Intro: Interesting article from 22 April. Readers of this blog are invited and encouraged to process the information and data presented to apply locally.
Community Input Is Bad, Actually
Angry neighborhood associations have the power to halt the construction of vital infrastructure. It doesn’t have to be this way.
"Development projects in the United States are subject to a process I like to call “whoever yells the loudest and longest wins.” Some refer to this as participatory democracy. . .
Democracy is at its best when the views and needs of the people are accurately transmitted to their representatives, the representatives act, and voters express their approval or disapproval in the next election. The existing community-input system purports to improve upon this process by offering a platform where anyone can show up and make their voice heard. After all, providing input shouldn’t just happen at the ballot box, or so the thinking goes. But the process is fundamentally flawed: It’s biased toward the status quo and privileges a small group of residents who for reasons that range from the sympathetic to the selfish don’t want to allow projects that are broadly useful.
Granted, Big Government doesn’t have the best track record of respecting legitimate grievances about massive infrastructure projects. American cities still display the scars of highways that razed marginalized communities; many remember the indignities of urban renewal, a mid-century federal policy aimed at city revitalization. . .
Let’s look at housing first. Because participation in local politics, even at the ballot box, is extremely limited, elected officials are often swayed by just a handful of emails or phone calls,..Anytime a developer seeks to build something outside the existing zoning code (which in most places mandates single-unit residences, often with large yards and parking spaces driving up the cost of every home), they have to get a “variance” from the local zoning board. To receive that variance, developers have to present their projects at public meetings. Community members can come and register their opinions about apartment buildings, homeless shelters, dorms, and on and on. Even someone attempting to convert her garage into a mother-in-law suite might need the approval of her neighbors. It’s like a homeowners’ association from hell, backed by the force of the law.All of that feedback seriously impedes the production of new housing. . .
Sometimes the mere specter of community objection is enough to make a project less ambitious or less effective. According to a recent report from the Eno Center for Transportation, officials often attempt to preemptively avoid conflict with neighborhood groups by selecting “routes along freeways or industrial freight rail rights of way” instead of in dense areas where they would be most useful. . .
The community-input process is disastrous for two broad reasons. First, community input is not representative of the local population. Second, the perception of who counts as part of an affected local community tends to include everyone who feels the negative costs of development but only a fragment of the beneficiaries. . .
This representational problem is not one that can easily be solved by making these meetings more accessible. The BU researchers looked into what happened when meetings moved online during the coronavirus pandemic and discovered that, if anything, they became slightly less representative of the population, with participants still more likely to be homeowners as well as older and whiter than their communities. Relatedly, survey evidence from California reveals that white, affluent homeowners are the ones most committed to local control over housing development. Among renters, low-income households, and people of color, support for the state overriding localities and building new housing is strong. . .
>> Expanding opportunities for political participation failed to solve the problem of inequitable project distribution, because the fundamental problem wasn’t lack of community input; it was a lack of political power among disadvantaged groups. Making it easier for people to lodge their disagreements doesn’t change the distribution of power; it only amplifies the voices of people who already have it. . .
Government officials should not ignore concerns from ordinary citizens and organized community groups. In fact, state and federal officials should appreciate that these entities have useful knowledge that is difficult to access from afar. . .
In the U.S., moving decision making from the hyperlocal level to the state level is the first step to fixing the broken development process. This would ensure that a larger proportion of voters had a say, though an indirect one, in housing, transportation, and renewable-energy policy, because more people vote in these elections than hyperlocal ones. We have to let representative democracy actually work.
Local government is fundamentally not equipped to internalize and weigh the benefits and costs of large infrastructure projects, which can affect the economic and environmental prospects of the whole nation. . ."
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