Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 2
·
November 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
3
A Paper Tiger on Chestnut Lane:
The Significance of NIMBY Battles in Decaying Communities
John C. Kilburn
Stephen E. Costanza
Texas A&M International University
University of South Alabama
Kelly Frailing
Stephanie Diaz
Texas A&M International University
University of Cincinnati
This article details a New England community’s struggle over a halfway house placement. Through our
interviews with community members, we found that they are prone to experience sharp feelings of moral
cynicism and, to a lesser degree, feelings of fear and loathing toward halfway house residents. We also note how
political figures sometimes use community residents’ fear of the halfway houses and its inhabitants as a platform
to commandeer political discourse. Our conclusions discuss how NIMBY (‘not in my backyard’) battles present
important opportunities for communities in decline to control symbolically their own neighbourhoods.
Keywords
: Corrections, Halfway House, Housing, NIMBY, Rehabilitation.
Introduction:
Social ecology (Park 1926) is a school of thought that emphasizes how certain manifest
neighbourhood conditions (that is, broken windows, boarded up housing, and so on) coalesce
to form predictable patterns of human interaction. This theory suggests that neighbourhoods
in decay experience an economic downturn, a spiralling decay in quality of life including
heightened crime and victimization rates. Such neighbourhoods are commonly
disenfranchised, having limited control over the actions of other neighbourhood residents,
politicians and the police (Kaylen and Pridemore 2013). Criminologists have shown there are
myriad certain characteristics that manifest within such neighbourhoods. These include, but
are not limited to abandoned housing, boarded up windows, graffiti, and open-air drug
markets (Porter, Rader and Cossman 2012). Such neighbourhoods in decline are often viewed
as society’s ‘dumping grounds’, making suitable zones for locating undesirable facilities
(Costanza, Kilburn and Vendetti-Koski 2013; Snowden and Pridemore 2013). Among the
forms of undesirable facilities that can be placed in the neighbourhood are bars, mental health
clinics, strip clubs and correctional facilities, such as jails or halfway houses.
While social ecology often uses aggregate conditions to explain neighbourhood
deterioration, it seldom describes the shared experience of these people and their ‘feelings’
about their circumstances (Bruinsma, Pauwels, Weerman and Bernasco 2013). Much of this is
due to the fact that social ecology was developed as an aggregate level theory to explain
expanding crime victimization rates. Over many years, the trend in criminology has been to
show that aggregate conditions associated with certain neighbourhoods is a predictor of
conditions that influence crime, without taking behaviours of individuals into regard. Many
aggregate level theorists recoil from committing the ‘ecological fallacy’, which refers to a
mistake made when aggregate level conditions are used to describe individual behaviour
(Kramer 1983).
