Getting streetwise in the battle against big business

BOOK REVIEW: NIMBY Wars: The Politics of Land Useby Michael Saint; €20 ($29.99) - IT IS a few years since Tesco, the supermarket group, had a tricky encounter with a population of burrowing owls in California. The small endangered birds were cited in a legal challenge to the construction of a huge distribution centre east of Los Angeles that now supplies Tesco's US chain of Fresh Easy grocery stores.

The suit, eventually defeated, was seen as the work not of concerned owl lovers but of an informal alliance between the UFCW grocery union and local supermarket businesses – both threatened by Tesco’s US debut.

It is a good example of the kind of local political shenanigans and Machiavellian manipulation that keep the authors of Nimby Wars in business.

The book is co-authored by Michael Saint, founder of Saint Consulting, which describes itself as a “management consulting firm that specialises in winning zoning and land use battles for global and national companies” – an activity that the authors, who all work for Saint, regularly compare in the book to street fighting.

These are the kind of people you call in when it turns out that the local community does not want your new hospital or mobile phone tower, or if you want to stop Walmart opening just around the corner from your previously profitable grocery store.

The authors have produced what amounts to an introductory promotional handbook to the dark arts of land use politics, which naturally argues that this is a job which requires an expert professional approach.

Do not rely on a lawyer, they say; avoid the local political fixer; forget about public relations.

There is plenty of business to keep Saint busy in developed markets. Their research suggests that in North America and the UK, the Nimby (Not In My Back Yard) complex has turned into Banana (Build Absolutely Nowhere Anywhere Near Anything).

Since decisions on Lulus (Locally Unwanted Land Usage projects) are taken by local politicians, planning approval is a question of whether they think giving a project the green light will lose votes.

“The local land use permitting process is totally political and is thus controlled by those who control the ballot box,” the authors write, in what is the central tenet of the book and their consultancy.

So, conduct the battle like a political campaign. If necessary, covertly organise a group of supporters to populate the planning meetings. You must be ready for anything, the authors say – keeping your own supporters in line may prove one of the hardest challenges.

The authors also suggest using aliases to check out planning applications, driving around in a car with local numberplates to prevent arousing suspicion and avoid using the local photocopying services.

Such tactics are intriguing. Sadly, the book fails to deliver a full account of the shenanigans in which they have been involved, which makes this book less John Grishamesque and frank than it should have been. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009