By Roland Murphy for AZBEX
Many times, the first issue of a new year will look back on notable changes and big wins of the last 12 months.
Unfortunately, there is one trend that’s casting enough of a shadow on the national and Arizona A/E/C landscape that, rather than indulging in a bit of retrospective whimsy, leads us to ask our readers to sharpen their focus: Opposition to development project is getting more entrenched, better funded, better organized and more broad, and the development community is not responding quickly enough to the change.
While evolution in the natural world is an exceptionally slow process, in the development and cultural world, lasting shifts can happen in a comparative instant.
It was only slightly more than five years ago that Village Property Management proposed redeveloping the struggling Lucky Plaza retail center at Hayden and Osborn roads in Scottsdale. It was a straightforward plan to replace a strip mall that was struggling to retain stores and customers with a modern 388-unit multifamily development called Greenbelt 88.
It was also one of the first non-master-planned developments to catch the eye and ire of organized opposition groups. Sure, the Southbridge 2.0 master plan was the genesis for organized opposition in Scottsdale (and, eventually, much of the rest of the state), eventually leading to a referendum and a sound defeat, but Greenbelt 88 was just a mid-sized street-corner redevelopment proposal that would previously have sailed through.
In the intervening years, opposition to new developments—particularly in multifamily and recently in data centers and associated industrial—has become the norm.
We refer to them by cute names like NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard), BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) and CAVEs (Citizens Against Virtually Everything), but the threat they pose to growth, revitalization and modernization is anything but cute. Even when they lose, they add months, sometimes years, to the review and approval process, compel changes that otherwise probably would not have been necessary and add exceptional cost increases to the entire process.
And the development community has failed to respond quickly enough or expansively enough to counter the threats.
The Nature of NIMBY
Having covered hundreds of projects and dozens of opposition statements, we’ve found the opponents generally fall into three broad categories.
The first type is fueled by nostalgia. These are the people who got their first kiss in 1967 in a long-gone orange orchard and have since seen the grove developed into a strip mall with their favorite restaurant and cannot bear the thought of it now becoming “cookie cutter” apartments.
They’re the ones who most commonly fall into the BANANAs category and oppose virtually any type of change. When the Baby Boomers get blamed for holding on too tightly to the past, this is the cohort people are talking about. They feel the modern world is moving too quickly, leaving them behind and sweeping away their memories and purpose. This is most often reflected in references to “neighborhood character” and “the special character of the community.”
Those items may have gone the way of the dodo by the time pavement on north-south streets moved north of Bell Road, but reality is slow to overtake romanticism.
The second type is those who have a good thing going at no cost to themselves and don’t want to see that changed. These are sometimes the people who moved into a new subdivision three years ago and are now opposing plans for the next phase because it will increase the density or spoil their views.
They are also the ones who enforce “neighborhood values” and don’t want to see homeowners replaced with renters. Renters may be a third of the population, and more than 90% of Arizona rental units built in the last decade may be in the top two tiers of development classes, but they’re still viewed as “those people,” as in, “We don’t want those people here.”
This completely disregards the fact that those people are the teachers, firefighters, business professionals and other leaders who make daily contributions to the community and who, when their circumstances allow, often buy their eventual homes in the same neighborhoods where they had previously rented.
These opponents are the people who allege before every commission and council meeting about a development proposal that rental properties decrease property values, cause excessive traffic and deplete water resources. In reality, multifamily of any development category increases the value of surrounding properties, generates markedly less traffic than retail and uses less water/SF than equivalent single-family.
One particularly troubling and egregious case currently making its way through the approval process is the redevelopment of Shalimar in Tempe. Shalimar Golf Course owners Jane Neuheisel and her family want to sell the property to BB Living and Cachet Homes for a Build-to-Rent and townhome project. She and her family have closed the golf course and plan to retire.
A vocal group of residents, however, views the golf course as an essential part of the neighborhood and treasures the fact that it buffers their community from the surrounding neighborhoods. They have formed the group Save Shalimar, which is exceptionally vocal. Their attempts to maintain this free-rider benefit have grown to the point of expansive and disparaging commentary in media outlets, government and neighborhood meetings, and, of course, across social media.
The final group is, perhaps, the most insidious: groups opposing developments to further their own businesses and personal agendas. We’ve reported on groups like labor union Unite Here and its political arm Worker Power (including in today’s issue), allegedly interfering (sometimes successfully) with multibillion-dollar projects if the owners do not agree to use union labor in the hotel and service components of their developments.
We need to add that not every plan and development is a well-thought-out positive contribution. An apartment complex should not go next to nightclub. A data center should establish how it will procure its water and power without depleting the community. Generally speaking, zoning exists for a reason, and community input is essential to building the best possible development and benefitting the area.
Our point is, zoning is frequently being weaponized, not against developments that would actually harm the community, but against congruent uses where modifications are generally within a reasonable degree of adjacency.
Developers Must Stop Fighting the Last War
There’s a military adage that says the current war is always fought with the previous war’s methods. That, unfortunately, is where much of the development and A/E/C community currently finds itself.
Developers are great at assembling development teams, managing applications and documentation and checking every box on the process form. While the Arizona Legislature has recently helped out with House Bill 2447, which moved key portions of some approvals to an administrative review without hearings and personal input—mandating a standard checklist instead—major portions, particularly rezoning, are still subject to the hearing and review process. As one former area city councilmember said, in that situation, facts don’t matter; you can check every box and still get denied.
The development and building community need to adapt. Fortunately, there are existing developments that can be used as a playbook.
Ikonic Multifamily, formerly referred to as Scottsdale and Bell Multifamily, didn’t just target the City of Phoenix approval process when the project was proposed. Located on the Scottsdale-Phoenix border, the 14-story project drew concern from local residents and officials. Developer The Hampton Group and the project representation team undertook a six-month public information and outreach campaign to inform the community about the project’s benefits, the area dynamics, the need for housing and density, and several other positives.
In the end, by the time the project came to the Paradise Village Planning Committee, it had garnered 21 written statements of opposition and 169 statements of support. Most of the supporting comments were form letters, but volume speaks volumes.
As reported in today’s issue, Banner Health is undertaking a similar approach for its proposed medical center in north Scottsdale.
This type of outreach and pavement pounding is essential, and it is under-used. It is also not nearly enough.
Given the entrenched and deepening nature of development fatigue and NIMBYism, developers and the building community need to take the offensive.
Very few neighborhoods are saturated with opposition. In many cases, there exists a silent majority who would like to see revitalization, growth and modernization. The NIMBYs, however, are so loud and so willing to engage that the silent majority is often cowed into silence.
Developers who want to see their projects move forward need to improve their outreach. This means more than the required neighborhood meeting notice, which only the opponents are likely to act on.
It means reaching out to the community at large with mailers, door-to-door canvassers, social media campaigns, and promotion of not just the project’s benefit to the community, but the developer’s benefit as well. Builders need to show they care about the issues affecting the average resident’s daily life—issues like affordability, access, choice and supply.
Then they need to make the ask to get residents involved. Committee and council meetings are long and boring. They can be hard to get to and harder to sit through, even for people with a stake in the outcome. Some cities have recently made public comments even more challenging to present.
Ask anyway. Explain why it matters. If you can’t get them to the planning committee, try for council. Plant the seed. Put a face to the corporate name. Keep trying.
If they can’t or won’t attend the meeting, ask them to call or send an email and provide them the committee or council members’ contact information. Add them to your email lists, then keep them informed about the specific project. Don’t spam them with general marketing messages. Stay focused.
To successfully manage all this, there should really be another member of the project team: A public relations and media representative with experience consulting on public outreach. Unlike a press release announcing a groundbreaking or ribbon-cutting, this can’t be handed off to your marketing intern or junior communications associate, and it shouldn’t be done in-house, as company employees may be too walled off to see the entire field.
Developers should find an outreach consultant that is willing to research, identify the real issues in an area, chart the demographics and tailor messaging to best fit the average resident.
Will this be cheap? No. Then again, developers are already paying tens-to-hundreds of thousands to the design and land-use teams, and they will pay tens of millions, at least, to procure the land and build the project. If paying +/-$50K to an expert that’s willing and able to do the work means the difference between building and scrapping the project, that’s an easy expense to pencil.