Debunking the Top NIMBY Myths in Idaho Housing Debates

By Daniel Malarkey and Joe Jaszewski

Sit through enough public hearings on new housing in Idaho and you'll hear the same five objections. Traffic will get worse. Property values will drop. New housing will bring more crime. This isn't what the neighborhood looks like. The infrastructure can't handle it. Each one gets repeated so often it starts to sound like settled fact. Here's what the research actually shows.

Myth 1: New housing drops property values.

NYU's Furman Center reviewed the full body of recent research on housing supply and prices. Their conclusion: building more housing slows rent growth regionally, and in some cases reduces rents in the immediate surrounding area too. The researchers found no evidence that new construction causes the kind of neighborhood decline opponents predict. (NYU Furman Center, 2024) It's worth being clear about what the fear is here. It's not that residents think supply and demand will somehow work in reverse. The worry is that new housing will make the neighborhood a less desirable place to live, and that home values will drop for that reason. That's a different claim, and it's the one the research above speaks to directly: it hasn't held up.

Myth 2: Density brings more crime.

A GIS-based study of Irving, Texas mapped crime rates against housing density and land use patterns. The researchers found no consistent link between higher density and higher crime. Some of the city's densest, most multifamily-heavy areas had lower crime rates than surrounding single-family neighborhoods. What actually predicted crime was socioeconomic status, not how many units sat on a block. (ESRI Proceedings) This isn't a one-off finding. A block-level study of Chicago using the city's 1923 zoning code found that higher residential density lowers per-capita crime, and that dense, mixed-use blocks end up safer than typical single-use residential blocks (Twinam, 2017, Journal of Urban Economics). And when it comes to adding subsidized multifamily housing specifically, the evidence points the same direction: new LIHTC developments built in low-income neighborhoods reduced both violent and property crime nearby, while pushing up surrounding home values by about 6.5% (Diamond & McQuade, 2019, Journal of Political Economy).

Myth 3: This isn't what the neighborhood looks like.

Every Idaho city already contains the housing types people say don't belong, usually a few blocks over. Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies has documented how duplexes, triplexes, and cottage courts can match the scale, height, and setback of a single-family block closely enough that most people walking past wouldn't clock the difference in unit count. (Harvard JCHS)

It's also worth remembering that no neighborhood has looked the same forever. Every subdivision in Idaho was a farm or an open field before it was a neighborhood. Boise's densest, most walkable blocks weren't always dense. Neighborhoods have always changed to meet the needs of the people living in them, and letting that continue isn't a loss, it's normal. The alternative, freezing a neighborhood in place exactly as it looks today, isn't neutral either. It's a choice, and the cost of that choice is that fewer ordinary people can afford to live there. Nothing guarantees any of us that our neighborhood looks the same in twenty years. The only question is whether it changes in a way that keeps room for the next generation of Idahoans, or only for the people who already own a house there.

Myth 4: The infrastructure can't handle more housing.

New research backed by the Pew Charitable Trusts, led by the World Resources Institute and ECOnorthwest, compared the cost of building homes near existing jobs, stores, and transit against building on the urban fringe. Capacity constraints are sometimes binding, but the property tax cap leaves cities little room to fund maintenance and upgrades, which is an even stronger argument for infill. Homes in already-developed areas pay back their infrastructure costs through property taxes in nine years on average. Homes built on the fringe take thirteen years, because roads, water lines, and sewer connections have to be built from scratch instead of reused. Adding housing where infrastructure already exists is the cheaper option, not the riskier one. (Pew Charitable Trusts, 2026) Research also shows that middle and smaller housing types cause much less strain on infrastructure systems. (Flush the Fear, 2026)

In practice, "infrastructure" is rarely about sewer capacity or water pressure. It's shorthand for a different worry: more cars on the street. That's a concern, but it's an argument for building out better transit and street design, not for blocking new homes. Same as with traffic in Myth 5: the housing gets built somewhere. The question is whether it gets built where infrastructure already exists and can be improved, or on the fringe where it has to be built from scratch.

Myth 5: Blocking new housing prevents traffic.

Idaho’s growth comes from people moving here, not from permits. Deny the duplex and the family doesn’t vanish — they buy on the fringe and drive through the same intersections, further, every day. Blocking infill doesn’t reduce trips; it relocates the homes and lengthens the drives.

Researchers Guang Tian, Keunhyun Park, and Reid Ewing studied household travel data across 30 U.S. regions and found that vehicle trips per household drop as neighborhood development gets more compact. Single-family homes in spread-out, car-dependent settings generate far more daily trips than the same number of homes built at higher density near shops and services. Compact infill adds less traffic per home than the sprawl alternative. (Urban Studies, 2019)

The bigger issue is how cities measure traffic in the first place. A UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies review found that traffic impact analyses, the standard tool cities use to evaluate new development, tend to bias against dense urban housing precisely where car alternatives are most available. That bias discourages the kind of infill housing that would reduce driving overall. (UCLA ITS)

None of this means new homes add zero trips. They add some, and neighbors are right to notice. But cities can manage cars with signal timing, intersection upgrades, parking policy. What cities cannot do is zone their way out of a housing shortage: block the homes and the traffic still arrives, attached to longer drives.

Why the loudest voices in the room don't reflect the city.

Political scientists Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick, and Maxwell Palmer coded thousands of instances of residents speaking at planning and zoning meetings across 97 Massachusetts communities. The people who show up skew older, skew toward longtime homeowners, and oppose new housing at far higher rates than the general public. Renters and future neighbors, the people most affected by a housing shortage, rarely show up, because they don't live there yet. (Perspectives on Politics, 2019)

That matters because Idaho's Local Land Use Planning Act treats many of these hearings as quasi-judicial proceedings, not popularity contests. When a project meets the standards already written into a city's comprehensive plan and code, officials answer to a due process framework. Decisions rest on the evidence in the record and on whether the application meets adopted, objective standards, not on how many objectors show up. A packed room of unhappy neighbors is not, on its own, grounds for denial. Idaho courts have pushed back repeatedly on decisions that ignored this distinction.

Well-attended hearings aren't always the solution, because it's a hard paradigm to maintain. Instead, clear rules set in advance allow for more predictability for developers and the community. That's why we advocate for by-right zoning, where a use is simply permitted once it meets clear, upfront standards, works better than a conditional use permit process for the housing types Idaho needs more of: duplexes, townhomes, starter homes. A conditional use permit just adds a layer of review. It does damage long before a shovel hits the ground. It costs money and time for anyone trying to build. It blocks accurate land valuation, because nobody can be sure what will get approved. It causes buildable sites to get passed over early, because predictability is worth more to a builder than a maybe. It forces applicants to disclose confidential business plans just to get in the door for a hearing that might not go their way. And it stops feasibility studies from ever getting finished, which kills projects that never even make it to a public hearing.

None of this means neighbors don't matter or that public input should disappear. It means cities get better outcomes, and more of the housing their own comprehensive plans call for, when the rules are clear and objective before an application gets filed, instead of negotiated on the spot by whoever happens to be in the room that night.

As citizens, we have seen the same pattern play out at City Halls across the state. A project comes in that matches what the Comprehensive Plan already calls for, and it would still get buried under months of hearings, redesigns, and objections from a handful of the same voices. We weren't planners or developers. We were residents who want more of our neighbors to be able to afford to stay in Idaho, and we get tired of watching good projects die by a thousand cuts in rooms that didn't reflect the city outside them. That's what pushes us to organize and to support zoning code updates: not because we didn't trust our neighbors, but because we have seen too many hearings decided by whoever had the time to show up on a Tuesday night, rather than by whether a project fit the rules the city had already written for itself.

Idaho cities that get ahead of this, by cleaning up their codes and moving the right housing types to by-right approval now, will spend a lot less time relitigating the same five myths one hearing at a time.