A small group of Housing Matters volunteers has begun regularly attending public meetings throughout the city. Since our inaugural outing to the 18 Brownlow public meeting, we’ve averaged four per week.

This has exposed us to a significant variety of experiences, from those meetings dominated by an angry mob mentality to those that are generally sympathetic to the proposed development, if not for some minor concerns. Through these experiences, we’ve also managed to recognize some patterns in terms of recurring concerns and identifiable NIMBY rabble-rousers.

It’s also lead us to the joint realizations that a) NIMBYs dominate these meetings, and b) the battle for more housing in Toronto can not be won by circumventing, but by converting, them.

To the first point, as the costs of new projects (shadow impacts, transit crowding, etc.) are local and benefits (downward pressure on prices, etc.) regional, the process itself is significantly skewed to overweight the former. Consider that all neighbours within a given distance of a proposed development site are notified of the public meeting but that its potential future residents are not.

It’s no wonder that housing availability and affordability in Toronto is as bad as it is.

To the second point, we’ve found that, when we manage to ask our questions or make our comments first, they act to shape a lot of the subsequent discussion. This is significant, and can really shift the mood in the room for the better.

We’ve also experienced situations in which, even with an extraordinarily antagonistic crowd, once we’ve said our piece, other attendees, including members of the local residents’ associations, have come up to us to quietly — secretly — voice their support for our position.

This has lead us to suspect that many of these communities are not as NIMBY as the most vocal among them would like us to think. The marginal NIMBYs, as we call them, are often only occupying that position in solidarity with their neighbours, who are themselves only occupying that position due to pressure from the residents’ associations’ leadership.

To be clear, this is not to say that NIMBYism is not a big problem in our city. It really is. But it’s not an insurmountable one.

To tilt some of these marginal NIMBYs over to our side, we are launching a campaign that we’re calling “Neighbours for More Neighbours”. It will be explicitly targeted to established homeowners, traditionally the residents’ associations’ base, and have as a goal to help them understand the link between local opposition to new housing and our regional housing availability and affordability crisis.

It’s a three legged campaign.

First, we will continue attending these public meetings, making our case, and elaborating on our position for anybody willing to listen.

Second, we will be distributing these door hangers (below), appealing to established homeowners’ best selves, and asking them to get in touch with us to, again, allow us to elaborate on our position.

Third, we will be reaching out to residents’ associations and asking to meet, to, again, allow us to elaborate on our position.

In short, we know their arguments. We’ve heard them repeated hundreds, if not thousands, of times. But, for the most part, they don’t know ours, and might be open to accepting some of them if they could be made effectively and compassionately.

This campaign is about opening lines of communication to win hearts and minds. We don’t think that it will be a sufficient step to solve the housing problem, but that it is a necessary one.

If you are willing and able to help out, please reach out to me directly at chris@torontohousingmatters.com. Together, we might just be able to shift the conversation around new housing from NIMBY to YIMBY.