Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America's Housing Crisis

Not a page turner but extremely well researched. If you’ve ever wondered why there isn’t more housing available where you live, check this out.

Very well researched and insightful. I bought the book after hearing one of the authors on the EconTalk podcast.

Spot on and full of great insights into the Special Permit process here in Massachusetts towns. One big reason we have a housing affordability crisis.

This is a very concise and well composed study thats main premise is that affordable housing in the United States is greatly reduced because of so called, neighborhood defenders, who object to the development of new multi-family housing in their neighborhoods. According to the book, neighborhood defenders are often affluent, white, wealthy homeowners, who use several tools, such as zoning restrictions, to their advantage in order to delay and outright object to the development of affordable housing. I found this book quite insightful although at times I felt overwhelmed by the amount of data. I also felt that $15 is a bit pricey given that it’s a short book and could have been further truncated to fit an academic paper.

Although some cities clearly need more housing, many people would prefer that housing to be in someone else's neighborhood- and the people most virulently opposed to new housing often have the biggest voice in land use decisions. These "neighborhood defenders" (as the authors call them) or NIMBYs (as pro-housing activists call them, an acronym for "Not In My Back Yard") are able to exclude housing because of the public meeting process surrounding zoning. Because zoning laws are so complicated, new building often requires a zoning change, which under current law nearly always requires a public hearing. Neighborhood defenders the neighborhood flock to these hearings and fight the project. This book didn't tell me much that it was surprising, but adds data supporting what I already suspected to be the case. Based on a survey of dozens of towns in metropolitan Boston, the authors point out that: 1. The sheer volume of regulations is correlated with low levels of housing production, especially low levels of multifamily housing production. Suburbs with many different types of regulation have fewer new apartments or condos, and the buildings that are developed in these suburbs have fewer units. This correlation is not limited to regulations directly limited to housing supply (such as density limits); even innocuous regulations can be used to delay housing. 2. Conventional economic wisdom suggests that neighborhood defenders seek to protect their property values by limiting new housing. On the other hand, some new urbanists would like to believe that prettier projects would be more popular. However, neighborhood defenders are more likely to raise concerns about traffic and environmental concerns than aesthetic or economic concerns. Less than 10 percent of commenters in the authors' sample directly mentioned home values. 3. The traditional justification for public meetings about zoning is that commenters represent the public. The authors disprove this idea: commenters at zoning meetings are much more likely to be homeowners as opposed to renters, and are whiter, older and more male. (However, it is unclear to what extent this affects commenters' positions; nonwhites are more likely to support new housing, but because Massachusetts is so white, the authors have a limited sample size of comments to draw from). While the overwhelming majority of comments are against new housing projects, results from a 2010 Massachusetts referendum on affordable housing show that most people want more housing, not less.

Many small towns are ruled by developers. In my small town, we have over 100 vacant office spaces and millions of square feet of vacant retail spaces, which were built on former residential parcels, and now, developers try to ram apartment buildings into residential and historic areas instead of redeveloping vacant retail, so don't blame us for trying to defend the residential areas. Not all development is good. There is a lot of potential for mix-use.