What if the easiest way to overcome opposition to new housing was simply to pay people to accept it? A recent article in The Atlantic argues that after state laws, packed public meetings, and economic appeals have failed to overcome local resistance, cash payments might succeed where persuasion has not. Chuck Marohn is joined by John Reuter, executive director of Strong Towns, and Dr. Chloe Groome, treasurer of Strong Towns Chicago, to test that idea against what they’ve seen in real neighborhoods. Their discussion turns to what happens when new neighbors are framed as a burden, and whether cash can do the work that persuasion, trust, and local relationships have failed to do.
What if the easiest way to get people to accept more housing was simply to pay them? That’s the idea at the center of a July article in The Atlantic titled “A Perfectly Crude Solution to America’s Housing Shortage.” According to the article, just about every effort to solve America’s housing shortage runs into the iron law of NIMBY, the “not in my backyard” mindset. Whenever a development is proposed in a place where people already live, existing residents erupt in opposition, claiming the new homes will alter neighborhood character, increase traffic, and hurt property values. Those who benefit most from new housing, meanwhile, don’t yet live in the community and therefore have no say in the political process. This creates an asymmetry that’s hard to overcome.
Even reforms passed at the state level to override local building restrictions keep failing because, according to the article, NIMBYs find clever ways to work around them. The proposed solution is simple: If you can’t beat the NIMBYs, just pay them.
Welcome to Upzoned, where we talk about one big story making the news and explore what it can teach us about building stronger towns. I’m Chuck Marohn, the founder and president of Strong Towns.
Joining me today is, first of all, Dr. Chloe Groome. She’s the treasurer of Strong Towns Chicago. She has a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering and now works as a support engineer at Rescale. She’s been part of the fight to relegalize ADUs, fix single-family zoning, and make the city’s neighborhoods work better at the local scale. She’s also helping bring a very Chicago mix of detailed policy work, neighborhood organizing, and improv-rooted comedy to issues like transit funding and the looming fiscal cliff.
Chloe, it was cool to hang out with you earlier this week. It’s now super cool to have you on Upzoned. Welcome to the show.
Delighted to be here, Chuck. Thank you.
We’re also joined by John Reuter. John is the executive director of Strong Towns. Before that, he served for over a dozen years on the Strong Towns board. He served on City Council in Sandpoint, Idaho. He now lives in Boston with his wife and his Wookie-like dog.
John, welcome to Upzoned. Glad you’re here.
It’s good to see you, Chuck.
John, I want to start with you. In your time in Sandpoint and in the advocacy work you’ve done for many years, whether crossing political lines or building coalitions, I feel you’re going to have a strong reaction to the idea of paying the people you perceive as your opposition. Give us your take on the article.
I had a very strong revulsion on my first reading of it because the crux of the matter is the need to see people as people. It’s a moment where they’re saying, “We keep trying to pass things at the federal level, and we keep trying to pass things at the state level. We keep trying to skip over talking to people in the community and dealing with the politics of neighborhoods and cities. What if we just bribe them instead? What if we take a dump truck full of money to their house and figure out how much it would cost to get them to agree?”
It feels like we’re still avoiding the humanity at the local level: understanding people’s motivations, how they think about their place, and how to have a conversation that finds the common ground needed to build the housing we desperately need. We do need to build more housing, and we need communities to come on board for that to happen.
After I took a beat to move past feeling angry, annoyed, or frustrated with the dehumanization of the approach, my second reaction was, “Well, no, wait. There’s something good about this.” We’re starting to think about the motivations of NIMBYs and communities and how to approach them. The hopeful side is that we’re beginning to recognize that we can’t simply jump over neighborhoods, communities, cities, and towns. We have to engage with them.
But I don’t think this approach quite hits the mark, for a number of reasons.
Chloe, you’ve spent a lot of time in the trenches at these meetings, where people show up against this or against that. What was your surface-level reaction to this piece?
Similar to John, I had an immediate, visceral reaction of really hating this idea, to be honest with you. I’ve been hissed at during zoning meetings by the stereotypical NIMBY you picture. In Chicago, they do tend to be older, retired, and largely white. They’ve booed us at City Council meetings. My very human reaction was, “You want to pay those people?”
I had to read the article twice to get past my initial emotional reaction and sit with the idea. Moving beyond my own experiences, I still don’t think it hits the mark. From what I’ve seen and heard in public comments, and from speaking with people at these meetings when they’re willing to talk with me, housing in your neighborhood is deeply emotional for most people.
This approach is a very dry economic way of trying to shift incentives. But on the ground, for real people, a check for $1,000 is not going to make someone comfortable with a building or duplex they feel is wrong for their neighborhood. This is a Band-Aid over a cultural problem, and it would reward some of the worst antisocial behavior I tend to see on the ground.
Chloe, I want to come back to you after this. In my intro, I read part of the opening sentence about the iron law of NIMBY, and part of me feels this is coming from people who have never actually engaged with their neighbors.
Near the end, the article says housing advocates have done everything in their power to combat what they see as the selfishness of local NIMBYs. It says they’ve tried to convince them of the economic benefits, filled town hall meetings to shout them down, and lobbied for state-level laws to override them. My reaction was, “Have they ever tried to understand their motivations?”
There is an easy, grotesque caricature of the NIMBY. I’ve been in meetings where people get up, say awful things, hiss at people, and do not represent themselves well. You can also go on Twitter, Reddit, or wherever YIMBYs hang out and see equally grotesque things shouted into the void. What gets lost is the humanity of people.
I really wanted to have you on because I feel you have more credibility on this than I do. You’ve been in more of these meetings in recent years. The places where we’ve seen progress seem to be the ones where people have sat down with the opposition, with people opposing housing, or with NIMBYs, if we want to use that term, and asked, “What is the concern we’re actually dealing with?”
Chloe, go for it.
I think that’s a really good point. There is a stereotype of who a NIMBY is, and that stereotype does exist. I don’t want to pretend otherwise. At the same time, the broader ecosystem of NIMBYs is very diverse.
Chicago has a very hyperlocal, Strong Towns-like system in the sense that almost every neighborhood has a block club, and these people meet monthly. Some are great; it’s a mixed bag. Some seem to use all of their money and energy to oppose housing.
What has been interesting is seeing groups evolve. When I moved to Chicago three years ago, people told me, “They’re very NIMBY. We’re going to have to work around them on this project.” I’ve increasingly seen those same groups ask for less parking in projects. The traffic concern may still be there, but the parking message has gotten through. That is what meeting people where they are can accomplish.
Some people say the quiet part out loud. They don’t want their property values to go down, and they don’t want shadows from buildings falling across their backyards. In a vacuum, that is very selfish. But that is not every NIMBY, and some people do learn that there may be another way to address their concern.
What I’m trying to say is that everyone’s lived experience is real. NIMBYs are rational people acting rationally, just in a way we largely don’t like or appreciate. A lot of this is education.
I was speaking with another advocate recently who shared something from a meeting. I believe it was Laura Foote, whom I met last Friday. She told a group, “You blocking housing is why your grandkids can’t afford to live in this neighborhood.” One woman gasped and clutched her pearl necklace. She spoke with Laura later and said that connection had never clicked for her.
I know Strong Towns Chicago doesn’t do memes, but my somewhat glib answer is that maybe we should start making AI slop on Facebook for the over-65 demographic.
I don’t think people are impossible to change, and I’ve seen that in person. At the same time, I’m very sympathetic to the argument that people are struggling and we don’t have time to change the heart and mind of every person in Chicago. In Chicago, our local context, in my opinion, is that we need state intervention to bring some sanity to zoning, but that may be beyond the scope of the article.
John, I think listeners should understand that this is not simply the writer’s idea. He’s quoting researchers and economists who are studying this.
Chloe and I both have technical backgrounds, so calling economics a science sometimes sits awkwardly with me. It is a social science, but it is not a material science in the way Chloe or I may look at things.
The researchers asked how much someone would charge to have a building constructed at the edge of their neighborhood, how much they would charge to have it built next door, and how much they would charge if it matched the size, bulk, and scale of the neighborhood versus being out of scale.
Their answers, while not definitive, pointed in a logical direction: When things change incrementally and gradually, people tend to have less concern. When things change dramatically, people tend to get their hackles up.
I don’t know whether that resonated with you or whether something Chloe said resonated with you. The floor is yours.
There are a few threads here that I find really interesting. Let me start with the bribe itself, the money, as though this were only about money.
What we know is that development next door, when done well, can increase your property values and your wealth. We can figure out how to require good development rather than stop it. There are also benefits to cities. Especially with infill development, cities receive more revenue and become financially stronger. That can mean more funding for parks, police, fire, and schools. Everyone can be better off as those incremental developments are built.
Part of my problem with giving people money is that it suggests they are being harmed by new development. The crux is helping our communities understand that development and growth do not have to be negative.
I live on a street in Boston with single-family homes, a triplex, and some duplexes. My neighbor, whom I adore and who is in her 80s, has an apartment that she rents out. She could not afford to stay in her house without that apartment upstairs. She comes over with her dog three or four times a week. The dogs play in our backyard while we talk and have great conversations. I would not want to live here without her, and she can only remain here because she was allowed to have that apartment.
Down the street, there’s a family with two little girls who are adorable. They wave and talk to us when we walk our dog in the morning. They were able to afford our neighborhood because they live in a duplex. They found somewhere they could buy after moving from a more expensive place. My neighborhood is better because they are on my block.
There is also a single-family home next door with a great family whom I love and adore. They make my neighborhood stronger. I think about the renter next door who lives in a two-family unit. He is a Vietnam veteran and retired police officer whom I love. When his “grand-dog,” as he calls it, visits, he comes over and hangs out. We talk all the time, solve problems together, talk about the neighbors, and he keeps an eye on our house when we’re out of town.
All these people make our neighborhood stronger. They are here because we didn’t freeze the neighborhood as single-family when it was first built. My house was one of the first houses built on this block in 1915. If we had frozen it then, none of these people would be around us, and frankly, it would not be a street I wanted to live on.
We have to understand that growth can improve our lives, make our lives richer, and surround us with people with whom we develop friendships and relationships.
That is why, in this study, people in denser areas, apartment buildings, or closer corridors are less worried about development. When you live in places with more people, you discover that having neighbors is often a gift. It is not only noisy people next door or other distractions. It is a community. It enriches your life. You have richness around you without needing to drive somewhere to find it.
The last thing I want to say is that one insight in the article was right. A lot of big thinkers have been trying to solve these problems from the top down, and this is where I would push back slightly on Chloe.
State legislation is part of the solution. But if we don’t solve the problem in the community, reach the neighborhood and city levels, and get in alignment, people will always find a way out. It is too easy. There are too many tools, from transportation planning and fees to design reviews. If neighborhoods or the city really don’t want to build, they will find a way out.
That is where these bribes come from: a reckoning that we have to deal with people who oppose development at the local level. We have to engage with them. That part is right on. I simply don’t think paying them is the way to do it. We have to engage them more fully.
I don’t mean to simplify your position, Chloe, or suggest that you’re avoiding all of this. State legislation is not out of place. It can trigger action and conversations. But we are going to have to reach the neighborhood level and help people recognize that more neighbors can make their place stronger rather than worse.
One part of the article really stuck with me, and John, you hit the nail on the head. From a research perspective, I found it interesting that they had to offer five times the original payment for low-income housing to be accepted by study participants.
To me, that fits the noxious framing of people as pollution: “This is a hazard I don’t want in my neighborhood, and I’ll tolerate it only for an inflated amount of money.” Unfortunately, the idea that having neighbors is wonderful and that growth can be good feels radical. It is nice to be around other people.
What has been challenging in Chicago is that the city may not have invented, but perhaps perfected, the use of zoning to facilitate racial and other forms of segregation. Many of these neighborhoods have been single-family for more than 70 years. A very specific type of person tends to live there, and it can feel awkward to show up and knock on doors because that is not socially accepted.
They have had multiple generations of an insular identity: “We’re a cop neighborhood,” “We’re the bungalow belt,” or “We’re a Latino area.” That insularity is very challenging to break down. Because they’ve had single-family zoning, relatively few people live there.
I hear you on changing hearts and minds, and I do think the message still needs to be bottom-up. We need to reach as many people as possible. But there are very real barriers that, in some cases, were put up intentionally.
Maybe offering cash payments is a way around that. I’m a scientist. I would appreciate seeing a pilot project done in real life. I could be wrong, and I will accept evidence to the contrary.
I struggle with the dissonance in this conversation because I agree with the insight that having more people move into your neighborhood can make it better, particularly when growth happens incrementally. You’re not dislocating people or kicking them out; you’re adding to what is already there. I think that is really positive and helpful.
How do we square that with a statewide framework? I’ll look at Minnesota. We’ve done this in the seven-county metro area, and I know this has also been a major push in California’s state-preemption efforts. The frame is that everybody has to take their “share” of undesirable housing development. If you’re not doing your share, the state will force it down your throat.
It is hard to reconcile a viewpoint that says, “This is good. You should want it. It is wonderful, and here is how much value it adds,” with, “If you don’t want it, we’re going to force you to take it because it’s good for you.”
I feel this article contains some of that dissonance. The study’s frame is, “We aren’t even going to try to convince you that it’s good for you.” It abandons the conversation about how John’s neighbor can remain in her home because she rents out part of it.
That is a compelling story for people who feel precarious and wonder, “Am I going to get kicked out of my neighborhood? Am I going to get priced out?” Someone may be house-rich and cash-poor. They can turn part of their house into income and have someone nearby who may help shovel the sidewalk.
That story disappears when the frame becomes, “We’re going to pay you to take on this negative thing we’ve defined as negative. How much do we have to pay you to take someone else’s garbage?” There is a dollar amount for which China will accept our trash; we’ve figured that out in a global marketplace. There is a dollar amount for which a poor neighborhood will accept an incinerator.
I feel that is a really bad frame of governance.
Let’s go back to something Chloe raised that I think is really important: the racism that fueled zoning in Chicago. It is not always racism, but racism is a relevant example across the country of a force that made us misunderstand what growth means and what having other people around us means.
We often talk about racism in this country as something that harmed people of color, especially Black people, and that is true. They have been disproportionately impacted. But when you look at the economic effects of racism in this country, we are all poorer because of it. Exclusionary zoning made everyone poorer.
When you look at what happened in Tulsa and the destruction of Black Wall Street, that was wealth being created that was making an entire community better off. Racism shut it down in a way that made the entire community poorer.
There is a book about this whose title I’m trying to remember, but its idea is that racial solidarity makes us stronger. I think about another Black leader from Chicago who talked about how to fight racism. He said, “You don’t fight racism with more racism. You don’t fight fire with fire. You don’t fight water with water. The solution to racism is solidarity.”
What he meant was that we are in this together and our fates are intertwined. There is a real connection between that idea and the way we feed the belief that we are threats to each other, that we harm one another rather than seeing one another as allies.
The force separating us does not benefit us. It makes us do things like shut down public swimming pools. That happened in the South, and it probably happened in Chicago too, though I don’t know for sure. Public pools were closed to stop Black and white people from mingling, and then nobody had public pools except the wealthiest people with private pools. We do this with many things, cutting off our nose to spite our face.
I feel that is what happened with housing too. We’ve allowed ourselves to see one another as threats and to see the other as human pollution. We have to take those ideas head on.
Part of resolving this moment is recognizing that there is strength in one another, that community has strength, and that relationships have strength. I don’t think it is easy. I think it is necessary. That is what I come back to over and over again.
There is no quick and easy fix. What I resist is the search for a silver bullet, the one policy solution that will solve all of this. It turns out there isn’t one. A complex set of economic, social, and political forces built the current situation and now stops us from building housing, having affordable housing, and creating vibrant communities.
We will have to dismantle those barriers and rebuild, piece by piece, in ways that allow us to be good neighbors to one another. That is my sideways answer to what you’re talking about.
Chloe, I’m going to give you the last word before we switch into the Downzone.
Something I have found really interesting, and want to read and research more, is tied to the civil rights movement. There were towns in the South that proactively desegregated before the Civil Rights Act. I think that is inspiring and incredible.
As someone who is not from that era or that part of the country, I think we could learn a lot from that for the Strong Towns movement and the YIMBY movement as a whole. At the same time, those towns were few and far between. For immediate social change, the massive impact of the Civil Rights Act did have to come from above.
You had to force the dog to swallow the pill a little bit with top-down action, and that is not desirable. It may frame things in an unkind way. But I think most people eventually saw, “The sky didn’t fall. Big government is making me do this, but my life isn’t worse.”
As you said, there is no one-shot housing policy. It is going to take time and experimentation, and many things will not work. State-level legislation is also incremental. People amend bills, switch things out, and try new approaches.
In Illinois, what we are aiming for is allowing four-flats by right in every single-family zoning area. Anywhere you can build a single-family house, you could build a four-unit building. I think that is one of the better ways to approach top-down action because it avoids some of the negative framing that your neighbors are pollution and something you have to be paid to deal with.
I hope most people simply live through the experience of, “My neighbor built a duplex. Normally, if someone had asked me, I would have hated this. But now that I see it, it hasn’t been a big deal.”
There is a term for this: the “hill of hysteria.” I was introduced to it by the YouTuber CityNerd, Ray Delahanty. I’m sure he didn’t invent it, but the idea applies to many changes, especially new housing. As more people hear about a change and it gets closer to happening, resistance rises.
A group in Chicago bought billboards and has paid lawyers tens of thousands of dollars to fight a zoning change. Eventually, the change happens. That is the top of the hill of hysteria, and there is backlash. But as time passes, people adjust and realize that maybe having more neighbors is okay. Maybe they get to meet their own older neighbor who has an adorable dog.
I love the bottom-up approach; in my heart, that is where I am. But we need both. It is not one or the other. It is synergy, my favorite buzzword. I think the two approaches are synergistic and work together.
Again, I don’t think paying people is the answer, but maybe they’ll run a pilot and it will work well. Then I’ll change my mind. Those are my final thoughts. Thank you.
All right, let’s switch into the Downzone. Is there anything you are reading, watching, or engaging with that you’d like to share with the broader Strong Towns community?
John, can we start with you this week? Do you have a Downzone item?
Sure. Mine is a little heady this week. I just finished reading The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, which was first published in the 1950s. Many people talk about Arendt because she writes about fascism and similar topics. But this book is about people and what it means to live a good life.
One thing she discusses is the need to have both a private self and a public self, and the need for both to have a good life. The public self is about political action, while the private self is away from it and on your own.
Something I’ve been thinking about, which extends naturally from what she writes in The Human Condition, is how technology and the suburban pattern have made us lose both the public self and the private self at the same time. We’re never really alone anymore with our phones at our fingertips. It is also much harder to get together than it used to be because of how we’ve built our places, the lack of third places, and growing disconnection.
This has been on my mind: How do we restore the space to be private while also going into our communities to be together, engage, and take action? That is what is on my mind right now.
Chloe, do you have a Downzone item you want to share?
I have really been enjoying a creator on YouTube. The channel is called Farm to Taber. Taber is T-A-B-E-R. I think it’s a cute little pun. Sarah Taber is a small farmer herself, and she went to school for farming and agriculture.
Her content has been incredibly interesting, especially her work on agricultural subsidies and the contrast between popular media depictions of farmers and the reality of their challenges. I think it helps explain the challenges rural people face.
What has really interested me is the effect of subsidizing agricultural land. First, many rural areas lose out on a huge amount of tax revenue. They increasingly can’t pay for themselves because farmland is taxed at 30% to 50% less than residential land.
Second, it incentivizes farmland as a tax shelter. Many people who farm do not necessarily have an interest in farming as a vocation, and they are not necessarily good at it. I’m included in this. I inherited my grandmother’s farm. Technically, I have two acres, and we let a family friend harvest wheat, which classifies it as farmland.
I have my own Strong Towns contradiction because I’m benefiting from the system too. The channel has been eye-opening and very interesting. I highly recommend it.
It’s a very good web channel. I’ve watched it too.
For my Downzone this week, I’ve been reading a book called Stolen Revolution. The subtitle is “Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran.” It was written by two reporters, so it is not a commentary. They document Iran from the fall of the Shah up to modern times. It is a story I am familiar with to a degree, and it is obviously timely given the current conflict between our country and Iran.
The most hopeful thing so far, and I’m only about two-thirds of the way through, is that I did not fully appreciate how much intellectual diversity there was within the movement in the early days of the Iranian regime.
This was a movement to push back on the Shah and that version of Iran, but it was not necessarily a theocratic revolution devoid of care for the poor, the vulnerable, or minorities. That version of the regime arose out of conflict in the early days.
It was very interesting to hear Iranians, in their own language and their own way, speak about different paths the country could have taken that seem very different from the one we discuss today. It gave me hope. When conflict arises, it is easy to caricature an entire people in one way. This book is another reminder that there is a broad diversity of people in Iran and across the region, and we would do well to pause and remember that.
Stolen Revolution has been a very good book. Because it was written by reporters, I think there is an attempt to be more factual than opinionated, which I really appreciate.
That’s it for Upzoned this week. If you have a reaction to this conversation and want to take part in it yourself, you can go to the Strong Towns Commons at commons.strongtowns.org. We’ve shared the article there, and there is an ongoing discussion.
As always, we’ll be back next week with a new article and a new team to chat about it. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. In the meantime, we’ll talk later.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.