By Conor Dougherty | The New York Times
Susan Kirsch is a 78-year-old retired teacher who lives in a small cottage home in Mill Valley, Calif., on a quiet suburban street that looks toward a grassy knoll. A Sierra Club member with a pesticide-free garden, she has an Amnesty International sticker on her front window and a photograph on her refrigerator of herself and hundreds of other people spelling “TAX THE 1%” on a beach.
The cause that takes up most of her time, however, is fighting new development and campaigning for the right of suburban cities to have near total control over what gets built in them. We met just before the pandemic, after Ms. Kirsch sent an email inviting me to coffee and in the note suggested that my reporting on the nation’s housing problems could benefit from her slow-growth perspective.
We’ve become friendly in the two years since, and as I’ve absorbed her cheerful demeanor and come to appreciate her distrust of large institutions, I’ve tried not to reduce her philosophy to a single and oversimplified term. But just so we know what we’re talking about, Susan Kirsch is a NIMBY.
