Local Control or Centralized Planning? There’s a Third Answer.

(Source: Canva.)

A couple years ago, I had a maddening phone conversation with a Strong Towns reader that encapsulated much of what’s wrong with America’s approach to planning and development regulation. I have a lot of conversations like the one that I’m about to describe. I think of them as “Can’t I just—?” stories.

This reader, a charismatic Air Force veteran and self-employed artist, had built—literally built—her own accessory dwelling unit (ADU) on her property: a combination art studio and small living space, so that she could do her work and rent out the main house to help cover the building costs. The city planner told her he couldn’t approve it as a residential unit, but that if she resubmitted the exact same plans labeled “garage/shop/studio,” it could be of unlimited size. So she did.

When a new zoning administrator took over at City Hall, he took it as his responsibility to enforce the strict letter of the code, and contacted our reader about her unauthorized ADU, informing her that she must either move out of her home or evict her tenant. Otherwise, she was faced with the prospect of a lengthy battle and thousands of dollars in legal fees to request a variance. (I’ve omitted her name and location because, at the time of our conversation, she was concerned that our sharing the story would adversely affect her battle with the city.)

Meanwhile, five miles up the road, development of a 9,000-acre, master-planned community was rapidly underway, in a stark illustration of whom the prevailing planning system empowers and whom it disempowers.

Where does this kind of story fit into major narratives about planning and zoning? In recent years, the contest over who should get to set land-use rules in America’s changing cities has been largely framed as a choice between local control, on one side, and the preemptive use of state (or federal) authority to override local control for the greater good, on the other.

People on both sides of the argument use this framing. Just witness two recent, hotly discussed pieces of national media. On the one hand, The New York Times feature “Twilight of the NIMBY” by Conor Dougherty (which I discussed with Abby Kinney on an episode of the Upzoned podcast) profiles the founder of Livable California, a group opposed to (essentially all) statewide land-use and housing reform. She positions her advocacy as a staunch defense of communities’ right to self-determination. On the other hand, a recent Atlantic article by Jerusalem Demsas is titled “Community Input is Bad, Actually” and makes the case that a local veto over things like affordable housing and clean energy infrastructure amounts to giving an unrepresentative minority the ability to hold basic societal needs hostage, and that the answer is to move much of this decision making to the state level.

Yet the narrative of “local control vs. centralized control” is missing something crucial about the actual stakes of the issue, as illustrated by the story I began with above. It doesn’t really capture the reality that local authority can be just as coercive and maddening as distant authority. Or that local governance can serve to stymie bottom-up action while empowering top-down, centralized forces every bit as much as state or federal lawmaking can do the same.

On the other hand, I reject the notion, popular in some advocacy circles, that if you want solutions to our pressing national problems, then you have to reject localism itself and favor centralized power. I am, at heart, a localist. Self-determination is a timeless principle of democracy, and it is simply true that the people who live in a place have both the deepest understanding of it, and the most skin in the game when it comes to what happens there. People ought to have meaningful agency in shaping the environment in which they live everyday, and that we will have healthier, more prosperous, more resilient places to live in where that is the case.

It’s just that the question we need to be asking is this: What does such “meaningful agency” look like in practice?

To get there, we need to ditch a simple-minded vision of local authority or control, in favor of a vision of true community empowerment. And the latter, perhaps paradoxically, requires relinquishing some control and tolerating a little more chaos than many in the ardent “local control” camp seem to want to.

When Too Much Democracy Disempowers

In practice, local control over land use often means an abundance of formal processes. Lots of mandatory permit applications, public meetings, formal votes. But this sort of hyper-democracy can very often mean a situation where it’s easy to be told “no” to something, but slow, costly, and cumbersome to get a “yes” to move forward. In Seattle, an infamous design review panel can send apartment projects literally back to the drawing board because the members don’t like the color of brick, or think the proposed building looks “too historic.” In San Francisco, a controversial provision called Discretionary Review allows effectively any citizen to block any permit, for any reason, and force a laborious public hearing. It has infamously been weaponized by small business owners to target prospective competitors who want to open up nearby.

These are extreme, almost parodic examples of local democracy run amok, but they are the tip of a much greater iceberg. In a very real way, local control of development—in the sense of a veto, or a convoluted set of hurdles—simultaneously empowers one segment of the local community and disempowers another: the small business owner trying to open up, or the artist trying to create a viable live-in studio space.

Community power can look like voting on things. It can also look like building things, literally or proverbially. One measure of “local control” is how much the community, through its representatives, is able to influence or restrict the development process. A very different measure concerns a different sort of local agency: How much actual power do I have to meaningfully alter the place in which I live? Can you create something incremental and experimental in a bid to meet your and your neighbors’ needs?

And if you or I don’t have that power, who does have it? I’ve written before about the way in which red-tape-heavy planning processes naturally produce gatekeepers and high barriers to entry. The result is that the local residents who might want to build something are the first to be shut out. It’s deep-pocketed corporate entities who have the resources to steamroll their way through the process, and who ultimately benefit from the exclusion of smaller competitors.

(Source: Canva.)

Now we’ve narrowed the category of “developers” in a way that, in most places, almost wholly excludes those who live locally and are deeply committed to the place. And this creates a vicious cycle, politically, because once building things is seen as something that only outsiders to the community do, then it becomes more intuitive that “local control” means imposing checks and veto points on the ability to build things.

Demsas’s “Community Input” article in The Atlantic identifies the basic power asymmetry that occurs when the nexus of local control is voting on things, rather than building things. Development projects, by nature, tend to have diffuse benefits and concentrated harms. Even if the harms are relatively minor nuisances, they tend to create groups of committed opponents who will mobilize against the project, while the beneficiaries are farther away, hypothetical, don’t even know about the project yet, or are at least less motivated to speak up. This is the “NIMBY” phenomenon in a nutshell. It’s a basic Prisoner’s Dilemma that no amount of enlightened local views is likely to overcome.

Reclaiming the Mantle of Local Control

This is what ultimately drives me crazy about the vision of groups like Livable California who are the loudest champions for “local control”: It wraps high-minded assertions about self-determination around a politics that, in practice, merely proclaims one particular community of interest, with one narrow set of concerns, to be the voice of “the community.”

In the New York Times profile, Livable California founder Susan Kirsch describes the foundations of her advocacy—which is to preserve things such as single-family zoning, parking mandates, and veto points on new development—with language such as “self-reliance and self-resiliency,” and the importance of “being able to have efficacy in your own life.” Kirsch lives in a community (Marin County) in which it is notoriously difficult to build anything. The median home sale price in May 2022 was $1.65 million. The rental vacancy rate is the lowest in the Bay Area at 1.8%, and most of the workforce must commute in from elsewhere. What does this do for “efficacy in your own life,” I wonder?

“It feels like huge forces conspiring to take away control from people at the lowest level at which they live,” Kirsch says of the drive for statewide land-use policy in California. But the lowest level at which you live is your own home, and it’s thanks to statewide land-use policy that, for example, thousands of Los Angeles homeowners have chosen to build accessory dwelling units—which now comprise over 20% of all housing permits issued in LA—since a state law forced cities to remove roadblocks to ADUs in 2017.

Ultimately, Kirsch and her ilk are selling a deeply impoverished vision of “efficacy in your own life:” one that really only applies if the thing you happen to want in your own life is to block change in your neighborhood.

A more holistic approach to local efficacy would land in a very different place. If I may be blunt, it’s time to take the mantle of “local control” back from the NIMBYs.

Allow Small Things to Grow

If “local control” is a limiting way to understand the impact of local land-use regulation, then an even more useless framing is that of “deregulation.” Critics of land-use reforms which would make it easier to build missing-middle housing, open a neighborhood business, or not provide parking, often refer to such policies in a pejorative sense as “deregulation.” This is particularly common from the left half of the political spectrum, where “deregulation” carries the connotation of letting powerful, greedy interests run amok. This framing is deeply disingenuous: it flattens the distinctions between hassling a retiree about having a small accessory apartment on her property, shutting down an auto mechanic’s shop over parking he can’t afford and doesn’t need, and giving a billion-dollar corporation free rein to transform a whole neighborhood. These are all simply “regulation” under this view.

A Strong Towns approach, instead, tries to decentralize the actual ability (in practice, not in theory) to shape our communities and put that ability into more hands, in smaller increments. This might simultaneously mean tighter scrutiny (“regulation” if you will) of large-scale changes to our communities, alongside greater freedom to pursue small-scale plans without exhaustively seeking permission or consensus. This decentralization of power is very different from a top-down approach but it's also very unlike the NIMBY ideal of local democracy, in which some reified version of "the community" gets a collective vote or voice on how things should be.

Community is important, and much of the most important work in building resilient places comes through collective action. “The Community,” on the other hand, does not exist. In truth, each of us belongs to a huge number of overlapping communities that don’t all share common interests or common geographic boundaries, let alone ones that map neatly onto political boundaries. The reality of “community” in our lives is complex, and local government is thus a deeply flawed vessel for the “community” to express its will just as often as it is the correct vessel.

Instead of reflexively privileging local government as the appropriate site for regulation, we should pursue an agenda of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the principle that decisions should be made at the lowest level of governance that is competent to make the decision. In some cases, this might be a higher body capable of internalizing externalities or resolving disputes. In some cases, this is the local government. But in many cases, it’s the individual. Or set of individuals: actual subsidiarity would call for many decisions to be worked out interpersonally, neighbor to neighbor, instead of involving City Hall at all.

The case for statewide preemption of land-use rules has too often been framed in “necessary evil” terms. California state senator Scott Wiener, maybe the politician most associated with the drive for such preemption, told the New York Times’s Dougherty, “I am a huge believer in making decisions at a local level and people passionately tending to their community. But we’re going over the cliff, and whatever the benefits of local decision making, and there really are benefits, it has failed to produce the housing we need.”

I don’t think we ought to see it as a necessary evil, or as a loss of local control in any sense that is truly meaningful. There’s an affirmative argument that is precisely about local self-determination. It’s that communities must not be put in a straitjacket. They must be free to become each new iteration of themselves.

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