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

“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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“Rethinking Federal Housing Policy,” or, What One Swarthmore Resident’s National Perspective Suggests About What We Can Do in Our Small Town

If you’re working to make your small town’s housing more affordable, and that town turns out to be home to a well-known housing economist with a book about the affordability crisis, you probably ought to read that book. 

A couple of months ago, I learned that Joseph Gyourko, a professor of real estate, finance and business economics, and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, lives right here in Swarthmore. Or rather, I knew a guy named Joe Gyourko lived in Swarthmore; our daughters had been friends back in elementary school. What I learned was that this neighbor was a well-known housing economist.

One surprise about Rethinking Federal Housing Policy: How to Make Housing Plentiful and Affordable, which Gyourko wrote with Edward Glaeser, was how readable it was to a non-economist like me: lucid and direct.

As the title suggests, the book is largely about what the authors think the federal government should do to address the affordability problem. But a lot of what they say has implications for what can be done on a smaller scale—a borough scale—too.

We Need More Housing

When they published their book in 2008, Gyourko and Glaeser already observed that in a “growing number of metropolitan areas, housing prices have soared, making housing unaffordable even for middle-income Americans.”

The main reason? “Stringent land-use regulations make it too costly to change the quantity of housing very much.”

In other words, while zoning serves an important function, overly restrictive zoning laws were making it nearly impossible to build more housing, which was driving prices up. 

This is still the case—and it’s very relevant to the housing situation in Swarthmore.

Two Affordability Crises

One still applicable tenet of Gyourko and Glaeser’s book is that America is suffering from two separate affordability crises with different causes and different solutions. 

One crisis is that many people are so poor that they struggle to afford any housing, even inexpensive housing. 

Another is that, in many parts of the country, housing has become unaffordable to even middle-income people. 

Unless you understand which crisis you are talking about, the writers explain, you’re not going to be able to implement a solution.

I found this extremely clarifying.

In my reading and thinking about affordability over the last year, I’ve often found myself stuck in a thicket of confused ideas about what “affordability” is. I wrote about this a few weeks back in a post called “What Is Affordability Anyway?”

Gyourko and Glaeser helped me see how the word “affordable” is such a flexible, protean term that it can be more obfuscating than useful.

Their book spends most of its time discussing the lack of housing affordable for middle-income earners. The principal solution, the authors argue, is to loosen local zoning restrictions in unaffordable markets to encourage the creation of more housing units. 

Gyourko and Glaeser argue for limiting the federal mortgage-interest deduction and sending the resulting tax dollars back to municipalities that build housing. This is a national and therefore efficient approach, but not one I imagine seeing implemented any time soon.

So What Can We Do Locally?

Loosening land-use restrictions in Swarthmore alone would likely not drive down the price of existing homes. That would probably require changes across the Philadelphia metropolitan area. But it could open the door for the creation of housing units at lower price points.

Other communities have done just that by, for example, permitting accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to offset the cost of homeownership while providing affordable rentals. They have rewritten their zoning laws so large houses can be divided into several condominiums. They have designated areas for townhomes like Swarthmore’s Village Green near the Princeton Avenue underpass. 

Changes like these could make our town more accessible to middle-income earners like teachers, small merchants, data-science consultants, writers, and college professors who were able to afford to buy homes in Swarthmore twenty years ago but mostly can’t anymore.

As for the poor who struggle to afford even inexpensive housing, Swarthmore has long been mostly out of their reach. A 1972 proposal by local religious leaders that the borough allow twenty units of subsidized housing went down to defeat. The words of one of the proposal’s advocates at a borough council meeting, quoted in the January 23, 1973, issue of The Swarthmorean, show that our forebearers half a century ago had some of the same concerns many of us do today: “[The proposal] bears on Swarthmore’s ability to remain an open, socially mixed community in which material achievements aren’t the only measure of human worth.”

An article in the Delaware County Daily Times described an exchange, not mentioned in The Swarthmorean’s account of the meeting, in which a citizen named William Allen Raiman said the proposal “would little by little make one big Scrapple Hundred out of Swarthmore.” Scrapple Hundred is a derogatory term for the Historically Black Neighborhood of Swarthmore. 

I’m guessing no one in Swarthmore today would speak that way in a public meeting. But I worry that opposition to making housing more affordable is driven in part by stereotypes and prejudices about the kind of people who would live in it.

I’d like to think we could find ways to make Swarthmore more accessible to low-income workers, especially those employed in our community as restaurant servers or custodians at Swarthmore College or home health aides. 

Two Takeaways

One optimistic nugget I unearthed from Gyourko and Glaeser’s book is the idea that—since the lack of affordability for middle-income earners is largely the result of overly restrictive zoning policies—changes in government policies can supply solutions.

Here’s a more ambiguous nugget. The book notes that in some big cities, mayors fight for the creation of housing units so city workers can afford to live near their jobs. But, the writers continue, “In leafy suburbs…there is no group to oppose existing homeowners’ natural desire to restrict construction.” 

As I read this, I found myself wondering how, in our own leafy suburb, such a group might be created. 

I chair Swarthmore’s Development and Affordability Task Force, which is charged with making recommendations to our borough council next year. But beyond that, a critical mass of residents who see the benefits both to themselves and to others in creating more affordable housing in Swarthmore will be crucial to bringing about change.

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