchell Byars, “Boulder: Heaven for the Homeless”; Karie KP Koplar, “Homeless Housing—Find Another Area for Proposed Unit,” Daily Camera, September 9, 2011; City of Boulder Regular City Council Meeting, 2012, https://bouldercolorado.gov/boulder8/city-council-video-player-and-archive.

66 Hugh Walton, “Guest Opinion: Don’t Concentrate the Chronically Homeless in One Neighborhood,” Daily Camera, November 9, 2011.

67 Lynne Bentley, “Homeless Housing—A Distortion of Economic Demographics,” Daily Camera, February 27, 2012.

68 Karie KP Koplar, “Homeless Housing—Find Another Area for Proposed Unit.”

69 Bruce Goldstein, Interview by Whitney Gent, March 18, 2016.

70 North Boulder Alliance, http://northboulderalliance.org.

71 North Boulder Alliance, “North Boulder Alliance: 1175 Lee Hill Community Open House Meeting (September 29, 2011).”

72 North Boulder Alliance.

73 Bruce Goldstein, interview by Whitney Gent, March 18, 2016.

74 Jane Mansbridge et al., “A Systemic Approach to Deliberative Democracy,” in Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale, eds. John Parkinson and Jane Mansbridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–26; Eva Erman, “Representation, Equality, and Inclusion in Deliberative Systems: Desiderata for a Good Account,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 19, no. 3 (2016): 263–82; Iris Marion Young, “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy,” Political Theory 29, no. 5 (2001): 670–90; Robert Asen, “Imagining in the Public Sphere,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 34, no. 4 (2002): 345–67.

75 North Boulder Alliance, “North Boulder Alliance: 1175 Lee Hill Community Open House Meeting (September 29, 2011).”

76 Gail Promboin, “After the Affirmation of Lee Hill Housing,” Daily Camera, May 2, 2012; Gail Promboin, “Hit the Pause Button on Homeless Housing In North Boulder,” Daily Camera, April 17, 2012.

77 Todd Bryan, “Homeless Housing—Land Purchase Is a Win–Win,” Daily Camera, February 27, 2012.

78 Erica Meltzer, “Survey: Continued Opposition to Lee Hill Project from North Boulder,” Daily Camera, August 26, 2012; Gail Promboin, “Hit the Pause Button on Homeless Housing In North Boulder.”

79 Bill Hussey, “Guest Opinion”; Bruce Goldstein, interview by Whitney Gent, March 18, 2016.

80 City of Boulder Regular City Council Meeting.

81 Clare Birchall, “Transparency, Interrupted Secrets of the Left,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 7–8 (2011): 62, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276411423040.

82 See Slavko Splichal, “Why Be Critical?,” Communication, Culture & Critique 1, no. 1 (2008): 20–30; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

83 City of Boulder Regular City Council Meeting.

84 Robert Asen, “Ideology, Materiality, and Counterpublicity: William E. Simon and the Rise of a Conservative Counterintelligentsia,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 3 (2009): 283.

85 Erica Meltzer, “Boulder Housing Partners Vows to Seek Community Input on Homeless Project.”

86 This tweet refers to the administration’s halting of the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule, which aimed to overcome historical patterns of segregation and promote housing choice. Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, August 12, 2020, 6:59 am, https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1293517514798960640.

87 North Boulder Alliance, http://northboulderalliance.org.

88 North Boulder Alliance, http://northboulderalliance.org.

89 North Boulder Alliance, “Attachment to Packet, December 13, 2011 Study Session—City Council”; Heath Urie, “Boulder Leaders Get Earful on Homeless Project”; Shannon Cox Baker, interview with Whitney Gent, November 16, 2015.

90 Talmadge Wright, “New Urban Spaces and Cultural Representations: Social Imaginaries, Social-Physical Space, and Homelessness,” Research in Urban Sociology 5 (2000): 23.

91 See Samira Kawash, “The Homeless Body,” Public Culture 10, no. 2 (1998): 319–39; Teresa Gowan, “Excavating ‘Globalization’ from Street Level: Homeless Men Recycle Their Pasts,” in Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World, eds. Michael Burawoy et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 74–105; Randall Amster, Lost In Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2008).

92 Ross, Dead End, 94.

93 Ross, Dead End.