ARTICLES

A STRATEGIC PLAN TO AVIOD NIMBY PROBLEMS
Affordable Housing Finance Magazine - September 2002

by Debra Stein

While NIMBY opposition to affordable housing projects may be traditional, it isn’t inevitable. Project sponsors can reduce or even avoid community resistance to affordable housing by taking a strategic, proactive approach to community relations.

There are four different causes of opposition to residential projects, and it’s important to target your outreach activities so that you don’t actually stir up new opponents or create new problems.

Get the Facts Rights

A significant amount of opposition to affordable housing projects is based on misperceptions, lack of information, and exaggerated fear of the impact of projects. The solution: educate the public. Common public information tools include passive communication, where you educate the public with a one-way stream of information via newsletters, advertising, Web pages or fact sheets. More interactive, bilateral communication tools include one-on-one briefings and invitational events such as coffee-and-donut meetings.

Some project sponsors and many public officials believe that the most efficient way to educate the public about a proposed project is to host a massive community meeting. Enormous public meetings, however, are one of the least effective ways to reduce opposition arising from lack of information. Large audiences usually have too many issues to address in depth, and many people feel uncomfortable displaying their confusion or ignorance in front of a crowd. At their worst, huge neighborhood meetings introduce potential opponents to each other, allow them to hear and adopt each other’s agendas, and encourage spotlight-hungry activists to stake out irrevocable positions in front of their constituents. When public information is a top priority, don’t rely exclusively on big public meetings to get your messages out.

Help Neighbors "Save Face"

It is impossible to overemphasize the need for neighbors to "save face." When a citizen feels humiliated, ignored, or pushed around, that activist is likely to go on the warpath simply to redeem his damaged self-esteem and prove to the world that he really is a force to be reckoned with. Meeting the emotional needs of activists is a critical part of any community outreach campaign and can be substantially less expensive than making concessions later on in the process.

Go out of your way to show neighbors how much you respect them. Make personal eye contact. Refer to individuals by name. Instead of telling neighbors they "have to" believe your experts, demonstrate respect for citizens’ intelligence by encouraging them to review technical documents and confirm for themselves that the conclusions are correct. And keep your hands away from your mouth while listening, because hiding your lips while listening sends strong signals of rejection and dislike.

Deal with Moral Conflicts

Some citizens may view your proposal as a fundamental conflict between good and evil. For traditional economic moralists, progress and change are morally good, more housing and jobs are morally good, and any environmental impacts are strictly incidental. Environmental moralists, by comparison, believe that land has intrinsic value apart from its ability to be exploited for human benefit, and believe that preserving the quality of life if more important than increasing the quantity of life. NIMBY neighbors often see themselves as the only line of defense between the morally corrupt economic goals of the project sponsor and the morally righteous priorities of environmentalists.

Even where no genuine ethical conflict exists, opponents may try to claim that your moral violation justifies their outrageous or even unethical behavior. When your enemies can condemn you as evil, they may then feel entitled to engage in lying, bad faith negotiations, personal attacks, or other behavior that would otherwise be condemned as socially unacceptable. So what can you do when a land use debate starts sounding like a battle between good and evil?

One strategy is to show that, in fact, the situation involves at most a case of "right versus right" rather than "right versus wrong". Yes, preservation of the environment is important, but how does that principle rank in relationship to other values, such as affirmative action, or property rights, or concepts of compassion or fairness? Merely getting neighbors to confirm that they hold other values or interests can help single-focus opponents broaden the scope of their project consideration.

Do differing values always lead to irresolvable conflict? No, of course not. When land use controversies appear to be grounded on ideological conflict, the key is to focus the parties on their mutual interests, not their non-mutual ethics.

Use Persuasion and Negotiation

Most project supporters are motivated by their "positive interest" in gaining new benefits they don’t currently enjoy: additional housing units, a new community center, clean-up of a contaminated site. By comparison, most project opponents are motivated by their "negative interests" in protecting the status quo from change; they like their existing lifestyle and aren’t willing to tolerate any project that might lower their property values or introduce strangers into the neighborhood. Conflicts of interests are commonly resolved by persuasion or negotiation.

Persuasion: Persuasion involves changing neighbors’ beliefs, values and attitudes so that they accept that your project will not adversely affect their interests.

Developers often rely on rational persuasion, offering facts, data and logical arguments that they hope neighbors will carefully evaluate and accept. Rather than risking information overload, however, most citizens will engage in peripheral evaluation, focusing on the external context rather than the internal content of your statements, such as "All lawyers lie," or "Since ‘everyone’ is opposed to this proposal, it must be a bad idea," or "A fancy brochure must mean this will be a high quality project."

Competing parties also engage in irrelevant emotional persuasion intended to encourage gut-level and irrational responses. Common emotional attacks include appeals to pity, provoking fear, laying guilt trips and making personal attacks.

Negotiation: Negotiation isn’t about convincing neighbors that the proposed project won’t injure their interests. It’s about making concessions to get the best deal for yourself at the lowest possible cost. During negotiations, the developer and the community both concede on issues they don’t care about in order to gain something that is important to them. There are three types of concessions to consider during negotiation:

• Your project can be modified to remove the real or perceived threat to neighbors’ interests. Project modifications often involve physical changes related to density, height, acreage, use and so on.
• Unavoidable negative impacts can be reduced to less offensive levels through the incorporation of mitigation measures. For example, attractive landscaping and berming can mitigate the view impacts of a new mixed use complex. Like project modifications, mitigation measures are aimed at meeting neighbors’ negative interests to preserve the status quo.
• It may be possible to appeal to neighbors’ positive interests by offering counter balancing benefits: some new feature, amenity, or program so desirable that it offsets the negative impacts of the project, such as providing more public open space or community facilities such as child care centers or senior centers.

A Strategic Approach

Dealing with NIMBY opposition is a crucial aspect of developing affordable housing. By anticipating likely citizen resistance and addressing it in a strategic manner, you can minimize the controversy, cost and delay of affordable housing NIMBYism.


Debra Stein is the president of the San Francisco-based public affairs firm, GCA Strategies. She is the author of several books on NIMBYism and her firm specializes in controversial land use projects across the nation. For more information, e-mail Stein, call her at 415-391-4100 or visit the GCA Strategies Web site at www.gcastrategies.com.