How does anything get built? What are the political precursors to development? Michael Munger has an interesting, and at times persuasive, argument that self-interest combines with particular institutional designs, such as public hearings, to create a prisoner’s dilemma where everyone knows that development is in aggregate desirable but wants that development to be in the next town over. This is, in many ways, the conventional story of NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) politics.
That story isn’t wrong per se, but it’s missing a critical component: culture. The claim that culture matters is sometimes dismissed as hand-wavy or “just vibes,” but it’s critical to understanding whether building is the default or deviant move, to identifying who has standing to object, and to explaining whether a proposed new development is seen as a contribution to the community or a threat to it. Without understanding the cultural ideas that drive NIMBYism, scholars and housing advocates are flying blind in a storm.
At the extreme ends of the spectrum, the desirability of land use choices is obvious to the locals. Virtually everyone would welcome a new bakery taking over an abandoned building. No neighborhood wants a new wastewater treatment facility going in next to them. But for all the marginal cases between those two extremes, culture plays a huge role in what and how much gets built.
I argue that three cultural practices (growth orientation, property rights norms, and positive-sum attitudes) act essentially as gates. If a place fails on any one of them, it is very likely to underbuild. Development will thus, over time, gravitate toward places that can pass all three of these cultural tests.
Growth Orientation
There are places where people take pride in growth. Think of this as “growth boosterism.” The town I grew up in (Chelsea, Alabama) had a strong dose of this. Any time a new business got started, people were excited: “Hey, did you see we have a Mexican restaurant now? How cool is that?!”
For everyone, from the city council to the church choir, growth was itself a marker of success. It meant that both people and business wanted to be here. Who doesn’t like feeling wanted? In 1990, the town had about 1,300 people. By 2000, it had more than doubled to about 2,900. Since then, it has gotten more than six times larger and has a population of just under 18,000. It had certain advantages (being at the edge of rural with the ability to suburbanize helped, as did overall growth in the area), but wanting to grow was a key ingredient—arguably the key ingredient—in that development.
Conversely, other places do not actually want to grow. The change that comes with growth (whether that’s to the aesthetics, to the landscape, to traffic patterns, to anything really) is disliked and bemoaned. Just as important, it is seen as a betrayal of the place’s identity. Where the first kind of place says, “all growth is good,” the second kind says, “all change is bad.” Local citizens view themselves as ‘stewards’ whose purpose is to prevent anything from ‘damaging’ this precious place. And then, over time, resistance to change becomes part of the place’s civic identity. A good example here is how Bernie Sanders got his original start in Burlington, Vermont, politics running on the slogan “Burlington is not for sale,” by which he meant, “I am going to slow down, or better yet stop, new development along the waterfront.”
Where developers are seen as greedy plutocrats despoiling the community for their own selfish ends, we should anticipate that a new proposal will be met with more skepticism.
In both of these places, the local population takes pride in where they live (and that’s entirely natural), but notice how the difference in growth orientation leads them to precisely opposite instincts about building. This difference in growth orientation powerfully shapes whether, on an individual level, objecting to new development is seen as the default move or the deviant move. In one place, the objector receives status and encouragement; in the other, they are treated as a nuisance. In both, being on the wrong side of the culture comes with all the social sanctions that being perceived as ‘disloyal’ to the community usually comes with. Interests do not come from nowhere. They are powerfully shaped by culture.
Growth orientation is the gate New England either can’t or doesn’t want to get through. Even in its most innovative places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, longtime residents fight growth tooth and nail. Somerville next door has gotten much richer over the last 50 years, but the local population is actually down over that time. Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont are the three oldest states in the country, because even as anti-growth politics preserves views and vibes, it exports young people en masse. Taken as a whole, the region’s anti-growth orientation amounts to nothing less than self-sabotage.
Proceduralism vs. Property Rights
Assuming a place does want growth, that still leaves some questions. What should be done with any given plot of land, and who gets to decide? Here you can think of a place with a strong sense of property rights, where land use is fundamentally the owner’s business unless they’re directly harming someone. There, someone is being a bad neighbor if they object to the property owner’s choice of what to do with their land. Both local institutions and members of the community will treat that person as a busybody and, over time, they may well internalize the message that it is bad form to object to development unless there is some obvious harm being done. Texas is a good example of a place where property rights norms are especially strong. You can see this in more areas than just housing. Texas has some of the most pro-property rights rules around wind turbines in the country. Not surprisingly, they build by far the most wind energy of any state.
Conversely, you can imagine a place defined more by communitarian proceduralism, where the sacred thing is the hearing itself, the town meeting, and the idea that legitimacy requires everyone getting a say. Endless process is perceived as a feature of good governance rather than a bug. While property rights still operate as a legal concept, they have functionally ceased to exist as a cultural norm. You can only do with your property what you want so long as you have satisfied every whim of seemingly any other interested party in the community.
This is California’s failure mode. It is home to some of the most innovative companies in the world and is an economic behemoth. It is not a place that, for the most part, leans into full-on degrowth. It believes itself to be welcoming of immigrants and newcomers. But every time someone wants to build anything, particularly new housing, they get ensnared in a Byzantine bureaucratic obstacle course the likes of which would make Franz Kafka cry.
Zero-Sum Attitudes
In brutally simple terms, new development gets built by businesses (i.e., developers), and is typically understood to benefit newcomers, even if much of the actual benefit goes to those already in the community. So underlying attitudes about those two groups (businesses and newcomers) matter a lot for how much sympathy those potential winners of development, and by extension development itself, get.
Let’s imagine a place where developers are seen like grocery stores. Unless they are found to be breaking some law, they are presumed to be engaging in legitimate economic activity, and are generally cheered on by a community that values them. In such a place, new proposals for development will presumably be looked at with a generous eye. The burden of proof would be on objectors.
In the opposite kind of place, where developers are seen as greedy plutocrats despoiling the community for their own selfish ends, we should anticipate that a new proposal will be met with more skepticism. The developer would have to, as a general rule, prove a case against nearly every possible objection from the outset. That takes time and money.
Attitudes toward new people matter too. Is the local area presumed to be “full”? Is a newcomer imagined in epithetical terms (e.g., “transplant”)? Are they perceived to be too rich (“gentrifier”), too poor (“riff-raff”), or are they seen as merely someone who needs a place to live?
The success case here would be a place like North Carolina that generally has a pro-business culture but also a very welcoming attitude towards people moving in. Another example might be Utah where, influenced by its Mormon roots, people have both an unusually entrepreneurial and an unusually cosmopolitan sensibility. Not coincidentally, North Carolina and Utah both place in the top six in new housing construction and the top 10 in core startup rate.
Conversely, you can see the zero-sum instincts flourish in parts of Appalachia. Don’t take my word for it. Barbara Kingsolver, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and de facto poet laureate of Appalachia, has described it in almost exactly those terms, saying, among other things, “we have been treated almost like an internal colony of the U.S. We have suffered the exploitation of extractive industries, managed by and profited from outside companies that come in and take what they can and leave a mess. So it started out with the timber industry. Then it was coal. Then it was tobacco. And now, the latest car in this coal train of exploitations has been the opioid epidemic, which was, again, quite deliberately perpetrated on us as a vulnerable population.”
That may or may not be a justified view; Kingsolver has a much closer relationship with Appalachia than I do. But it does reflect a remarkably zero-sum set of instincts about economic activity. That zero-sum mindset isn’t really about preserving the value of various amenities; it’s closer to a defensive localism where outside capital and outside people are viewed as, to use Kingsolver’s word, extractive.
The Magic Triple
Notice something about the three regional failures above: each one flunks a different gate. New England is welcoming enough to newcomers and no more hostile to property rights than most of the country, but its growth orientation treats a new building as a loss to be mourned rather than a win to be claimed. California is pro-growth and proud of its openness, but its communitarian proceduralism turns every project into a negotiation with anyone who cares to show up. Appalachia’s zero-sum instinct toward outside capital operates independently of whatever a given town believes about growth or property rights.
This is also where Munger’s own examples turn out to be quite interesting. Chapter 40B and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act aren’t just generic pro-building interventions; each one forces a “yes” past exactly one gate. Chapter 40B overrides the proceduralism veto, letting developers bypass the hearing that a communitarian culture treats as sacred. Yucca Mountain overrides the growth-orientation veto, forcing a state to host something no local vote would ever choose to host. Both worked, as far as they went, precisely because they didn’t need to ask those places’ underlying culture to change at all.
That’s a real achievement, but there’s also a limit there. A statute can force one decision through one gate at a time. It can’t make property rights feel legitimate to a town that has never believed in them, and it can’t make growth feel like success to a place that has spent two generations building its identity around saying ‘no.’ Munger is right that the rules, not the people, are the defect. But the rules were built by people influenced by a culture. If you want to change the rules, you have to change the culture. Or, alternatively, you have to accept that growth and development are going to flow to the places that can pass these cultural tests, and bypass the places that can’t.
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