Please Save My Parking Lot!
If you want to foster any doubts you may have about democracy, watch a local debate over building multifamily housing.
“Development projects in the United States are subject to a process I like to call ‘whoever yells the loudest and longest wins.’ Some refer to this as participatory democracy.” — Jerusalem Demsas
Up here in the Northeast local democracy has a somewhat better reputation than it does in Alabama.1 Every American studies professor’s favorite French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, practically rhapsodized about the New England town meetings he witnessed while touring the then burgeoning republic:
“Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it. A nation may establish a system of free government, but without the spirit of municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty.” (Excerpt from chapter 5 of Democracy in America, originally published in 1835)
After all, even when de Tocqueville first arrived in the United States in 1831 the country was far too large for everyone to know their representatives in Congress, or even really to have the chance to talk to them. At the town or city level, though, citizens could still come together and do what they all wished they could do in D.C.: shout and laugh and clap at the people they’d elected, or even try to change their minds on occasion.
So, in a curious mood and with de Tocqueville’s words rattling around the back of my head, and more importantly still trying to put off starting the second econometrics problem set, I decided to attend my local city council meeting earlier today. And, as expected, I found firsthand evidence confirming what was already clearly shown by the rallies across the nation earlier this month: the body politic is angry. But if I’d been asked what they were angry about before tonight, I’d have been far off base.
Even accounting for the speakers eloquently decrying the war in Gaza and the liberal arts college students supporting a resolution in favor of a climate superfund—both of which I believe may be standard fare up here but would have been an arresting sight at a city council meeting back in the “Heart of Dixie”—the most emotionally charged topic of the day was the fate of 32A-170 and 32A-197, two zoning parcels on Phillips Place2 maybe a block from the center of town.
Just over a third of an acre combined according to Northampton’s GIS maps, the two parcels are currently zoned CB-Side, or “Central Business-Side Street District” in the somewhat arcane jargon of the Northampton zoning code.
O’Connell Development Group, after buying the St. John Cantius Church and surrounding properties in 2020, wants to turn the plots into a 5 story, 54-unit housing complex.
A Change.org petition presumably put together by one of the folks I talked to or heard speak earlier today has accumulated well over 200 signatures to “SAVE OUR NEIGHBORHOOD” in the last ten days. The petition complains, just like the participants in the public comment session, about shadows and how “most of the ground floor will be a parking garage, capacity 25 vehicles.”
And, you know, I might have felt inclined to complain about that too. After all, the area in question is just a couple minutes’ walk from the closest bus station or about ten minutes from the city Amtrak station, and one woman spent her two minutes of public comment talking about how lovely it is to bike in Northampton.
Then I decided to look up what the property looks like today. Right now, 32A-170 and 32A-197 are just one massive parking lot. Check Google Street View if you don’t believe me.
The folks talking at the city council meeting and the real nice petition they drew up (which notably doesn’t include any pictures of the actual site) are complaining that a new building replacing a parking lot would… have parking. That’s one of their ace-in-the-holes, an apparent rallying cry.
Observant readers may have noticed that you’re now a few hundred words into this post and I still haven’t mentioned the word I texted to my urbanist friend the second I overheard what people were planning to gripe about. As best as I can recall, none of the eight councilors who ended up voting against the dezoning said the word either. But it was certainly weighing heavily on the anti-development crew’s minds.
“This is not exactly what you would call a NIMBY community,” Councilor Rothenberg defensively asserted at one point. The Ward III city council member, Rothenberg was the strongest opponent of the development during the meeting, even appearing to gather the members of the public who came to oppose the project to discuss strategy at the close of the public comment period. And at one point she somewhat laughably referred to the proposed building, which looks just fine to me, as “something like a Soviet-style block building.”
I feel I would be remiss—albeit likely a somewhat better person—if I declined to note here that, before Rothenberg spoke, the man widely identified by the council as the person with the most legitimate grievance literally called for the development to not be built in his backyard.
“How this personally affects me is that I’m the abutter—directly right here, next to it—and my property will be in a perpetual shadow,” he explained to the council members with the help of a prepared visual aid. “This has emotional, financial, and environmental implications that are real.”
And yes, that one man’s house being in the shade would prevent him from installing solar panels on his roof. (It would not, however, prevent him from paying a couple more cents per kWh to participate in the Valley Green Energy program Northampton helped establish and receive 100% green energy through the grid.)
But larger buildings, multifamily buildings, are far better for the environment than single family homes, even if they are built on what was “a hawk habitat for many, many years” in Rothenberg’s telling. If Northamptonites3 in every neighborhood push back and fight tooth-and-nail against five story buildings, then unless we stop anyone from moving to western Mass., we’ll be seeing a lot more single family buildings. And that’d be far worse for the climate than a couple families being left unable to install solar panels and forced to buy green energy from Eversource instead.
If you’ve already read the article in The Atlantic I took the epigraph for this piece from, what I’m about to say won’t be a new concept to you: As the title of Demsas’ piece somewhat glibly relates, “community input is bad, actually.”
You see, my “day job” is being an economics TA for UMass Amherst. This semester, the students I’m helping teach are all working on group projects about local markets they care about.
Almost every single group elected to write about housing.
I’m teaching ECON 203, or intermediate micro, so most of my students have already been kicked out of the first year on-campus housing and into the western Mass. rental market. And, by and large, they’re all still so sore about that experience and how much they’re now paying in rent every month that they opted to spend this semester writing about the local housing market.
It sure seemed to me like every single person who lives on the same street as the proposed development came to the city council meeting tonight. At the very least, the Phillips Place crew thought so.
Do you know who didn’t come? Who could not conceivably have come because there is no way they’d ever know they had an interest in the outcome of this smallbore zoning dispute? The 54 individuals and/or families who might get to move onto Phillips Place in a couple of years if the project isn’t delayed or, worse, cancelled because of interminable community input cycles.
At one point during her lengthy comments on the proposed ordinance, Rothenberg referred to a submitted public comment that asked “if [the proposed development]’s not good for traffic, if it’s not good for this, if it’s not good for that, what is it good for?”
Well, it could be good for whoever wants a home in Northampton: maybe students who need a place to stay while studying at Smith or UMass or Amherst College, or families just trying to settle down in western Mass. And in my opinion that ought to be enough.
Before the sun set, anyone sitting in the city council chambers could have glanced out the window and seen McDonald House, one of the local public housing authority’s developments. I looked at it several times during the night’s proceedings. A 7 story building with 60 units, McDonald House was built in 1964. Some back of the napkin math suggests it has likely been a home to hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the more than fifty years since its construction.
One wonders if it could have been built today.
My favorite pieces of the last week or so are:
Kim Kelly writing about the uncertain fate of the MSHA’s silica rule for In These Times
Dan Moynihan on the death of Direct File for his Substack
Ben Ehrenreich on nonviolent resistance in the West Bank for Harper’s
Jamelle Bouie writing about Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s detention for the New York Times
And Elizabeth Bruenig on the Natal Conference for The Atlantic
And you can find a couple other things I’ve written below:
A detailed piece about what recent data about CHOOSE Act applications might mean for Alabama’s public schools
And a write-up of an intra-Republican debate about whether Alabama should embrace crypto
At least to me, the phrase “local democracy” in a Southern context brings to mind images of Birmingham commissioner “Bull” Connor and the remnants of a city pool I saw in Tuscaloosa that had been sold off to avoid mandatory desegregation and long since filled in.
No relation as far as I know.
Alright, I’m not really sure what residents of Northampton are called.