You gotta show up to the meeting

There’s a sign on a lamppost, or an email in your inbox, or an article you read about: there’s going to be a meeting about some sort of local project. It sounds like a nice improvement to the city or your neighborhood.

But you’re busy, so you don’t show up. And that should be fine, right? Who would be against a park, or keeping people safe, or affordable housing?

And then you forget about the project, and a few months or years later you realize it never happened, or was delayed, or seems a lot worse than the initial proposal. And maybe there’s an obvious follow-up that you never heard about at all, because it was silently canceled.

Here’s the sad truth: there are people who will always show up, and they will try to kill even the slightest improvement, and very often they win because no one else shows up.

If you want a better city, you have to show up to the meeting and share your support. Let’s see why!

Everyone has an opinion…

While many people will see the city making a change and say “oh, that’s nice” and move on with their life, there are also inevitably people who will dislike a particular change. For example:

• Small business owners dislike change; they have large investments in a particular physical location, and worry about anything that might threaten their livelihood.
• Some people think tall buildings are ugly.
• No one likes spending extra time looking for parking.

There isn’t anything wrong with these beliefs, or with people disliking a particular change as a result. But for some people these beliefs become strong emotional reactions, and corresponding actions. And now we have a problem.

It doesn’t matter how innocuous a project seems, there will be someone who is angry, upset, or afraid.

• Any affordable housing project will have numerous people showing up to complain that tall buildings are an aesthetic crime, or that the massively-subsidized street parking belongs to them and it’s unacceptable that anyone else get to use it.
• When separated bike lanes were installed on Brattle St in 2017, all the parking was preserved, with a slightly different configuration. Despite keeping all the parking, a number of business owners were still very upset; one dry cleaner claimed a 20% reduction in business (the only explanation I’ve heard was that some of their customers relied on illegal double parking, but even that seems implausible). A year later, a city survey unsurprisingly showed “a mostly neutral-to-positive effect on frequency of visiting the street”, including for drivers, and no business owner has publicly complained about this project since 2017.
• The Danehy Park Connector is a proposal to replace an area currently covered with garbage and inaccessible train tracks with an actual park, planting native plants, removing invasive species, adding a walkable path and public art, and more. But the “tree” people are strongly opposed, for reasons I can’t muster the fucks to try to decipher.

…but only some people show up at the meeting

Because they’re angry, opponents of change will show up at the meeting. And they will recruit less-informed people and get even more people to the meeting. And then they will spend the meeting explaining to city staff or the City Council how utterly depraved this proposal really is. At the same time, all the people who said “oh, that’s nice” may not show up at the meeting at all.

There’s fun social science research about this. A group of local researchers looked at participation in meetings and how it relates to support for housing projects; the resulting book is called Neighborhood Defenders. Here’s an except from a research paper they wrote:

The overwhelming majority of attendees spoke out in opposition to proposed new housing. Sixty-three percent of all comments were in opposition to proposed housing projects, while only 14.6% expressed support; the remaining 22.8% of comments were neutral. These results strongly suggest that, as predicted, the incentives to show up and oppose new housing are far stronger than those to participate in support.

And they also suggest that attendees’ opinions don’t match those of the larger public. Discussing support for Chapter 40B, a law making it easier to build subsidized affordable housing:

… in Cambridge, the town with the highest support for 40B (80% of voters opposed repeal), only 40% of comments at development meetings supported multifamily housing. Indeed, almost every town in Massachusetts exhibited higher support for Chapter 40B than for the development of specific multifamily housing projects. While voters in these towns supported affordable housing construction in the abstract, a significant majority of those who attended development meetings opposed the development of specific project proposals.

The comments are about commercial development, so it’s not a one-to-one comparison to support for 40B, but my personal experience is that far more speakers at affordable housing project meetings are opposed compared to support you can see in election results. And given Cambridge has very low voting rates in municipal elections, and the demographics of who votes, the total public support for affordable is probably even higher than voters’.

Angry opponents have the most influence on outcomes

Given these dynamics, from the perspective of decision makers there are two sets of people weighing in on every project:

• Very angry, very motivated opponents, who showed up to the meeting.
• Supporters who might not even exist, and who even if they do, don’t care enough about the project to bother showing up.

It may well be that 90% of people actually support the project, but how can decision makers know that? And if their support is that lukewarm, will canceling the project really make them that upset, or change how they vote? Will they even notice?

For a Councilor who wants to get reelected, the obvious incentive is to side with opponents.

And City staff can’t always continue projects if residents (or rather, a small minority of very vocal residents) and the Council oppose the projects strongly enough. So maybe they scale back the project, and maybe next time they have a similar idea or opportunity they won’t pursue it. Why invest time and effort in a project that will just get killed or compromised into ineffectiveness?

What can you do?

Because voting also matters, over time the City Council has passed ordinances that make meetings less influential in certain key areas. But even so, it’s quite common for pressure from these meetings to result in delays, worse outcomes, or outright cancellation of improvements. So voting and volunteering for better Council candidates can lead to better outcomes.

Outside of elections, part of what organized pressure groups do is ensure people show up to support improvements, so opponents aren’t the only ones there. Volunteering with one of these groups can also result in better outcomes.

But still, eventually it all devolves to people showing up to a meeting.

Next time you see a sign on a lamppost, or get an email from a newsletter, or hear from a friend about a meeting and you think “that project sounds nice”—please, show up to the meeting, and actually say that in person. If you want things to get better, you gotta show up.

A bit more

Songs of the day:

• (Whatever it is) I’m against it, performed by Jim Wake & Sleepwaker.
• The original version as sung by Groucho Marx in 1932; some things don’t change.
• The Ramones have a song with the same title, from 1978.