Democracy in Action?: NIMBY as Impediment to Equitable Affordable Housing Siting

Abstract

Effective democracy requires participation. However, the history of urban politics, housing policy, and neighborhood revitalization has demonstrated that wealth and power often overshadow participation and community activism. Proponents of equity planning and advocacy planning in the USA have fought to include vulnerable, marginalized populations within planning decisions, yet there have been few examples of this in action. We apply Fainstein's principles of The Just City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010) to investigate the extent to which local opposition affects affordable housing development. In doing so, we question the extent to which housing policy and planning in the USA successfully achieve the goals of equity and fairness, or whether not-in-my-backyard forces operating within (and beyond) “democratic” planning processes override those principles in siting decisions. Our results suggest that community opposition is a considerable barrier to the efficient siting of affordable housing, and propose changes to local planning and implementation strategies in order to minimize opposition and produce more equitable outcomes.

Keywords::

• Affordable housing
• NIMBY
• democracy
• equity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Email: [email protected].

²Public housing, on the other hand, refers to housing funded through the USA public housing program, and operated by local PHAs. While some PHAs also develop and manage affordable housing funded through other public subsidies and tax incentives, they are excluded from this present analysis given their unique and complex issues of hybridization (Nguyen et al., 2012). This analysis focuses instead on how nonpublic entities (private and not-for-profit developers) experience public processes.

³ They can also exist within the public sector, including local PHAs, but these are excluded from this analysis as discussed in note 1 above.

⁴ Further details about the Low Income Housing Tax Credit can be found on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development page at http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src = /program_offices/comm_planning/affordablehousing/training/web/lihtc/basics.

⁵ The exception is the Long Island Workforce Housing Act passed in 2008 that places some mandatory requirements on developers seeking to build a project of five units or more in Nassau or Suffolk Counties only.

⁶ Unfortunately, the sample is too small to rigorously analyze any differences between those respondents who experienced opposition versus those who did not. We thus restrict our analysis to the large majority of respondents indicating they have experienced local opposition.

⁷ In NYS, place definitions are typically as follows: “urban” is an incorporated city, “suburban” is an incorporated town or village, and “rural” as an unincorporated area.

⁸https://www.planning.org/ethics/ethicscode.htm.