NIMBY Defined

 A NIMBY is someone who understands that the financial benefit of development to someone else outweighs any price they would be willing to pay to prevent that development and so attempt to achieve the same ends more cheaply by making nebulous claims of public harms. This inevitably entails claims of 'It could happen everywhere!', until it alarms enough people to gather sufficient political support to cause sufficient public clamor at a public meeting to intimidate council members. (This essential NIMBY tactic is my chief dispute with Missing Middle advocates. Upzoning everywhere threatens a lot of people with change).

A second standard NIMBY talking point is "Skyscrapers!" and "Manhattanization! and "East Coast!". Anyone who has actually traveled around the East coast can tell you that the pre-war urban core is dwarfed in scale by the surrounding suburbs, and that average density metropolitan density is quite low. But it's designed to cause fear, and it's almost always coupled with cries of "Crime! Renters!" like it's still 1980.

On Displacement

All renters move, and often. Partially it's a response to changing conditions (employment, family size) but also in response to being able to take advantage of a better deal (better rent, better quality, better location) elsewhere. So renters (per se) aren't displaced. When people talk about displacement, they are talking about the displacement of an ethnic community--when a traditionally Black / Mexican / Jewish / Chinese / Irish / Italian / Greek / Korean / Hmong / Ethiopian community ceases to have a majority of that ethnicity, typically because a wealthier, whiter, less immigrant population is moving in.  

If the housing stock is is fixed, newcomers inevitably displace incumbents, in a zero sum game that always sees the incumbents outbid. And over time, the decline in the size of the ethnic community population can no longer support 'specialty' services, markets, grocers, and (eventually) churches. And that is a loss. As strands are pulled away, the fabric of a community dissolves. And it's not something that can be casually recreated, because it's an both: a) an emergent property of a density of recurring interactions with a single spatial & temporal locus; and also b) the product of the purposeful effort by past community leaders (even if you've got dry tinder, it still takes someone to strike a match).   

There is a disjunction in community norms about acceptable behavior - newcomers vs incumbents. And the newcomers are of the hegemonic in-group, they have the law on their side (de facto or de jure), endangering incumbents through exposure to the police. 

So when people talk about displacement, we should be clear on what that means and what that requires: Enough NIMBY* to prevent new rising rents from being matched with new development, and a zero-sum game reducing the ethnic population below the threshold necessary to support specialty stores and services.  

*There is nothing more NIMBY than a parking requirement--people fighting the addition of new people or businesses, excluding them simply to prevent competition for a limited resource that they have no legal claim or right to exclude. 

Court Co-op

A developer friend argued that too many single family homes for rent in a neighborhood was dangerous to the neighborhood, because renters failed to keep up the property. The planner in me bristled, considering this nothing more than blatant NIMBYism. But after longer discussion, I was forced to agree.

Non-occupying owners, don't receive any of the use-benefit from even minor improvements (new paint, new windows). As a landlord, it's very hard to know if an improvement is worth the money. Will repainting increase the rents? (Market information on residential rents is scarce).

As a renter (with a lease only a year long), I'm very reluctant to fix anything, let alone make improvements--I know the only value I can obtain for doing so will be utility over the next year, so it's not in my interest to make improvements that will endure beyond my lease.

How to make rentals (and thus affordable housing) available in single family neighborhoods? I would suggest 'Court Co-ops'. A 'Court Co-Op' would consist of adjacent single family homes clustered around a shared street, with a Co-Op Ownership structure.

 Co-ops are most often seen in Manhattan apartment buildings. A co-op is like condo association, but instead of the condo property being owned by an outside company, the owners of the condos are also the owners of the condo corporation, with a board of directors chosen by residents. 'Private communities' or 'planned communities' already represent a trend toward 'private government' in the form of HOA (Home Owners Associations), which have the power to exact a mandatory fee from residents, and then use those funds to make repairs and improvements to common resources.

HOA's make sense because a not insignificant portion of the value of a home is 'neighborhood value', as a result of the quality of your neighbors home. Providing a mechanism to guarantee the maintenance of all houses in the neighborhood (to the cost of to households) represents and equitable sharing of risk and benefit. (Although I'm less fond of their deed restrictions on renting....).

Salt Lake City would be an excellent place for this. Due to the large size (660' on a side) of blocks in Salt Lake City, many have 'courts', or mid-block alleyways, with small houses built on each side of the alley. Some courts are city streets, while others have only decrepit asphalt paving, installed by the original owner before it was subdivided into house parcels. Changing the courts into 'Court Co-ops' would provide a mechanism to both revitalize the areas and ensure that the properties are maintained, thus generating benefit for all occupants, whether owner or renter.

*The developer friend stated that the same effect was not true for multi-family units, because they enjoyed the services of professional management companies (with much better information on rents, the ability to adjust rents in response to changing conditions, legal liability with the city...).