Henry Nieberg, MBA Candidate, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
The image of local politicians listening to and acknowledging the concerns of local residents sounds like the purest form of a democratic society. According to one study, 97% of local governments in the United States hold public hearings. I’d like to argue that public hearings do more harm than good for the development community.
Public hearings in the United States can be traced back to Puritan New England in the 17th century. Built at taxpayer expense, Puritan colonies quickly developed a method of town meetings to discuss and decide on community-specific matters. From the very beginning, these “public” meetings were closed to and often resulted in devastating outcomes for Native Americans, people of color, women, and other marginalized groups. The intention was to preserve local autonomy and allow those who had any semblance of power to retain it.
Over the past 400 years, the demographic makeup of public hearings hasn’t changed much. In a study from 2018, Katherine Levine Einstein, Maxwell Palmer, and David Glick conclude that “meeting participants are unrepresentative of the broader public…they are more likely to be older, male, longtime residents, voters in local elections, and homeowners”.
Homeowners fear that change in their neighborhoods can diminish their property values, a main source of wealth for Americans. Public hearings undoubtedly make development more expensive. There is more risk of the project actually coming to fruition (which developers then require a higher risk-adjusted return), and there are holding costs that can add millions of dollars to a project (e.g. attorney fees, paying taxes on the land, etc.).
My question for you today – is the ability from an unrepresentative, unelected sample of individuals to influence the built environment really a democratic process?