The hidden costs of “neighborhood defenders”
The hidden costs of “neighborhood defenders”
Housing expert warns of unintended consequences as region grapples with LANL’s expansion
As Los Alamos National Laboratory's workforce swells, the community faces a housing crunch that’s sent prices soaring and forced most employees to commute from out of town. The situation mirrors challenges faced by other booming areas across the nation, prompting a closer look at how public-input processes and zoning regulations impact housing affordability.
Katherine Levine Einstein, associate professor of political science at Boston University and co-author of “Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America's Housing Crisis,” recently shared insights on these issues in an interview ahead of her upcoming talk in Santa Fe.
“When you have economic growth, you have to build more housing,” Einstein says. “Being a site of economic growth is an incredible privilege, and with that privilege comes responsibility.”
What is a neighborhood defender?
Neighborhood defenders are typically homeowners who have a vested interest in maintaining the current state of place they call home. Einstein prefers this phrase over the pejorative “NIMBY” (Not In My Backyard) epithet. These residents aren’t only concerned with their own backyards — they genuinely care about their entire neighborhood and want to see it protected against encroachment and change. Their primary concerns revolve around preserving “neighborhood character,” which encompasses the aesthetic, historical, and environmental attributes they value in their community.
Einstein explains that while these concerns are understandable and valid, opposition from neighborhood defenders can hinder necessary housing development. This can lead to broader negative consequences, such as higher housing costs, staffing issues, less business activity, and longer commutes — which in turn affect the environment and overall community well-being.
If neighborhoods are preserved under glass by policy, “We are actively saying we value keeping the physical housing stock the same, or more, than we value providing safe and stable housing to newcomers," Einstein says.
The pitfalls of public meetings
Einstein's research shows that public meetings on housing projects, while intended to collect broad community input, often amplify the voices of a select few. “The people who show up are way more likely to be homeowners, older and whiter, and they are overwhelmingly opposed to the construction of new housing,” she says.
Why are they the only ones who show up? It’s because of what economists call “concentrated costs and diffuse benefits,” says Einstein. Nearby residents face immediate, tangible impacts from new construction, such as noise, dust, traffic, or changed views, motivating them to attend meetings and voice opposition. In contrast, the broader benefits of increased housing supply are less visible and slower to materialize. The people who will benefit from new housing might be anywhere from Española to Estonia while their future home is being built — they don’t even know about it until it’s done. They aren’t going to show up to a neighborhood meeting to fight for the project.
However, Einstein cautions against eliminating public input altogether. “We are not pushing for total autocracy when it comes to housing development,” she says. “Instead, what we want to say is that the process we have right now creates this unpredictable slog for housing developers.”
Rethinking community engagement
To get a better array of voices, Einstein suggests ending project-specific hearings and focusing instead on city- or regional-level zoning discussions. This approach, she argues, gets a broader demographic, a wider range of opinions, and allows for more comprehensive planning.
In addition, to bring underrepresented voices to the table, Einstein advocates for innovative alternatives to traditional public meetings. For example, the town of Newton, MA, implemented equitable focus groups for young people, renters, and members of marginalized communities, where she says comments were much more supportive of housing and higher-density housing.
People at these meetings said they’d never shown up to a public meeting before — or had, but stayed silent because they were “so terrified of the long-term residents.” According to Einstein, participants of these focus groups said, “I feel like my voice actually matters here, and that local government is actively soliciting me.” (Read more about this initiative here.)
Balancing growth and preservation
“If a community like Los Alamos is blocking new housing development, forcing new employees to drive long distances, that is also doing profound damage to your mountain ecosystem and to the community air quality”
In communities like Los Alamos and Santa Fe, where historic preservation and environmental concerns are paramount, striking a balance between growth and conservation is crucial.
“I certainly am not an advocate for building across all of our conservation lands to ensure that we can house everyone,” Einstein says. “But I think this is where higher density housing and infill housing comes in.”
She points out the unintended environmental consequences of opposing construction. “If a community like Los Alamos is blocking new housing development, forcing new employees to drive long distances, that is also doing profound damage to your mountain ecosystem and to the community air quality,” she says.
It’s important to realize “the environment” is a big system. Although individual trees are important, removing a few to build denser housing where infrastructure already exists can be better for the overall environment, Einstein says. Building housing where there’s already water, electricity, and roads is efficient and helps prevent sprawling development that creeps into pristine wilderness.
So how do residents make their views known, if not during a project hearing? Einstein says county-wide planning opportunities, such as when we update our comprehensive plan or development code, are a good way for residents to use their voice. This is a time to advocate for requirements like native plants in landscaping, or replacing any trees that come down. “In certain types of developments, ask for greening in a certain way to ensure that we don't create urban heat islands,” Einstein says. “There are ways that we can set our policies to make it easy and streamlined to build in a sustainable way.”
The role of government
For those skeptical of leaving housing decisions solely to government officials, Einstein spoke to the importance of local elections and broader policy frameworks. “We still vote for city councilors,” she says. “For people who are unhappy with the development decisions that have happened, they have an opportunity to exercise the franchise and show up and vote.”
Ending the chaotic project-by–project way of deciding housing doesn’t mean stopping all public input, she points out. There are opportunities for public participation, as mentioned, whenever a master plan, comprehensive plan, or affordable housing plan is updated. Community input at this level is generally more democratic and functional than asking each neighborhood whether it will allow anyone else in.
At the state level, Einstein notes examples of preemption laws that require local governments to provide their fair share of housing. In Massachusetts, for instance, a recent law requires communities served by regional mass transit to increase allowable density near transit stops if they want to continue receiving certain state grant funds.
Community input at this level is generally more democratic and functional than asking each neighborhood whether it will allow anyone else in
However, Einstein cautions that well-intentioned policies can sometimes have unintended consequences. She cites Boston's recent fair-housing law review process for new developments as an example. It was meant to increase affordability and equity, but the extra layer of bureaucracy “may also be making development significantly more expensive and reducing the overall number of housing units built,” she says.
Market-rate housing and affordability
For those concerned that market-rate housing doesn't address affordability issues, Einstein offers a nuanced perspective. While acknowledging the need for subsidized affordable housing, she says that overall housing supply plays a crucial role in moderating prices.
“We know that building lots and lots of new housing will overall reduce prices,” she says. She points to Austin, Texas, as a recent success story where relaxed zoning codes and increased building have led to declines in rental prices.
However, Einstein also warns against overly strict affordability requirements, where apartment-builders are mandated to keep a certain number of units “affordable,” meaning below the going rate. “We have communities in Massachusetts that have set inclusionary zoning [IZ] requirements to require new developments above a certain size to be 25% or 30% affordable, and they've produced exactly zero affordable housing units with these policies because they have made them too stringent for market conditions,” she says. In other words, because the developers have to either pass the cost of below-market-rate units to other tenants, or just eat that cost, they can’t make the math work. This, combined with other economic forces, has caused construction of multifamily housing there to grind to a halt.
Daniel Werwath, the policy advisor to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, often speaks about what happened to Santa Fe when it launched an IZ initiative decades ago. After some initial success when land was cheap and interest rates low, the Great Recession happened. Housing development in Santa Fe skidded to a halt, partly because the well-intentioned requirements of IZ made post-crash building too expensive. As Werwath puts it in this piece, “too stringent an affordability requirement makes housing development nonviable. As an old boss said during the debate around the HOMES program ordinance, ‘30% of nothing is nothing.’”
Regarding rent control, often proposed as a solution to rising housing costs, Einstein cautions about potential drawbacks. “The general consensus is that rent control may harm the overall number of available rental units, and it also poses really significant obstacles to mobility,” she says. (As a counterpoint, housing journalist Jerusalem Demsas, also a Livability Series speaker, says that she has been won over to the rent-control argument — with caveats. Read more about that here.)
Looking ahead: comprehensive planning
As Los Alamos County releases its new housing affordability plan,* and prepares to revise its comprehensive plan, Einstein stresses the importance of addressing key obstacles in government policies and explaining the compromises inherent in policy decisions.
“If you want to preserve your community in amber, you’re going to make it less affordable,” she says. “You're going to make it less likely that young people can raise their families there. You're going to make it less likely that seniors can remain there.”
Einstein suggests reframing the conversation around single-family zoning. Most residential land in Los Alamos is zoned for single-family housing only, which is essentially a ban on affordable housing typologies like apartments and even townhomes. This above graphic [Fig. 3] contrasts “missing middle” concept with a depiction of different densities to illustrate what affordable housing in Los Alamos County could look like. Currently, the only allowable housing on most residential land in Los Alamos is low density. Since density is so linked to affordability, this is the least-affordable use of land.
“If you want to preserve your community in amber, you’re going to make it less affordable. You're going to make it less likely that young people can raise their families there. You're going to make it less likely that seniors can remain there.”
However, when there’s talk of ending single-family zoning, nervous homeowners picture a bulldozer coming for their house — which is not at all the case, says Einstein. Upzoning (allowing more kinds of housing) usually results in slow, incremental change in real life: picture a homeowner selling their house to a buyer who remodels it as a duplex. Nobody forced the homeowner to do anything, selling was a choice. What changed is that the buyer now has options they didn't have before.
“I think when you tell people that you want to allow an accessory dwelling unit and get rid of a ban on townhouses — that sounds really different and less scary to people. Less like a radical change,” Einstein says.
Tradeoffs
As Los Alamos and neighboring counties grapple with housing affordability challenges, Einstein's research offers insights into the complex interplay between public input, zoning regulations, and housing development.
“The politically challenging part of comprehensive planning is to explain to folks the tradeoffs inherent in a policy decision,” says Einstein. There are upsides and downsides to every policy, whether you’re legalizing affordable housing options like duplexes and townhomes, or continuing the single-family-zoning ban on them, she says. While there are no easy solutions, a more inclusive and strategic approach to community input may help cities like Los Alamos meet their housing needs while preserving the qualities that make them unique.
Einstein will further explore these themes in her upcoming talk, “Why is Affordable Housing in Such Short Supply? The Role of Neighborhood Defenders,” on Thursday, July 18, 2024, from 6 - 8 p.m. at the Farmer’s Market Pavilion in Santa Fe. The event is free, but advance registration is required.
*Click here to read and watch the June 25, 2024 presentation to County Council on the updated affordable housing plan
Note: Stephanie is a Planning and Zoning Commissioner in Los Alamos, but her views are only her own and do not reflect those of the commission.