Wilson, who became a legendary social scientist, ended up writing a paper about the situation and enunciating a more general principle: When planners open up their plans to local debate, it’s largely the naysayers who show up and complain. Public participation, however well-intended, most often yields nothing more than a great deal of public grousing.
Wilson’s principle is being tested right now in Seattle, where Mayor Bruce Harrell has proposed an update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan that, among other things, would create as many as 30 “neighborhood centers,” a new zoning type that would allow multifamily housing in areas with a concentration of single-family homes.
The city has conducted numerous public meetings on the issue over the past several years and has trimmed the number of projected neighborhood centers down from the original proposal of 50. Still, a formidable array of activists, backed by some members of the City Council, have complained of insufficient consultation, and tend to dominate the meetings. The mayor has said he would consider further modifications to the plan, but the continuing ruckus threatens to substantially delay its implementation, possibly jeopardizing its future. This is happening even though surveys seem to show that most Seattle residents support denser housing.
Over the years, there has been broader academic research on the Wilson principle, and scholars have come up with some consistent conclusions: Not only is public participation in planning decisions indeed dominated by opponents of significant change, but the participants themselves don’t reflect the broader community. Much of this research has been summarized by The Urbanist, a Seattle-based nonprofit.
Among the scholars who have investigated the participation question is Katherine Levine Einstein, a political scientist at Boston University who focused her research on a plan to redevelop the land around a declining Catholic parish in Boston and create 50 units of affordable housing. Despite majority support from local government, Einstein reported, the project was delayed by a multitude of rancorous public hearings, lawsuits, studies and costly alterations. It took a decade to get the project completed, at far greater expense than anyone foresaw in the beginning. “The people who show up to these meetings are largely unrepresentative of their communities. They’re more privileged in a variety of dimensions,” Einstein found. “They’re more likely to be homeowners, they’re more likely to be older, and they are also overwhelmingly opposed to the construction of new housing.”
A study conducted by law professors at the universities of Houston and Denver found that public meetings tend to be biased in favor of homeowners and against renters. In many cases, renters do not receive formal notification telling them when and where a meeting is being held. “This type of discrimination is really relevant,” said Sarah Schindler of the University of Denver, “not just in giving notice to tenants but also in how tenants are treated more broadly by the law.”
Another student of the subject, Anna Fahey of the Sightline Institute, told The Urbanist’s Leah Hudson that extensive research shows that “American voters are actually far more favorable to a bigger range of housing in their communities than the handful of people who show up at a local hearing. We can show empirically that the people who show up do not represent the rest of the voting population.”
NEVERTHELESS, ELECTED OFFICIALS in much of the country continue to tell their constituents that extended public discussion is the key to effective policy. Long after James Q. Wilson published his seminal paper, there is plenty of evidence that this just isn’t true. But why isn’t it true? And what can be done about it?
Well, one simple thing would be to make sure that renters are as well informed about public meetings as property owners are. But that probably wouldn’t make a lot of difference. Local residents, whether they own or rent, not only have to know about a meeting, they have to want to be there. Maybe more of them would want to participate if the meetings were held online. Or maybe not. It isn’t that clear.
Other tactics might be used that would be very little trouble for anyone. The views of the broader community could be solicited with polls. Here too, though, there’s no clear evidence that people who don’t like meetings in any form would be good telephone responders. It’s hard enough to get an uninterested constituency to tell pollsters which candidate they want to vote for. Getting them to answer a complex question about a planning decision seems many times harder.
One thing political scientists have taught us in the last generation is that civic participation, whether it’s voting or showing up at a meeting, is a function of connectedness. Renters and single young people in general have much weaker community connections than homeowners. That’s a fact of American political life. Working harder to smoke out their opinions might help a little, but probably not all that much.
LEGISLATORS WHO CARE ABOUT THIS PROBLEM have begun to consider much more drastic solutions. One is to make it possible to push planning decisions through without a long-drawn-out public debate.
States can create exemptions that allow developers, under certain circumstances, to proceed with a project in the absence of a public endorsement or vote of approval. This has been tried in a number of states when it comes to permitting accessory dwelling units attached to residences in single-family neighborhoods. How this would work in the case of a much larger project seems like a much different matter. It has litigation written all over it. Still, it has its proponents. “We shouldn’t be soliciting public input every time we want to build a new unit of housing,” Einstein told The Urbanist.
As it happens, one of these controversies is playing out right now in Arlington County, Va., where I live. The local government began nearly a decade ago to develop ideas for creating so-called missing middle housing, in part by permitting apartment buildings with as many as eight units to be constructed in residential neighborhoods. Countless public meetings were held to discuss the ideas. Many of these sessions were dominated by the plan’s critics — which of course was their right.
When the county acted after numerous delays to implement a version of the proposal, the opponents went to court, charging, among other things, that there hadn’t been enough study. For the record, I agree with much of what the opponents say about the merits of the proposal; I also think their argument about a lack of sufficient study is ludicrous. In any case, a local judge agreed with them, and the plan has been blocked, at least temporarily.
It’s a tired cliche that a squeaky wheel gets most of the grease. But most cliches, tedious as they may be, are based on reality. In this case, it might be said that a squeaky group of neighborhood activists can grease the wheels of public policy. Even if we know this, it’s especially worrisome when they don’t represent broader community opinion. I think that is what James Q. Wilson was trying to tell us.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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