No Retirees in My Backyard

The most intellectually credible - though rhetorically horrifying - NIMBY argument is: Since a lot of redistribution is local, we shouldn’t allow anyone to build housing for the poor. Otherwise, the poor will move into our area, and consume a lot more services than they ultimately pay in property taxes.

This argument has instant appeal if you’re rich; the fewer poor neighbors I have, the less the law will force me to help them. But on reflection, the argument makes almost as much sense for already-existing poor residents! If more poor people move into your neighborhood, you’ll have to share the loot with them.

You could object, “But most redistribution isn’t local. Per the Tiebout model, federal and state governments practically pick up the whole tab.” But this objection is deeply facile, because our absurdly expensive public schools are largely funded by local property taxes. The upshot is that every school-age child annually burdens their local community by many thousands of dollars.

If, like me, you’re a staunch natalist, you may be tempted to point to massive estimates of the average child’s lifetime fiscal contribution. Most of these gains, however, happen at the federal level, so NIMBYs can safely discount them. Indeed, even if most of the gains happened at the local level after kids reached adulthood, NIMBYs could fairly protest, “What are the odds that the kid even stays in our district after he graduates?”

Prudentially speaking, then, isn’t it reasonable for NIMBYs to oppose multi-family housing, insist on massive minimum lot sizes, and so on? Not at all. If you want to keep out fiscal burdens, the people to exclude aren’t really the poor. The people to exclude are kids - and anyone likely to have kids. Rich people with big families - the kind that buy single-family homes on five-acre lots - are still probably a burden on their local communities. Poor yet permanently childless folk, in contrast, can easily be net local taxpayers.

Still, when you give builders of affordable multi-family homes a green light, aren’t you ultimately inviting hordes of burdensome children into your locality? Again, not at all. One major kind of residential construction almost always more than pays for itself: retirement housing. While seniors are a massive drain on the federal budget, this rule completely reverses at the local level. You build homes for the elderly. They (or whoever owns their housing) pay full property taxes. Yet they never use the main service those property taxes pay: public education. It doesn’t matter how many “55 and better” dwellings you crowd into your area. The number of kids they’ll send to your public schools remains approximately zero. No grief, all gravy.

The upshot is that prudent NIMBYs would roll out the red carpet for elder construction. Fast track all the way. They’d pressure local officials to frantically court retirees - and anyone who builds retirement housing.

Real-world NIMBYs, in contrast, aren’t so prudent. Communities with single-family zoning rarely deign to make a standard exception for retirement housing. Despite a few high-profile reforms, single-family zoning remains the American norm. And as NIMBYs love to insist, “the rules are the rules.”

The case for welcoming retirement housing becomes even clearer if you think about three other classic NIMBY complaints: crime, traffic, and parking. The elderly commit almost no crime. And once they retire, they stop commuting - which drastically cuts their impact on traffic and parking. While I suspect the elderly call the fire department more than normal for emergency assistance, they are otherwise model citizens.

Perhaps this is all news to NIMBYs, and they’ll change their mind as soon as they read this. If not, at least we learn a valuable lesson about the NIMBY problem. Namely: NIMBYism is not primarily a movement of rational self-interest. Instead, it is a movement driven by status quo bias, economic illiteracy, innumeracy, and sheer paranoia. NIMBYs almost never ask questions like, “Counting all benefits and costs for our community, would the net effect of another retirement community be positive?” Instead, they ask questions like, “Can we imagine any possible problem with retirement communities?” Since the answer to this childish question is almost inevitably yes, their answer to developers is almost automatically no.