Grassroots approaches can counter NIMBY fears from development — Saint
By P. Michael Saint, CEO, The Saint Consulting Group
When you drill down into the heart of NIMBY fears about development, people are afraid that new development will adversely affect them. That emotion overcomes any facts given to them.
Developers think if they shout ‘jobs’ and ‘taxes’ loud enough it will overcome people that are afraid. There’s a disconnect there. The fear people feel becomes passion, which is easily translated into political action. It’s time to learn new approaches to prevent that chain reaction of opposition.
Developers need to realize it should be a political campaign. It’s not about facts, it’s about politics. Whether it’s London, England, London, Ontario, or London, Kentucky, people are going to decide based on the politics of the community.
The key is not to address the people in favor of a project — they seldom become active in their support — but to focus on opponents. If a PR firm gets a front-page article in the newspaper on how good the development will be, they think they have a victory. But in reality, it’s simply alerting the opponents to begin their fight against the project.
Grassroots opponents have become more sophisticated, using Internet campaigns and quickly organizing themselves into groups. The company needs to spend the shoe leather and go out into the neighborhoods. Get out and meet people to prevent them from organizing against you.
P. Michael Saint is founder and chairman of The Saint Consulting Group, email msaint@tscg.biz
One local developer said to join the neighborhood association.
“Infiltrate and tenderize” I think were his words.
“It’s not about facts, it’s about politics.”
Truer words have never been spoken. Kind of.
‘Perception is reality’ is the mantra I move oceans with.
I recently stopped a school rezoning. For fun.
I flooded the search engines with anti-rezoning content to the point where I controlled 90% of the results on page 1 in Google for “xyz rezoning”, though all on different websites. When a journalist, school board member or concerned citizen Googled for information, like they all do, they were immersed in virulently anti rezoning content.
They voted 9-3 in favor of delaying the rezoning a FULL YEAR for a review of school rezoning in the ENTIRE county.
It rocked the school board.
It was fun.