How I Changed My Mind About Change

Over the summer, I read an article from The New York Times called “Twilight of the NIMBY.” I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It made me reckon with my own NIMBYistic tendencies, bringing to the surface a conversation with myself that had been largely subliminal.

I wonder how many of you are having similar conversations with yourself, subliminal or otherwise.

NIMBY stands for “not in my backyard.” It refers to people not wanting stuff they don’t like being built on their street or in their neighborhood or town. It might be a power plant, an apartment building, a backyard cottage, a train station, or—in the case of the article’s focus—a row of townhouses in Mill Valley, California.

In the article, housing and economics reporter Conor Dougherty paints a complex and not unsympathetic of portrait of a former school teacher named Susan Kirsh who has spent the last 18 years organizing to keep a 20-unit townhouse development out of her affluent Marin County town. When Kirsh moved to California in the 1970s, Dougherty writes, she was part of a movement fighting suburban sprawl and promoting environmentalism. Like many of her neighbors, she questioned the idea that growth is always good. Instead of building more roads and houses—instead of focusing on wealth and productivity—what if we tried slowing down, building less, and preserving more of the natural world?

I sympathize with that point of view. A lot.

If you had asked me 10 years ago how I would feel if Swarthmore implemented changes to make it possible to build more homes here, I would have said what I’m guessing Kirsh would have said: “I don’t want to see Swarthmore more crowded and built up! We’re fine as we are.”

Now, however, I think our town of 6,400 could accommodate a few hundred more residents—ideally from a range of backgrounds with a range of jobs and income levels.

Not only could but should. I believe we have a responsibility to welcome more neighbors into our lovely borough with its leafy streets and well-tended parks and independent merchants and good public schools.

So What Changed?

When my spouse started a teaching job at Swarthmore College in 2000, we bought a home in the borough. Twenty years ago, houses here were within reach for new faculty. But the median price of a single-family home rose from $258,000 in 2000 to $437,700 in 2020 and is now higher still.* This has pushed such a purchase beyond the means of most young faculty and their families. (I’m not saying Swarthmore College faculty, whose salaries start at about $90,000, are more important than other people, just that my awareness of how different my life would be if I had arrived here 20 years later than I did was part of what opened my eyes to the big changes we’ve experienced.)

Over the last few years, I’ve said goodbye to friends and neighbors who left Swarthmore because of the rapidly rising cost of housing. Mostly they were renters who had been planning to buy a home, then discovered that skyrocketing prices made that impossible. More recently, rents too have headed rapidly upward.

At the same time, I have watched as more of the Hondas and Subarus on our streets have been replaced by BMWs and Teslas.

I have seen the population of the Historically Black Neighborhood of Swarthmore become mostly White, and I have learned how the legacy of formal and informal housing segregation is still with us in the form of the racial wealth gap. In other words, one of the reasons White people have an easier time than Blacks moving to places like Swarthmore is that for decades African Americans were largely excluded from towns like ours. A friend recently told me that his Swarthmore Hills house deed still contains a (now unenforceable) restriction against selling to a Black family.

The Swarthmore Phoenix, March 22, 1955

I have walked past tent encampments in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Recent estimates put the number of homes the U.S. lacks upwards of five million.

I have read about the environmental costs of single-family homes on large lots and learned how more density near transit, work, and shopping can help fight climate change.

I love Swarthmore the way it is, but I believe I will love it just as much with more homes and people in it. And, if Swarthmore becomes a town where you don’t have to be rich to buy a place to live in it, I’ll love it more.

What I Don’t Want

I grew up outside Washington, D.C. Way outside. To get to our house, you drove past a small village center and kept going for miles, past horse farms and cow pastures, then turned onto a narrow dead-end road into the woods. My parents liked the trees and the quiet.

Gradually, sprawl surged toward us. New pricey developments branched off the main road. Cow pastures became the manicured grounds of gigantic mansions. The traffic got so bad my father shifted his schedule to go into work at off hours.

This demoralizing experience of development is one I think many people share, and it’s part of what makes us wish that house building could just stop.

But building homes can’t stop, because the number of households in the U.S. keeps growing. People need places to live.

The good news is that development does not have to look like sprawl. Many urban designers have spent time and effort on better ways to build. Support is growing for Daniel Parolek's "missing middle" idea of adding “gentle density” like ADUs (“accessory dwelling units” such as backyard cottages or in-law suites) or small multifamily buildings to make room for more people without changing the look and feel of a town.

Indeed, Swarthmore already has ADUs and small multifamily buildings, constructed before our zoning code was written in the 1970s. The fact that this kind of density is woven into our fabric bolsters my confidence that we can build more relatively inexpensive housing without significant disruption.

This is a single-family house in Swarthmore.

This similar house on the same block contains 5 living units.

Life Is Change

While working on this blog post, I came across an article by Addison Del Mastro about his own conversion from NIMBYism. Del Mastro writes about revisiting his hometown of Flemington, New Jersey, and thinking about how it has evolved over the years. As he learned more about its history, he saw how change had been a part of what kept the place not just alive but vibrant:

This perspective helps me step outside of the narrow point in time during which I knew this place most intimately, and to avoid mistaking my nostalgic memories for the place itself…NIMBYism can be a kind of distorted love, one that conflates a place’s present physical form with its essence, and ends up destroying both of them.

He goes on:

We owe it to ourselves and to the future to keep building where we live, to keep iterating, to see people as a resource, and to see growth not like cancer but like childbirth: something painful and beautiful at the same time, something that takes away some things while opening up many more.

Whether NIMBYism is in decline or not (and I suspect it’s not), Swarthmore is never going back to the place it was when I moved here in 2000. I wouldn’t want it to.

But as we move into a future that will necessarily be different from now, I hope we make room for people besides just the very affluent to share it with.

*The 2000 and 2020 figures come from the U.S. Census. According to Zillow, Swarthmore home values rose 8.5% between May 2021 and June 2022.

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Tags: Swarthmore, affordability, missing middle, NIMBY, ADUs

Categories: Swarthmore, affordability, race

More Affordable for the Planet, Too

Last week I heard the term “15-minute city” for the first time.

In the 15-minute city, people can walk or bike to everything they need within 15 minutes: stores, schools, workplaces, parks, and restaurants. Originator Carlos Moreno focused on city neighborhoods (he lives in Paris), but the 15-minute city applies to towns and suburbs too.

I learned about the concept in a webinar called “Housing Policy Is Climate Policy” from Joanna Gubman, environmental director of YIMBY Action and executive director of Urban Environmentalists. Gubman explained that the most effective way for people living in the exurbs to reduce their carbon footprint was to move to inner-ring suburbs or towns and cities. She said people should be able to easily access the things they need (home, food, school, work, fresh air) without using a car.

Which people?

All people.

Housing affordability is powerfully connected to the 15-minute city. Partly this is because the framework aims to transform the whole way we live on this planet. Dan Luscher, the creator of 15minutecity.com, calls it a “North Star” idea, acknowledging that most existing 15-minute communities (like the Noe Valley in San Francisco where he lives) are currently unaffordable for most people. “Walkable and bikeable neighborhoods need to be…accessible financially, not just physically,” he writes.

There is lots of overlap between the actions we need to take to make places where people don’t need cars in order to live there and the actions we need to take to create housing that people don’t need to be millionaires to call home.

The Many Benefits of Density

Toward the beginning of the webinar, Gubman shared a list of changes that would make housing policy more environmentally friendly. But Gubman's list would also have another positive result: her recommendations would also make housing more affordable. They are:

· Permit taller buildings and more homes per building (“upzoning”)—especially in high-opportunity, exclusionary neighborhoods in climate-resilient locations.

· Permit small lots and let people build on their whole lot.

· Don’t mandate off-street car parking for new housing units (because it significantly raises the cost of building them).

· Allow a mix of residential and commercial space in buildings.

· Allow small multifamily housing everywhere (triplexes, quadplexes, and the like are often known as housing’s “missing middle”).

· Increase tenant protections, too.

Image courtesy of YIMBY Action network

If we make neighborhoods a little bit more dense, and we make our communities more compact and walkable, more of us can take advantage of their offerings.

Legalized density can look different in different communities. In a city, or near a transit hub, it might make sense to allow buildings many stories high. In single-family neighborhoods, it might make sense to legalize accessory dwelling units (a.k.a. ADUs, in-law suites, garage apartments, etc.) or to permit some triplexes or quadplexes. “A mix of residential and commercial” might look like a small shop attached to a home (“accessory commercial unit”) or like a row of street-level stores with apartments upstairs.

Any of those ideas—ADUs, multifamily housing, mixed-use housing—probably means adding more smaller homes in among larger, existing ones. In any given location, a smaller home should be less expensive to buy or rent than a larger home, and it’s likely to use less electricity, gas, and water too.

Denser neighborhoods near amenities mean that people may not need a car to get to school or shopping. Because VMT—vehicle miles traveled—is a major contributor to climate change, this is good for the environment. (If you want to explore your personal carbon footprint, UC Berkeley’s CoolClimate Network has a handy calculator.)

And because cars and gas and insurance are expensive, living near jobs (or public transit) can save people a lot of money.

But my very favorite thing about the presentation was the way Gubman talked about density as vibrancy. Some people worry that more homes in their neighborhood will bring too much traffic or noise, or will make room for residents they consider undesirable. (Historically this has often been a coded way to talk about race or class.)

But what Gubman says is: “More neighbors are a delight.”

Swarthmore Is Already a 15-Minute Town

One of the things many of us who live in Swarthmore love about the borough is that it comes pretty close to being a 15-minute town. I live all the way at its southern edge, but I can walk to shops, restaurants, parks, the library, the school my children attended when they were young, and the commuter train, which I took into Philadelphia for the five years I worked in the city.

Of course, one of the reasons housing has gotten so expensive in Swarthmore is that other people would like to live in a town like this too. That’s why it’s so important to think about how to keep Swarthmore accessible to people other than the very affluent, and to make sure a wide range of people can afford to live here.

Another great thing about Swarthmore is that it’s full of passionate environmentalists. We have an active Environmental Advisory Council, and organizations like aFewSteps.org and Friends of Little Crum Creek Park do important work to keep our planet and our town livable. Meanwhile, Swarthmore College is making strides to fulfill its pledge of reaching carbon neutrality by 2035.

I’d like to think we could one day have as many groups and citizens working to solve the affordability crisis as we do taking on the climate crisis.

The good news is that these two major endeavors have so much synergy.

As people focused on the environment and those focused on affordability look for places to work together, we should be able to both get more done and find more community. These days, I’m increasingly aware how much the solace and pleasure of community will give us the strength for the work we need to do.

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“Everyone Can Reap the Benefit”: Delaware County’s Housing Plan

When I first started looking into what other communities were doing to address the housing affordability crisis, my research took me west and north.

California and Minneapolis are well-known for using zoning changes as a tool to provide more reasonably priced housing. Connecticut and Massachusetts are actively working toward that goal as well. My uncle recently sent me this optimistic story from Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. The crowded tourist town is permitting property owners to rebuild some commercial spaces with up to 20 housing units if at least a quarter of them are deeded “affordable.” The proposal sailed through the town meeting.

(There are, unfortunately, cautionary Massachusetts stories too, like this one about wealthy suburban towns willing to forgo state grants rather than build more housing near transit hubs—transit oriented development being central to Republican governor Charlie Baker’s Housing Choice plan.)

What’s Happening Locally?

After learning about what was happening elsewhere, I started reaching out locally to see who is working on affordability closer to home.

I met with two staff members of the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC), who explained that they are at the very beginning of their work on housing affordability. Learning of Swarthmore’s Task Force on Development and Affordability, they offered their support.

The DVRPC staffers sent me links to articles on “missing middle” housing—like duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes—from the American Planning Association and Zillow; to their own study of how multifamily housing benefits communities; and to a report on how mixed-use development and a diversity of housing types helps make communities resilient.

Then they connected me to staff in the governmental offices of Delaware County.

Rebecca Ross, Principal Planner, worked on Delco’s comprehensive 2020 housing plan. This plan stresses the importance of housing diversity, urging all 49 municipalities to develop different types of housing at different price points.

Noting that local zoning often favors single-family homes, the plan encourages missing middle housing and promotes accessory dwelling units, a.k.a. ADUs, in-law apartments, or granny flats.

The Delco plan explains how increasing housing variety helps more prospective home buyers to enter the housing market. Smaller homes at lower price points enable more people to

build equity, eventually moving “up the ladder” of housing as their needs change. Allowing people to add ADUs to their properties and offer them for rent also provides a potential income source for homeowners, which could help alleviate costs.

Much of the county’s work on housing focuses on income-qualified projects that are eligible for federal, state, and county funding. But Delco is beginning to pay more attention to “attainable housing”—that is, market-rate housing for first-time home buyers, younger families, and middle-income earners.

Ross said she saw Swarthmore’s task force as a useful response to “a growing, ongoing need for our communities to look more holistically” at housing overall.

“No one community should be bearing the brunt of high housing prices,” she said. “And no one community should bear the brunt of disinvestment.”

If municipalities across the county work together, Ross said, “Everyone can reap the benefit.”

What Else Is Happening in Delco?

Ross and her colleague Sarah Carley pointed me to other local communities that are tackling the affordability problem. Mostly these places have different situations and populations than Swarthmore (more land, more people, less wealth). Phoenixville’s new Council on Affordable Housing is working on public-private partnerships for new development and is developing a grant program to help low-income buyers afford homes. Upper Chichester is experimenting with land banks. Media, which has experienced its own explosion in housing costs—has a new group addressing affordability.

On the one hand, I had hoped to see more efforts to alleviate the housing crisis.

On the other hand, it’s exciting—and a little sobering—that what we do here in Swarthmore can serve as a model for our neighbors.

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