NIMBYism and how to resolve it

A diagnosis and a solution.

Seán O'Neill McPartlin is the director of housing policy at Progress Ireland. This story first appeared on its Substack.

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How does a single person cost the taxpayer €500 million? Why is electricity so expensive? Why can't you build an apartment block beside a LUAS line? There are different answers to each of these questions. But most will include one word: NIMBYs (Not in my backyard-ers).

Ireland has been grappling with NIMBYism. What's driving it? Is it a particularly Irish thing? Is it about homeowners protecting their property values?

Ireland badly needs to build, so these are important questions. Today, I want to show what drives NIMBYism in Ireland and why it matters.

A culture of NIMBY?

It is said Ireland has a culture of objecting to development, from water treatment plants to new apartments.

This model says that there is something distinctively NIMBY about Irish people. You will hear a few different and related ways to cash this diagnosis out. One is that Irish people are uniquely attached to a detached house with a patch of grass. Or you'll hear someone invoke the legacy of the Land Wars. This model says Irish people resist development because they're individualistic and have a special relationship with land.

But I think all that is wrong.

The most important thing the cultural explanation misses is just how common NIMBYism is elsewhere. NIMBYism is part of the common culture of most developed nations. It's found everywhere from Canada to Texas to Sweden to Taiwan. My favorite example of NIMBYism is from Ancient Rome, where an aqueduct was blocked on religious grounds.

Rational homeowners?

People the world over object to development near their homes. For what reason? The most common story is that they're protecting the value of their home. This model says that objectors, who are overwhelmingly homeowners, have invested in a house and they will resist changes to policy that will hurt that investment.

A lot of politicians believe this. I think it is important to spell out the ways this model is wrong.

The first is the popularity of pro-housing parties. The UK's Labour party won the 2024 election, partly, on the basis that they would build more homes. All major parties in Ireland notionally support building more houses. The Canadian election was recently fought partly on the housing issue.

If restricting national-level supply was the motivation of NIMBYs, then we wouldn't see such strong support for national-level pro-housing measures. This is because higher national housing production would put downward pressure on prices. If NIMBYs were just defending their asset-values, they would object to housing everywhere in the country, not just near them.

The second reason is that, if maximizing asset values was the principal drive behind NIMBY, then we should see more land owners clamoring for infill projects to maximize the value of their own plots. But that is not what we observe at all.

The third reason that the house price story is wrong is that renters seem to object to housing as well as homeowners. That behavior doesn't make sense if their motivation is said to be protecting house prices. If they're protecting something, it isn't their assets.

The fourth, final, and most important reason is what NIMBYs say for themselves. For their book, Neighborhood Defenders, three political scientists from Boston University attended a series of local planning meetings to see what local NIMBYs were thinking. They found that NIMBYs uniformly cast themselves as defending their local area.

NIMBYs often believe development comes with a cluster of threats to their local area. It might cause more traffic or overburden the local schools or GP surgeries. And, often correctly, NIMBYs believe that new developments will be ugly and make their area aesthetically worse.

The green jersey approach

NIMBY isn't peculiarly Irish, and it's not motivated by property prices. What if NIMBY is a problem of dispersed benefits and concentrated costs?

What this means is that society as a whole and the new residents will jointly benefit from new development, while local people incur some cost. For example, you will sometimes hear NIMBYs asked to consider the national interest.

An example is a motorway being built through a townland. The nation benefits from the new road, but the locals must deal with construction delays, traffic noise, and other costs.

This is, as it stands, correct: new development does have aggregate benefits and imposes direct costs on individuals who live near it. But what's left out?

If we leave it there, we end up saying something like the following. Local people have two options in the current system. They can either "do the right thing" and incur the cost, accepting the development. Or they can object to the project and do their best to stall it.

This is not a sensible approach. Few want to unilaterally accept costs for the good of the nation. In New Zealand, one national policy to increase densities – the so-called Medium Density Residential Standards – was partly responsible for Labour's defeat at the ballot box. In Croydon, a policy to densify plots delivered a lot of homes, but it also partly cost the Labour party control of the local council at the next election.

So, how do we deliver homes and infrastructure in a way that learns from these mistakes?

NIMBY is a policy failure

There is one more way of looking at this problem. It says, yes, it's true we get NIMBYs because of concentrated costs and dispersed benefits. But that problem is not, in principle, intractable. What it is, is a failure to bargain properly.

Where there is development, there will be winners and losers. The winners get to move into the new homes, use new infrastructure, and profit from their construction. The losers have to put up with the noise, disruption and change caused by the new development.

The present policy extols the merits of public participation. But it essentially only allows participation in one direction: to block, object and stall. It only allows people to say no.

The result is that much of the surplus generated by development is spent defensively navigating procedures, fighting legal battles, or preemptively goldplating projects in an attempt to smooth things over with planning authorities and locals.

This is wasteful. If developers could positively win over locals, rather than minimize the risk of being vetoed by them, many more bargains could be struck.

The question is what mechanisms could be designed that best align the interests of both locals and newcomers.

An example comes from London, which has been balloting social housing residents on regeneration projects since 2018. A deal is presented to social housing tenants and put to a vote: maintain the status quo, or redevelop the estate and receive a replacement home in the new development. The policy has been a remarkable success. 31 estate regeneration ballots have passed so far. In some instances, over 90 percent of residents voted to regenerate their estate.

The model here is intuitive: if those in the local area see a direct benefit of new development, they will want to see more of it.

One policy we have worked on tries to learn from this model. It is called Street Plan Development Zones, or SPZs.

The basic idea is that building homes at scale in the areas of highest demand requires the buy-in of residents if it is going to be politically durable. Railroading locals doesn't work in the long run.

What SPZs do is allow streets to opt into a set of rules for the development of their street.

As before, the current policy empowers local people to say no to development. But it offers them no official channel to say yes. If the model of NIMBYism discussed here is right, local incumbents could become the most ardent supporters of development if they had the power to shape it and benefit from it.

SPZs would enable just that: those most affected by the development, those on the street, would have the power to shape and benefit from it. Local homeowners would benefit not just from the value uplift caused by adding density to their plots, but would also be able to improve the amenity and visual impact of their streets.

The central idea of SPZs and related policies from around the world is that, in order to overcome NIMBY, we need to create ways for those most affected by development to benefit from it.

Land readjustment

SPZs are one of many potential ways to incentivize stakeholders to back development. Another idea is called 'land readjustment.'

Land readjustment tries to solve problems downstream of fragmented ownership. Say a planning authority is trying to masterplan an area and deliver infrastructure alongside new homes. One major problem the plan faces is that there are lots of land owners with plots split in inconvenient ways.

At present, our policy tools include asking nicely or compulsory purchase orders (CPOs). Neither works well. CPO is acrimonious, slow, risky, and costly.

Plugging this situation into our above model of NIMBY, we see that these landowners suffer the concentrated costs of new development.

What land readjustment does is provide a mechanism for landowners to benefit from the new development in a way that incentivizes them to say yes to it.

Progress Ireland is currently working on a detailed land readjustment proposal, but the basic idea goes like this. Landowners can 'pool' their plots together for the new development under a master plan. Once pooled, a developing authority (whoever it ends up being: the LDA, local authority, a special purpose vehicle) replots the land to suit the plan and dolls out repackaged plots that are, because of the plan, of greater value than the original plots.

Land readjustment in action.

Where before policy provided just a stick, with land readjustment, it can provide a carrot too.

Like with SPZs, taking the bargaining theory of NIMBY seriously means giving people an incentive and a mechanism to say yes to new development.

In SPZs, it means giving homeowners a say in the look and feel of their street. With LR, it means giving landowners a share of the uplift created by public goods like LUAS lines and new parks. Both work by powerful incentives and mechanisms to jointly say yes.

If we want to confront NIMBY, we would do better to move past the cultural commentary and the moralizing. If we do it right, we can create a planning system that benefits everyone.

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