Property Rights vs. NIMBY

"I can do what I want with my own land" vs. "Not in my backyard."

It all goes back to biology.   Humans are a social animal, but only partially so.  We cooperate with other humans, but also compete with them for status and advantage.  We are somewhat willing to work for the good of the whole, but are simultaneously selfish.   This behavior is somewhat hard-wired into our DNA, but it is also an artifact of culture, so there is lots of variation among individuals and groups.

Team effort all the way.

There are much more thorough social animals.  Honeybees and ants are team players all the way, and worker bees, drones, queens all know their place.  It is hard wired into their DNA.  There are no prisons or civil wars inside a hive.

Humans are not bees.

Our lives are a constant reminder of our partially-social animal status, if we take note of the things that are so obvious as to be invisible:

    I have my own house, and I lock the door of my house when I leave it, but the postman comes up to the door to drop off mail.

    There are traffic signals on the roads coordinating traffic, which most people obey, most of the time, without apparent supervisions from authority figures, except some do not, which is why there are police patrols.

    I have my own house, and there are empty bedrooms, but I do not share them with the homeless, although they need the room.

    I am encouraged to make gifts to charities, and I do so, but I keep most of my money for myself.

    I get water for my house from a municipal system, but the system turns off the water if I do not pay them.

    I participate in an American culture that generally has a shared religious ideology--Judeo Christian Americanism--but it is splintered into dozens of sects which disagree with each other, sometimes violently.

I observed it most directly in the past 24 hours in the issue of personal freedom regarding personal territory (i.e. real estate) in conflict with the desire that neighbors sacrifice in the interests of others.   

Yesterday's post related the conflict between two neighbors, one neighbor in whose interest it would be to site a quarter acre of marijuana on his property, versus another neighbor who does not want to look at or smell marijuana growing on his neighbor's property.   The complaining neighbor asserted that a marijuana grow site changes the serenity and nature of the neighborhood.   Meanwhile, that complaining neighbor expressed an interest in building a new residence on his own land near the objectionable marijuana grow site, thus generally making farming activity for himself and others in that general area with its attendant smells, dust, noise, and activity (including animals and marijuana) that much more difficult.

Lots of opportunity for conflicting interests.

A second person who had questioned the issues raised in yesterday's post told me that she had twelve acres of pear trees on rural farmland.  She faced the usual conflicts between individual freedom and shared uses.  She used water from an Irrigation District (without which orchards would be impossible in this area) but she stored the water in her own irrigation pond for use at her convenience, which was in fact to the advantage to other water users in her District, but which violated the inflexible rules of the district.   

She also believes that her own land's EFU zoning was absolutely unfair to her.  She lost her choices on how to divide her land, saying it would be much better for her to be able to divide her property into smaller parcels both to accommodate a division of her estate and to sell pieces for profit now, if she chose to.   She lost her freedom to choose, she said.   EFU zoning for her was taking something valuable from her, the ability to divide her land into small homesites.  I asked if she would be happy if a neighbor of hers, perhaps upstream on the irrigation ditch,  divided his property, creating small lots of neighbors complaining about her wind machines for frost protection, and her position switched.  That would destroy her ability to farm, she said.

Not In My Back Yard.  There has been a massive growth of NIMBY-ism in southern Oregon in the past 35 years.  Three decades ago land use conflicts had a pattern:  a landowner would want to do something and the local government would apply rules which might or might not constrain him.   It was person vs. government.

People want affordable housing, just not near themselves

Now it is different.  NIMBY is the rule now.  If a landowner wants to do something his neighbors rise up in protest. They complain it will change the view. It will bring too much density.  It will change the traffic.  It will bring in poor people or bad people or strange people.  Government is still present to apply rules, but it is now an adjudication of conflicting interests of two parties, neighbor vs. neighbor.  

Landowners generally consider that "their" property now includes an expanded curtilage, an area that goes out well beyond ones own property lines to include the general circumstance of the area, particularly if they can see the area being changed.  People now assert a property right to an existing view.   Except, simultaneously, they consider their own deeded property to be theirs and theirs alone, to do with what they want.

City and county zoning rules attempt to set out guidelines which alert everyone to the rules under which the interests of one party prevails over another.  The ideal situation for any one person is to be purely selfish, but to live in an environment where everyone else is very considerate of others.   

Bees don't feel that way, but humans do.  

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Thanks to Ed Cooper for the blog comment yesterday which raised this point on NIMBY:

"As a retired real estate broker, I have to laugh at the NIMBY people who 25 years ago were screeching about not having the ability to do with their land as they saw fit, and how dare people like Peter Sage tell them otherwise. Thank you, Peter, for all you did then, and for all you do now. Most of the folks bitching about EFU owners actually farming, would bitch if you were to hang them with a new rope."