God and NIMBYism
The writer of Psalm 138 describes a paradox in the nature of God. Verse six states: “For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly, but the haughty he perceives from far away.” God is great and powerful, but God looks at the lowly, being less concerned with the mighty among humanity. Though the haughty are closer to God in power and the respect they command from their fellow men, God looks first to the weak. God shows love and care to those that the world forgets.
We are probably all well aware of the current housing problem. There are various views on how we have arrived in our current situation, but we have seen housing prices rising far beyond what many people can reasonably pay. Many young people are living with their parents into their mid and late twenties simply because they cannot afford to buy a home or even pay rent in some places, even with full time employment. Some will say that this is the result of government meddling in the economy. Others will say that this arises from massive companies buying property and increasing rent for the sake of increasing their profits. We could spend time discussing whether corporate greed or government interference is a more likely cause, and I will briefly mention Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Black Rock, the world’s largest private equity firm. Black Rock has spent millions of dollars buying homes in order to rent them out to people, among other major financial projects. As a result, Schwarzman saw a spike in his net worth during the pandemic, climbing to 34.8 billion dollars in 2022. Obviously that value isn’t only from corporately owning tens of thousands of houses that could otherwise be owned by families, but it is part of it. But for now, I want to focus less on the cause of the problem, and more on its solution.
If people cannot afford houses, the easiest solution would seem to be a commitment by communities to provide more affordable housing for people. Cities could build more apartments and houses, grant land for development specifically to non-profits who are dedicated to affordable housing rather than for-profit corporate developers and landlords, or enforce price controls on rent, so that landlords couldn’t charge so much that people are unable to afford to save any money. However, whenever cities try to adopt some of these solutions, city planners run into a recurring problem: NIMBYism.
NIMBY stands for “Not in my backyard.” In this context, it refers to people who theoretically believe in development, but they simply don’t want it to be near them. Imagine an upper middle class suburban neighborhood: hundreds of identical houses, small trees, horribly confusing streets that don’t follow any semblance of a grid system, tall privacy fences, shielding mostly white people from their neighbors, and a homeowners association making sure all the lawns look exactly the same. Now, imagine that the city wants to put five low-rent apartment buildings just outside this suburb. The people living in the neighborhood are furious, and we can probably sympathize with at least one of their arguments.
“I paid a lot of money for this house and I take good care of it. If the city starts putting low-rent housing in here, the quality of the neighborhood will decline and the property value will either go down or at least will no longer rise with the rate of inflation. I will lose money on my property, which is supposed to be the safest investment.”
That would be a truly unfortunate scenario, and we could feel for the suburbanites in that case. We can understand why they wouldn’t want these new rental properties in their “backyard” so to speak. Of course, then we are comparing the loss of property value for one person up against the threat of homelessness or a life of expensive renting trapping someone with such high living costs that they can never save for a down payment on a house of their own. It doesn’t seem like a fair comparison. Maybe we should be okay with losing some property value if it means people have more hope of escaping poverty. But there are other reasons that aren’t quite as tolerable.
“We all know what kind of people low-rent housing draws. I am uncomfortable with them being here. I will feel like the neighborhood and even the school are less safe with them here. They will make the neighborhood dirty and dangerous.”
Now, if you perceived some racist undertones in that hypothetical argument, I don’t blame you. Not everyone who opposes development in their neighborhoods is racist, but some undoubtedly are. And even if they aren’t intending something as racist, it could still have racist outcomes. There is a history of inequality in development. If a new freeway needs to be built in a city or a new city dump site must be designated, these projects almost always go through the neighborhoods of the poor and racial minorities before they go through wealthy white suburbs. Obviously, not everyone in power is going out of their way to bully minority communities, but when choices must be made, the groups with more political power to put their hand on the scale in an election tend to be favored by politicians.
And if you have political power, why not use it? Sure, solar panels are good for the environment, but if you can keep a bunch of ugly solar farms from going up near you, of course you would do it. Sure, if the old state penitentiary isn’t doing its job anymore, a new prison must be built, but nobody wants it to be close to them. And nobody in a wealthy suburb wants a bunch of people who can hardly afford to pay $600 a month in rent, people who may have been formerly homeless, to suddenly become their neighbors. They don’t want to see those people. This isn’t to say that they don’t care about them as humans. They don’t want them to die or cease to be on this earth. They want them to have homes, safety, shelter, so they can put their lives back together. They just don’t want them to do it anywhere near their own homes.
In humans, we see a tendency for the haughty to exclusively associate with one another. They don’t want to see the lowly. They don’t want to regard the poor and marginalized. They don’t want to see drug addicts and ex-convicts. They hope they get the help they need, but they don’t want to see it themselves. That world is gross and distressing. We don’t want to be confronted with the discomfort we feel when we see the poor among us.
God rejects this. God looks upon the weak, undeterred by the misery and hardship to be seen there. God bears the pain and perhaps even the blame, when humans curse God for the cruelty of other humans. God doesn’t turn away from the problem. God is present in the midst of hardship and suffering. When we push away the world, saying that we believe in positive development for the sake of housing and other needs, but we just don’t want to see it near us, we are rejecting God’s method of being present in the midst of suffering. I’m not suggesting that when we engage in NIMBYism we are pushing God away, and God is certainly still present in the suburbs. However, if we continue to turn our faces away from where God is at work, we only have ourselves to blame when our spirits aren’t blessed with opportunities to see God doing that work.
