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Charles G. Field
America has made significant progress toward meeting affordable housing needs, yet developers and other providers of such housing increasingly face resistance and hostility to their projects. Community opposition to affordable housing development-or NIMBYism (Not in My Backyard)-has become a major consideration that developers and community leaders must consider in planning such projects.
Taking the necessary steps to make housing affordable attracts the attention of a wide range of parties that often have competing interests. Some of the more visible groups are members of the housing industry, who traditionally work together to produce housing; local citizens' groups, whose interests reflect diverse concerns about neighborhood quality, neighborhood stability, the environment, the property tax burden, traffic congestion, and crime; religious, civil rights, labor, or local advocacy groups, who promote the housing interests of low- and moderate-income families; employers, who need accessible, affordable housing for their workforce; elected officials and administrators, who need to deal with the politics of affordable housing; and nonresidents, who would move into the community if housing were available at a price they could afford.
Bringing together these diverse-and often hostile-interests has become a major challenge in securing approvals for affordable housing. If progress toward affordable housing is to be made, proponents must recast the way they operate in this environment. New financing plans or recommendations for regulatory relief are not enough-attention must also focus on the processes by which groups address divergent interests and come to agreement. "Principled negotiation," a form of joint problem solving, when coupled with third-party intervention, offers a promising and effective means of dealing with this hostile environment.
The Joint Problem Solving Process
Joint problem solving is a process that recognizes that each party has its own set of interests or needs that must be satisfied to reach an agreement. Instead of denying the other party's interests, joint problem solving encourages each party to define its real needs, to accept the real needs of other parties in order to allow the exploration of options that can embrace both sets of needs, and to move toward mutually satisfactory solutions.
"Principled negotiation" offers a practical and conceptually useful approach to joint problem solving. Principal developers and proponents of this approach are Roger Fisher, William Ury, and their colleagues at the Harvard Program on Negotiation. This school of principled negotiation has grown out of the analysis of vexing international disputes in such settings as the Middle East and South Africa, where these techniques were used to reach agreement. This approach to negotiation has also been widely applied to conflicts ranging from business disagreements to environmental land disputes. So far it has been applied only on a limited basis to community and housing disputes, but there are examples of such use that suggest it is a promising vehicle for resolving these disagreements.
Principled negotiation can be described as a seven-element framework for joint problem solving. The elements are: interests, options, legitimacy, communication, relationships, commitment, and alternatives.
Central to effective joint problem solving is the process of making explicit the parties' interests, developing a broad range of options for action, and agreeing to standards of legitimacy. Interests are the needs, aspirations, fears, and desires that motivate behavior. Options are possible actions that parties can take together to satisfy their interests. Legitimacy is the search for objective standards to which each party can subscribe as producing fair results when used to evaluate the options.
The ability of the parties to discuss their interests, identify options, and select standards of legitimacy will be shaped by their communication with one another and the way they handle their relationships. Communication often breaks down because the parties do not feel that their interests are being understood or considered. Communication also fails when parties make assumptions without questioning-such as assumptions that lower-income families will bring crime and drugs along with them or that affordable housing will reduce neighborhood housing values and cause taxes to go up in response to the perceived need for municipal services. These barriers to communication can be overcome through "active listening" techniques that are part of the process of joint problem solving.
The parties can exit from the negotiation in one of two ways. They can reach a commitment (agreement) as to actions that satisfy their respective interests. Or they can walk away from each other because they can pursue an alternative course of action that better satisfies their interests. Principled negotiation does not guarantee an agreement. It does move the parties to address real interests and issues, to evaluate a range of options in terms of their benefits and costs, and to deal with the interaction between the parties. The use of a third party as a facilitator or mediator may be helpful in guiding the dialogue between the parties and getting past impasses.
Some Examples of the Use of Joint Problem Solving for Affordable Housing
In Norfolk, NE, a city administrator who was a graduate of the Harvard Program on Negotiation applied joint problem solving techniques to local challenges. Using this framework, Norfolk reorganized city agencies, resolved zoning variance requests, and created an affordable housing zone in part of the city. A significant conclusion reached by Norfolk parties was that the process legitimatized the governance process. City and private interests expressed satisfaction that they were being treated fairly during the problem-solving process. According to the city administrator, the use of principled negotiation "has completely revolutionized the way we do everything…"
In the Hartford, CT, metropolitan region, joint problem solving was used to reach a fair-share agreement for affordable housing among 29 jurisdictions. Using principled negotiation techniques with a third party mediator, the parties reached an agreement that, over a five-year period, fully achieved its affordable housing goals. The successful collaboration has also led to development of a more permanent regional housing policy.
Recommendations
Groups in conflict tend to view matters in an adversarial framework; they often think that their best options are litigation or seeking intervention by governmental bodies as a means of stopping projects. Principled negotiation has emerged as a promising vehicle to resolve conflicts and get on with the business of providing affordable housing. Analysis of the successful use of joint problem solving suggests six recommendations:
We need to throw away old notions that process is not important or that we can make up process as we go along. Process is as important as substance for achieving results. Both are necessary and sufficient for moving forward on America's agenda for affordable housing.
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Charles G. Field is staff vice president and regulatory counsel, National Association of Home Builders, and teaches conflict resolution at the University of Maryland. This article is based on Field's article "Building Consensus for Affordable Housing" that was published in the Foundation's journal Housing Policy Debate Volume 8, Issue 4.
The Foundation has given a major grant to the University of Maryland to develop a pilot education and training program, directed by Charles Field, for community-based housing and community development organizations. The program focuses on negotiation and problem-solving techniques and how to leverage resources that communities need to provide affordable housing.
[This article was originally published in the Fall 1998 issue of Fannie Mae Foundation's A New Way Home newsletter.]
Resources
Web sites:
Consensus Building Institute www.cbi-web.org
Policy Consensus Initiative www.agree.org
Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School www.pon.org
Society of Professionals in Dispute Resolution www.spidr.org
Reading:
Costantino, C., and C. Merchant. 1996. Designing Conflict Management Systems: A Guide to Creating Productive and Healthy Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Fisher, R. W. Ury, and B. Paton. 1991. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Stone, Douglas, B. Patton, and S. Heen. 1999. Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. New York: Viking Books
Susskind, L., M. van der Wansem, and A. Ciccarelli. 2000. Mediating Land Use Disputes: Pros and Cons. Cambridge, Mass. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Susskind L., and J. Cruikshank. 1987. Breaking the Impassse: Consensual Approaches to Resolving Public Disputes. New York, Basic Books.
Ury, W. 1993. Getting Past No: Negotiating Your Way from Confrontation to Cooperation. New York: Bantam Books.