Attack of the Fifty-Foot NIMBYs

http://i.stanford.edu/~ullman/pub/nimby.html

by jmias • 14 years ago

106 93 14 years ago

i.stanford.edu

jawns• 14 years ago

Also frustrating is when a local municipality lowers the speed limit on a section of highway that runs through it to produce a speed trap, as a way of generating revenue.

JoeAltmaier2• 14 years ago

I've wondered if having dendritic, branching neighborhood streets would stop the issue. Main highways would be bigger; all roads leading to neighborhoods would end in cul-de-sac. Only residents and visitors would ever drive into neighborhoods.

Its a minima of road-per-house, thus a minima of cost. More greenspace, quieter neighborhoods.

This American habit of gridding roads everywhere has a huge impact on quality-of-life, costs a bundle, and stems from what? Some surveyors' sense of symmetry?

guylhem6• 14 years ago

Excellent analysis of the situation - very interesting and could be with other consequences and applications, whenever the minority can be the one to both benefit on, propose, and vote on a change that the majority will have to bear and pay - all the while using a false pretense like safety.

The proposed solution to study the consequences could also be returned and simplified - to mesure the impact of the proposed changed on property value and to refuse by default any change that would raise it.

(the best way would be to accept changes that increase the global utility, but it might be hard to measure - giving a number to the increased property value would be hard, but giving a number due to lost time due to lower speeds or other inconveniences would be even harder)

guylhem6• 14 years ago

Wow that's luck - just when I was browsing around I found the perfect analysis on overcoming bias : senior voters and their healtcare - paid for by the majority, but since seniors vote more, they favour the candidate serving their interest - at the expanse of the majority

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/09/us-politics-of-medicin...

Very interesting indeed- it seems to be the simplest pitfall of democracy : when the repartition of voters becomes detached from the repartition of the consequences and advantages.

edoloughlin• 14 years ago

> senior voters and their healtcare - paid for by the majority, but since seniors vote more, they favour the candidate serving their interest - at the expanse of the majority

It's difficult to see how this is at the expense of the majority since it's not exclusive: the majority will eventually become members of the beneficial group. I.e., why not have a policy that benefits the elderly since most of us will one day be elderly?

MartinCron• 14 years ago

Having a society where the elderly are not just left to wither and die benefits everyone, even those who are not (yet) elderly.

chris_wot3• 14 years ago

In Australia, this isn't such a problem. Voting is mandatory. I'll now await to hear the almost universal condemnation or be downvoted by American participants...

Spooky232• 14 years ago

You're really off base in that assessment. The original case for Medicare was driven by the realities of life in the 50's and early sixties when medicine started advancing.

Middle class people found themselves in situations where they were forced to make choices that were either morally questionable or difficult to bear. What do you do when your parents lose their faculties and require care?

Before Medicare and Medicaid, you had three basic choices: pay for nursing care at great expense and impact you ability to provide for your kids, care for them yourself to the degree that you can (ie, cramming the kids into one bedroom and doing what you can, probably destroying your marriage in the process), or essentially discard them and allow them to die, which is morally reprehensible and hard in the soul.

Forget about the bunkum of modern politics. Do you think it is ethically or morally sound to cut off access to healthcare to the elderly? Should my father die of congestive heart failure because my family doesn't have $30k for a cardiac stent?

In my opinion, the answer is no. Society as a whole should provide some rational level of quality health care to all.

AnthonyMouse2• 14 years ago

The analysis is reasonable overall, but trying to distinguish between "good" and "bad" NIMBYs is a pretty serious flaw. You have to put halfway houses and power plants somewhere. Those NIMBYs are still stealing from other people, they're just stealing from the residents of some other place whose residents have less free time or political capital to prevent something that lowers property values from being constructed in their neighborhood. Or they're again stealing from society at large if they prevent such things from being built at all. In either case they create a societal cost by adding the cost of the fight to the cost of building necessary things.

cturner• 14 years ago

The OP and your post have the word 'stealing' in. It's an incorrect use of the word.

It's not hard to find respectactable nimby cases. What if someone wanted to pub a pub at the end of your street? You are not a drinker, and you object to the prospect of people stumbling down your street shouting at strange hours, leaving mess on your property and more chance of intoxicated drivers.

Turing_Machine2• 14 years ago

Neighborhood pubs/bars of the sort that are attended primarily by people in the neighborhood are actually beneficial to neighborhood security and quality of life.

Anything that gets the people who actually live there out on the street, particularly in the nighttime hours, increases security.

Our modern, sterile "city planning" where everything is separated and zoned off into their own areas is a huge factor in the decline of our quality of life.

For an extensive treatment of this thesis, see the work of Jane Jacobs.

AnthonyMouse2• 14 years ago

>The OP and your post have the word 'stealing' in. It's an incorrect use of the word.

I'm not interested in the "is copyright infringement theft" debate. Words mean what people understand them to mean. "Stealing" encodes a moral condemnation of the activity, which can be objectionable when it is used to frame the debate. But it's also a lot easier to say than "acquiring a relative net benefit" or the like. Moreover, I'm just using the author's terms. All I mean to say is that constructing traffic obstructions and obstructing the construction of power plants are either both stealing or neither are, and in any event they're both socially expensive.

>It's not hard to find respectactable nimby cases. What if someone wanted to pub a pub at the end of your street? You are not a drinker, and you object to the prospect of people stumbling down your street shouting at strange hours, leaving mess on your property and more chance of intoxicated drivers.

It's still the same thing. You're either arguing that we shouldn't have pubs at all or you're arguing that we shouldn't have them in your neighborhood. If you're arguing the second, you're still a "bad NIMBY" because the pub then has to go in someone else's neighborhood and you're just foisting the cost of the drunkards onto those people.

And if you're arguing the first, we tried that already (see: prohibition) and it was a disaster. In the general case, there will be some things that are always net undesirable, but the people qualified to make that determination are scientists and statisticians, not the self-interested local residents in whatever place they propose to construct a potentially beneficial thing with known local negative externalities.

raldi• 14 years ago

> Hmmm... anybody have a guess as to what they have in mind?

I don't, actually. Anyone wanna clue me in?

mhb2• 14 years ago

OK. What they have in mind is that what they think is an accurate representation of what is best for everyone and represents the majority's preference. So no need for further research or polls.

ff0066mote• 14 years ago

I read the whole article, but stopped taking it seriously at: "a vicious collection of roadblocks"

I think it's fine for people to desire quieter neighborhoods in this era of high population density. I don't think that the people in all of those examples were pursuing change for the financial gain.

rflrob• 14 years ago

> I think it's fine for people to desire quieter neighborhoods in this era of high population density. I don't think that the people in all of those examples were pursuing change for the financial gain.

It's fine for people to desire see things (either quiet ,increased property values, or both), but the point of the article as I see it is that they don't necessarily deserve to have them when it comes at the expense of even a mild cost to lots of people.

gammarator2• 14 years ago

"they don't necessarily deserve to have them when it comes at the expense of even a mild cost to lots of people."

That argument has been used to justify demolishing inner-city neighborhoods to make way for overhead freeways benefiting suburban commuters.

natrius2• 14 years ago

Roadblocks make one part of a neighborhood quieter at the expense of another part. They also make traffic worse, which increases wasted time and pollution. If enough of those policies get implemented, people will find it too hard to get to downtown Palo Alto, and the shops that make it attractive to live there in the first place will suffer.

Policymaking based on parochial interests without regard to the effect those policies have on the rest of a city tends to be a bad strategy. Unfortunately, this is the status quo in many cities.

jamieb2• 14 years ago

On the other hand, I live at the bottom of a hill, 100ft from a traffic light. A new development opened up at the top of the hill, and now SUVs barrel down the hill at >50mph, see the green light, and accelerate. The speed limit is 25mph.

So when I hear about communities in Palo Alto "viscously" blocking traffic, I wonder if perhaps they are simply attempting to return traffic levels that were present when they bought their houses to raise their children.

bengoodger• 14 years ago

PA city council is already hard at work at this, choking off key arteries like Arastradero/Charleston Rd for "safety" (their attempt at lowering speed was to choke bandwidth, worsening traffic jams at peak hours).

lnanek22• 14 years ago

I know I run into them a lot trying to drive around Berkeley. It's a huge pain in the ass to cars trying to navigate through. Obviously home owners must love them, though. "How would you like if we blocked off your road to traffic so it becomes a quiet cul-de-sac?" "Yes, please!" Forget about hurting everyone else coming through.

gammarator2• 14 years ago

"It's a huge pain in the ass to cars trying to navigate through."

And therefore it's a real pleasure to bike, walk, or take transit.

Having moved away from Berkeley to a city that prioritizes car travel above all else, I find I choose now to drive two blocks rather than walk because it's just unpleasant to get buzzed by cars doing 50 in a 35 on residential streets.

kiba• 14 years ago

Nuclear power plants are dangerous? I thought people might be NIMBY about coal power plants which kill more people each year than do nuclear plants.

michaelochurch3• 14 years ago

It's more about property values and image than livability. A grisly murder in a house 30 years ago ("haunted house" effect) doesn't make a difference to people who live there now, but in many states you're required to disclose that detail (because of its effect on resale value).

lnanek22• 14 years ago

Ah, I'd always wondered what was with all the blocked off roads in California. This explains it.

michaelochurch3• 14 years ago

High house prices are a moral and economic disaster, as the post-2008 recession has shown us. The problem at the root of NIMBY is that real estate prices and behaviors have a few positive-feedback loops:

1. Because real estate "always goes up", and because Americans are delusional in general and seem to have a housing fetish, people have the deluded belief that they aren't paying for housing but investing in something that will always appreciate. This mentality creates bubbles. By the way, we're still in a real estate bubble-- just in a valley of one, and the "star" locations have barely dipped (yet).

2. Because people have absurd quantities (often over 30% of income and 80% of wealth) of their resources invested in housing, they have strong economic incentives toward NIMBYism. If I were going to lose 50c/dollar on 90% of my net worth (assuming I had any, but that's another story... don't work for shitty startups, kids) because of a speed limit change, I'd be pretty pissed too. The real problem is not locational change (necessary) but overinvestment in an asset that is highly sensitive to such change. It's simply not wise to invest 90% of your wealth in an asset whose value can plummet because some piece of shit decides to clear-cut a nearby hill and ruin your view... but some people have no other choice because housing is so stupidly expensive.

3. NIMBYism actually forces property values to stay high. Housing should be worth about $100-125 per square-foot, with about a 50-100% premium for top locations (urban areas) due to increased construction costs and reduced transportation costs (proximity to desirable places). Housing over $250/ft^2 would be an extreme anomaly were it not for outright regulatory corruption (read: NIMBY). However, due to the extreme price inelasticity of housing, even slight scarcities (1-2 percent) cause huge upward movements in prices. Hence the price levels observed in Manhattan and Silicon Valley.

The end result of all this is that NIMBYism creates scarcity (due to transportation inefficiency and by retarding new development) that makes houses expensive, and that causes people to be economically extremely sensitive to real estate changes (which are out of their control) which causes more NIMBYism. It's also yet another generational fuck-over of which we're on the losing side, the assholes pulled the ladder up behind them.

People also tend to inappropriately overvalue land, given how easily its value can be reduced to near-zero by nearby goings-on over which one has no control. For most land-- a very small set of trophy locations being excepted-- the value is a function of proximity and the fair value can be determined from transportation costs for an average working person in that area, and land would be pretty close to free (in comparison to the construction costs for the house itself) except for the artificial scarcity imposed by NIMBYism.

It ends very badly. Bubbles, cultural rot, and urban decay. People associate expensive real estate with success, but the most expensive city (real estate wise) is Luanda, where more than half of the residents are in poverty. Moscow and Sao Paulo aren't cheap, either, even though those cities have massive poverty problems.

dkasper• 14 years ago

>> Housing should be worth about $100-125 per square-foot, with about a 50-100% premium for top locations (urban areas) due to increased construction costs and reduced transportation costs (proximity to desirable places)

How'd you arrive at this number? Citation needed?

jcampbell1• 14 years ago

$100-125/sqft is roughly new construction cost for suburban housing in the US.

blahedo• 14 years ago

I'd be curious to hear this as well. There are many parts of the country (a vast majority by area, and a not-insignificant minority by population) where housing is way less than $100/sqft. In the (small) city I just moved from, $30-40/sqft was more like it, and that was higher than the entire surrounding area.

bhickey• 14 years ago

He made it up along with the rest of his low content blather.

aes2562• 14 years ago

> The end result of all this is that NIMBYism creates scarcity (due to transportation inefficiency and by retarding new development) that makes houses expensive, and that causes people to be economically extremely sensitive to real estate changes (which are out of their control) which causes more NIMBYism. It's also yet another generational fuck-over of which we're on the losing side, the assholes pulled the ladder up behind them.

This is so unbelievably true of the UK at the moment. In fact, we have the problem even worse given the higher population density (almost ten times that of the US).

Here the baby boomer generation got rich by sitting on the property ladder. Now we have a generation who simply can't afford to get on the ladder. Average prices are 20 times average wages in parts of the country.

Existing homeowners are paying down their mortgages with record low interest rates, while there are no mortgages available for first-time buyers, so the wealth gap is just getting larger.

Oh well. Here's to a lifetime of living with the parents while we cruise towards a pensions disaster...

Edit: By way of example, this is what £90,000 ($145,000) gets you in London these days: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2210436/

jdietrich• 14 years ago

It is an amazingly intractable catch-22 - if the government increase housing supply then a whole generation who are just about to retire lose almost all of their wealth; If they don't increase supply, a whole generation are unable to afford a home in which to raise a family. Whatever happens, it is almost inevitable that hundreds of billions of pounds will be funneled towards the baby boomers from the young or the yet-unborn.

You know things are seriously broken when a senior Tory minister writes a book entitled "The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future – And Why They Should Give It Back.".

liber82• 14 years ago

I'm also curious why you claim that "'star' locations have barely dipped (yet)."

In southern California, many of the highest priced areas have seen property values literally fall by half. I know many other such areas around the country have been similarly affected by the housing collapse, though I haven't seen any data measuring just top-end properties.

michaelochurch3• 14 years ago

New York and Northern California are still extremely high, even relative to incomes. Purchase prices are declining but rents are actually increasing in Manhattan.

My theory is that this is an artifact of the damage done to job markets everywhere else by the recession. The few places where the job market remains strong are seeing rents hold ground or even increase, on account of what is effectively supply destruction of an extremely inelastic good.

Anechoic2• 14 years ago

I've been on both sides of public project hearings, representing proponents who want to build or expand a project, and project opponents who want to block or reduce the expansion of a project. NIMBYism is very real, from folks who may just oppose a project on principle unrelated to actual negative effects (I see this a lot on transit projects from folks who are just opposed to public transportation) to folks who may be uninformed. It can be extremely frustrating when I have the facts on my side (and even the experts on the other side agree with me), but there is still opposition based based on "feelings."

That said, the public process in general (aside from NIMBYs) is necessary and useful. The most prominent example from my experience is the public opposition marshaled by Cambridge MA against the original "Scheme Z" Charles River crossing plan for the Big Dig. From an engineering point-of-view, it made perfect sense, but it would have been a hideous monstrosity that the city would have been stuck with for 50 years. The opposition made the project go back to the drawing board and resulted in the iconic Zakim bridge. The public process worked.

In my own direct experience, there have been times when me or my team missed something on an analysis (we may have mistaken a home for a garage for example) and the public process makes us aware of that so we can properly account for impacts. It works. Yet the process can be hijacked by NIMBY's and if those opponents know who to work the politics, it can cause real problems.

The problem is trying to separate the NIMBYs from the legitimate concerns. Planners and public staff have been trying to deal with this for decades with no real progress. If you eliminate the public process, you get the original Boston Central Artery where the state came in, bulldozed entire neighborhoods at pennies on the dollar, and constructed an eyesore that divided the city for decades. With the process, you get the Big Dig where a whole bunch of interests use Section 4(f), NEPA, MEPA, and Army Corp of Engineer regulations to blackmail the project into funding dozens of pet projects.

This is definitely an area in need of disruption. If you have ideas, get them out there.

forensic• 14 years ago

Thanks for your comment. One thing I take away from what you said is that the solution to problems like this is BETTER government, not ZERO government.

All the libertarians want to use any government problem as an excuse to just scrap the whole government. But you make it clear that the problem is not ALL government, the problem is BAD government, and government CAN be improved.

Anechoic2• 14 years ago

Yes, I would choose "better government" over "zero government" (although the libertarian response would be "we're not calling for no government, just minimal government). That said - I don't really see the path to "better" government. We have so many competing interests, even at the city level, that it's very difficult to develop reasonable regulations that are effective yet fair. That's one of the big problems with environmental regulations and the public process.

One response would be to push as much of the decision-making process as possible down to the local level, but that creates its own problem, as well as inefficiencies.

Obviously, it's a hard problem; if it wasn't, it would have been solved by now.

eli_gottlieb3• 14 years ago

There is no way to get zero government for urban issues. Urban living naturally means an overlap between private property rights, public commons, and governmental infrastructure efforts.

The question is whether you have a democratically-run municipal or regional/county government with the power to make urban-planning decisions, or whether you instead resolve everything through a tangled network of property-rights lawsuits.

wisty2• 14 years ago

> If you have ideas, get them out there.

Trial by jury works pretty well. Instead of a public hearing by interested parties, a random bunch of citizens could be tasked with reviewing the process, with a skilled arbitrator (like a judge) ensuring submissions by special interest group are done in a fair way.

notatoad• 14 years ago

Forcing better public input would be one strategy, I would suggest that public input should simply be ignored. Traffic flow patterns and safety are a science. It isn't a question of taste, there is an empirical 'best' way to design infrastructure. Public input belongs on things like public art projects, and what type of flowers to plant in the community gardens. How fast traffic should flow is not something that should be decided by anybody's uninformed opinion, regardless of whether or not they stand to gain.

luser0013• 14 years ago

I actually support "vicious" speedbumps. People regularly drive 40 mph on my road which has official speed limit of 25 mph.

Instead of spending money policing main streets, I support draconian camera-driven enforcement on side streets.

Make unmarked google-maps-like cars with high quality cameras and software. Park it on streets and watch for traffic. Send tickets remotely to speeders (equivalent to running a red light). Split revenue with the city.

Hmm, maybe I should run this by my city council. :)

TDL2• 14 years ago

Speed bumps are great up until you need an ambulance or fire truck to get to you quickly.

stuaxo• 14 years ago

Here (UK) we have speed bumps that are narrow - cars hit the bump, buses ambulances and trucks hit the bump ... though cars in the US are pretty big, so not sure this would work.

dmckeon• 14 years ago

If you have lower back issues, each speed bump is painful, no matter how slow you cross it. Also, barriers can make a neighbourhood arms race - street A gets speed bumps; traffic diverts to B & C, who get roundabouts; traffic diverts to D & E, which get pinch points; traffic diverts again, streets F, G, H & I become one-way; wash, rinse, repeat.

JoeAltmaier2• 14 years ago

You can ramp normal speed bumps pretty easily. Hit them at 35-40 and bah-bump you're over them.

So its only the 'vicious' ones that have any effect at all.

EricDeb• 14 years ago

I will only support this when we are all required to use self-driven cars that can go twice the normal speed limit safely :)

luser0013• 14 years ago

Not going to happen imho: how will a self-driving car change the fact that stopping distance increases with speed?

Consideration for (unexpected) pedestrians (children etc) and cyclists seems to the primary motivation for low speed limits on residential side streets. I think that makes sense.

CamperBob2• 14 years ago

I actually support "vicious" speedbumps. People regularly drive 40 mph on my road which has official speed limit of 25 mph.

Translation: I actually support giant SUVs doing 40 mph on my road. It's those goddamn Miatas that I want to slow down to 25.

js2• 14 years ago

I was once told by a traffic engineer that a more effective way to slow traffic through neighborhoods (traffic calming) is narrower lanes, such as via wide bike lanes or a median strip. I have personally observed this to be true in a subdivision I drive through (narrow lanes) vs my own (wide street with speed humps).

goodcanadian• 14 years ago

I STRONGLY oppose speed bumps. They do not slow down traffic; they just make people drive erratically. People race in between the bumps and then brake hard and go over the bumps at a ridiculously low speed. All the while, the drivers are paying more attention to the bumps than to any pedestrians or pets or cars that might be about. Enforcement may help; intelligent road design may help; speed bumps are not the answer.

Spooky232• 14 years ago

I take it that you don't live in a place that has winter (speed bumps == ice humps) or have back pain.

mahyarm2• 14 years ago

I can do 25mph on my road bike on a flat road for 10 minutes, and i'm not that good of a cyclist. 25 mph is way too slow for city speed limits and nobody drives it as a result. The minimum standard should be 30mph. In Canada the standard city speed limit is 50km/h, which converts to about 31mph. I find in Canada that people tend to follow the 50km/h speed limit far more readily. Nobody really follows the 25mph limit in the USA.

Since people like even numbers, the standard speed limit in america should be 30mph, not 25mph.

rbanffy• 14 years ago

> I actually support "vicious" speedbumps. People regularly drive 40 mph on my road which has official speed limit of 25 mph.

A speeding camera is a better solution than a speedbump. You turn the problem into a revenue stream. And then you'll create a negative incentive for locals to reduce the speed limit even further.

sehugg• 14 years ago

I got lost when the author talked about moving the speed limit from 35 to 25 mph would increase property values by $100k. Seriously?

1veteran2• 14 years ago

I love this HTML.* If only all the web could follow this simple way to convey information. CONTENT. Heck, that's what makes HN interesting. It's the lack of web developer fluff. Just text. CONTENT.

*But why the reference to tags.js? Javascript is not used.

dangrossman• 14 years ago

It's a web stats program. Tags.js is sending the document URL and referrer back to some server, and injecting a click tracking script into the page.

1veteran2• 14 years ago

That's assuming the user has js enabled. What I like about this is that it's just one line. No inline script (that would be just bloat for the user with js turned off.)

malandrew2• 14 years ago

Am I the only one that finds it ironic that 90% of the examples of NIMBYism cited in this thread and the example cited in the original article revolve around cars?

Cars are the epitomy of an externality and are inherently anti-community and anti-commons. A vehicle that can move at 20mph to 70+ mph and comes in contact with human beings (as opposed to being segregated from them by barriers or being buried underground like a train) can only ever be detrimental to the commons. Everyone with a car wants it to move slowly around their own neighborhood and fast through everyone else's.

guylhem6• 14 years ago

I found a good example on seniors healthcare, while reading overcomingbias today. It hasn't been discussed that much in the thread. Maybe that's because of the political link of the issue? Then it's not a bad thing.

Yet healthcare is the total opposite of anti-community !

malandrew2• 14 years ago

Yes and no. It's definitely an externality issue where one group robs another via voting power, but it's not NIMBYism because it doesn't involve "backyards"/neighborhoods.

kenko• 14 years ago

"The origin of the NIMBY ("not in my back yard") is honorable. People would buy a home, planning to live and raise children in reasonable safety, when some agency of government decides to locate a halfway house or nuclear power plant nearby. When that happens, the homeowners' property value is reduced, so much so that they cannot even get their investment out and relocate to a safer place. Local residents needed to band together to fight the intrusion that would take from their assets and distribute the benefit among large numbers of other people."

How in the world is that honorable? "No halfway house in my backyard" means "halfway house in someone else's backyard, please" (or "no halfway house at all, please").

Attack of the Fifty-Foot NIMBYs

Related Stories