As someone who works in national infrastructure, the perversion of environmental regulations to serve NIMBY interests is something that keeps me up at night. The laws are often not fit for purpose. To take the most extreme example I have encountered, one project that I have been involved with ended up being forced by the legal case of a wealthy and well-connected local landowner to cough up £9m to provide environmental mitigation for 22 stone curlews, or £400k per bird. Since the state will never spend that much to subsidise an individual's housing, I can only deduce that we humans are less important than birds under our legal code, which is a disturbing conclusion indeed.
Great post, making such an important point in a way that I haven’t seen made so clearly before.
I also think there’s a fix that needs to happen all the way up at the central banking level. Right now the Bank of England readily collateralises “mortgage backed securities” but not, e.g. loans to property developers or local councils for building projects. This means that it’s low risk for a bank to lend into the *demand* side for housing but high risk to lend into the *supply* side. As a result, loans for mortgages grow faster than the housing stock, driving the inflation more. A simple adjustment to the BoE’s collateral framework could change all this, I think.
To be hyper specific in explaining the mechanism of the title of your article, I think this post by Matt Yglesias on his Slow Boring substack is very good and easy to follow:
You’re right to zero in on the incentive structures. Any planning reform that doesn’t offer a quid pro quo to existing residents will fail, because they currently hold all the power. Get them on side by shovelling carrots into their entitled, privileged, greedy mouths, and something might happen.
I'd also say that "luxury" in cities increasingly just means "suitable for living in". If you're looking for somewhere that's large and well-equipped enough to raise a kid in, your options are 1) get a "luxury" flat, 2) get on the waiting list for one of the 5 remaining 1960s council flats that hasn't been right-to-buyed by a private landlord and converted into 4 student bedsits, or 3) move out to Suburb-on-Motorway.
Generally speaking that's true, but don't fool yourself that building more stuff everywhere won't often decrease the quality of life for everyone except for the new residents. Sometimes development is done right, and the result is the transformation of a formerly derelict area into a truly inspired space, pedestrian-friendly, transit-oriented, full of life, etc., but often you get ugliness finance-driven developments that bring transient residents, traffic, noise, chain stores, etc. It took me finally moving to the suburbs after decades of living in a city to realize how valuable peace, quiet, and knowing everyone in your immediate environment by name really can be.
As soon as I saw mention of the Gravesend cinema I almost skipped straight to the comments to whinge about the nearby Ebbsfleet spiders being worse.
Glad to see that particular aberration mentioned with the loss of a multibillion pound theme park (25,000 jobs! In post-industrial Northfleet! Sacrificed for spiders and a contaminated bit of land that was going to be kept as a nature park anyway)
1. As I write this comment, there were 21 before this. Only 1 - so under 5% if you like maths and stats - mentions the key logisitical issues of Doctors, Dentists and schools. As the author says he has no children he doesn't worry about 1 out of 3 of these things. In rural areas it is well nigh impossible to get a NHS Dentist if not already registered, many dentists are trying to get out of NHS dentistry and into private cosmetic dentistry which pays more. The fact so few commentators talk about these absolutely key issues shows for me a worrying lack of analysis when willing to bandy terms like NIMBY around.
2. The figures quoted say we need 300000-340000 new homes - every year(!) to keep pace - but we managed 216000 in 2020/21. The ONS figures gives an average occupancy of 2.4 persons per household. So... with a short fall of 84000-124000 in that year alone, on those average figures 201600-297600 people are without the new home they need. So a population equivalent to just under York and just over Newcastle upon Tyne... where are they living? They are not on the streets clearly, so what is the actual 'need'?
3. Given that so many young 'professionals', who I guess would buy into the YIMBY concept, don't seem to want to go back to work in an office because they can 'WFH'... why do they want houses in the South East of England or indeed the Greater London Area? They could ease the pressure on that housing market by procuring up in the North and hey if there is not the 'culture' they seek for their social lives they could import it starting a social revolution. As demand falls, the cost of housing in the South East falls too.
4. Finally, it would be great to see some analysis of what the figures for housing required would be if we hadn't had EU freedom of movement and the implications of the new members states from the former Warsaw Pact, and what it would be if we manage to control our borders properly.
As with so many contributions to this debate, the starting point for this piece is the assumption that the 'housing crisis' is due to a failure to build enough new homes. Nobody ever questions this; attacks on 'NIMBYs' are the way that the Housebuilding lobby seeks to discredit its opponents and to distract attention from the facts about housing in this country and its determination to generate more business for developers. There is rarely any analysis of whether we really do have a housing shortage.
In reality, the UK is already building houses in huge numbers: the ONS figures show that more than 4 million homes were built in this country during the first two decades of this century, an average of more than 200,000 per year.
The fact that demand for housing exceeds supply is the artificial result of:
1. Second home ownership which accounts for 3% of the market (about 772,000 households);
2. The emergence of ‘buy-to-let’ as the best way of investing spare cash: during 2001-2014, nearly 3 million new homes were built, but the proportion that were private rented grew from 16% to 30%. The proportion that were owner occupied fell from 69% to 63%. So don't blame the NIMBYs, blame the HUTHOs (Homes under the Hammer opportunists).
3. Fiscal and monetary policies which make property investment more lucrative than investment in other forms of production, the inflationary pressures of quantitative easing and consequent assets bubble. This is the main driver for 2, above, though all those telly programmes promoting investment in property for gain rather than to provide a home also contribute.
4. The expansion of higher education (how many new homes in most cities are student accommodation?).
As Ian Mulheirn of the LSE demonstrated a couple of years ago, house price inflation is not a result of under-supply: from 1996 to 2019, the number of new homes built consistently outstripped the creation of new households. He calculated that there was actually a housing surplus.
London property has become the investment of choice for the global rich, making the poorest citizens of the Capital poorer and encouraging internal migration of the lower middle classes out beyond the M25. That is hugely damaging to London’s social fabric, as well as contributing to housing inflation.
The problem of housing affordability is not a national one: any internet search will identify dozens of homes on the market for less than £100,000. The problem is that we have failed to shift economic activity (i.e. jobs) away from the places in which it is currently concentrated and back to places like Redcar, Rotherham and Rochdale. We could do much more to make it attractive to create decent jobs in the North and other areas that have de-industrialised.
And whilst house prices and big shed prices increase, we have an over-supply of office and retail space in many urban areas; converting that space to housing could increase supply without consuming more of the green belt. Most NIMBYs would support that.
And a final point: actual contact with planning professionals in real life will quickly disabuse any sensible person of the misconception that ‘planning’ is stifling development. Quite the opposite is true. And if you want to see where the real power lies, look at how often Planning Committees take decisions that reject the advice of planning professionals (rarely), and how often, in such cases, those decisions are allowed to stand when subject to appeal (almost never). The NIMBYs may put up a fight, but they rarely win in planning disputes. Their only recourse is the ballot box, which is the main reason so much Blue territory is turning yellow....
What on Earth is the point of building more houses in the UK while hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants turn up here each year, and most will probably be allowed to stay, and their familes will shortly follow them here?
Building new houses in those circumstances is like trying to hose water into a very leaky bucket, and you'll end up with less agricultural and amenity land and a housing crisis just as severe as before, if not worse.
The way things stand, those advocating for more house building are discreditable useful idiots for Governments who obstinately refuse to curb immigration, for reasons mostly intended to benefit themselves via gratitude votes and their corporate sponsors.
I broadly agree, but feel positively commenting on all planning applications is a bit simplistic, for these reasons:
1) in rural areas, such as where we live, essential services such as schools, GPs and dentists rarely keep up. Therefore the objection of "it's already impossible to register at a doctors/get an appointment" is pretty valid (albeit admittedly sometimes overused). Unfortunately I assume your best avenue at this point is to engage more robustly with the local planning policy but that then requires an engagement with local politics that many 'normal folk' can't stomach (the vast majority of 'normal folk', IMO, want stuff like that to just happen, not to have to be involved in it)
1a) there is an addendum to the above, that when our local area finally built a new GP the application attracted the usual NIMBY comments, as did the application for building an extension (within the existing building footprint, ie upwards) on my own GP practice
2) we shouldn't see all negative comments as bad. I'm currently engaged in a bit of a to do with a local business that keeps expanding and our residential roads here are - genuinely - at breaking point. The local business definitely serves a community good in providing educational spaces as well as local employment, but their consistent small, incremental growth has - in my opinion - been done because if they'd put in one big application it would have been rejected as too large for that space and the local network. I'm sure my comments come across as very NIMBY but I am careful to say I support the objectives of the business, but the constant expansion (of which more is earmarked after this current one) is going to cause issues. Ironically the person that leases the land has said "without me all this land would be houses!" because they know that line works and puts the fear into people.
I'm not presenting all this as a total straw man. I appreciate that nowhere in your piece do you say "every development should get green lit", and I don't want you to take it as such. But just musing out loud how do we ensure that people can genuinely be YIMBYs, whilst also objecting for sound, genuine reasons.
Note the system almost has it baked in that politically to stay in any elected office it's much more in your favour to be a NIMBY than a YIMBY.
To be the guy who responds to footnote 15: it hardly seems to be shooting yourself in the foot to suggest a reduction in migration might ease the problems with obtaining housing that you describe. As you acknowledge elsewhere in the piece, this is about trade-offs. Surely the reasonable position is the tailor an immigration policy to capture the benefits of migration while mitigating against the boost to housing demand it entails?
As someone who works in national infrastructure, the perversion of environmental regulations to serve NIMBY interests is something that keeps me up at night. The laws are often not fit for purpose. To take the most extreme example I have encountered, one project that I have been involved with ended up being forced by the legal case of a wealthy and well-connected local landowner to cough up £9m to provide environmental mitigation for 22 stone curlews, or £400k per bird. Since the state will never spend that much to subsidise an individual's housing, I can only deduce that we humans are less important than birds under our legal code, which is a disturbing conclusion indeed.
Great post, making such an important point in a way that I haven’t seen made so clearly before.
I also think there’s a fix that needs to happen all the way up at the central banking level. Right now the Bank of England readily collateralises “mortgage backed securities” but not, e.g. loans to property developers or local councils for building projects. This means that it’s low risk for a bank to lend into the *demand* side for housing but high risk to lend into the *supply* side. As a result, loans for mortgages grow faster than the housing stock, driving the inflation more. A simple adjustment to the BoE’s collateral framework could change all this, I think.
To be hyper specific in explaining the mechanism of the title of your article, I think this post by Matt Yglesias on his Slow Boring substack is very good and easy to follow:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-more-porsches-means-cheaper-priuses
So are these follow-ups:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/housing-policy-lessons-from-the-microchip
https://www.slowboring.com/p/yimbyism-without-markets-or-supply
You’re right to zero in on the incentive structures. Any planning reform that doesn’t offer a quid pro quo to existing residents will fail, because they currently hold all the power. Get them on side by shovelling carrots into their entitled, privileged, greedy mouths, and something might happen.
I'd also say that "luxury" in cities increasingly just means "suitable for living in". If you're looking for somewhere that's large and well-equipped enough to raise a kid in, your options are 1) get a "luxury" flat, 2) get on the waiting list for one of the 5 remaining 1960s council flats that hasn't been right-to-buyed by a private landlord and converted into 4 student bedsits, or 3) move out to Suburb-on-Motorway.
Generally speaking that's true, but don't fool yourself that building more stuff everywhere won't often decrease the quality of life for everyone except for the new residents. Sometimes development is done right, and the result is the transformation of a formerly derelict area into a truly inspired space, pedestrian-friendly, transit-oriented, full of life, etc., but often you get ugliness finance-driven developments that bring transient residents, traffic, noise, chain stores, etc. It took me finally moving to the suburbs after decades of living in a city to realize how valuable peace, quiet, and knowing everyone in your immediate environment by name really can be.
As soon as I saw mention of the Gravesend cinema I almost skipped straight to the comments to whinge about the nearby Ebbsfleet spiders being worse.
Glad to see that particular aberration mentioned with the loss of a multibillion pound theme park (25,000 jobs! In post-industrial Northfleet! Sacrificed for spiders and a contaminated bit of land that was going to be kept as a nature park anyway)
1. As I write this comment, there were 21 before this. Only 1 - so under 5% if you like maths and stats - mentions the key logisitical issues of Doctors, Dentists and schools. As the author says he has no children he doesn't worry about 1 out of 3 of these things. In rural areas it is well nigh impossible to get a NHS Dentist if not already registered, many dentists are trying to get out of NHS dentistry and into private cosmetic dentistry which pays more. The fact so few commentators talk about these absolutely key issues shows for me a worrying lack of analysis when willing to bandy terms like NIMBY around.
2. The figures quoted say we need 300000-340000 new homes - every year(!) to keep pace - but we managed 216000 in 2020/21. The ONS figures gives an average occupancy of 2.4 persons per household. So... with a short fall of 84000-124000 in that year alone, on those average figures 201600-297600 people are without the new home they need. So a population equivalent to just under York and just over Newcastle upon Tyne... where are they living? They are not on the streets clearly, so what is the actual 'need'?
3. Given that so many young 'professionals', who I guess would buy into the YIMBY concept, don't seem to want to go back to work in an office because they can 'WFH'... why do they want houses in the South East of England or indeed the Greater London Area? They could ease the pressure on that housing market by procuring up in the North and hey if there is not the 'culture' they seek for their social lives they could import it starting a social revolution. As demand falls, the cost of housing in the South East falls too.
4. Finally, it would be great to see some analysis of what the figures for housing required would be if we hadn't had EU freedom of movement and the implications of the new members states from the former Warsaw Pact, and what it would be if we manage to control our borders properly.
I like this article. A lot. Especially the thinking behind point 20, even if the link didn't work.
As with so many contributions to this debate, the starting point for this piece is the assumption that the 'housing crisis' is due to a failure to build enough new homes. Nobody ever questions this; attacks on 'NIMBYs' are the way that the Housebuilding lobby seeks to discredit its opponents and to distract attention from the facts about housing in this country and its determination to generate more business for developers. There is rarely any analysis of whether we really do have a housing shortage.
In reality, the UK is already building houses in huge numbers: the ONS figures show that more than 4 million homes were built in this country during the first two decades of this century, an average of more than 200,000 per year.
The fact that demand for housing exceeds supply is the artificial result of:
1. Second home ownership which accounts for 3% of the market (about 772,000 households);
2. The emergence of ‘buy-to-let’ as the best way of investing spare cash: during 2001-2014, nearly 3 million new homes were built, but the proportion that were private rented grew from 16% to 30%. The proportion that were owner occupied fell from 69% to 63%. So don't blame the NIMBYs, blame the HUTHOs (Homes under the Hammer opportunists).
3. Fiscal and monetary policies which make property investment more lucrative than investment in other forms of production, the inflationary pressures of quantitative easing and consequent assets bubble. This is the main driver for 2, above, though all those telly programmes promoting investment in property for gain rather than to provide a home also contribute.
4. The expansion of higher education (how many new homes in most cities are student accommodation?).
As Ian Mulheirn of the LSE demonstrated a couple of years ago, house price inflation is not a result of under-supply: from 1996 to 2019, the number of new homes built consistently outstripped the creation of new households. He calculated that there was actually a housing surplus.
London property has become the investment of choice for the global rich, making the poorest citizens of the Capital poorer and encouraging internal migration of the lower middle classes out beyond the M25. That is hugely damaging to London’s social fabric, as well as contributing to housing inflation.
The problem of housing affordability is not a national one: any internet search will identify dozens of homes on the market for less than £100,000. The problem is that we have failed to shift economic activity (i.e. jobs) away from the places in which it is currently concentrated and back to places like Redcar, Rotherham and Rochdale. We could do much more to make it attractive to create decent jobs in the North and other areas that have de-industrialised.
And whilst house prices and big shed prices increase, we have an over-supply of office and retail space in many urban areas; converting that space to housing could increase supply without consuming more of the green belt. Most NIMBYs would support that.
And a final point: actual contact with planning professionals in real life will quickly disabuse any sensible person of the misconception that ‘planning’ is stifling development. Quite the opposite is true. And if you want to see where the real power lies, look at how often Planning Committees take decisions that reject the advice of planning professionals (rarely), and how often, in such cases, those decisions are allowed to stand when subject to appeal (almost never). The NIMBYs may put up a fight, but they rarely win in planning disputes. Their only recourse is the ballot box, which is the main reason so much Blue territory is turning yellow....
What on Earth is the point of building more houses in the UK while hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants turn up here each year, and most will probably be allowed to stay, and their familes will shortly follow them here?
Building new houses in those circumstances is like trying to hose water into a very leaky bucket, and you'll end up with less agricultural and amenity land and a housing crisis just as severe as before, if not worse.
The way things stand, those advocating for more house building are discreditable useful idiots for Governments who obstinately refuse to curb immigration, for reasons mostly intended to benefit themselves via gratitude votes and their corporate sponsors.
I broadly agree, but feel positively commenting on all planning applications is a bit simplistic, for these reasons:
1) in rural areas, such as where we live, essential services such as schools, GPs and dentists rarely keep up. Therefore the objection of "it's already impossible to register at a doctors/get an appointment" is pretty valid (albeit admittedly sometimes overused). Unfortunately I assume your best avenue at this point is to engage more robustly with the local planning policy but that then requires an engagement with local politics that many 'normal folk' can't stomach (the vast majority of 'normal folk', IMO, want stuff like that to just happen, not to have to be involved in it)
1a) there is an addendum to the above, that when our local area finally built a new GP the application attracted the usual NIMBY comments, as did the application for building an extension (within the existing building footprint, ie upwards) on my own GP practice
2) we shouldn't see all negative comments as bad. I'm currently engaged in a bit of a to do with a local business that keeps expanding and our residential roads here are - genuinely - at breaking point. The local business definitely serves a community good in providing educational spaces as well as local employment, but their consistent small, incremental growth has - in my opinion - been done because if they'd put in one big application it would have been rejected as too large for that space and the local network. I'm sure my comments come across as very NIMBY but I am careful to say I support the objectives of the business, but the constant expansion (of which more is earmarked after this current one) is going to cause issues. Ironically the person that leases the land has said "without me all this land would be houses!" because they know that line works and puts the fear into people.
I'm not presenting all this as a total straw man. I appreciate that nowhere in your piece do you say "every development should get green lit", and I don't want you to take it as such. But just musing out loud how do we ensure that people can genuinely be YIMBYs, whilst also objecting for sound, genuine reasons.
Note the system almost has it baked in that politically to stay in any elected office it's much more in your favour to be a NIMBY than a YIMBY.
To be the guy who responds to footnote 15: it hardly seems to be shooting yourself in the foot to suggest a reduction in migration might ease the problems with obtaining housing that you describe. As you acknowledge elsewhere in the piece, this is about trade-offs. Surely the reasonable position is the tailor an immigration policy to capture the benefits of migration while mitigating against the boost to housing demand it entails?