Hi there my name is Paul Constant I'm a writer at Civic Ventures I'm also a

co-founder of the Seattle Review of Books I worked in independent Bookstores for many years and books are kind of the

center of my life. So here on this podcast I like to occasionally recommend books that I think

our listeners would like to try out.

And I have a new one that I'm especially excited about.

It's called Neighborhood Defenders,

Participatory Politics and America's Housing crisis by Catherine Levine Einstein

David M. Glick and Maxwell Palmer. Now if you've ever attended a neighborhood meeting

you've likely seen a crank or two. They like to complain against any progress in their

neighborhood and these are the kind of people who have earned the acronym

NIMB for not in my backyard. If you haven't attended a neighborhood meeting

you've likely seen these people parodied on shows like Parks and Recreation.

For the purposes of this book, the authors renamed the NIMBY phenomenon with something a little less dismissive.

They call them neighborhood defenders, capital N, capital D.

So this book comes out of a deep study of Massachusetts neighborhood meetings.

They selected Massachusetts specifically because they are better at documenting what goes on in neighborhood meetings than other states are.

So there's sort of a deep body of research about the kind of people who show up at neighborhood meetings to protest

growth or development issues.

So we're not particularly talking about Boston or other big cities.

It covers all of Massachusetts, which can get pretty rural out in the west,

all the way over to the larger urban areas in the east.

The authors explore developments like senior centers

...