Susan Kirsch is a 78-year-old retired teacher who lives in a small cottage home in Mill Valley, Calif., on a quiet suburban street. A Sierra Club member with a pesticide-free garden and a photograph on her refrigerator of hundreds of other people spelling "TAX THE 1%" on a beach, she has a sticker on her window and a picture on her fridge.
She spends most of her time campaigning for the right of suburban cities to have total control over what gets built in them. After Ms. Kirsch invited me to coffee, she suggested that my reporting on the nation's housing problems could benefit from her slow-growth perspective.
I have tried not to reduce her philosophy to a single term as I have come to understand her distrust of large institutions. So we know what Susan is talking about.
NIMBY is an acronym that means "Not in my backyard" and is used to describe neighbors who fight nearby development. The Oxford English Dictionary added "NIMBY" in 1989 and has since added "NIMBYism" and "NIMBYish", but the meaning of the word has changed as rents and home prices have gone up. NIMBYs who used to be seen as defenders of their community, and at worst just practical, are now painted as housing hoarders who have increased racial segregation, deepened wealth inequality and are robbing the next generation of the American dream.
Homeowners trekking down to city hall to complain about a new condo building or a proposed row of townhomes is a lot to dump on. The structure of American civilization is at stake in these disagreements. In a country with little national housing policy, the thicket of environmental and historic preservation laws that govern local land use are the primary regulators of a multi-trillion dollar land market that is the source of most households' wealth.
Cities and states trying to tame rising housing costs are trying to wrest control from neighborhood activists. Too much of the power over whether new housing and infrastructure projects get built is left to a relatively small group of activists who pack late-night city meetings to tell their city council that whatever is being proposed is out of character.
To differentiate themselves from NIMBYs, the current generation of housing activists has adopted new "back yard" versions of "Yes in my backyard", "Public housing in my backyard", and "Yes in God's backyard" 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 told The San Francisco Chronicle that nimbyism is destroying the state.
Susan Kirsch doesn't like the word "NIMBY" She describes herself as a person who helps people. She was able to make peace with the term.
The removal of five trees in Mill Valley sent "existential messages to our fellow citizens of the world" according to an article written by this person. The developer wanted to put condominiums on a hill at the end of the street.
Every law the California legislature puts forward to address the state's housing and homelessness problem is opposed by Catalysts for Local Control. In her meetings with her members, she describes the intentions of the lawmakers and drives the message home with graphics that say, "Our homes and cities are under attack."
If it weren't so effective, it might seem kitschy. Susan was 60 years old when she started her fight against the condominiums. The hill is still dirty eighteen years later.
A bigger story about how the state and nation dug themselves into a housing shortage can be found in stories like that. People who already live in a place have always objected to newcomers. The feeling is applicable to renters as well as homeowners, crosses boundaries of race, class, and culture, and has been a part of urban life for hundreds of years.
California went further than most in empowering it. This was thought to be something to be proud of.
That turnabout is baffling to Ms. When she moved to Marin County in the late 70s, California was in the forefront of an ideological backlash that created modern environmentalism and rejected the idea that a growing economy and more people were always good.
California is a different place with a different struggle and a lack of housing. It's not just that the $800,000 median home price is too expensive, or that the 100,000 people who sleep outside are a daily tragedy, it's also that the outflow of cost-of- living refugees has helped steer it into population decline. The questions about the state's governance and sense of self have been raised.
How does a place with a reputation for progressive politics have so many policies that make things worse? How can a housing system that has caused children to flee be rationalized by homeowners who say they welcome everyone?
She does not deny that there is a housing problem in California. The state's problems have nothing to do with the lack of housing, but with investors who buy single- family houses, big technology companies, and inequality.
She believes that a smaller local government is more responsive to its citizens than a larger one further away. In the midst of a brutal housing crisis, less people want to listen to her voice.
She said it felt like forces were conspiring to take away control from people at the lowest level.
"We are doing well."
Alan Durning founded the Sightline Institute, a think tank that promotes dense housing. The Yimbytown conference is a gathering of pro-housing activists who feel locked out of the housing market and under the thumb of rising rents.
In the past two years, a number of new state and local development laws have changed the national conversation about housing. There are new rules that allow homeowners to build second homes. There are restrictions on the number of apartments in suburbs. Someone in the crowd of 300 went crazy when he mentioned the obscure set of rules that limit the amount of parking.
The housing supply action plan was released by the Biden administration a few weeks after the conference. The plan aims to increase the nation's supply of housing by using grant money to reward cities that reform land use regulations like Yimbytown. According to the administration, the nation has a shortage of 1.5 million units.
Two trends are to blame for the deficit. 17 years after the housing bust began, new home construction has yet to reach the peak it reached in the mid-2000s. The other was built gradually as cities installed land use rules that made housing scarce and more expensive.
Portland had an unseasonable April snow before the Yimbytown gathering began. There were tents under the frost as attendees walked to the auditorium for the conference.
Mr. Durning said in his speech that it puts a knot in his stomach and makes him feel afraid. It feels like that in Nimbytown. We are about the opposite of all that.
Abundance of housing is what he wants.
It wasn't just the wordabundance that was important. Too few houses, not enough colleges, a lack of wind and solar projects, and the only way to solve them is to build are just some of the problems that can be solved by building.
YIMBY believes that the best way to deal with NIMBYs is to discard them. Since the success of one generation becomes the burden of another, they should first comprehend them.
Susan was idealistic and young when she lived in Portland. She grew up on a farm in a small town. She took a yearlong road trip with a man she called the adventure husband after a series of urban teaching jobs were broken up by trips to protest the war in Vietnam. They arrived in Portland in a van.
The idea of a stop at Yimbytown being included in the activist circuit would have been crazy back then. The national feeling was that three decades of mass suburbanization and urban redevelopment had created a crisis of too much.
The backlash was caused by songs like the 1962 tract home satire " Little Boxes", which said that they all looked the same. President Lyndon Johnson made a speech two years later in which he warned of an " ugly America" beset by decaying cities and lifeless sprawl that were breaking community spirit and creating an epidemic of loneliness.
The book " Small Is Beautiful" was written by E.F. Schumacher. The book cast doubt on a growth-at-all costs mentality and was one entry in a genre of population and land use apocalypse.
Ms. Kirsch believes that self-resiliency and self-reliance are qualities that keep a community strong. Being able to have efficacy in your own life is one of the trends that I think is being diminished.
Instead of celebrating the arrival of new citizens, new power plants, new cloverleaf interchanges, California scholars began to complain that they couldn't require visas for people from elsewhere in the US. The environmental activists decided what they wanted to stop.
The emergence of anti-growth politics in the postwar period was a politics of quality of life.
Marin County, located across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, enacted some of the strictest growth control measures in the country. The group of Marin homeowners were praised by the county for their public service.
Housing fights could be used to exclude people of color. Economic segregation continued even after redlining and other discrimination practices were banned by federal civil rights legislation. Marin County is the most segregating county in the bay area.
After Portland, Susan Kirsch went to Marin. In 1979 she moved to Mill Valley and bought a house for $112,500.
Phil Richardson looked at a tiny home. A model of a townhome was on top of a bath towel-sized aerial photograph of Mill Valley.
The model and photo were part of a growing archive of drawings, rendering and environmental reports that document Mr. Richardson's failure to build two dozen condominiums on Kite Hill, a plot of trees and bushes that sits next to a small office building. Several proposals and millions of dollars in land, legal and consulting fees have yet to appease neighbors.
The home office of Mr. Richardson is decorated with models of World War II tanks and battleships. He talked about the time he met Ms. Kirsch in an interview at his house. She told him to get rid of it and build a bench.
He started the project in the 60's. He is determined to get it done. He said that his wife thought he was crazy. The town could use some housing.
He said that he wanted to know her motivation. My project was about what drives her bus.
After getting a public notice in the mail, Ms. Kirsch heard about the proposal. The plan was for 20 earth-toned homes with pitched roofs. She asked her neighbors in the living room if they thought it was a good idea.
She stated that they did.
There was a decade of meetings and lots of legal back and forth. A lot of letters were received by the city. The idea of the project was so crazy that it would lead to an LA-like destruction.
There were many questions about parking and traffic. Some people voiced concerns like confusion for the post office. The writer said that anyone who lived in the new condos would accept a higher cancer risk since their homes would be next to a wood-fired oven.
She wrote from her account that she saw the hillside from her backyard. If open space is replaced with view- blocking, dense, ugly buildings, my property value will not be deflated.
Nine years after he first proposed it, Mr. Richardson decided to focus on another project. The slow-growth platform was launched by Ms. Kirsch.
She fought the developer through a group. Friends of Mill Valley became Citizen Marin. Ms. Kirsch was a candidate for the Marin County Board of Supervisors. She lost with less than half of the vote.
The year 2016 was a turning point. After the state reformed a longstanding planning process to increase the amount of growth, it marked the start of a wave of state legislation that would force cities to accept higher density neighborhoods in the form of backyard units and duplexes. A sort of NIMBY patrol that monitors whether or not localities approve new housing has been created by the governor.
A policy wonk will point to a series of dull but important bills as the reason for this. The power over housing has been shifted to state bureaucrats and local planning and building departments in order to prevent activists like Ms. Kirsch from having too much influence.
Most of the attention was given to a series of bills by Scott Wiener, a state senator from San Francisco, over the course of two years. The bills would have forced California cities to allow four- to eight-story buildings within a mile of rail stations and bus stops.
Mr. Wiener is a former elected official and a former neighborhood association president. It has failed to produce the housing we need because we are going over the cliff.
After travelling to San Francisco to hear Mr. Wiener talk about his plans at a police station, Ms. Kirsch and a group of furious attendees left the meeting for a nearby restaurant. The goal was to get the fight for local government to the statehouse.
She said that if we unify we will have greater impact.
Livable California is the most well-known brand among groups protesting the state's housing moves. The groups produce research that paints the idea of a shortage as overblown. The state's low per capita building rate and illegal and overcrowded homes are related to this charge.
Many of the most active members are from wealthy enclaves, but the fight to maintain local control over housing attracts a more diverse group. In California and around the country, activists who fight gentrification in cities often team up with homeowners who are worried about development. The political sphere is small enough that a group of volunteers can still be effective, so they often side with having those decisions made at the city or neighborhood level, even if they don't agree on housing policy.
The board of Livable California is chaired by a man who is 26 and Black, a resident of the historically Black Leimert Park neighborhood. You are just a number when you go to the state. The community gets lost because there are so many issues.
Many of the most active homeowners expressed a feeling of upper middle class regression. People who did what society told them to do, like buying a house, getting involved in their neighborhood, are now being asked to accept large changes in their surroundings.
They are angry that someone who cares about their neighborhood can be reduced to being a cartoon character. They are the people who oppose development. The people who make and distribute signs. People who attend late-night city meetings to ask probing questions about bids on the city's dog catching contract. Everyone else takes for granted the fact that someone organizes the block party.
Maria Kalban is on the board of directors of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association and recently founded a statewide homeowners' and neighborhood group called United Neighbors. The people are trying to find a solution to the question of where our kids live.
The dilemma of local control reappears when the discussion shifts to solutions. Ms. Kalban's plan to build higher density housing on high traffic corridors sounds reasonable. It seems like Mr. Richardson has been trying to build something for a long time.
The number of bedrooms, the size of the yard, the quality of local schools, proximity to work, family and transit are some of the factors that affect housing. The price is something that is hanging over all of this.
Fear of losing what you have is what drives housing politics. The financial dimensions of the Homevoter hypothesis were laid out by the economist William Fischel. Since you can't buy a policy that will protect you from the neighborhood going to hell, people pack planning meetings to fight anything they think is a threat.
People who get involved in local politics because they are angry at their school board or worried about a condo complex stay involved because they derive purpose from the work. Something to do is what it becomes.
Susan said she has spent a lot of time on her deck drinking wine and talking with her friends over the past two decades.
She devoted a lot of energy to railing about how corporations are too big and billionaires too under-taxed, as she did to the state housing policy. With so many things to be angry about, why spend so much time fighting?
She thinks it's the feeling of home. You don't need to worry about how you're going to make ends meet if you have a safe place to go to.
What about the next generation who are fighting for the same thing? She made a mistake by not controlling neighborhood control.
She said that local communities would do a better job. The language of centralized power is what charges me to do this.
Mr. Richardson came up with a new proposal. There would be 25 condominiums that ranged in size from 800 square feet to 2,100 square feet and six subsidized units for households making less than the area median income. Changes in state law have made him feel better about his chances, but he is not on time.
Mr. Richardson said he would either win or die. Is it one or the other?
He is hopeful that a public hearing will be held later this year. Susan is going to be there regardless of the date. She has something to say.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
