S Tier Sewers, F Tier Feelings

I spent plenty of time during my working years sitting in hearing rooms where citizens stood at a microphone to explain at length why a project should not be built. Eventually, their objections fell into recognizable patterns, which I now realize I can sort into tiers, not unlike the ranking meme teenagers use for video game characters. I offer this metric half-jokingly and half-earnestly; I think I’ve earned the right to use it here to highlight an issue endemic to public hearing processes.

 
Tier lists run from S ("Superior") down to F ("Worst"). I’m ranking the objections neighbors raise against urban infill not by how sympathetic they sound but by how much they reveal about real issues. A B‑tier objection can be perfectly valid and still serve as cover for something further down the list.
 
Here are the tiers:
 
S Tier: Infrastructure Capacity
Sanitary sewer, water mains, stormwater management. When someone says the existing line can't handle the load, that's a testable engineering claim, not a feeling dressed up as a fact. These arguments can kill projects, and sometimes they should. Real historic preservation belongs here too, but only if there's a documented resource at stake, not simply something old.
 
A Tier: Documented Safety
Traffic conflicts, pedestrian risk, and genuine scale transitions at zone edges. These objections point to intersections with actual crash histories or to proposals that drop five stories onto a block of single-story houses with no buffer. They warrant real debate; neighbors are often in the right.
 
B Tier: Real Issues, Routinely Misapplied
Parking, shadow studies, tree canopy loss. These are legitimate design considerations, but detractors deploy them as categorical vetoes regardless of whether the specific project deserves rejection. The concern is real in the abstract and often misapplied in practice.
 
C Tier: Dressed-Up Preference
"Neighborhood character." Unlike parking, character rarely gets defined before someone invokes it. In my experience, the definition shifts depending on who proposes what: a duplex threatens character; a McMansion, somehow, does not.
 
D Tier: Coded Objections
The "wrong kind of people," phrased as politely as possible. These objections are rarely said outright. More often, it’s cloaked by whatever euphemism fits the day.
 
F Tier: Property Values, Undisguised
No argument attached. Just fear. Occasionally someone outright admits this is the sole basis for their objection; more often it rides inside one of the tiers above.
 
The tier list is neat on paper. In practice, the tiers converge. I learned that firsthand on one of my projects.
 
Back in 2013–2014, I worked on a developer’s proposal for nearly fifty student-housing buildings across a steep, tree-covered hillside under the city's discretionary PUD process. My firm's assignment was narrow: design the buildings and testify on visual impact, scale, and compatibility with the property’s hillside setting. It's easy to prosecute NIMBYs from the outside; it's harder to admit that I sometimes served as counsel for the defense. My role put me at the microphone to answer the neighborhood's strongest objections. They argued the project violated hillside protection goals, encroached on a protected ridgeline, and required clear-cutting century-old oaks and Douglas firs. I testified that our team arrayed the buildings sensitively, mitigated visual impact, and respected the ridgeline.
 
Did I believe every word of my testimony? Yes, on that day, I thought it was defensible. Whether I offered the most candid answers, I'm less sure now. The neighbors did bring substantive concerns about geology and canopy loss. I remember feeling a mix of professional obligation and faint unease as I listened, unsure whether I was hearing genuine alarm or simply the familiar cadence of public opposition. The Hearings Official weighed every voice against the PUD criteria and ultimately denied the project. On the merits that really mattered, the neighbors were right, and the process worked.
 
But alongside those legitimate arguments, a more specious complaint surfaced about the kind of residents the project would bring: fewer families, more students. That coded objection belongs squarely in D tier. It wouldn't have survived scrutiny on its own. The reality is it didn't need to because it traveled beside arguments backed by real science and policy, and nobody in the room—me included—separated it from those valid concerns.
 
Public hearings compress every argument into the same few minutes at the same microphone. A Hearings Official can weigh a claim about slope stability against the record and rule on it. The hillside objections deserved and received a full hearing. Should anyone in that room have separated the coded objection from the legitimate ones? I didn’t, and I’m not sure the structure of a public hearing allows it.