Why is it so difficult to build dense housing in the United States? Economically thriving regions rarely supply enough housing to keep pace with local demand. What housing does get built is rarely the multi-unit housing most in demand by lower- and middle-income families. Does the blame lie with voters’ overall preferences against building more housing, or with biased local institutions that give disproportionate power to a narrow group of fervent housing opponents? In Neighborhood Defenders, Katherine Levine Einstein, David M. Glick, and Maxwell Palmer argue strongly that structure dominates agency: local institutions allow housing opponents to insert themselves into discretionary local housing approval processes and block local development. Such housing opponents are, on average, older, whiter, richer, and more likely to be homeowners than other voters. And they capture local institutions nominally designed to allow “small-d” democratic input in local land-use planning.
This story of local land-use policy seems familiar at first glance. What distinguishes the success of “neighborhood defenders” described in this book from stereotypical “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) activity? The authors argue that local antidevelopment activism succeeds as a function of two intersecting factors. The first is the level of local political engagement, particularly among opponents. The second is the extent of local land-use regulations. High-participation, high-regulation environments often deter developers from even attempting housing projects, as they anticipate that their proposals will bog down in dilatory action. Projects that do see the light of day undergo multiple challenges and modifications. Ceteris paribus, the residents of high-SES, high-participation communities are better equipped to capture institutions in this way. In response, developers turn to low-SES, low-engagement communities, especially if such communities lack access to regulatory and legal remedies (p. 43).
In support of their claims, the authors present a mix of case study examples and quantitative analyses demonstrating how local activists exploit institutions to block housing approvals. Integrating remarkable data from public meetings, local land-use regulations, and housing permits in Massachusetts, they show that local land-use regulations and participatory processes give “neighborhood defenders” the means to delay and impede housing development projects.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its account of how antidevelopment campaigners exploit every trick in the book to oppose housing in their neighborhoods. For example, Einstein and coauthors recall the 11-year effort by the Archdiocese of Boston to develop a mixed-income housing project at St. Aidan’s Parish in affluent Brookline (pp. 44–51). Local opponents, dominated by longtime homeowners, pulled on every available regulatory and legal lever, from zoning board meetings to legal appeals to the Vatican! Although the opponents failed to stop the project entirely, their intervention served to shrink it and reduce the number of low-income housing units. Housing development advocates and those immersed in legal aspects of land-use regulation will find such an account familiar. (See, for example, land-use lawyer Richard Babcock’s entertaining critique of local land-use politics in his 1967 book The Zoning Game.)
This book improves on previous practice-oriented case studies by integrating them with modern social science. After telling the story of St. Aidan’s Parish, the authors turn to the abundance of quantitative data in their own backyard, including the Massachusetts Housing Regulation Database and original, painstakingly collected data drawn from local meeting minutes and public comments. They show that cities with a greater number of regulations are most likely to produce effective local challenges to dense housing development. The most compelling of these analyses is a natural experiment: the sudden sale of real estate by the financially distressed Archdiocese of Boston, resulting in the redevelopment of parcels across a diverse set of municipalities. They find that cities with more land-use regulations permitted fewer church properties to convert to multifamily housing (p. 78).
The authors’ analyses reveal the power of administrative data in tracking local political activity around housing development. But they go a step further, criticizing survey research for failing to measure important local outcomes. Because active opponents of any given development are a highly self-selected group, the authors argue, “Surveys do not tell us who these individuals are or what motivates them” (p. 16). This places them in the company of other contemporary local political economy scholars who use administrative data to the exclusion of survey responses.
Survey research, to be sure, cannot easily speak to local controversies, but it can measure policy attitudes that do not appear in public records. For example, the authors argue that seemingly inclusionary local institutions such as open meetings produce biased participation. Public records can show that meeting attendees look very different from the average registered voter, but they cannot ascertain whether that difference in participation is due to heterogeneous preference intensity. To be sure, the authors admirably attempt to triangulate their public data to address the issue. They develop one measure of support for affordable housing—municipal vote shares opposed to repeal of Massachusetts’s Chapter 40B local affordable housing mandate (pp. 107–8). They also examine participatory biases within (presumably) homogeneous subgroups of registered voters.
Administrative data best reveal preferences of voters who have already chosen to engage with specific local controversies. But preference heterogeneity and intensity remain critical to the authors’ theory. To know how much institutions mediate NIMBY predispositions, we must know how different types of voters in different municipalities would have behaved in the institutions’ absence. Survey work by Michael Hankinson and others suggests that such local preferences can diverge substantially even among homeowners and renters. The policy attitudes measured on such surveys are latent antecedents of local activism.
The authors also only indirectly address another, related issue: the extent to which the local institutional choices at the center of their account are endogenous to local antidevelopment sentiment. Although high-regulation municipalities appear across Massachusetts, extensive regulations are common in certain affluent outer-ring suburbs, such as Lexington and Weston, and are rare in Boston and its inner suburbs (p. 61). Why? This is the first-order question underlying the book, because maintenance of land-use regulation regimes feeds neighborhood defenders’ political power. Protracted housing approval processes derive from these prior institutional choices.
The authors’ focus on the resulting social outcomes is understandable: their goal is not to explain the origins of local land-use regulations, but to isolate proximal institutional causes of housing shortages. On that count, this book is likely to be of great interest to a large audience concerned with the nation’s failure to build needed housing. However one reads into the evidence and the relative importance of preferences and institutions, the authors convincingly show that local land-use institutions are captured by a small set of community members concerned with protecting their local context. Einstein, Glick, and Palmer have delivered an impressively supported account of the institutions that enable NIMBYism and constrain housing opportunities in US cities and towns.
