Bad Faith
The bad faith of NIMBY objections
31 March 2023 - Harper Howze
A few weeks ago, the president of my neighborhood association made a circuit of the neighborhood, carrying with him a petition. Developers were planning to build a big new apartment complex, on the corner of Rainbow Boulevard and West 46th Avenue. He wanted to stop it.
Now, for some context. I live in the Rosedale neighborhood of KCK, in the city’s far southeast corner. Rosedale is divided into several neighborhoods, and is almost exclusively zoned for detached single family homes, with a scattering of commercial buildings on the major arterial roads, and around the vast University of Kansas Medical Center. The developer, in this case, was the Woodside Club, a semi-luxury pool and health club that sits just on the Wyandotte-Johnson county line (full disclosure: I have been employed by them as a summer job).
Woodside wanted to construct 172 apartments, on a stretch of land which is currently an abandoned building surrounded by crumbling parking lots. The planned structure was seven stories high, and had a bottom story of retail that faced onto Rainbow, a significant corridor and part of US-169. The apartments were intended, according to Greg Kindle, president of the Wyandotte Economic Development Council, to provide healthcare workers to live in KCK, with easy access to KU Med.
The local residents were not nearly as enthusiastic. The building was significantly larger than the low-lying businesses and single-family homes that abutted it to the north. Their complaints were familiar to anyone who has followed similar proposals, anywhere in the country. Fears about increased traffic, large trucks, parking on the street, and shade. They raised havoc, and the developer agreed to negotiate. Woodside shaved 23 units off, changing the back half of the structure to five stories and promising to work to prevent street parking.
That’s where my neighborhood enters the story. We aren’t the neighborhood where Woodside wants to build. At seven stories, there is no way even the top would be visible. No one is going to park their car on streets half a mile away. In short, our neighborhood would not be impacted in any tangible way by these apartments. And yet, there was the president, petition in hand.
I queried him as to why he wanted to stop the project, and he listed off the reasons above. Woodside, he explained, was, “not willing to change anything.” That particular line caught my attention, as it demonstrates a fundamental problem with how these sorts of resident-developer negotiations happen in America. Remember, the developer had already taken off almost two dozen units. Given that the average rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in Rosedale is $987 a month , that’s more than $272,000 a year in lost revenue. They are clearly willing to make accommodations. The local residents were not: the petition I was shown called for the project to be completely blocked. They didn’t want to compromise, they wanted to shut it down. My neighbor, when I asked him, didn’t have any alternative development that he’d prefer on that lot, he just didn’t want anything.
This sort of bad faith negotiation, where NIMBYs ask for change after change, without ever declaring what they want or being satisfied with significant compromises, is detrimental to our public discourse. Cities cannot be frozen in amber, and to expect that things will always remain exactly as they were when you moved in is unrealistic and self-interested. Developers are not angels; they are usually motivated simply by profit, and certainly there are plenty of cases in which they barged past the complaints of residents. However, neighborhood opposition groups too often conflate democracy with obstruction, believing their stonewalling to be a legitimate engagement with the issue at hand. Unless all parties enter the debate with the goal of finding a solution, everyone will leave feeling frustrated and ignored, eroding the value of community input and collaborative development.
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For more information on the Woodside project, click here.