Balancing Act turned housing-site NIMBY fights into a budget game residents must hit

In a May 2022 Fast Company article, Nate Berg describes how California cities, required by state law to plan for an assigned number of homes, face heated public input on where to put them. Cities that do not comply risk state funding, but their residents are mostly able to say where they do not want development.

Balancing Act, a company founded in 1998 to improve public policy facilitation through technology, built a simulation first used for balancing city budgets. A city official, Christopher Jordan of Elk Grove, saw that a budget of housing units works like a budget of money, and after a few weeks of tweaking, the tool became a site where residents pick development sites from a map.

President Chris Adams says the aim was to put people in the position of a public official or community problem solver rather than a narrow critic. A running tally shows how close each user is to meeting the state target, and only users who select enough sites can submit their plan to the city.

Normal public comment collects objections but no trade-offs.

A target-gated submission forces every proposal to add up.

A budget metaphor already fit the problem of allocating a fixed number of units.

Citywide scale lets residents see housing beyond their own street.

Put critics in the planner's seat with the same constraint, and the conversation shifts from objecting to choosing.

The article says cities throughout Northern California were using the tool, with an atypically high rate of support from residents. It gives no specific participation numbers.