Placer County overcomes NIMBY opposition to lower cost housing

Placer County needed resident input to determine if opposition to its new housing plan was representative of the overall community.

The county hoped to address a housing shortage that was impacting the local economy and making it hard for people to buy homes.

Past plans to build smaller and cheaper housing had been strongly opposed by outspoken NIMBY opposition. The county hoped for support but the people who self-selected themselves to participate in public meetings and unscientific surveys created the impression that an anti-housing sentiment was representative of the overall community.

Instead of doing more meetings and online forums and hearing from the same organized voices, the county needed to collect public input in a way that represented the public. They hoped that they would find the broad community support needed to pass a housing plan and pave the way for improvements in the overall housing supply.

Feedback gathered using scientific surveys proved instead that the community overwhelmingly supported building new housing.

County elected officials regularly heard and saw the input from NIMBY opposition so they naturally assumed that was what the whole community thought.

But data from a series of quick scientific surveys created by FlashVote surprised them by proving this was wrong.

Public support for statements like “Placer County should remove barriers to building smaller and less expensive housing units” was 3 to 1. The community supported the idea that “The range of housing costs in Placer County should match the range of people’s incomes” by 4 to 1.

The dominant noise from the opposition was not representative at all. The community overwhelmingly supported building smaller and cheaper housing.

FlashVote’s data filters also allowed the county to view responses by owner/renter, age, gender, and resident/non-resident. With these features, the surveys provide the full decision support to understand the problem and what to do about it. The data enabled the county to create a housing plan that solved real problems with the confidence that it had the support of its constituents.

Shawna Purvines, Placer County’s Principal Planner in charge of the project spoke to the success of this project by saying, “It’s been a really great experience working with FlashVote.”