I suspect this in part due to most people when they are travelling to the UK are traveling to London and specifically to the big tourist spots in London; Westminster, Buckingham Palace, Big Ben etc. And those tourist spots tend to be (not surprisingly) located in the wealthiest areas of London.
I forget who said it, but I saw a quip that imagine if Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and New York City were all one city in America and you would have an idea of London's outsized importance in the UK (and that's probably underselling it). Point being, the extreme focus on London warps most outsider's views of what UK is really like in places like Sunderland or Blackburn or Liverpool etc.
London's about 13% of UK population. London/SE region (broad definition) is about 22% of UK population. The latter's GDP likely approaches 30% of GDP and even higher share of tax revenue generation.
The numbers for the largest US city (NYC) are about 2.5%, 7% and 9%.
And, as you point out, NYC doesn't house the national government.
It's been too long since I read it for me to recall what the upshot was but many years ago I recall reading an article that noted there are certain countries for which the primary economic hub (generally also the country's political capital city) has such an outsized proportion of the country's population and activity that it's accurate to call them effectively "one city countries" despite the existence of very large land areas (and numerous smaller population centers of dramatically lesser importance).
I believe the UK (London) was on the list, and I think France (Paris) was as well, although IIRC South Korea (Seoul) and Iran (Tehran) were considered even more central examples.
At least with respect to South Korea this has resulted in particularly poor development consequences because Seoul has exerted a continuous gravitational pull on economic and population activity at least since the end of the Korean War and it's very difficult to opt out of those dynamics for individuals or companies, even though at any given point in history it would likely have been desirable to draw a line under Seoul's expansion and build SK's primary economic and population hub somewhere that *wasn't* in range of conventional North Korean artillery. Instead, said military-logistic hole has just been getting dug deeper for the past 70-odd years because the centralization dynamics are a positive feedback loop.
Overall, the size of cities tends to follow a power-law distribution, and the n-th largest city in a country is expected to be about 1/n the size of the largest one. A primate city is one that is the largest in its country and significantly larger than expected from the power law. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate_city) credits Mark Jefferson (1939) with defining a primate city as one that is "at least twice as large as the next largest city and more than twice as significant." They are often the center of government, but this is not necessary -- for instance, Jakarta will remain a primate city even as the capital of Indonesia is moved to the planned city of Nusantara, unless populations change dramatically enough.
I think Americans have come to associate UK towns/villages with a kind of quaint pastoralism (see: "cottagecore") so they think of the average UK lifestyle more as a function of aesthetic and cultural preferences than as a function of lower wealth / living standards.
I don't think you can just look at home sizes to compare standard of living. I mean dwelling size is part of it, but you also have to consider proximity to amenities. I'd argue that a New Yorker with a 900 sq ft condo has a higher standard of living than someone with a 1500 sq ft house in Battlecreek, MI.
Also, I think that American/Canadian/Australian home sizes are international outliers. I'm guessing that this is because they sparsely-populated continent-sized countries. I'm guessing that house sizes in the UK are more comparable to other countries whose native populations weren't depopulated at the time of their founding.
I'm pretty sure that in MY's one-billion-Americans America, where the US has the population density of France, that Americans would also live in smaller houses on average. But they would also have more abundant amenities nearby and may consequently live richer lives.
I wouldn’t know how to calculate it. I guess it would be the property value if the market were freer and supply were more responsive to demand. Someone with more knowledge in economics could maybe give a better answer.
Keeping in mind in the UK workers are entitled to almost 6 weeks of vacation. Some of the home size differences can be attributed to lower earnings as a result as well as a larger vacation budget.
I thought that the deal was most people in the UK earn less and are taxed more but their standard of living for the poor and lower middle class is higher than in the US. Is that wrong? Isn’t the UK richer than Japan?
Yeah that's what I mean -- the median American (which is undoubtedly below basically everyone in this comment section) makes a lot more than the median Brit or Japanese person. And that's true even when you control for things like healthcare and education costs.
People don't really appreciate how much higher standards of living are in the US. Like, the vast majority of homes in the UK don't have air conditioning -- when was the last time you were in an American building that didn't have AC?
Hmmm...I'm not sure that Brits don't have AC primarily because they can't afford it. I think it's more that (usually) the summer climate is mild enough that people don't think they need it. This summer of course there were massive heatwaves in the UK, and the likelihood of heatwaves is likely to increase. But if you want to illustrate differences in living standards, I would use something else. Here in Israel, nearly everyone has AC, but GDP per capita here is substantially lower than in the UK.
Yeah plenty of buildings in Seattle don’t have AC but that’s because it doesn’t hit 90 very often and it tends to cool off a lot at night. And it’s not as if Seattle is a poor city. Most office buildings have AC though.
It's partly the difference in wealth, partly the difference in climate, partly some other things.
For instance, most US houses are built of wood, and are built with space for all the ducting central AC systems require - UK houses aren't built that way and cannot easily be retrofitted.
(Heating is usually hot water radiators, which only require narrow pipes routed through the house.)
It's partly just expectations. Increasingly, it would be nice to have AC in the summer, but it's still worth saying basically no-where in continental US has summer temp.s as low as even southern England.
A/C is uncommon in the UK partly due to planning. Although sticking a window unit up is usually considered permitted development (i.e. you can do it by right) it's very difficult to get modern integrated A/C built as part of a new development.
Due to global warming, there's a big campaign ongoing AGAINST A/C, with the Government instead deciding to manage overheating in buildings not by adopting new technology, but by making all the new homes in London have tiny windows: https://twitter.com/AntBreach/status/1521986907378495490
I’m absolutely positive that Yale dorms aren’t without AC because they can’t afford it.
I kid. Lived in Boston for a while. Was in a lot of homes, and surprised by how many didn’t have AC. The last year I was in Mass, I lived right on the water and mostly just kept the windows open. Ran the AC for maybe 2 weeks total.
Definitely only a modest minority (still, in 2022) of homes in Metro Boston have *central* AC, I think. I imagine that's the case in many northern US cities.
Though in my experience the vast majority at least have window units at this point. It does get genuinely sub-tropical for 9-12 weeks each year...
Yeah, I live in Metro Boston and I (and most people I know here) do not have central AC, but use window (or sometimes wall) units regularly in summer. This is also common in NYC. It's just a function of old buildings.
I do think if stats about proportion of households without AC in Europe and other places don't take window or wall units into account...well, that seems kind of misleading. I've lived in four apartments in three US cities in my adult life and have never had central AC, but I wouldn't say I "don't have AC" because window units exist.
The US is a bit weird in that ductless split AC units aren't so common. So in the US, it's either central air or window units. I think internationally, the ductless split "wall" units are more common
Yeah over a thousand people died this year because of a heatwave but sure, I take your point (though compare AC adoption in the UK to that in Minnesota and there's still a huge disparity).
I think the most salient demonstration in the difference in living standards is what the post described as the difference in home sizes.
Air conditioning abundance in the US has far more to do with the hot, humid and unhealthful climate of the Eastern side of the Continent where most Americans live than pure expense.
People on the West Coast, who have a climate much more similar to Western Europe, are much less likely to have air conditioning
Well, generally unless otherwise stated, the average refers to an arithmetic mean. If they use something else, like a median, mode, geometric mean, then it should be clear. So I have a right to still be annoyed :)
Japan's issues also include being immigrant wary until recently and still not a good place for women to work. Housing policy isn't a panacea for all other bad policy and cultural decisions
I work in a field associated with transport planning. Somebody wants to build a new housing development (about 100 houses or so) in a well-to-do town near a bigger and even wealthier city in the UK. I don't know the details, but somebody wealthy didn't want this development and they were able to appeal against the construction of this development on traffic grounds (I understand there have been multiple appeals already. Someone convicted of murder wouldn't have been allowed this many appeals). I was part of a team that worked on this guy's appeal, which involved multiple technical staff and lawyers some of whom were very senior. The other side would have employed the same. The cost of this process is astronomical. I don't know what has happened with the appeal but no doubt it is still stuck in planning hell.
Of course, there would have been (marginal) traffic impacts caused by this scheme. But any proper solution to traffic problems, like allowing more development in the bigger city that everyone would have driven to, or creating a high quality bus service, or building a bigger road, or anything at all, is laughable. The only way of mitigating the problem, according to the team I worked for, is to not build the new development. It's a joke.
As an aside, climate change is now a new stick for NIMBYs to beat any new development. Having a meadow near a tube station is crazy. But if you build houses on a meadow, the people that live there will use energy! And that's not consistent with the governments climate change strategy!
The core reason for the above is that local plans and local transport plans in England are completely different documents, written over different timelines, by different people, usually in different organisations (district and county councils), and so have absolutely no connection to each other. Planning in England isn't spatial and it isn't about managing growth in an orderly way or providing infra and services to new development - it's about negotating between different stakeholders, including anti-housing Nimbys.
It’s so painful, but at the same time it is maddening how little thought is giving to what makes new development manageable. There is a prospective new development near me (500 homes, so not small by any means) yet so far there is no plan to increase traffic routes, GP or dental surgeries, or school places despite everything being oversubscribed. Sure I will miss living on the “edge of town” and being able to easily go for a run in the woods, but the people who buy those cramped and practically gardenless houses are going to be even angrier when they have to take their kids to crappy schools 20 minutes drive away.
I think I agree that the benefit to those people living in those practically "garden-less" houses is greater than the inconvenience to those currently living in the neighborhood.
Question for Joolz--in the UK, are the number of GPs, dental surgeries, etc planned at the neighborhood level? I know it's a fully nationalized system with doctors and clinics being run by the government, so I'm curious how planning like that works at the neighborhood level.
Sure, they don’t need any sort of quality of life as long as Taylor Wimpy sells them a shoe box and they have both a commute and school runs to do in opposite directions. I guess you expect people to be grateful for whatever scraps they get.
I live in 52 sq m with no garden. Don’t have kids so don’t need to worry about school location. I live with my partner, and we’re very happy with our quality of life.
So people have different needs and priorities. While you value size, school location and garden, I may value new construction and ability to save money.
So that housing estate isn’t aimed at you - they are building family houses. So the gardens and schools point holds - but I am taking about something specific, and you are generalising to centre yourself and your needs.
No, you are generalizing to your needs. If it's not appropriate for people to live there, then they won't live there. If they decide to live there despite having other options, then it makes sense for them. It is possible that these specific apartments are a bad idea, but your general reasoning can be applied to any development at any time, making the perfect the enemy of the good.
We're talking about school commutes -- work commutes are, I think, distributed differently.
And the problem exists on both sides of the tail, as far as I can tell: short school commutes are things that primarily happen in (some) exclusionary post-ww2 suburbs. If you live in a big city, it's luck of the draw: maybe your school is walking distance, maybe it's on the other side of town. And if you live in farmland or abandoned rust-belt mini-cities, you've probably got a nice long drive ahead of you.
Really? I'd imagine that the people driving that far for high school are truly living in the middle of nowhere, or are choosing to drive that far to send the kid to a specific school. Most people, I think, are not driving that far to send their kids to school.
Yeah - I mean in a country of 330m people I am sure *someone* has a 90 minute school commute - but at least in my state its literally impossible as schools are countywide (at worst) and the counties aren't that big.
"I cannot emphasize enough how many americans would sell their soul for a 20 minute school commute for their children, at any gas price." - that makes it sound like something, if not common, not too rare, when i think you would have to really go out of your way to find anyone with a mandatory (not by choice) 90 minute school commute.
Gas in the UK is $7.40/gallon. Americans just lost their shit when it reached $5 for a couple of months and are still complaining with it at $3.70. That 20 minute drive cost double what it does in the US.
I cannot emphasize enough how many americans would sell their soul for a 20 minute school commute for their children, at any gas price. 40-60 minutes is not uncommon. 90 is far from unheard of in deeply exurban areas.
(The average high school commute, thankfully, is under 20m. But with 325M people and 3.1M square miles, the tails are long and the outliers significant.)
That's kind of comparing apples and oranges - the people facing 90 minute commutes aren't exurban - they are either in the middle of nowhere or not going to public schools.
The schools are all city or county in my state (Alabama) and since no county is that big (and almost all have multiple schools) there are no 90 minute commutes.
My kids ride the bus every day so I think its over half an hour but that's because the bus has to stop a bajillion times.
Interesting comment. My frustration from today's post was that I could only get a superficial understanding of the UK housing challenges. Something something green belts something something historical preservation. More would have been nicer. This comment fills in more needed detail.
Thanks for the shout-out Matt! Completely agree with this analysis, - the case-by-case system England has is really really bad, and much worse than American zoning. Agree too on the connection to not just housing affordability (which is very poor in the UK) but also economic growth as well. It's really difficult to build a bigger economy when it's really difficult to build anything.
Just a quick correction - it's not necessarily the case that homes in the UK are becoming smaller, but rather that space per person for new households (i.e. renters) is falling because they're having to share a stock that isn't growing nearly as fast as population and incomes. Plus, the original chart is from Mayor of London's Housing Research Note 06: https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/housing-research-notes
For people who want to know a bit more:
As well as poor quantity, the UK also has really poor quality stock. There's an element especially for people who visit the UK that they see lovely period housing stock in Chelsea or affluent suburbs and imagine this is commonplace across the country, but it's really not. For instance, there's a massive and actually really upsetting ongoing scandal with social housing in Britain, with poor people living in terrible squalor because it's really difficult to both build more and to demolish housing stock that's at the end of its useful life: https://twitter.com/DanielHewittITV/status/1496431107381858304
In terms of how we fix this, Centre for Cities has a clear proposal - moving away from England's unpredictable planning system, where builders can follow the rules and still be denied permission to build, towards a new flexible zoning system, where if developers follow the rules they can always build, and with less strict zoning than a lot of US cities: https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/planning-for-the-future/
The Levelling Up Bill going through Parliament at the moment will help create a national set of rules that's a pre-requisite for further improvements, and is probably the most promising source of progress towards flexible zoning in the short-term: https://www.centreforcities.org/blog/the-levelling-up-bills-planning-proposals/
And there's a whole bunch of other problems to do with Britain's incredible centralisation that make it very difficult to get local government in England on board with economic growth and building more stuff. Fixing local government is probably a pre-requisite to properly fixing planning and housing in England: https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/centralisation-nation/
>>the case-by-case system England has is really really bad, and much worse than American zoning.<<
In the aggregate, yes. We have Atlanta and Dallas as Matt points out. But there are significant swaths of the US where it's every bit as arbitrary and "case by case" in nature as in England, I think. Pretty much all the "blue" US metros operate policies hugely hostile to housing abundance, where local government units possess mostly unfettered authority to veto housing proposals because incumbent owners (ie, those who vote in local elections) want them vetoed. This often happens (indeed almost always happens) even when the proposal in question satisfies zoning criteria. The NIMBY veto in many US municipalities can be triggered on entirely arbitrary grounds (though the perennial favorite "traffic" is often cited, as is "adverse environmental impact").
Basically, the question of whether or not a "shall issue" legal standard exists with respect to housing construction permits is the whole ball game. If that doesn't exist, housing abundance won't exist, either (human nature being what it is). I can't really fault a person for preferring one hundred neighbors to one thousand neighbors.
After California said that you can build four units on your property by right, my dad was scared that the empty lot next to him would be developed into a 4-plex and said he really doesn't want that because of parking concerns. This is in a neighborhood where everyone has a 2 or 3 car garage, and most houses have a driveway where you can store another two cars at least. So basically the concern is that if they throw a dinner party with more than 2 familes, a few of the guests may have to park around the corner. Or if you own a 5th or 6th car, you may have to park it around the corner...and for this 4 families shouldn't live in our neighborhood and take advantage of the good public schools and nice amenities.
That describes some but by no means all neighborhoods. My LA neighborhood now allows 4-plexes and very few houses have garages usable for parking and most only have room for one car in the driveway. There will be quite a competition for street parking. (I'm still in favor of the law, though.)
I have some sympathy for people who physically don’t have the space for off street parking and would have to either go car-free or move (rental garages aren’t a thing in most neighborhoods & new ones wouldn’t be permitted).
But if you have parking space and you’ve simply chosen to use it for other purposes, that’s a tradeoff you’re allowed to make and live with the consequences of, IMO. If it’s so important, they can convert back.
Agree it's totally possible to introduce discretionary elements into zoning systems - this is why I refer to the US zoning approaches as "inflexible zoning", and best practice in Japan as "flexible zoning"
Thank you so, so much for this. The housing situation in this country is maddening and it really feels like there are huge forces stopping any improvements from being made.
One way in which I'm quietly optimistic is that the new housing and levelling up secretary, Simon Clarke, seems to be well-aware of the huge problems housing shortages create in the UK. He's previously advocated building lots of new houses around Green Belt train stations and is also a supporter of street votes. And it's possible, given that the Tories are becoming a rare breed in London anyway, they may decide they have little to lose by just massively liberalising planning in the capital. But I don't want to get my hopes up.
I think the maddening thing about the situation there is by rights in ought be easy to implement nationwide change (at least wrt England/Wales), right?
In the US there's virtually nothing that could be done by Congress to deregulate house building, from what I can see (maybe Matt Y. knows otherwise) because it's almost entirely a state/local matter. But in Britain Parliament is supreme, and is not even beholden to the judiciary. Just pass a damn act!
Oh yes, if parliament wanted to they absolutely could do it. But they're afraid of electoral backlash. The Chesham & Amersham by-election last year made the point quite well, sadly :(
With the obvious caveat that I don't live in the UK and am just an interested external observer: I don't think we'll see another Labour government in the next 20 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if we never saw one again in my lifetime.
Federal supremacy clause + commerce clause means that there's actually nothing stopping the US government from overriding local zoning rules. The federal government already does it, just not for housing.
For example there are federal laws that make it so cities have only limited grounds to block cell phone towers, and so that no zoning/HOA rule can prevent you from installing a satellite dish on your own home.
Housing is definitely an interstate market though. That is the reason why the Fair Housing Act is constitutional. There is no reason why you can't amend the Fair Housing Act to include zoning reform.
Some of America's biggest metro areas cross state lines, and even in cases where that's not true, there are substantial interstate impacts on housing markets. People priced out of California are a big factor in driving up prices all over the Western United States.
Well sure, obviously it's politics that prevents this. Eventually the constituency for lower rents starts to exceed in influence the constituency for higher rents, and then change will come. We're seeing this now (incipient stage, to be sure) in California.
I think people would be shocked to see exactly how much poorer the UK is than the US.
I suspect this in part due to most people when they are travelling to the UK are traveling to London and specifically to the big tourist spots in London; Westminster, Buckingham Palace, Big Ben etc. And those tourist spots tend to be (not surprisingly) located in the wealthiest areas of London.
I forget who said it, but I saw a quip that imagine if Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and New York City were all one city in America and you would have an idea of London's outsized importance in the UK (and that's probably underselling it). Point being, the extreme focus on London warps most outsider's views of what UK is really like in places like Sunderland or Blackburn or Liverpool etc.
London's about 13% of UK population. London/SE region (broad definition) is about 22% of UK population. The latter's GDP likely approaches 30% of GDP and even higher share of tax revenue generation.
The numbers for the largest US city (NYC) are about 2.5%, 7% and 9%.
And, as you point out, NYC doesn't house the national government.
It's been too long since I read it for me to recall what the upshot was but many years ago I recall reading an article that noted there are certain countries for which the primary economic hub (generally also the country's political capital city) has such an outsized proportion of the country's population and activity that it's accurate to call them effectively "one city countries" despite the existence of very large land areas (and numerous smaller population centers of dramatically lesser importance).
I believe the UK (London) was on the list, and I think France (Paris) was as well, although IIRC South Korea (Seoul) and Iran (Tehran) were considered even more central examples.
At least with respect to South Korea this has resulted in particularly poor development consequences because Seoul has exerted a continuous gravitational pull on economic and population activity at least since the end of the Korean War and it's very difficult to opt out of those dynamics for individuals or companies, even though at any given point in history it would likely have been desirable to draw a line under Seoul's expansion and build SK's primary economic and population hub somewhere that *wasn't* in range of conventional North Korean artillery. Instead, said military-logistic hole has just been getting dug deeper for the past 70-odd years because the centralization dynamics are a positive feedback loop.
These cities are called "primate cities."
Overall, the size of cities tends to follow a power-law distribution, and the n-th largest city in a country is expected to be about 1/n the size of the largest one. A primate city is one that is the largest in its country and significantly larger than expected from the power law. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate_city) credits Mark Jefferson (1939) with defining a primate city as one that is "at least twice as large as the next largest city and more than twice as significant." They are often the center of government, but this is not necessary -- for instance, Jakarta will remain a primate city even as the capital of Indonesia is moved to the planned city of Nusantara, unless populations change dramatically enough.
The metropole!
Rick Steves said it, and didn’t attribute it. Could be him.
I think Americans have come to associate UK towns/villages with a kind of quaint pastoralism (see: "cottagecore") so they think of the average UK lifestyle more as a function of aesthetic and cultural preferences than as a function of lower wealth / living standards.
UK GDP per capita is $20000 less than America. If the UK were to somehow become the 51st state tomorrow, it would be the poorest state in the country.
Yea but if the uk was part of America trade growth would be double digits. And NYC really might lose its status as global money hub :)
Quite true
It would also be, by far, the largest state in the Union
Isn't Alaska more than 6x bigger than the UK?
By population should have clarified
I think Benjamin is talking about population.
Yep. I lived in UK for several years. My son lives in Scotland. Standard of living is way lower. The homes are tiny.
I don't think you can just look at home sizes to compare standard of living. I mean dwelling size is part of it, but you also have to consider proximity to amenities. I'd argue that a New Yorker with a 900 sq ft condo has a higher standard of living than someone with a 1500 sq ft house in Battlecreek, MI.
Also, I think that American/Canadian/Australian home sizes are international outliers. I'm guessing that this is because they sparsely-populated continent-sized countries. I'm guessing that house sizes in the UK are more comparable to other countries whose native populations weren't depopulated at the time of their founding.
I'm pretty sure that in MY's one-billion-Americans America, where the US has the population density of France, that Americans would also live in smaller houses on average. But they would also have more abundant amenities nearby and may consequently live richer lives.
>> I'd argue that a New Yorker with a 900 sq ft condo has a higher standard of living than someone with a 1500 sq ft house in Battlecreek, MI.<<
Argue all you like, but Battlecreekers get themselves some fantastic deals on breakfast foods.
I'm sorry if I offended any Battlecreekers :)
It’s “Battle Creek.”
"I'd argue that a New Yorker with a 900 sq ft condo has a higher standard of living than someone with a 1500 sq ft house in Battlecreek, MI."
I'd hope so, the New Yorker is likely much wealthier. If they don't have a better standard of living there's a big problem.
I'm not only talking about the New Yorker being wealthier. I'm talking about the fact that they have more access to more in-demand amenities.
Okay, but what about someone with better housing in, say, Chicago or Philadelphia instead of Battle Creek, Michigan? Where is the crossover point?
I wouldn’t know how to calculate it. I guess it would be the property value if the market were freer and supply were more responsive to demand. Someone with more knowledge in economics could maybe give a better answer.
Keeping in mind in the UK workers are entitled to almost 6 weeks of vacation. Some of the home size differences can be attributed to lower earnings as a result as well as a larger vacation budget.
How else does lower standard of living manifest?
I thought that the deal was most people in the UK earn less and are taxed more but their standard of living for the poor and lower middle class is higher than in the US. Is that wrong? Isn’t the UK richer than Japan?
Yeah that's what I mean -- the median American (which is undoubtedly below basically everyone in this comment section) makes a lot more than the median Brit or Japanese person. And that's true even when you control for things like healthcare and education costs.
People don't really appreciate how much higher standards of living are in the US. Like, the vast majority of homes in the UK don't have air conditioning -- when was the last time you were in an American building that didn't have AC?
My dorm
Transfer now! No wonder Yale students are always having drama.
Yale has what, $40 billion in the bank, and they won't give you AC?
They didn't get their 40 billion being stupid with money.
No AC? You should've picked a school with decent resources.
Luckily you won't generally be there for the crazy New Haven summer action.
Hmmm...I'm not sure that Brits don't have AC primarily because they can't afford it. I think it's more that (usually) the summer climate is mild enough that people don't think they need it. This summer of course there were massive heatwaves in the UK, and the likelihood of heatwaves is likely to increase. But if you want to illustrate differences in living standards, I would use something else. Here in Israel, nearly everyone has AC, but GDP per capita here is substantially lower than in the UK.
Yeah plenty of buildings in Seattle don’t have AC but that’s because it doesn’t hit 90 very often and it tends to cool off a lot at night. And it’s not as if Seattle is a poor city. Most office buildings have AC though.
It's partly the difference in wealth, partly the difference in climate, partly some other things.
For instance, most US houses are built of wood, and are built with space for all the ducting central AC systems require - UK houses aren't built that way and cannot easily be retrofitted.
(Heating is usually hot water radiators, which only require narrow pipes routed through the house.)
It's partly just expectations. Increasingly, it would be nice to have AC in the summer, but it's still worth saying basically no-where in continental US has summer temp.s as low as even southern England.
A/C is uncommon in the UK partly due to planning. Although sticking a window unit up is usually considered permitted development (i.e. you can do it by right) it's very difficult to get modern integrated A/C built as part of a new development.
Due to global warming, there's a big campaign ongoing AGAINST A/C, with the Government instead deciding to manage overheating in buildings not by adopting new technology, but by making all the new homes in London have tiny windows: https://twitter.com/AntBreach/status/1521986907378495490
I’m absolutely positive that Yale dorms aren’t without AC because they can’t afford it.
I kid. Lived in Boston for a while. Was in a lot of homes, and surprised by how many didn’t have AC. The last year I was in Mass, I lived right on the water and mostly just kept the windows open. Ran the AC for maybe 2 weeks total.
Definitely only a modest minority (still, in 2022) of homes in Metro Boston have *central* AC, I think. I imagine that's the case in many northern US cities.
Though in my experience the vast majority at least have window units at this point. It does get genuinely sub-tropical for 9-12 weeks each year...
Yeah, I live in Metro Boston and I (and most people I know here) do not have central AC, but use window (or sometimes wall) units regularly in summer. This is also common in NYC. It's just a function of old buildings.
I do think if stats about proportion of households without AC in Europe and other places don't take window or wall units into account...well, that seems kind of misleading. I've lived in four apartments in three US cities in my adult life and have never had central AC, but I wouldn't say I "don't have AC" because window units exist.
The US is a bit weird in that ductless split AC units aren't so common. So in the US, it's either central air or window units. I think internationally, the ductless split "wall" units are more common
AC is also uncommon in France and they have much hotter summers than the UK
Yeah over a thousand people died this year because of a heatwave but sure, I take your point (though compare AC adoption in the UK to that in Minnesota and there's still a huge disparity).
I think the most salient demonstration in the difference in living standards is what the post described as the difference in home sizes.
The UK’s climate is a lot different than the MN.
“July is the warmest month in London, with an average high-temperature of 22.3°C (72.1°F) and an average low-temperature of 13.5°C (56.3°F).”
“The hottest month of the year in Minneapolis is July, with an average high of 83°F and low of 65°F. ”
Air conditioning abundance in the US has far more to do with the hot, humid and unhealthful climate of the Eastern side of the Continent where most Americans live than pure expense.
People on the West Coast, who have a climate much more similar to Western Europe, are much less likely to have air conditioning
The UK has a lower nominal GDP per capita than West Virginia
I'm annoyed that they are using average household disposable income and not median...
Are they? In this context, average could very easily mean median. Couldn't find anything on the website to confirm either way.
Well, generally unless otherwise stated, the average refers to an arithmetic mean. If they use something else, like a median, mode, geometric mean, then it should be clear. So I have a right to still be annoyed :)
I know that people in the UK have higher college debt than in the US
Yes the UK is richer than Japan in GDP per capita nominal terms; Japan is surprisingly poorer than much of W. Europe though.
UK is poorer than Germany, Denmark, Netherlands etc.
Japan has pretty badly stagnated, growth-wise, for the better part of three decades at this point.
Yet, worth pointing out that Japan has the zoning policies most often called out for praise by econo-yimbys.
Japan's issues also include being immigrant wary until recently and still not a good place for women to work. Housing policy isn't a panacea for all other bad policy and cultural decisions
Here's a fun story.
I work in a field associated with transport planning. Somebody wants to build a new housing development (about 100 houses or so) in a well-to-do town near a bigger and even wealthier city in the UK. I don't know the details, but somebody wealthy didn't want this development and they were able to appeal against the construction of this development on traffic grounds (I understand there have been multiple appeals already. Someone convicted of murder wouldn't have been allowed this many appeals). I was part of a team that worked on this guy's appeal, which involved multiple technical staff and lawyers some of whom were very senior. The other side would have employed the same. The cost of this process is astronomical. I don't know what has happened with the appeal but no doubt it is still stuck in planning hell.
Of course, there would have been (marginal) traffic impacts caused by this scheme. But any proper solution to traffic problems, like allowing more development in the bigger city that everyone would have driven to, or creating a high quality bus service, or building a bigger road, or anything at all, is laughable. The only way of mitigating the problem, according to the team I worked for, is to not build the new development. It's a joke.
As an aside, climate change is now a new stick for NIMBYs to beat any new development. Having a meadow near a tube station is crazy. But if you build houses on a meadow, the people that live there will use energy! And that's not consistent with the governments climate change strategy!
The core reason for the above is that local plans and local transport plans in England are completely different documents, written over different timelines, by different people, usually in different organisations (district and county councils), and so have absolutely no connection to each other. Planning in England isn't spatial and it isn't about managing growth in an orderly way or providing infra and services to new development - it's about negotating between different stakeholders, including anti-housing Nimbys.
It’s so painful, but at the same time it is maddening how little thought is giving to what makes new development manageable. There is a prospective new development near me (500 homes, so not small by any means) yet so far there is no plan to increase traffic routes, GP or dental surgeries, or school places despite everything being oversubscribed. Sure I will miss living on the “edge of town” and being able to easily go for a run in the woods, but the people who buy those cramped and practically gardenless houses are going to be even angrier when they have to take their kids to crappy schools 20 minutes drive away.
I imagine whoever buys these houses will appreciate only being 20 as opposed to 60 minutes away. Perfect planning doesn't exist.
I think I agree that the benefit to those people living in those practically "garden-less" houses is greater than the inconvenience to those currently living in the neighborhood.
Question for Joolz--in the UK, are the number of GPs, dental surgeries, etc planned at the neighborhood level? I know it's a fully nationalized system with doctors and clinics being run by the government, so I'm curious how planning like that works at the neighborhood level.
Sure, they don’t need any sort of quality of life as long as Taylor Wimpy sells them a shoe box and they have both a commute and school runs to do in opposite directions. I guess you expect people to be grateful for whatever scraps they get.
I live in 52 sq m with no garden. Don’t have kids so don’t need to worry about school location. I live with my partner, and we’re very happy with our quality of life.
So people have different needs and priorities. While you value size, school location and garden, I may value new construction and ability to save money.
So that housing estate isn’t aimed at you - they are building family houses. So the gardens and schools point holds - but I am taking about something specific, and you are generalising to centre yourself and your needs.
No, you are generalizing to your needs. If it's not appropriate for people to live there, then they won't live there. If they decide to live there despite having other options, then it makes sense for them. It is possible that these specific apartments are a bad idea, but your general reasoning can be applied to any development at any time, making the perfect the enemy of the good.
TWENTY MINUTES DRIVE!
*stares in American*
I think you mean *stares in coastal megalopolis that dominates American discourse*
I live in a city big enough for an airport with flights to both coasts, and my driving commute is twelve minutes, fifteen if I hit rush hour.
We're talking about school commutes -- work commutes are, I think, distributed differently.
And the problem exists on both sides of the tail, as far as I can tell: short school commutes are things that primarily happen in (some) exclusionary post-ww2 suburbs. If you live in a big city, it's luck of the draw: maybe your school is walking distance, maybe it's on the other side of town. And if you live in farmland or abandoned rust-belt mini-cities, you've probably got a nice long drive ahead of you.
Really? I'd imagine that the people driving that far for high school are truly living in the middle of nowhere, or are choosing to drive that far to send the kid to a specific school. Most people, I think, are not driving that far to send their kids to school.
Yeah - I mean in a country of 330m people I am sure *someone* has a 90 minute school commute - but at least in my state its literally impossible as schools are countywide (at worst) and the counties aren't that big.
"I cannot emphasize enough how many americans would sell their soul for a 20 minute school commute for their children, at any gas price." - that makes it sound like something, if not common, not too rare, when i think you would have to really go out of your way to find anyone with a mandatory (not by choice) 90 minute school commute.
“…exclusionary post-ww2 suburbs”
What (and where) are those?
Gas in the UK is $7.40/gallon. Americans just lost their shit when it reached $5 for a couple of months and are still complaining with it at $3.70. That 20 minute drive cost double what it does in the US.
I cannot emphasize enough how many americans would sell their soul for a 20 minute school commute for their children, at any gas price. 40-60 minutes is not uncommon. 90 is far from unheard of in deeply exurban areas.
(The average high school commute, thankfully, is under 20m. But with 325M people and 3.1M square miles, the tails are long and the outliers significant.)
That's kind of comparing apples and oranges - the people facing 90 minute commutes aren't exurban - they are either in the middle of nowhere or not going to public schools.
The schools are all city or county in my state (Alabama) and since no county is that big (and almost all have multiple schools) there are no 90 minute commutes.
My kids ride the bus every day so I think its over half an hour but that's because the bus has to stop a bajillion times.
Someone once said something like - 100 miles is a long way in England, 100 years is a long time in America.
But what alternative do they have if they ever want to own a home and get on the vaunted property ladder?
Interesting comment. My frustration from today's post was that I could only get a superficial understanding of the UK housing challenges. Something something green belts something something historical preservation. More would have been nicer. This comment fills in more needed detail.
There was an episode of the weeds a while ago focusing on UK housing policy. It may fill in a few gaps. https://podcasts.apple.com/ci/podcast/housing-policy-but-make-it-british/id1042433083?i=1000540115339
Thanks for the shout-out Matt! Completely agree with this analysis, - the case-by-case system England has is really really bad, and much worse than American zoning. Agree too on the connection to not just housing affordability (which is very poor in the UK) but also economic growth as well. It's really difficult to build a bigger economy when it's really difficult to build anything.
Just a quick correction - it's not necessarily the case that homes in the UK are becoming smaller, but rather that space per person for new households (i.e. renters) is falling because they're having to share a stock that isn't growing nearly as fast as population and incomes. Plus, the original chart is from Mayor of London's Housing Research Note 06: https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/housing-research-notes
For people who want to know a bit more:
As well as poor quantity, the UK also has really poor quality stock. There's an element especially for people who visit the UK that they see lovely period housing stock in Chelsea or affluent suburbs and imagine this is commonplace across the country, but it's really not. For instance, there's a massive and actually really upsetting ongoing scandal with social housing in Britain, with poor people living in terrible squalor because it's really difficult to both build more and to demolish housing stock that's at the end of its useful life: https://twitter.com/DanielHewittITV/status/1496431107381858304
In terms of how we fix this, Centre for Cities has a clear proposal - moving away from England's unpredictable planning system, where builders can follow the rules and still be denied permission to build, towards a new flexible zoning system, where if developers follow the rules they can always build, and with less strict zoning than a lot of US cities: https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/planning-for-the-future/
The Levelling Up Bill going through Parliament at the moment will help create a national set of rules that's a pre-requisite for further improvements, and is probably the most promising source of progress towards flexible zoning in the short-term: https://www.centreforcities.org/blog/the-levelling-up-bills-planning-proposals/
And there's a whole bunch of other problems to do with Britain's incredible centralisation that make it very difficult to get local government in England on board with economic growth and building more stuff. Fixing local government is probably a pre-requisite to properly fixing planning and housing in England: https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/centralisation-nation/
>>the case-by-case system England has is really really bad, and much worse than American zoning.<<
In the aggregate, yes. We have Atlanta and Dallas as Matt points out. But there are significant swaths of the US where it's every bit as arbitrary and "case by case" in nature as in England, I think. Pretty much all the "blue" US metros operate policies hugely hostile to housing abundance, where local government units possess mostly unfettered authority to veto housing proposals because incumbent owners (ie, those who vote in local elections) want them vetoed. This often happens (indeed almost always happens) even when the proposal in question satisfies zoning criteria. The NIMBY veto in many US municipalities can be triggered on entirely arbitrary grounds (though the perennial favorite "traffic" is often cited, as is "adverse environmental impact").
Basically, the question of whether or not a "shall issue" legal standard exists with respect to housing construction permits is the whole ball game. If that doesn't exist, housing abundance won't exist, either (human nature being what it is). I can't really fault a person for preferring one hundred neighbors to one thousand neighbors.
After California said that you can build four units on your property by right, my dad was scared that the empty lot next to him would be developed into a 4-plex and said he really doesn't want that because of parking concerns. This is in a neighborhood where everyone has a 2 or 3 car garage, and most houses have a driveway where you can store another two cars at least. So basically the concern is that if they throw a dinner party with more than 2 familes, a few of the guests may have to park around the corner. Or if you own a 5th or 6th car, you may have to park it around the corner...and for this 4 families shouldn't live in our neighborhood and take advantage of the good public schools and nice amenities.
We evolved to fear crowding and resource competition. For similar reasons people dislike immigration.
That describes some but by no means all neighborhoods. My LA neighborhood now allows 4-plexes and very few houses have garages usable for parking and most only have room for one car in the driveway. There will be quite a competition for street parking. (I'm still in favor of the law, though.)
What’s a garage unusable for parking? I’m familiar with garages full of stuff, of course, but that’s a choice.
For example my house where the previous owner turned the garage into an art studio. Now it's just for storage, without even a garage door for a car.
Many others convert theirs to ADUs.
I have some sympathy for people who physically don’t have the space for off street parking and would have to either go car-free or move (rental garages aren’t a thing in most neighborhoods & new ones wouldn’t be permitted).
But if you have parking space and you’ve simply chosen to use it for other purposes, that’s a tradeoff you’re allowed to make and live with the consequences of, IMO. If it’s so important, they can convert back.
Agree it's totally possible to introduce discretionary elements into zoning systems - this is why I refer to the US zoning approaches as "inflexible zoning", and best practice in Japan as "flexible zoning"
Thank you so, so much for this. The housing situation in this country is maddening and it really feels like there are huge forces stopping any improvements from being made.
One way in which I'm quietly optimistic is that the new housing and levelling up secretary, Simon Clarke, seems to be well-aware of the huge problems housing shortages create in the UK. He's previously advocated building lots of new houses around Green Belt train stations and is also a supporter of street votes. And it's possible, given that the Tories are becoming a rare breed in London anyway, they may decide they have little to lose by just massively liberalising planning in the capital. But I don't want to get my hopes up.
I think the maddening thing about the situation there is by rights in ought be easy to implement nationwide change (at least wrt England/Wales), right?
In the US there's virtually nothing that could be done by Congress to deregulate house building, from what I can see (maybe Matt Y. knows otherwise) because it's almost entirely a state/local matter. But in Britain Parliament is supreme, and is not even beholden to the judiciary. Just pass a damn act!
Oh yes, if parliament wanted to they absolutely could do it. But they're afraid of electoral backlash. The Chesham & Amersham by-election last year made the point quite well, sadly :(
Hopefully next Labour government does something substantive. If they're smart they'll do it at the very beginning of their term.
The next what?
What's that supposed to mean; you think it's a foregone conclusion Tories will win the next general election?
With the obvious caveat that I don't live in the UK and am just an interested external observer: I don't think we'll see another Labour government in the next 20 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if we never saw one again in my lifetime.
Federal supremacy clause + commerce clause means that there's actually nothing stopping the US government from overriding local zoning rules. The federal government already does it, just not for housing.
For example there are federal laws that make it so cities have only limited grounds to block cell phone towers, and so that no zoning/HOA rule can prevent you from installing a satellite dish on your own home.
Communications is different because it uses the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, which cross state lines. That makes it inherently federal.
Housing is definitely an interstate market though. That is the reason why the Fair Housing Act is constitutional. There is no reason why you can't amend the Fair Housing Act to include zoning reform.
Some of America's biggest metro areas cross state lines, and even in cases where that's not true, there are substantial interstate impacts on housing markets. People priced out of California are a big factor in driving up prices all over the Western United States.
Would probably be v. unpopular with much of the conservative base.
Well sure, obviously it's politics that prevents this. Eventually the constituency for lower rents starts to exceed in influence the constituency for higher rents, and then change will come. We're seeing this now (incipient stage, to be sure) in California.