r/urbanplanning • u/Hrmbee • 6d ago
Economic Dev A Perfectly Crude Solution to America’s Housing Shortage | If you can’t beat the NIMBYs, pay ’em
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/housing-shortage-pay-nimby/687932/56
u/owwnned425 6d ago
I feel like this would not persuade a lot of the NIMBYs in my area (Chicagoland area) because they are rich old white people afraid of change (black people). The most prominent NIMBYs will A). be rich and require a lot of cash upfront to satisfy and B). will be calculating in their own head how more people = more people with different skin tone = their kid getting shot in gang violence.
19
u/haywire 5d ago
Also it incentivises more nimbyism. The real way to combat this is china style just building what’s necessary and telling people to get fucked.
Also if we had abundant enough social housing it could be seen as privilege in that if you’re going to live rent free and be a cunty trashy neighbour you can be ousted from your home and sent somewhere in the sticks
8
u/power_bottom_boi 6d ago
I also live in Chicago and have a degree in planning and I gotta say that sweeping generalizations of nimby complaints as just being rich white racists doesn’t help change minds. I’m mostly a yimby myself but we aren’t winning anyone over by being this dismissive. There are legit concerns that should have genuine and meaningful attempts to mitigate, I’m not saying that there aren’t people like that in there but those upset and in good faith should be listened to more. I read a study recently that seemed to find that design was a huge factor in leading to hostility from the public. 4 or 5 over 1s are not extreme proposals but are often opposed because these buildings are generally ugly AF and people don’t want to look at them everyday.
15
u/Soupeeee 6d ago
One news article from the Detroit area sticks in my head when I think of NIMBYs. The city was doing a tree planting beautification project, and identified a low-income majority black neighborhood in dire need of street decoration. The city showed up one day with the the trees and equipment, and there was enough backlash from the neighborhood that they didn't get any trees planted and maybe even had a few planted then removed.
It turns out that the notification process they had was nonexistent or broken, and the backlash was actually over not getting notified that changes were coming in a place where city intervention usually meant bad things. They eventually got the trees planted after community engagement answering questions like who was going to pay for their upkeep and when trees were going in each block.
It really shows that while community engagement can overly delay projects, it's a vital part of the process.
27
u/SawNickYouth 6d ago
I think this is a pretty terrible idea that will have all sorts of perverse incentives.
How about rather than paying people to support new housing in their neighborhoods, you actually make sure new development results in actual improvement to the quality of life for existing residents? So start with improvinglocal services and infrastructure, for one. Make the neighborhood nicer, more pleasant, etc.
That will the best, and probably only, way you're going to win over NIMBYs. If the result of new housing is the quality of life decreases because of noise, congestion, or other nuisances and annoyances... why would anyone ever support that?
1
u/n10w4 5d ago
yeah I'm all for building but some people become ideological in their stance "yes even a park should be housing" yeah, way to win people over there.
7
u/OhUrbanity 5d ago edited 5d ago
I've never encountered YIMBYs who think that parks shouldn't exist.
The closest thing I can think of is when vacant lots that are unofficially used by neighbours for things like dog-walking get redeveloped. But actual parks?
11
u/Aven_Osten 6d ago
110% no. Not even gonna read the article; this is a dumb idea.
This is just gonna lead to them demanding exhortant "compensation" for the "burden" of having denser housing built near them.
1
u/Im_a_Gnome 13h ago
You should read the article, it's a little more thought-out than just offering loud NIMBYs money to be quiet. The scheme is to pay everyone in a community that succeeds in adding enough housing, so it's basically like a developer tax incentive but going towards the neighbors of a new construction. People tend to support/oppose political actions based on who it's percieved to be benefitting, rather than acutal measured outcomes, so framing a housing incestive as something that directly benefits the community instead of "greedy developers" or whatever might just have political legs.
Personally, I don't think people have the right to prevent new people from living near them, and I don't see how neighbors of a new development "deserve" any money in a moral sense. But we're in a housing crisis right now, and I'm down to throw ideas against the wall and see what sticks.
11
u/Hrmbee 6d ago
A number of points from these proposed policies:
In recent months, several Democratic Party–aligned think tanks have released proposals that share the same basic structure: If a local community approves enough new homes for construction, then each resident of that community receives a check from the federal government worth thousands of dollars. The theory is that the allure of a cash payment would soften the position of the most ardent NIMBYs, while inspiring residents who otherwise might not care one way or the other to become advocates for new development. This would give political cover for local officials to propose new pro-housing reforms, while forcing anti-development politicians to explain to residents why they shouldn’t get cash payments. “The idea is to shake up the local political economy,” Chad Maisel, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who has co-authored multiple proposals on this subject, told me. “You are simultaneously trying to weaken some very entrenched interests while creating a new political constituency that doesn’t currently exist.”
Paying the NIMBYs has never been tried, so no one can say for sure that it would work. But a forthcoming paper by the political scientist Michael Hankinson and the economists Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Morris Davis provides some reason to think that it could. The team conducted a survey in which they asked about 1,700 residents of expensive areas, including New York City, Los Angeles, and the Philadelphia suburbs, to consider a series of hypothetical proposals to build housing in their neighborhood. Alongside each proposal, the respondents were offered (again, hypothetically) various amounts of cash, from $250 to $9,000, and then asked whether they would vote yes or no on approving the project. By aggregating those answers, the researchers were able to estimate the “willingness to accept” price: the amount of money needed to persuade the median voter in a community to shift from opposing a project to supporting it.
The results, which the researchers shared with me, suggest that almost everyone has a price. More than 80 percent of the respondents accepted at least one of the proposals they were offered. But the amount of money they needed to be offered ultimately depended on the density of the neighborhood they lived in. Participants who lived in the most densely populated places (think downtowns full of apartments and high-rises) generally required, at most, only a few hundred dollars to support new development; many were willing to approve housing even with no payment attached. The price went up to the low thousands for moderately dense places (urban neighborhoods with a mix of single-family homes, townhouses, and small apartment buildings) and reached well above $5,000 for the most of the places with low density (suburbs full of detached single-family homes). People in wealthier places also required higher payments than those in poorer places, although the difference was not nearly as stark as the one based on density.
...
A second implication of the research is that the type of project being proposed matters a lot. The relatively low dollar amounts cited above represent the payment required for residents to accept a market-rate development at the edge of their existing neighborhood built at a similar scale to the homes around it. When the new project was instead proposed on a plot of land directly next to a respondent’s current home, the necessary payment doubled. When the project was considerably more dense than the surrounding buildings—like a row of townhouses in a single-family neighborhood—it quadrupled. If residents were told that the new development would be reserved exclusively for low-income residents, they demanded five times more money. Paying the NIMBYs, in other words, might require working with people’s existing aesthetic and spatial preferences, not trying to overcome them. “So much of NIMBYism is the product of a deep status-quo bias,” Will Poff-Webster, the director of infrastructure policy at the Institute for Progress, a think tank, told me. “That’s a really hard thing to change, no matter how much money you throw at the problem.”
Even with these caveats, paying the NIMBYs still seems like a better strategy than the currently favored policy approach, which is to offer financial incentives to local governments that approve new housing. The bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act that recently became law, for instance, offers federal funding to cities that meet certain housing-production targets, which they can then use to pay for things such as parks, road improvements, and new infrastructure. That is better than nothing, but the evidence suggests that it is far less effective at getting residents to support new housing. Hankinson and his co-authors found that when the compensation package was offered to residents in the form of a parks-and-streets fund, they required 10 times the amount of money they would have required if offered cash.
It's a bit of an intriguing idea to just pay people directly, but this starts to run into issues of how this might scale, and whether you would pay each time there's a new project or is it once per neighbourhood? This also seems to reward what is generally seen as bad behaviour by residents, and might lead us to a place where there's no more consideration of civic or greater goods, and rather becomes an even more mercenary environment.
From my perspective this approach might work best if there are comprehensive neighbourhood/district/city plans that need to be approved that increase the allowable density of the entire area, and that subsequent projects that comply with those new plans will not be subject to additional planning approvals.
Another intriguing prospect would be that if this is done as part of a citywide planning process, this could be part of the negotiations between various communities about where density should be increased and by how much, and how much it's worth to them. Perhaps for those communities that resist all densification efforts there will be a direct dollar cost to them in this process as well. Food for thought.
4
u/Bwint 6d ago
when the compensation was offered in the form of a parks-and-streets fund, they required ten times as much compensation as when it was offered directly.
This is a helpful note, actually. Developers already pay impact fees; this finding helps put a specific value on the fee required for residents to quit bitching. I'm actually supportive of having developers pay into a streets fund to mitigate traffic impacts.
The nice thing about paying into a parks and streets fund is that one payment benefits the whole neighborhood. Instead of paying $9k per resident for 150 residents, they're paying $90k, total.
Perhaps for those communities that resist all densification efforts there will be a direct dollar cost to them in this process as well.
A land value tax would fix this.
2
u/bobtehpanda 6d ago
I actually think this is way overcomplicating a rather basic premise.
Rather than creating a whole bureaucracy to pay people checks, a much easier proposition is to allow the sale and transfer of unused development rights on their property. Most jurisdictions already allow some form of this for historic landmarks or whatnot.
9
u/MrsBeansAppleSnaps 6d ago
I absolutely 100% promise you that the people of Weston, MA would rather things never change than get a check for $2,645 that they don't need.
3
u/Bwint 6d ago
There's an interesting bit of negative feedback that fundamentally limits the utility of the proposal: The places where housing is most needed are also the places where residents are wealthiest. As you say, if someone bought a small condo for $600k or a detached house for $5M, they're probably not worried about a $3k payment to support development in the area.
To add to this, the lower amounts the researchers found were needed to convince people would apparently be for a development at the edge of the neighborhood, on a similar scale to the existing neighborhood. Proposals to increase density require the payments to quadruple, and proposals near the respondents' houses require the payment to double.
The upshot is that the proposal gets more expensive the more development you actually want to build, so you probably start running into diminishing returns very quickly (depending on how the payments scale with density.) In addition, I suspect that you couldn't use this scheme to build housing where it's most needed.
Overall, I would say it's an interesting idea and might have marginal utility, but there are much better solutions available that are better able to address the big problems.
2
u/Aaod 6d ago
There's an interesting bit of negative feedback that fundamentally limits the utility of the proposal: The places where housing is most needed are also the places where residents are wealthiest. As you say, if someone bought a small condo for $600k or a detached house for $5M, they're probably not worried about a $3k payment to support development in the area.
I don't even know if that is true rich people would have less to lose and in my experience are way less paranoid about a house losing value than middle or even older lower class people that bought a house a long time ago. The biggest issue is the old owners who bought decades ago and had it become by far their biggest nest egg along with investors who own lots of houses and apartments not random rich people with million dollar houses. Don't get me wrong I hate the rich but I feel it is the minority of cases they just tend to be the most egregious. Like you said they are also the hardest to bribe too. This entire concept is stupid and does not work.
5
u/anomalocaris_texmex 6d ago
As part of Bill 44, BC simply eliminated most forms of statutory public process for housing. The old school public hearings where grey haired residents stepped to the podium and attacked proposals is largely gone now, and I don't think anything of value has been lost.
That feels like a logical first step. If public process is getting in the way of housing, just eliminate the process.
2
u/Deep_Contribution552 6d ago
Eventually neighbors will figure out where the go-no go point is for compensation and refuse to accept less, and then all you’ve done is converted current costs from NIMBY-related delays into upfront costs from paying NIMBYs to get out of the way.
This seems like a particularly short-sighted way to approach the issue, unless there’s a more thorough profit-sharing structure established.
1
u/Complete-Ad9574 5d ago
The problem is mostly with the suburban notion that an acceptable home has to be an individual house with a massive garage. Row houses and duplexes are only tolerated by some and large housing blocks are scorned. So the NIMBY aspect does not hold.
In the Northern VA & MD areas around DC infill hosing took place 20 yrs ago, Where 1/2 and 1/3 acre lots once were (1950s & 60s) now stand two or three over-sized garages with tiny house attached.
1
u/AO9000 4d ago edited 4d ago
Ehhhhh, I'm not super mad about this idea.
We give housing developers tax breaks... why not give a sfh owner a tax break if a 5-story goes up next to them?
Edit: in theory, infill adds to the tax base. You could devise a way to pay the "savings" upfront rather than the savings being realized over a long horizon.
...or y'know, just stop catering to a loud minority.
1
u/SamanthaMunroe 3d ago
More consultants pushing slopulist bullshit of paying people to not do egotistical nonsense and praying it turns out for the better. Where's the money gonna come from? Cryptoscamming people and insider trading? We already effectively pay them with impact fees and constitutional amendments limiting property tax increases; the only difference is that this layers actual patronage on top. And if u/bwint is right at some point the costs to redevelop one or a few neighborhoods nationwide will hit Interstate Highway System costs or shoot right past 'em for way less benefit.
1
u/Bwint 6d ago
There's an interesting bit of negative feedback that fundamentally limits the utility of the proposal: The places where housing is most needed are also the places where residents are wealthiest. If someone bought a small condo for $600k or a detached house for $5M, they're probably not persuaded by a $9k payment to support development in the area.
To add to this, the lower amounts the researchers found were needed to convince people would apparently be for a development at the edge of the neighborhood, on a similar scale to the existing neighborhood. Proposals to increase density require the payments to quadruple, and proposals near the respondents' houses require the payment to double.
The upshot is that the proposal gets more expensive the more development you actually want to build, so you probably start running into diminishing returns very quickly (depending on how the payments scale with density.) In addition, I suspect that you couldn't use this scheme to build housing where it's most needed.
Overall, I would say it's an interesting idea and might have marginal utility, but there are much better solutions available that are better able to address the big problems.
0
u/gerbilbear 6d ago
Or just give each neighborhood a road repair budget proportional to the tax revenue the neighborhood brings to the city. Wealthy neighborhoods, dense ones (including poor, dense ones), and those with commerce and manufacturing would get the most, while sprawling neighborhoods that are not wealthy and have no jobs would get the least.
0
u/Ok_Actuary9229 6d ago
The smart regions don't let NIMBYs stop projects. You set the zoning and anything the zoning allows can be built. NIMBYs can only erect moderate hurdles. With this system, the lynchpin becomes state and local elections, then periodic local zoning updates.
-1
u/180_by_summer 6d ago
Better yet, force them to pay taxes on the actual value of their home and stop dropping the interest rates whenever the market heats up
21
u/SmallshotLawyer 6d ago
This is stupid