The Woundedness of the NIMBY

Geraldine Brooks and generational combat

This weekend, to my severe annoyance, the ex-journalist and Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks wrote a column in the Sydney Morning Herald decrying, somewhat bitterly, plans for improving the density of her inner-Sydney suburb of Balmain.

“Suddenly, we’re snobs and NIMBYs because our once-affordable cottages are now as out of reach as places in Rose Bay and Vaucluse were when we were young. It’s as if we somehow caused this, but all many of us did was simply stay put.

“It’s just one of the myths in the debate about the housing crisis: affluent Boomers are hogging the goodies. If I look at our street in Balmain, most of the occupants are now elderly people of modest means who have developed, over the decades, a network of connection and support for one another, a rare and valuable thing in a big city. They’re hardly greedy villains.”

Now, the YIMBY project is about addressing a deficiency of housing supply (and thus improving affordability), thoughtfully increasing the density of inner-city suburbs, and curtailing environmentally and socially destructive sprawl. But never mind. Here was that sense of woundedness familiar to anybody who’s watched wealthy, liberal Boomers, who have otherwise always possessed The Correct Political Opinions, encounter the anger of younger generations now priced out of property.

The sense of woundedness that’s aroused when they’re asked to perhaps relinquish something: in this case, their nostalgia and the concomitant resistance to even slightly improving the density of inner-city suburbs.

How could Brooks – this enlightened woman born of commoners who cares deeply about the environment and supports immigration – how could she be part of the problem? It’s absurd! Well, the answer, of course, is that collectively the entitled intransigence of the individual members of a generation made wealthy through property, and who now wish to fossilise their nicely gentrified little suburbs, are contributing to housing unaffordability.

Here’s a recent example of the kind of virulent NIMBYism that sickens me, and so many others of my generation. For those not from Melbourne, this group is objecting to a mixed-use six-story development on the major road of North Fitzroy, a suburb less than five kilometres from the CBD and whose density is little different from that of suburbs 50 kilometres from the CBD. They want a perpetually cute, leafy village – a village that’s a stone’s throw from the CBD in a city of more than five million people.   

“There’s not a scintilla of evidence that more nice flats in close-in suburbs, many with views, will push prices down,” Brooks writes.  

Not a scintilla of evidence? From a woman whose novels have been praised for the sharpness of their historical research, and as an ex-journalist presumably with some familiarity with fact-checking, this is emphatically and demonstrably wrong. In fact, it qualifies as misinformation – the same scourge that Brooks has denounced when it’s applied to climate change.  

So, here’s some evidence: from the RBA, from the Auckland precedent of upzoning, and here’s a neat, comprehensive collection of economic research. Oh, and here’s the Centre for Independent Studies’ submission last year to the senate inquiry into the rental crisis:

“A mountain of academic research finds zoning restricts supply, and this increases prices and rents. More specifically, researchers find: less building in jurisdictions with tight planning restrictions; more building when restrictions are eased; lower prices and rents when restrictions are eased; prices exceed marginal costs for both detached houses and apartments; substantial economic harm from zoning restrictions; and so on.”  

Having read Brooks’ piece, the Labor councillor for Leichhardt, Philippa Scott, tweeted:

“Ok fine I will say something about today’s Balmain article. The @smh should not print demonstrably false information like ‘there’s not a scintilla of evidence’ that increased urban supply will ‘push prices down’. The evidence is clear and overwhelming that it will. Their editors know this. I do not think they should publish articles – even in the opinion section – that contain this misinformation. You can have your own opinion, you don’t get your own facts.”

*

You wanna read something really irritating? Here’s Geraldine Brooks from her series of Boyer Lectures, delivered in 2011 on the theme of “home”: “I do know that my generation owes the generation that now is coming of age. I had been in the workforce for just about two years when I bought my first house, in the inner-Sydney suburb of Erskineville… It’s like a fairytale, that story, isn’t it?”

Yes, Ms. Brooks, it is. She goes on:

“I do know that it is implausible to imagine any young person being able to do it today. The fact that they can't inspires many feelings in me. Regret. Guilt. A certain shame at my generation's heedlessness—that those of us who had such opportunities haven’t felt the political will to demand them for the ones who’ve come after us. It’s not supposed to go that way, after all. The older generation is supposed to smooth the way for the younger. And we haven’t done that.”

Now, this personal admission by Brooks – made at no personal cost, mind you, nor with any suggestions for improvement – was offered nearly 15 years ago. Housing affordability has become worse since. Much worse. What else has changed? Well, Brooks has returned home to Sydney from Martha’s Vineyard, for one. And second, there has emerged an energetic and articulate YIMBY movement and a NSW government that seems to be listening. In 2011, Brooks could well clutch her pearls and lament the vanishing opportunities for younger generations.

But in 2024, it requires vastly fucking more than lamentation. Nonetheless, today it seems that Brooks has replaced those earlier feelings of guilt and regret with considerable defensiveness. “Suddenly, we’re snobs and NIMBYs… It’s as if we somehow caused this.”

It seems to have become personal for Brooks – and lofty, costless lamentations tend to evaporate when it’s your own skin by the fire. Wither the “younger generations” that were so badly neglected by the “heedlessness” of her peers?

Brooks, of course, is not personally responsible for the housing crisis. Her generation is not responsible for having simply bought a home. And no one is coming for your house. But collectively, a generation has conspired to contribute to the crisis. “Property – and those that owned it – defined so much of the national political instinct,” I wrote in 2022. “The biggest headlines, the loudest speeches, the most perverse tax concessions – they all ratified the property owner. Rental laws reflected this obsession: underpinning rental insecurity is the assumption that few would be renting for long. It’d be merely transitionary, they reckoned. Houses weren’t simply to be lived in, but leveraged, flipped, fetishised. They were never just homes, but the source of a vacant national obsession.”

I encounter Brooks’ type of defensiveness constantly – older folks, heavy with assets, who think they’re being individually blamed for the fact that no-one now under the age of 30 will be able to afford a home without serious family support/inheritance.

Dissolve your armour, folks. Your defensiveness is unpleasant and unhelpful. And in your case, Brooks, hypocritical. I thought nobility was found in considering your role in the greater cause? In being mindful of younger generations? As when you said about climate change: “We are, by any world yardstick, a rich society and a decent people. Right now, by some metrics, we are the richest people on the planet. Rich enough to expend some of that capital and decent enough to know it is the right thing to do, the right time to act.”

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t, from a great and comfortable distance, offer sermons about the diminishing returns of younger generations – and then cry foul when those generations upset you about the very things that once “shamed” you.

I cannot say this enough: Your memories, Boomers, are not everything. They are not Biblical. They are not perfect. And they should not be the Northern fucking Star for planning decisions when we are well into a crisis of generational alienation.

I write all this as someone for whom community (and architecture) means a lot. But for communities to exist, people need something to conserve. Like their own home. Like, not renting indefinitely and insecurely under arrangements designed under the outdated assumption that renting is short-term. I wrote about this here:

It doesn’t seem to occur to many that this inequity is a social, demographic and political time bomb. Just as decades have been blithely squandered on climate change, so too have decades been spent ratifying the status quo and intensifying the wealth of the comfortable… In 2016, Donald Trump promised to be a bomb – and enough were willing to throw him. Do you think resentment always expresses itself neatly? Rationally? The aggrieved and forgotten will exercise their agency somehow, and in ways that the Australian Complacency is incapable of imagining. Another consideration is demographic: a Monash University study of youth attitudes found increasing numbers saying it was unlikely they’ll have children. “Unsurprisingly, young people see a stable home and financial independence as prerequisites for having a family – both of which seem increasingly unattainable for many in the current employment and housing market,” it found.

But I’ll leave the last words to Brooks, again from her 2011 Boyer Lectures:

“It was my great good fortune to have come of age in an Australia that extended to its children the freedom to dream those large, unfettered dreams. Yet my generation seems to be okay with tying down our own children, binding them up in a web of future debt.”

And, saliently:

“In dictionaries, definitions of ‘home’ are various. It is both ‘a place of origin, a starting position’ and ‘a goal or destination’. It may also be ‘an environment offering security and happiness’ or ‘the place where something is discovered, founded, developed or promoted. A source.’”

Amen.