The traditional narrative when it comes to NIMBYs is that these are individuals acting out of self-interest. Quintessentially, these are people who own their home and do not want development "in their backyard" out of fear that it might negatively impact the value of their property and/or have a negative impact on their local community.
But in reality, anti-development sentiment is likely more nuanced than this. In a recent working paper called "The Symbolic Politics of Housing," researchers at UC, Berkeley and UC, Davis show that anti-development sentiment is not always just about self-interest; rather, it can be predicted by how people feel about certain "salient symbols."
This is based on something called "symbolic politics theory" and it works like this: We all have positive and negative associations with certain "symbols." Often these are developed early in life. And so how we might feel about a development or a particular land use policy, depends on the symbols attached to it and whether we like them.
Here's an example.
Consider two identical apartment developments happening in your neighborhood. The first is being developed by faceless "Wall Street investors" and the second is being developed by a nice local entrepreneur who also happens to be of the exact same ethno-cultural group as you.
If you don't like people on Wall Street and you don't want them profiting from the development, the research suggests that you are more likely to oppose the first development, even though it's the same as the second one, and maybe even if it runs counter, in some way, to your own self-interest. You just don't like the symbol attached to it.
This is also why people who live in cities tend to be more pro-development on average. It reinforces symbols that they already like; ones associated with cities, density, and urban living. This is fascinating, but it also complicates matters. Because it means that strong opinions are not just being formed based on measurable impacts. It's also a question of symbols and feelings.
Today was a historic day for Toronto, for Canada, and for the game of basketball in this country. The Toronto Raptors are world champions for the first time since their founding in 1995. Soak it in. Here is a photo that I took of the parade coming through the Financial District at around 2:30pm:
this research paper
looking at the effect of high-tech clusters on productivity and innovation. (I am unclear if there is any relationship to the Italian brewing company Birra Moretti.)
One of the things he looks at in the paper is the decline of Kodak. Headquartered in Rochester, New York, Kodak famously missed the transition to digital photography. And so by the late 1990s, they were forced to start letting people go. The result was an almost 50% decline in the size of the entire "high-tech cluster" in Rochester.
But what Moretti goes on to test in his paper is the impact that this employment decline had on productivity and innovation outside of Kodak and outside of the photography sector (but within Rochester). And what he found was that between 1996 and 2007, the productivity of non-Kodak inventors dropped by about 20%!
This, of course, is one of the great features of cities. Even if you're not working at some big company with lots of smart people, just being in the same city, on the same block, or within the same office building, can make you more productive. It turns out that business ecosystems are pretty interconnected. Spillovers are important.
For more on this topic, check out this recent Wired article by Viviane Callier. In it she makes the case that remote work is going to negatively impact productivity and innovation over the long run.
Some of the estimates going around are that 1 to 2 million people attended today's championship parade. But 2 million seems like a lot, even though today was frenetic (see above photo, again). I mean, that's 1/3 of the population of the Greater Toronto Area.
The fact that some of the "official" estimates also have a 1 million person spread tells me that, as of right now, we actually have no idea how many people were at today's parade.
So that got me thinking: How do people count crowds? And are we using drones to do it, yet? Subway and rail ridership for the day -- which surely spiked -- will give us some indication. But definitely not the full picture.
It turns out that the typical approach to counting crowds is known as Jacobs' Method. It was invented in the 1960s by a professor at UC, Berkeley, named Herbert Jacobs. He came up with the method while trying to count the number of students protesting the Vietnam War.
The concept is simple: It's area x density. And permutations of his method usually use this same principle. What you do is take the area filled with people, break it up into a smaller grid, and then come up with a population density estimate for each square.
He had some rules of thumb for that. A light crowd was about 1 person per 10 square feet. And a dense crowd (such as a mosh pit or an NBA championship parade in Toronto) was about 1 person per 2.5 square feet.
Using this method and aerial photos of today's parade, I would imagine that we could eventually get to a more precise estimate than 1 to 2 million people. But surely somebody has figured out how to program a drone (or other UAV) and do this even more accurately.
Crowd data is valuable information, particularly for political rallies and protests (I would imagine). If you know of a company doing this, please leave it in the comment section below. And if it doesn't yet exist, well then, now you have a new business idea.
