Should Anyone Live in Northampton?
“This density housing ideology was designed for large cities not small towns.”
The fight over a potential multifamily development on Phillips Place I wrote about last week is still trudging along.
On Thursday, over thirty people crowded into Northampton’s city council chambers ahead of the planning board meeting’s 7pm start time, with a handful more trickling in over the next hour and some more people tuning in over Zoom. I arrived maybe ten minutes early toting a copy of Garry Wills’ The Kennedy Imprisonment, a prudent choice given I would not end up leaving until over four hours later.
After ninety minutes spent discussing another multifamily development, and a slideshow of before and after visualizations of that project which rather resembled a “spot the differences” game, the board finally moved onto the Phillips Place proposal.
O’Connell Development Group was granted time to speak first, space they used to try to preemptively address the complaints they knew would be relitigated during the public comment period. Unfortunately for the developer though, albeit to photojournalists’ great delight, everyone looks guilty when surrounded by men in suits, even if those men are architects rather than lawyers.
Sarah Stine, ODG’s president, defended the company’s ongoing restoration of the St. John Cantius church and pointed out the zoning code doesn’t actually require the development have any parking at all. And, alluding to comments published by the Daily Hampshire Gazette, she spent much of her time seeking to address “concerns about who might live here.”
Dan, who rocked up to last week’s city council meeting in a Jaws tank top, a denim jacket, and yellow-tinted sunglasses, had told the paper that “this is going to be a wall of like 30 college students and 20-somethings staring at my 2- and 5-year-old kids. It’s creepy to me the way this is going to be in my face.”
“This isn’t student housing, but I assume some college students will live here,” Stine said. “This isn’t senior housing, but it is ADA accessible. …. Based on our market research, we have some guesses: Seniors, that’s been mentioned, who are downsizing who want to stay in Northampton; nurses, doctors, other medical professionals who want to work at Cooley Dickinson; young people in their twenties and 30s who are new to the area or saving to buy a home; people who work at the business in Northampton and right now have very limited options to live where they work.”
As for the rent levels, she noted that the company is “using $2,000 to $3,800 in our financial projections.” For studio apartments through two bedroom apartments, that may seem a tad pricy, but fairly solid evidence suggests the development would still help low-income Northamptonites through filtering and the general effects of an increase in supply.
The public comment period went much the same as it did the week prior, despite the planning board’s repeated pleas to avoid any complaints that were already submitted through the online comment system, or brought up by a previous speaker.
Residents of the neighborhoods, especially abutters, called the plan “this monstrosity,” an “egregious massive behemoth of a building,” and said it “is not infill, this is invasion.” (That last statement was repeated in a letter by H. Leslie Wolfe published by the Gazette.) One said the plan “looks like a jail to me” and the residents “feel like pawns in a rigged game run by the city.”
A sizable minority, if not a majority, showed up with flyers, posters, and cute, apparently homemade scale models.
City councilor Rothenberg also made an appearance to showboat in front of her constituents, gratuitously reminding the planning board that “the award of this special permit is totally discretionary, which is fabulous.”
“Please try to find the difference between a NIMBY and a community that really does want to be involved,” she beseeched them.
Unfortunately, that difference cannot be found. It does not exist. A NIMBY isn’t a mustache-twirling villain who is against homes being built anywhere — again, the clue’s in the name. Even a “community that really does want to be involved” can help contribute to our horrific housing crisis. Arguably, it’s those communities that are most at fault.
As Dan said over Zoom on Thursday, he bought his Phillips Place home in 2022. First built in 1856, public records show the property was recently appraised at a value of almost $870,000.
Documents available online through the Hampshire Registry of Deeds reveal the same building was sold just over ten years ago, in 2014, for $405,000. Even after accounting for inflation, that’s a more than 50 percent increase in price, or around 4 percent every year.
Now, Dan isn’t responsible for the price of the place he lives skyrocketing over the past decade or two. As his family bought the property near the tail end of that meteoric rise, he’s arguably a victim.
But everyone ought to consider what those numbers might mean, especially for lower-income renters.
One document prepared by the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission in 2006 shows there were already significant shortages of housing at almost every income level almost twenty years ago. A more recent report prepared by the commission in 2022 records that the “median rent [in Northampton] increased from $843 in 2010 to $1,189 to 2020,” an 18 percent increase after inflation adjustments. Only 940 units were added to Northampton that decade.
As I tried to make clear last week, I think many of the aggrieved parties might have legitimate grievances. But the issue with NIMBYism — and that is what all this is despite residents’ protestations — is that everyone has legitimate grievances when their neighborhood is going to change significantly.
As a homeowner, you spent far too much of your hard-earned money on your house and are planning to stay there for years, maybe decades. Of course you’ll be concerned when someone proposes a large development right down the street. “Think of the traffic!” you might say. Or perhaps you’re more worried about those rambunctious Smith College students carousing late into the night.
In the 1965 classic The Logic of Collective Action, economist Mancur Olson effectively transposed the classic public goods problem, where non-excludable and non-rivalrous goods are systemically underprovided by markets, to an analysis of large groups.1 Basically, Olson sought to show it can be individually rational for members of small groups to engage in some costly provision of a public good—like speaking at a city council meeting—but in a large group costs tend to outweigh the added benefits of contributing.
When everyone pushes back on new housing in their own backyard, while the people likely to benefit from new construction naturally fail to organize, all of those individually rational decisions compound together and end up freezing a city in amber. Rents continue to climb higher and higher while low-income families are forced out.
Near the close of the four hour meeting on Thursday, planning board member George Kohout said frankly that “we can’t get at the paucity of housing” through condos alone. He explained that the board has to prioritize “providing housing for people who live here and may live here in the future.” (By this point I was taking dictation on an old subscription form for The Atlantic that’d been stuck inside the book I had brought. My phone was long since dead.)
Responding to current residents’ concerns about neighborhood character, Carolyn Misch, the Northampton director of planning and sustainability, remarked that “it’s not out of character in the city to have these juxtapositions.” One planning board member noted there’s already a large multifamily development within ready eyesight of the currently empty lot. And board member Janna White quipped that “you can’t make a new old building.”
At least by my estimation, the board members clearly recognize that Northampton needs new housing, not just homes built before the Emancipation Proclamation was drafted, and that multifamily housing is a key part of meeting that need. But, with midnight quickly approaching, they still chose to put off actually granting the special permit request, asking that the developers put together a few changes to their plans for another meeting in late May. Actually breaking ground has been delayed for another month.
And even after being given this temporary respite, residents still left steaming mad, already putting the new meeting date in their calendars and presumably organizing new email chains.
As the meeting concluded, I overheard one man muttering that the board would “rubber stamp” the proposal, a sentiment he thankfully illustrated with a mimed stamping motion. “We feel totally abandoned,” another complained, and a man who repeatedly griped about a “sidewalk to nowhere” spat expletives as he left.
As H. Leslie Wolfe said in the Gazette, “Beware social engineers. Their plans always end in tears.” I do question though whether he realized while writing that letter that NIMBYs are as much social engineers as the planning department he meant to critique.
The best articles you might’ve missed are:
Nic Johnson’s article about Trump’s trade war for the New York Review of Books
Preston Mui on how to think about a slowdown in hiring for Employ America
Julie Su on the latest from the Department of Labor for the American Prospect
And Josh Eidelson’s long-form piece on the subminimum wage for Bloomberg Businessweek
And I’ve written a couple pieces recently as well:
An article detailing Birmingham Starbucks workers’ accounts of alleged illegal unionbusting
And a short piece about Trump announcing he would give a commencement address at my alma mater
“The individual member of the typical large organization is in a position analogous to that of the firm in a perfectly competitive market, or the taxpayer in the state: his own efforts will not have a noticeable effect on the situation of his organization, and he can enjoy any improvements brought about by others whether or not he has worked in support of his organization.”