Local Democracy is Land-Use Policy

If you’ve ever been to a community board meeting or other public hearing about a contentious rezoning to produce more housing, it really seems like everyone is up in arms. There’s a lot of yelling and people claiming that “the neighborhood” has clearly defined views, usually against anything new getting built.

But if you pan out a bit, it’s clear that the people yelling at these meetings — which, let’s remember, take free time, civic know-how and commitment to attend — represent a tiny fraction of “the neighborhood” and an even smaller percentage of the people who will be affected by the construction of a new apartment building or office.

Not in that room are the huge number of people who work long hours and can’t make it to a meeting, people who don’t think the specific project is that big a deal, people who would like to move to the neighborhood but can’t because there isn’t enough housing and people representing citywide interests like employers and unions who benefit from more construction and lower housing costs but don’t care much about any specific project.

To some extent, that’s the way democracy always works — with only the people who are motivated to vote actually choosing our leaders, and a tiny fraction of them lobbying for specific changes. But local governments, and New York City particularly, have built institutions and practices that enhance and protect the voices of the residents near proposed new developments, to the exclusion of all others, with predictable effects on policy. Members of the City Council rely on neighborhood recommendations, and as it currently stands, council members have effective veto power over rezonings in their neighborhood. There’s long been a culture of deference whereby the entire 51-member Council follows the lead of the member in whose district a given rezoning is happening.

You can understand this as a theory of how democracy should work: that the people closest to a particular decision and with the highest intensity of preferences should have the most — and even the only relevant — say.

Call it hyperlocalism, and it describes how land-use policy in New York City — and many other places — generally operates. It’s not crazy. People near new projects do have both specific knowledge about the likely effects of new development and strong beliefs about how their neighborhoods should look and feel. America has always had a soft spot for raucous political participation by small groups, from its earliest town meeting-based governments to utopian communities on the prairies.

But hyperlocalism is also not the only type of democracy about land use that is possible, nor is it the best way to look at these questions. While existing neighborhood residents care about development, so too do many others. Practices that privilege the views of existing neighborhood residents, like council-member deference or community board meetings, are built on an assumption that outsider voices, larger in number if lower in intensity about a particular decision, shouldn’t matter. This is a particularly strange belief in New York City, which, as E. B. White famously noted, has always been defined by its newcomers and transplants — and, for that matter, in cities generally, which rely on dynamism and churn to thrive.

Perhaps more pressingly, hyperlocalism imports a deep conservatism into public policy, putting almost exclusive power in the hands of those who would rather not see change. Local homeowners who like how their neighborhoods look and feel clearly do not care if failures to build housing lead to ever-increasing rents, prices and homelessness (and indeed can benefit from the increases to their home values that scarcity brings).

We can use procedures that encourage other voices to participate, including potential residents in new housing, ordinary citizens seeking economic growth, employers and unions. Doing so generally entails that power must be put in the hands of high-profile citywide officials — mayors, most notably, but also heads of citywide agencies, borough presidents and city council speakers — who are known by and represent this broader range of voices. Cities that do this with citywide rezonings and plans have seen the greatest land-use policy successes in recent years, from Minneapolis’ 2040 plan to citywide rezonings in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Austin, Texas, to our own City of Yes.

Land-use policy is downstream from the type of democracy we have. Citywide elections and hyperlocal politics are both democratic, but they are fundamentally different kinds of democracy and lead to different outcomes. A hyperlocal system will be skeptical of change, protecting neighborhoods while rents rise and the homeless population surges. Relying more on citywide officials and decisions will encourage participation by a wider range of voices and, as a result, do more to embrace growth and change, but will reduce the ability of the loudest neighborhood voices to decide the fate of their communities.

New York must choose what kind of democracy it wants to be.

Our development problems are democracy problems

Having public meetings about changes to individual spending lines in local budgets would be considered ridiculous, a huge imposition on an already complex process. But we have public meetings about individual rezonings. What purpose do they serve?

In New York, any substantial land-use change must go through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), an early step of which is a public meeting before a community board. Community board recommendations are technically advisory; opposition from neighborhood activists, in theory, can be overcome. But in practice, this is a serious hurdle and is usually only surmounted by making very serious compromises, reducing the amount of housing and commercial space that gets built. And then there are all of the projects that never get proposed because developers know neighborhood opposition is likely and will be fatal.

There is an asymmetry of process here that gives more power to those who want to stand in the way of new development. The very fact that there is even a debate over a rezoning that only covers a single project or neighborhood creates dynamics that limit new building. Potential consumers of new housing may not be from the neighborhood yet and thus don’t care that much about this or that specific rezoning. Important interests — employers, unions — want more housing supply generally, because it drives down housing costs and increases population, creating greater demand for services and jobs. But they don’t care that much about specific projects either.

In contrast, opposition clusters around individual projects. Public meetings help organize this opposition. Organizing people in politics is notoriously difficult. But a big public meeting about a specific project provides local activists with a focal point to organize around and a way to monitor who shows up (or even — gasp — supports a rezoning). The public meeting requirement is effectively a subsidy to opponents of projects, a chance for all those who are against it to gather and marshal their arguments.

Further, public meetings are particularly influential because of the way elections work in New York. Members of the City Council are functionally elected in low-turnout, low-information primary elections, in which the same voices you hear at community board meetings — local homeowners most notably — dominate. The absence of strong party organizations in local legislatures usually leads to “member deference,” or a strong norm that City Council members get veto power over rezonings in their district.

This is roughly how it came to be that former Council Member Carlos Menchaca killed the redevelopment of Industry City in Sunset Park; that Council Member Raphael Salamanca stopped the rezoning of Southern Boulevard in the Bronx and that then-Council Members Antonio Reynoso and Raphael Espinal blocked dense new housing in Bushwick.

The result is hyperlocalism. The loudest neighborhood voices have the ability to veto or change new projects, meaning far too little gets built.

The better way

We can’t easily change the way people think, but we can retool the procedural dynamics to stop putting a thumb on the scale to effectively advantage antidevelopment forces at nearly every turn.

Big cities can pass citywide text amendments that change land-use policy for all similar neighborhoods, as New York City did with its City of Yes and Zoning for Quality and Affordability amendments. Cities can adopt citywide plans, which require them to zone in accordance with the plan’s commitments, as Minneapolis did in its widely hailed Minneapolis 2040 plan. Cities can leave more power in the hands of Mayors and their appointees, who are well known by and thus accountable to the public. The recommendations by the Charter Revision Commission that will be on the ballot in November are designed to encourage a more citywide perspective on land-use policy. States can either directly preempt local zoning, as we’ve seen on different issues in California, Montana and Texas, or set targets for new housing supply for jurisdictions, as we’ve seen in Massachusetts and California.

Each of these strategies has its own challenges. But the reason to pursue them is that they force a broader group of people and groups to get involved in deciding how much housing and commercial space should be allowed to be built. They usually lead to more liberal outcomes — i.e., allowing more building — than does hyperlocalism, because they consider the voices of those harmed by excessive zoning.

Hyperlocalism isn’t inevitable or necessary. It has done great harm to our economy. We should try something different.