Having never, ever been a morning person, I always made my brother drive me to school my senior year of high school. I’d stare out the window and brood about while the countless yard signs of suburban Fairfield County, Connecticut, glided by one after another.
For as long as I’d lived in New Canaan, these signs were the typical fare: high school plays, advertisements, local music festivals, and school board politics. My senior year, however, a new sign appeared on the scene: Save Weed Street.
I knew people who lived on Weed Street. My brother and I drove through it most days on our way to school. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it needed saving from.
The answer, it turned out, was a proposal for a 102-unit apartment complex on a 3.1-acre plot of land. While I didn’t know it at the time, for the past two years my community had been ensnared in controversy between town leaders, citizens, and a local developer named Arnold Karp.
The ensuing legal battle would see residents make countless arguments for sinking the project. Objections ranged from fire safety to stormwater management to traffic congestion. Those concerns were rejected by a judge this past July, who decisively ruled there was no evidence for any of them.
A closer look at the town’s reaction to the complex reveals that the story of Weed Street isn’t about local regulations or traffic concerns. The story of “Save Weed Street” is a story of a small suburb embroiled in the symbolic politics of affordable housing in America. Those politics get to the heart of the NIMBY, or “Not in My Backyard” movement. Understanding the dynamics at play in my community reveals the messy and complicated combination of emotional anxieties and bureaucratic processes that make NIMBYism a critical threat to affordable housing in America.
As Karp points out, much of the on-the-ground rhetoric against the development centers on apartment-style housing, or on the people within it disrupting the “character” of the town. That emotional reaction to an incoming disturbance provides a more convincing reason for the severity of reactions to the project. After all, when have town residents ever been passionately stirred by zoning laws and stormwater management?
The notion that affordable housing development disrupts the suburban ecosystem, or is just “bad vibes,” isn’t unique to New Canaan. In fact, concerns about “character” have driven resident-backed blocking of affordable housing development statewide. The opposition to affordable housing in Connecticut is winning big. New Canaan and other towns in the state continue to strike down proposals even though they are far below state guidelines, which sets the affordable housing target at 10 percent. While most Americans support affordable housing, that support disintegrates when the housing is built in their backyard. The question is, why do residents feel like affordable housing has bad vibes when it comes to their hometown?
The answer has to do with how individuals think about policy that affects them. Research shows that when people are faced with complex policy questions they don’t fully understand, they substitute them for easier, more emotional questions. Often, that substitution involves switching the difficult question of “in what ways will this policy affect my community?” with “how do I feel about the people this policy benefits?”
This phenomenon is especially relevant to affordable housing because housing not only targets groups about whom suburbanites feel uncertain, but also grants them access to their community. The broad, vague platitude of “character,” therefore, fills in for the anxiety residents feel around new socioeconomic groups gaining access to their community.
As the issue of affordable housing goes from a hypothetical question of correcting the housing crisis to a real-life question of people’s own communities, support for affordable housing decreases with that proximity.
The effect is a self-reinforcing cycle, especially in the most homogenous communities. New Canaan, Connecticut, is overwhelmingly affluent. While Connecticut’s 8-30g threshold loosens zoning law for developers when less than 10 percent of a town’s housing stock is affordable, New Canaan is not only below this mark, but in a totally different ballpark at under 4 percent. The least economically diverse towns are also the towns for which affordable housing and less affluent populations are the most unfamiliar. The unfortunate result is that the towns with the greatest preexisting inequalities are the towns with the greatest affective and emotional barrier to change.
Unfortunately, the emotional and symbolic barriers to affordable housing construction have harsh and material effects on those who are kept out. While Connecticut has some of the nation’s best public schools, only 7 of the 50 highest-ranked are in towns that meet the 10 percent affordability threshold. The result is a missed opportunity for economic mobility. Making it affordable for lower or middle-class families to get the best education in the most thriving communities could lead to intergenerational improvements. But if those opportunities are only available to the same groups of people, the barriers that separate upper and lower-class communities will continue to calcify.
The impacts don’t just harm those who can’t access certain areas; an increasingly untenable housing market makes for an increasingly untenable economy and country. A lack of new housing development drives up costs for renters, which snowballs into a nationwide affordability crisis, squeezing the middle class. At the same time, senior citizens get priced out of rents in areas they’ve lived for decades, while the social security net evaporates around them. Affordable housing can’t solve every social and economic problem the U.S. faces. But it’s safe to say housing is more than one piece of the puzzle, that you can’t make America a better home for everyone without making sure there is a home for everyone in America.
As it stands, the goal of increased investment and commitment to new affordable housing remains unmet. While anxieties about the arrival of new groups are a reactionary response rooted in deeper fears about class, race, and simply change, NIMBY-ist arguments are often packaged through a progressive lens, which allows their destructive and inequitable nature to go unexamined. Concerns about neighborhood “character” are portrayed as David vs. Goliath battles — small towns against big city developers bent on reshaping their community against its will.
Furthermore, in states like California, permitting regulations and broad environmental regulations are weaponized for the NIMBY agenda, enabling the threat of bureaucratic process to shut down affordable housing projects, sometimes before they even begin. For instance, in California, the “California Environmental Quality Act” (CEQA) has delayed or shut down numerous efforts. Right here in Berkeley, a proposed complex for low-income and formerly homeless residents faced opposition due to fears of noise pollution. The project was ultimately abandoned by the developer after their federal grants were jeopardized by the invocation of CEQA. That project shows how the bureaucratic process not only delays solutions but often shuts them down through the sheer cost of the process itself. It’s hardly an isolated instance. A 2024 study found that CEQA adds two years on average to project timeframes, often killing projects’ finances in the process. The scariest part is that CEQA’s just one factor. When you consider zoning regulations, historic preservation laws, residents’ anxieties, and the sheer cost and delay of overlapping financial and legal mechanisms, you get a system that is a headache at best. At worst, the many hoops projects must jump through provide endless opportunities for opponents of projects to sink them.
The lesson in housing, and for the progressive economic agenda at large, is the importance of attention to detail. Liberal and progressive movements over-emphasize the aesthetic of standing “against” big business and “with” environmental regulations and local communities at all times, without paying nearly enough attention to how those agendas are misconstrued or even taken advantage of. Housing policy and other bureaucratic reforms aren’t sexy, but the path forward requires attention to detail and nuanced policy focus. Sticking with “gut feelings” about housing policy may feel emotionally satisfying, but the implicit biases and fear of the unknown at the root of NIMBYism reveal that what feels good for residents isn’t always the same as what’s good for communities or the country as a whole.
While it’s nice and easy to keep things the way they are to avoid the messy and controversial politics around housing, that comfort doesn’t help the families, seniors, or communities who are struggling for access or stability right now. What’s more, the local communities vs. big developers dynamic is often not as it seems. If we let anything short of perfection stop solutions, we won’t make any progressive change or fix the affordability crisis.
We can’t allow inaction to persist as the crisis deepens. As it stands, everyone wants a better solution in a better place, a solution that may never come. Back on Weed Street, Karp asks the question no one wants to answer: “If not here, then where?”
Image Source: Dash Gilrain-Lennon