This is a great column. Boris Johnson actually tried pretty hard to upzone the UK last year, before getting shutdown by his own party's MPs. The Conservatives did implement an experimental upzoning-by-hyper-local vote that some YIMBYs are excited about.
A quick comment on gentrification (because I'd like to hear from people who are good at understanding this): I live in East Harlem NYC. I'm white, as are my wife and two kids. Our neighborhood is primarily Latino (Mexican/Puerto Rican/Dominican), and has been incredibly welcoming to us and our kids. White people make up less than 3% of the population in East Harlem (rising now), but most people in our neighborhood know me on sight - the tall white guy with kids.
My building is a condo building and about 75% of the people living there are owners, the other 25% renting from owners. About half of those owners are gay male couples and have been in the area for a long time (reinforcing the common trope about the first gentrifiers in an area). There is now another couple with kids in the building and we know from our daycare and local public school that this pattern is being repeated in East Harlem. And it will likely grow exponentially once the Second Ave subway line extends up through East Harlem (10 years out).
I've lived in the city for 20 years, since my wife started graduate school at Cornell Medical. We've always lived on the east side of Manhattan, starting in the 60's (where the school was), then moving to the 90's (so we could have a bigger place that we rented), then moving to East Harlem (110's) once we were priced out of the 90's. Each move was basically a response to our current housing costs being too steep. Eventually we settled in East Harlem because we wanted to have kids and we could afford to buy a place, something that was not an option in most of the rest of Manhattan.
We moved because people richer than us were moving to our area and driving up the prices, pushing us further from the center. In each case, we were aware that as we moved, we likely drove up the prices where we moved to, but that the move had to happen because the new place was affordable while the old place no longer was. Big fish eating the little fish...with us realizing that we are a mid-size fish that was eating and always in danger of being eaten.
I love history and spent a fair amount of time learning about East Harlem when we moved there. It was interesting to learn how the old Italian and Jewish neighborhoods were basically punished for not being important enough to the cities plans - that housing projects were purposefully put in to break up their influence. Then to see the large Puerto Rican immigration followed later by other Latinos and now Asians. Basically the area has always been in flux and continues to be so now.
Many more high end (but dense) options are being built in East Harlem now. Many with income restricted requirements in 30-50% of the housing, with the other apartments being at market rate. I know some young people who live in crazy far away Brooklyn from the sports I play. I've encouraged them to apply to some of these housing lotteries (they fit the income profile), but they've refused or been hesitant because they don't want to be gentrifiers.
I worry that I'm oblivious to my gentrification, but that I also don't see the harm clearly enough in a city that is constantly in flux. Why would we pick a certain point in East Harlem's history and decide that the population shouldn't change from that point? (Why not the point when it was mostly Italian? Why not the point, more recently, when it became largely Mexican?) Help me understand this better. Why do the young people I know prefer to live so far from the center that they have to travel to instead of moving to a place where they might be gentrifiers?
Part of me wonders if this reluctance isn't slightly motivated by some reluctance to move somewhere where they'd be in the racial minority.
I may be overstating the likelihood of it ever happening but planning liberalisation is one of the tragic missed opportunities of Boris Johnson being good at winning elections but catastrophically bad at being prime minister.
Biggest majority since Blair, biggest Tory majority since Thatcher, guaranteed no new election until 2024, lots of new MPs from traditional Labour areas so basically if you're going to enact necessary planning/housing reforms and risk a backlash from NIMBYs in Tory heartlands then this is the time to do it.
The Lib Dems ran on a NIMBY platform, won, at a time when Boris Johnson was enjoying a second honeymoon off the back of a successful vaccine rollout. It scared the bejesus out of the Tories and the issue was shelved.
Having green spaces near subway stops is very costly, but in terms of “people enjoying nature” it’s probably more value than green spaces further afield (pun kinda intended?) I could believe that it still doesn’t pass cost/benefit analysis, but how important is developing the green belt vs making it easier to build dense housing elsewhere?
I’m late here so idk if anyone will see this, but I’m very interested in this post as someone who is now living in DC after spending 1 year in London. My take was that the built environment in the UK was much, much, much denser than in any American city I’ve been other than NY. DC is a giant parking lot by comparison to London.
What I find puzzling is what reconciles these two facts: it’s harder to build in the UK yet it’s orders of magnitudes denser than the US. My guess is the automobile and manifest destiny are the primary factors, but I think it’s a topic that should be probed by US urbanists and YIMBYs.
A lot of what Matt covers here is spot on, but as someone who's been living in London for close to 3 years now, there are a few elements that are worth delving into:
1. The generational divide in home ownership
2. The large contribution of home values to wealth
3. Unused housing stock that is held up by foreign investors (though this is a distinctly London problem)
All of this combines, especially when overlaid with the weird class dynamics, to NIMBYism on a grand scale, and is not helped by the fact that the rate of building new public housing has deteriorated steadily since Thatcher and basically has been frozen since the Tories came back to power.
I'd like to think that a Labour government would change that, but nothing about Starmer or the current crop of Blair-wannabes inspires much confidence.
I definitely recall, when working briefly for a UK firm a while back, that our office manager told me that she was commuting to London from York, about 2 hours by tolerably fast train to the north
On a related point (and Slow Boring favourite topic) the UK transit system is also badly broken.
There is substantial high-density re-development in London around key transport links (Battersea, Vauxhall, Stratford, etc) but there are large parts of South London which attract basically no re-development because they are transit dead-zones with no underground service.
Building out the underground should be a key priority but the work is painfully slow and ruinously expensive. For example the new Elizabeth (/Crossrail) line *partially* opened this year after a 13 year build and a £25b price tag. That comes out to roughly $300m USD per km, that's obviously much better than NYC but it seems to be 2x what it costs in Spain (https://pedestrianobservations.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/costspresentation2.pdf).
It is often faster and more reliable to live in a commuter town outside London than to live in South London.
The analysis of the Blitz on productivity immediately made me think of post-WWII Japan. Does anyone know of any similar analysis for cities like Tokyo? Is part of what allowed Japan to generate some of the densest cities in the world related to the destruction of large parts of their urban centers and/or do they just have better policies in place to allow density to happen naturally?
Japan has one of the rich world's strongest "shall issue" laws on housing construction permits. There's tons of stuff you can find via google. A few years ago, there was a lot of YIMBY chitchat regarding the factoid that, apparently, Tokyo prefecture (pop 13 million) was building more housing units annually than California (pop 39 million).
This 'factoid' has been discussed so many times, I can't believe people are still repeating this inaccurate info.
Japan builds a ton because they don't tolerate old buildings- they tear them down & replace them in the same way people tend to replace old clothes or furniture. They're not building brand new buildings, they're simply demolishing and then rebuilding the same thing every 40 or 50 years. This is not really 'building more housing units'. Imagine if a 10 unit apartment building was demoed and then replaced with a brand new 10 unit apartment building- would you say that new housing has been created?
Tokyo's being relatively affordable is probably more a function of population & economic degrowth
Degrowth? Greater Tokyo has added six million people since 1990. Japan's demographic profile ≠ Tokyo's (nor Osaka's, Nagoya's etc). But yeah, depopulation in *rural* Japan does drives affordability...
The fact that the situation is so bad in the UK is unfortunately part of the explanation of why it is not likely to improve. It's a similar NIMBY situation as in the US, but on steroids. But given the greater centralization in their government, maybe they can figure something out.
The UK has shockingly bad housing quality for the money paid. Also the extreme centralization of everything in London means that its gravitational pull is hard to resist as far as economic measures go. The UK is a place where Heathrow expansion was a national parliament issue for decades.
Matt, I sincerely appreciate your obsession with housing. I’m a firm believer in the “housing theory of everything,” and via my work at Strong Towns I am doing what I can to try and help.
For your audience, and America, I think it would be more helpful for you to spend less time writing “we have a housing problem.” We know this. Everyone who needs to know, knows.
Where we need your help and energy is finding a way through the politics that make this issue a nightmare. There are so many status quo interests benefiting from the housing crisis, and so far nobody has been able to come up with a message or policy prescriptions that can break through the wall of opposition.
I would love to see you, and all of us, spend our energy on *that.* What would it take, politically, to actually deliver a reasonable, predictable, by-right development environment?
Because as I see it now, roughly 2/3 of US voters (and I assume also a majority of the UK) are home owners, and that’s plenty large enough majority to force us all to suffer terrible collective consequences in defense of each individual homeowner’s status quo.
Your political pragmatism is what draws me to your writing. Unfortunately on this political issue I feel the pragmatic “popularist” position is to do nothing on housing, because it would take catastrophe on the order of the London Blitz to break the electorate’s death grip preference for the status quo.
Is there any possible rhetorical breakthrough that could change hearts and minds, or policy that’s somehow both effective yet so mild it can sneak through Secret Congress?
>>Is there any possible rhetorical breakthrough that could change hearts and minds<<
Personally, I don't see a breakthrough coming. I think it will be incremental (IS incremental). California is leading the way. As housing affordability becomes a more pernicious issue in an ever-growing swath of the country, the pro-housing abundance stance will gradually become politically more popular. It has become more politically popular over the last few years, I think. The pandemic-related housing spike has added to this...
Also, remember, the percentage of voters who are hardcore NIMBY is likely to be lower than the percentage who are homeowners. Some are indifferent; some are worried about their children having to live far away; some are ideologically in favor of housing abundance; some realize teachers and firefighters can't afford to live nearby...
Finally, as YIMBY policies gradually (and maybe not so gradually in a few places) spread, opposition to housing abundance may recede, as more people realize the world doesn't end when someone builds a six story apartment building on the next block over.
I sense a sea change of opinion on this issue similar to where we were previously with gay marriage, prison reform or legalized weed. It happens gradually—then suddenly.
Productivity is important. I remember the fixing of an I-95 interchange by building some new on ramps when I lived in New Haven. I believe it took about 10 years, started shortly after I arrived and ended just before I left. Who the F would want construction dragging on like that? If it takes 4 years to construct an apartment building that I'm not convinced is good for the neighborhood, why would I even entertain the idea?
Improved productivity is always welcome. But my sense is America's construction productivity issues are mostly a matter of big projects and infrastructure. *Housing* can be slapped up pretty quickly.
Really? This is good news. I hadn't seen it. I was under the impression the (MAGA-captured) GOP was increasingly going down the "the liberals are trying to abolish suburbs" road in terms of their issue positioning.
"The idea of incurring some economic cost for the sake of preserving nature is perfectly reasonable. But one really ought to think this through. The economic burden of preserving an acre of meadow immediately adjacent to a London metro station is astronomical, and if you developed it instead, you could preserve many, many acres of less valuable land elsewhere."
Isn't part of the value of nature preservation in this context precisely that it's actually near where people are and can experience it, as opposed to where it's providing much less utility to nearby humans?
Furthermore, path-dependence would seem to dictate that nature preservation in areas that may experience high housing demand in the future has to be done ex ante, when it's feasible, as opposed to ex post, when it's impossible (no one is going to demolish a bunch of high rises to build a park), particularly because parks generally don't generate much if any revenue.
I understand the argument being made in the quoted paragraph, but I think it also puts the onus on pro-housing urbanists to explain why would be improper to preserve open land what appears to be an extremely non-dense area, but it wouldn't be improper not to pave over Central Park and replace it with skyscrapers, given that that land may have among the highest opportunity costs of non-intensive use in the country. As a native New Yorker, surely Matt is aware that "[several] acres of meadow immediately adjacent to a [] metro station" describes every subway stop from from 110th St to 59th St along Central Park West and East.
I also wondered about Central Park but is there a distinction between a meadow and a park?
If the meadow is to be kept untrammeled, then not very many people can enjoy it.
If they turned it into a park specifically to increase the value of that tube station and allow people to enjoy it, that's fine.
Austin has a greenbelt, but specifically with hike&bike trails and recreation in it so that it can be enjoyed by the citizens and not _just_ kept green.
Central Park is obviously highly developed for this.
I think even staunch YIMBYs like MY agree that it's good to provide public amenities, like parks, squares, and other public spaces in cities. Part of what makes a place valuable is its access to amenities--and parks, nature, etc. are amenities, and public transit provides access. I don't think anyone is arguing that a city should be only housing, with no aesthetic and quality of life concerns addressed.
But part of having a public transit system that connects people to other people and to amenities is people living near the transit stop (or amenities being located there). A privately owned meadow right next to a train station doesn't quite seem logical to me.
Where there is an actual park that makes sense. But the aerial photo appears to show some green space near a tube station that doesn’t actually have any amenities for people to use.
Indeed, the greenbelt is just land protected from being developed, not necessarily land that is open to the public.
TBF, It's worth saying that with the example he picked, Theydon Bois, MY has picked one of the relatively few London Underground stations that is outside of Greater London, and in the green belt, so the mayor of London can do nothing to push development there.
The actual area is borderline rural, the weirdness seem to be more that the tube station exists at all rather than that there's a big opportunity cost to the green space.
My point is that you can certainly make the argument "green space near a tube station is bad because the opportunity costs are high" but that's a fully general argument against literally any urban green space that doesn't pay its own rent, and in fact is a fortiori stronger for parks in places with extremely high housing demand.
“Green space” and “park” are two very different things. “Green space” is land that has plants on it but no human use, like the green space around a parking lot, or around many buildings. “Park” is land that is designated for public human use, which often happens to have plants on it that contribute to that use.
An argument against “green space” in high value areas does not extend to “parks”, because parks are higher value in high value areas.
There's definitely a difference (maybe less so in the Nordics with allemansratten) but I think there's some degree of continuum as regards the stressors of being in a built versus natural environment (for which studies come out every few months like clockwork and that admittedly are strongly in line with my priors so I can't claim to have tried to poke holes in robustness of findings). Also relates to stuff like tree cover to mitigate the urban heat island effect.
Perhaps more importantly, "green space" is a necessary (though not sufficient) characteristic of "being a park" and specifically the one that's in conflict with development, so I'm not totally sold on the distinction being the be all end all.
Obviously there's usually going to be more utility to a public park than some privately owned nondescript meadow, but I suppose I'm inclined to treat that as a question of degree rather than kind (e.g. going to the magnitude of the opportunity cost) when it comes to the question of "should we build something here because the opportunity cost of not doing so is too high?" -- YIMBYism seems like the name you give to describe the belief that the answer is "almost always, yes,"
I don't necessarily say we should build there - but on land with valuable transportation assets, like a Tube station, I would think you would want some sort of intentional land use, whether it be buildings or a park, not just a vacant lot. If it's not worth spending a few thousand pounds putting in a trail and a park sign, then it's probably not worth keeping empty.
I can't help but think that at least the facade rules--while doubtless overwhelmingly dumb--are still probably on net a little better than NYC's, where often as not you can't change the exterior experience of some utterly nondescript, wholly commoditized midcentury concrete block because reasons. Presumably the exteriors being obnoxiously preserved in the UK are at least nice-looking, right?
The utility of some facade rules can also depend on where you are.
For instance, "Old" San Juan, Puerto Rico has facade rules on all those buildings/apts lining the cobblestone streets, but they make a lot of money from tourism so to the extent that it raises housing costs (and this is kind of just the area within walking distance of where the cruise ships let off etc) it does provide a bunch of revenue to the island.
Is the argument that the one (ex-ante preserved park) should never be adjacent to a metro station because the opportunity costs are too high and we would / should never build Central Park West / East given the opportunity to do it over again, and thus normatively the open land next to this stop *shouldn't* be the ex ante preserved park? How is the ex ante preservation determination made?
EDIT: Also as to the argument that "Building over the one park in an otherwise densely populated area is not the same as building over a field surrounded by other fields and low density homes near a transit centre." -- without a good number to put on the imputed value of a park for public use that competes with the (implied) numbers for private use that are driving Matt's argument here, the point is that denser surrounding development and high housing demand probably drives *up* the opportunity cost of parks rather than down. Sure, *lots* more people benefit from Central Park than from a meadow near Theydon Bois, but the private value of that land is probably even higher used for housing, so even with (much) higher imputed value for public use, the delta between that use and (EDIT: previously mistaken said public) private development n is likely even higher still.
This point is definitely relevant, but I think privately-owned low-value added land probably still provides a public benefit to incumbents -- this is sort of the essence of NIMBY, right? "I'd like my leafy suburb to remain such even if most of the land is nominally privately owned" isn't exactly a an out-there position.
The point being that I think it's credibly it's a matter of degree (i.e. the question "does forgoing building here create too high an opportunity cost?" can be asked equally of parks or zoned private land) rather than kind, although the opportunity cost is almost always going to be much lower for the public park example.
I'm partially familiar with this line of argument (less so with the public-benefit purchase, which I guess abstractly I'm fine with?) but I think it's one of those ones where the principles behind it run into the "sure, it works in practice, but what about theory?" problem.
Specifically, as I understand this proposal, the idea is that people can have preferences about development but the only proper way to reify them is through some formal mechanism of contract (e.g. a private HoA or public-benefit purchase) rather than solving the collective-action problems by statute ('"illiberal zoning").
The public-dedication option seems reasonable in general, and I've chewed on it less, but then if the town owns a bunch of land at the outset it's not clear that it would be improper for them to set conditions on its development (including NIMBY conditions), no?
The more common framing I see is one Matt has brought up where you're free to restrict development but you basically do it as an HoA so that the development patterns are akin to a single (large) private landholder forgoing maximal density of development. The chief trouble being that this seems to basically land you in the world where you have the same outcome as illiberal zoning in the sense of less-dense development, but now people are forced to deal with their busybody neighbors restricting how tall your begonias can be or what color drapes you have instead of setting a basic development pattern and calling it a day -- it risks being strictly worse in practice than just allowing illiberal zoning even if by YIMBY proponents' lights it's sounder in theory.
Also I'm not sure I quite understand the artificial scarcity point - I think the people in question really do value the amenity of looking out at a field or a copse of trees instead of a midrise apartment building -- I know I do. While they might not necessarily enjoying traipsing through private property as they would a park it seems weird to say that they don't value the amenity per se in that context.
Central Park was conceived and created many decades before onerous zoning requirements came to NYC, and it would never be created today, so it seems like a really, really bad example for Ethics Gradient's point
Doesn't this make the parallels with the British greenbelt that much more acute? Matt is basically saying that we should be suspicious of setting aside land near potential development (or at a minimum transit hubs) because the opportunity costs of not building on it are high--but that's actually exactly how we get Central Park in the first place, because path dependency. I think we're talking past each other here.
I think Tokyo genuinely is a lot closer to the "fuck all urban green space" model, to be fair. That is, admittedly, absolutely a glib oversimplification but if you have to characterize it one way or the other I'm not sure it's misleading.
I found it very difficult to run in, personally, though not a long sample size (I think about eight nights total spread over a couple of trips; the second time I didn't bother to bring running shoes).
My experience was similar during a similarly short stay. Having eventually found a navigable pedestrian-friendly footpath, my attempts to navigate around the numerous citizens of Tokyo also on it were cut short when (totally my fault) I dodged one set of passersby only to immediately cut in front of the path of an unfortunate cyclist.
This column goes from "labor productivity growth in the UK has stagnated" to "housing seems like a sector with high returns to investment in the UK." Both are true, but I'm not sure what one has to do with the other.
Maybe you can argue that some workers would be more productive if reallocated towards construction or something related. But that's a one-time increase in labor productivity, not a strategy to improve long-term productivity *growth*. Long-term productivity growth is usually driven by technological change.
(Also, note that Kwarteng is probably wrong as well. The same argument applies to what he's saying: reducing corporate taxes might increase investment in physical capital, but that won't necessarily lead to technological improvements either.)
>>But that's a one-time increase in labor productivity,<<
I don't see why it would be a "one time thing" unless housing abundant policy were revoked after a short while. If, moving forward, perpetually, the UK made it easier for workers to live/work in the rich, high productivity London/SE, the gains to productivity for the UK economy should be ongoing.
This is a great column. Boris Johnson actually tried pretty hard to upzone the UK last year, before getting shutdown by his own party's MPs. The Conservatives did implement an experimental upzoning-by-hyper-local vote that some YIMBYs are excited about.
Here's my piece about the episode: https://www.sightline.org/2021/09/16/yes-other-countries-are-making-more-progress-on-housing-case-4-the-united-kingdom-and-new-zealand/
A quick comment on gentrification (because I'd like to hear from people who are good at understanding this): I live in East Harlem NYC. I'm white, as are my wife and two kids. Our neighborhood is primarily Latino (Mexican/Puerto Rican/Dominican), and has been incredibly welcoming to us and our kids. White people make up less than 3% of the population in East Harlem (rising now), but most people in our neighborhood know me on sight - the tall white guy with kids.
My building is a condo building and about 75% of the people living there are owners, the other 25% renting from owners. About half of those owners are gay male couples and have been in the area for a long time (reinforcing the common trope about the first gentrifiers in an area). There is now another couple with kids in the building and we know from our daycare and local public school that this pattern is being repeated in East Harlem. And it will likely grow exponentially once the Second Ave subway line extends up through East Harlem (10 years out).
I've lived in the city for 20 years, since my wife started graduate school at Cornell Medical. We've always lived on the east side of Manhattan, starting in the 60's (where the school was), then moving to the 90's (so we could have a bigger place that we rented), then moving to East Harlem (110's) once we were priced out of the 90's. Each move was basically a response to our current housing costs being too steep. Eventually we settled in East Harlem because we wanted to have kids and we could afford to buy a place, something that was not an option in most of the rest of Manhattan.
We moved because people richer than us were moving to our area and driving up the prices, pushing us further from the center. In each case, we were aware that as we moved, we likely drove up the prices where we moved to, but that the move had to happen because the new place was affordable while the old place no longer was. Big fish eating the little fish...with us realizing that we are a mid-size fish that was eating and always in danger of being eaten.
I love history and spent a fair amount of time learning about East Harlem when we moved there. It was interesting to learn how the old Italian and Jewish neighborhoods were basically punished for not being important enough to the cities plans - that housing projects were purposefully put in to break up their influence. Then to see the large Puerto Rican immigration followed later by other Latinos and now Asians. Basically the area has always been in flux and continues to be so now.
Many more high end (but dense) options are being built in East Harlem now. Many with income restricted requirements in 30-50% of the housing, with the other apartments being at market rate. I know some young people who live in crazy far away Brooklyn from the sports I play. I've encouraged them to apply to some of these housing lotteries (they fit the income profile), but they've refused or been hesitant because they don't want to be gentrifiers.
I worry that I'm oblivious to my gentrification, but that I also don't see the harm clearly enough in a city that is constantly in flux. Why would we pick a certain point in East Harlem's history and decide that the population shouldn't change from that point? (Why not the point when it was mostly Italian? Why not the point, more recently, when it became largely Mexican?) Help me understand this better. Why do the young people I know prefer to live so far from the center that they have to travel to instead of moving to a place where they might be gentrifiers?
Part of me wonders if this reluctance isn't slightly motivated by some reluctance to move somewhere where they'd be in the racial minority.
I may be overstating the likelihood of it ever happening but planning liberalisation is one of the tragic missed opportunities of Boris Johnson being good at winning elections but catastrophically bad at being prime minister.
Biggest majority since Blair, biggest Tory majority since Thatcher, guaranteed no new election until 2024, lots of new MPs from traditional Labour areas so basically if you're going to enact necessary planning/housing reforms and risk a backlash from NIMBYs in Tory heartlands then this is the time to do it.
Then this happened:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Chesham_and_Amersham_by-election
The Lib Dems ran on a NIMBY platform, won, at a time when Boris Johnson was enjoying a second honeymoon off the back of a successful vaccine rollout. It scared the bejesus out of the Tories and the issue was shelved.
Having green spaces near subway stops is very costly, but in terms of “people enjoying nature” it’s probably more value than green spaces further afield (pun kinda intended?) I could believe that it still doesn’t pass cost/benefit analysis, but how important is developing the green belt vs making it easier to build dense housing elsewhere?
I’m late here so idk if anyone will see this, but I’m very interested in this post as someone who is now living in DC after spending 1 year in London. My take was that the built environment in the UK was much, much, much denser than in any American city I’ve been other than NY. DC is a giant parking lot by comparison to London.
What I find puzzling is what reconciles these two facts: it’s harder to build in the UK yet it’s orders of magnitudes denser than the US. My guess is the automobile and manifest destiny are the primary factors, but I think it’s a topic that should be probed by US urbanists and YIMBYs.
A lot of what Matt covers here is spot on, but as someone who's been living in London for close to 3 years now, there are a few elements that are worth delving into:
1. The generational divide in home ownership
2. The large contribution of home values to wealth
3. Unused housing stock that is held up by foreign investors (though this is a distinctly London problem)
All of this combines, especially when overlaid with the weird class dynamics, to NIMBYism on a grand scale, and is not helped by the fact that the rate of building new public housing has deteriorated steadily since Thatcher and basically has been frozen since the Tories came back to power.
I'd like to think that a Labour government would change that, but nothing about Starmer or the current crop of Blair-wannabes inspires much confidence.
I definitely recall, when working briefly for a UK firm a while back, that our office manager told me that she was commuting to London from York, about 2 hours by tolerably fast train to the north
8 -10 years ago, I worked with a couple people in NYC who commuted by car from the Poconos five days a week.
Is Matt an ordoliberal? I get that vibe at times.
Is Matt an ordoliberal? I get that vibe at times.
Matt tends to support a strong welfare state.
On a related point (and Slow Boring favourite topic) the UK transit system is also badly broken.
There is substantial high-density re-development in London around key transport links (Battersea, Vauxhall, Stratford, etc) but there are large parts of South London which attract basically no re-development because they are transit dead-zones with no underground service.
Building out the underground should be a key priority but the work is painfully slow and ruinously expensive. For example the new Elizabeth (/Crossrail) line *partially* opened this year after a 13 year build and a £25b price tag. That comes out to roughly $300m USD per km, that's obviously much better than NYC but it seems to be 2x what it costs in Spain (https://pedestrianobservations.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/costspresentation2.pdf).
It is often faster and more reliable to live in a commuter town outside London than to live in South London.
The analysis of the Blitz on productivity immediately made me think of post-WWII Japan. Does anyone know of any similar analysis for cities like Tokyo? Is part of what allowed Japan to generate some of the densest cities in the world related to the destruction of large parts of their urban centers and/or do they just have better policies in place to allow density to happen naturally?
Japan has one of the rich world's strongest "shall issue" laws on housing construction permits. There's tons of stuff you can find via google. A few years ago, there was a lot of YIMBY chitchat regarding the factoid that, apparently, Tokyo prefecture (pop 13 million) was building more housing units annually than California (pop 39 million).
This 'factoid' has been discussed so many times, I can't believe people are still repeating this inaccurate info.
Japan builds a ton because they don't tolerate old buildings- they tear them down & replace them in the same way people tend to replace old clothes or furniture. They're not building brand new buildings, they're simply demolishing and then rebuilding the same thing every 40 or 50 years. This is not really 'building more housing units'. Imagine if a 10 unit apartment building was demoed and then replaced with a brand new 10 unit apartment building- would you say that new housing has been created?
Tokyo's being relatively affordable is probably more a function of population & economic degrowth
Degrowth? Greater Tokyo has added six million people since 1990. Japan's demographic profile ≠ Tokyo's (nor Osaka's, Nagoya's etc). But yeah, depopulation in *rural* Japan does drives affordability...
The fact that the situation is so bad in the UK is unfortunately part of the explanation of why it is not likely to improve. It's a similar NIMBY situation as in the US, but on steroids. But given the greater centralization in their government, maybe they can figure something out.
The UK has shockingly bad housing quality for the money paid. Also the extreme centralization of everything in London means that its gravitational pull is hard to resist as far as economic measures go. The UK is a place where Heathrow expansion was a national parliament issue for decades.
Matt, I sincerely appreciate your obsession with housing. I’m a firm believer in the “housing theory of everything,” and via my work at Strong Towns I am doing what I can to try and help.
For your audience, and America, I think it would be more helpful for you to spend less time writing “we have a housing problem.” We know this. Everyone who needs to know, knows.
Where we need your help and energy is finding a way through the politics that make this issue a nightmare. There are so many status quo interests benefiting from the housing crisis, and so far nobody has been able to come up with a message or policy prescriptions that can break through the wall of opposition.
I would love to see you, and all of us, spend our energy on *that.* What would it take, politically, to actually deliver a reasonable, predictable, by-right development environment?
Because as I see it now, roughly 2/3 of US voters (and I assume also a majority of the UK) are home owners, and that’s plenty large enough majority to force us all to suffer terrible collective consequences in defense of each individual homeowner’s status quo.
Your political pragmatism is what draws me to your writing. Unfortunately on this political issue I feel the pragmatic “popularist” position is to do nothing on housing, because it would take catastrophe on the order of the London Blitz to break the electorate’s death grip preference for the status quo.
Is there any possible rhetorical breakthrough that could change hearts and minds, or policy that’s somehow both effective yet so mild it can sneak through Secret Congress?
>>Is there any possible rhetorical breakthrough that could change hearts and minds<<
Personally, I don't see a breakthrough coming. I think it will be incremental (IS incremental). California is leading the way. As housing affordability becomes a more pernicious issue in an ever-growing swath of the country, the pro-housing abundance stance will gradually become politically more popular. It has become more politically popular over the last few years, I think. The pandemic-related housing spike has added to this...
Also, remember, the percentage of voters who are hardcore NIMBY is likely to be lower than the percentage who are homeowners. Some are indifferent; some are worried about their children having to live far away; some are ideologically in favor of housing abundance; some realize teachers and firefighters can't afford to live nearby...
Finally, as YIMBY policies gradually (and maybe not so gradually in a few places) spread, opposition to housing abundance may recede, as more people realize the world doesn't end when someone builds a six story apartment building on the next block over.
I sense a sea change of opinion on this issue similar to where we were previously with gay marriage, prison reform or legalized weed. It happens gradually—then suddenly.
Productivity is important. I remember the fixing of an I-95 interchange by building some new on ramps when I lived in New Haven. I believe it took about 10 years, started shortly after I arrived and ended just before I left. Who the F would want construction dragging on like that? If it takes 4 years to construct an apartment building that I'm not convinced is good for the neighborhood, why would I even entertain the idea?
Improved productivity is always welcome. But my sense is America's construction productivity issues are mostly a matter of big projects and infrastructure. *Housing* can be slapped up pretty quickly.
Really? This is good news. I hadn't seen it. I was under the impression the (MAGA-captured) GOP was increasingly going down the "the liberals are trying to abolish suburbs" road in terms of their issue positioning.
"The idea of incurring some economic cost for the sake of preserving nature is perfectly reasonable. But one really ought to think this through. The economic burden of preserving an acre of meadow immediately adjacent to a London metro station is astronomical, and if you developed it instead, you could preserve many, many acres of less valuable land elsewhere."
Isn't part of the value of nature preservation in this context precisely that it's actually near where people are and can experience it, as opposed to where it's providing much less utility to nearby humans?
Furthermore, path-dependence would seem to dictate that nature preservation in areas that may experience high housing demand in the future has to be done ex ante, when it's feasible, as opposed to ex post, when it's impossible (no one is going to demolish a bunch of high rises to build a park), particularly because parks generally don't generate much if any revenue.
I understand the argument being made in the quoted paragraph, but I think it also puts the onus on pro-housing urbanists to explain why would be improper to preserve open land what appears to be an extremely non-dense area, but it wouldn't be improper not to pave over Central Park and replace it with skyscrapers, given that that land may have among the highest opportunity costs of non-intensive use in the country. As a native New Yorker, surely Matt is aware that "[several] acres of meadow immediately adjacent to a [] metro station" describes every subway stop from from 110th St to 59th St along Central Park West and East.
I also wondered about Central Park but is there a distinction between a meadow and a park?
If the meadow is to be kept untrammeled, then not very many people can enjoy it.
If they turned it into a park specifically to increase the value of that tube station and allow people to enjoy it, that's fine.
Austin has a greenbelt, but specifically with hike&bike trails and recreation in it so that it can be enjoyed by the citizens and not _just_ kept green.
Central Park is obviously highly developed for this.
I think even staunch YIMBYs like MY agree that it's good to provide public amenities, like parks, squares, and other public spaces in cities. Part of what makes a place valuable is its access to amenities--and parks, nature, etc. are amenities, and public transit provides access. I don't think anyone is arguing that a city should be only housing, with no aesthetic and quality of life concerns addressed.
But part of having a public transit system that connects people to other people and to amenities is people living near the transit stop (or amenities being located there). A privately owned meadow right next to a train station doesn't quite seem logical to me.
Agreed!
Where there is an actual park that makes sense. But the aerial photo appears to show some green space near a tube station that doesn’t actually have any amenities for people to use.
Indeed, the greenbelt is just land protected from being developed, not necessarily land that is open to the public.
TBF, It's worth saying that with the example he picked, Theydon Bois, MY has picked one of the relatively few London Underground stations that is outside of Greater London, and in the green belt, so the mayor of London can do nothing to push development there.
The actual area is borderline rural, the weirdness seem to be more that the tube station exists at all rather than that there's a big opportunity cost to the green space.
My point is that you can certainly make the argument "green space near a tube station is bad because the opportunity costs are high" but that's a fully general argument against literally any urban green space that doesn't pay its own rent, and in fact is a fortiori stronger for parks in places with extremely high housing demand.
EDIT: context
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Theydon+Bois/@51.7417866,0.4043102,91461m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x47d8a21b21189467:0x6c7c73275f3e5729!8m2!3d51.6717598!4d0.1031094
“Green space” and “park” are two very different things. “Green space” is land that has plants on it but no human use, like the green space around a parking lot, or around many buildings. “Park” is land that is designated for public human use, which often happens to have plants on it that contribute to that use.
An argument against “green space” in high value areas does not extend to “parks”, because parks are higher value in high value areas.
There's definitely a difference (maybe less so in the Nordics with allemansratten) but I think there's some degree of continuum as regards the stressors of being in a built versus natural environment (for which studies come out every few months like clockwork and that admittedly are strongly in line with my priors so I can't claim to have tried to poke holes in robustness of findings). Also relates to stuff like tree cover to mitigate the urban heat island effect.
Perhaps more importantly, "green space" is a necessary (though not sufficient) characteristic of "being a park" and specifically the one that's in conflict with development, so I'm not totally sold on the distinction being the be all end all.
Obviously there's usually going to be more utility to a public park than some privately owned nondescript meadow, but I suppose I'm inclined to treat that as a question of degree rather than kind (e.g. going to the magnitude of the opportunity cost) when it comes to the question of "should we build something here because the opportunity cost of not doing so is too high?" -- YIMBYism seems like the name you give to describe the belief that the answer is "almost always, yes,"
I don't necessarily say we should build there - but on land with valuable transportation assets, like a Tube station, I would think you would want some sort of intentional land use, whether it be buildings or a park, not just a vacant lot. If it's not worth spending a few thousand pounds putting in a trail and a park sign, then it's probably not worth keeping empty.
This is basically what Brighton is nowadays, right?
I can't help but think that at least the facade rules--while doubtless overwhelmingly dumb--are still probably on net a little better than NYC's, where often as not you can't change the exterior experience of some utterly nondescript, wholly commoditized midcentury concrete block because reasons. Presumably the exteriors being obnoxiously preserved in the UK are at least nice-looking, right?
.....Right?
The utility of some facade rules can also depend on where you are.
For instance, "Old" San Juan, Puerto Rico has facade rules on all those buildings/apts lining the cobblestone streets, but they make a lot of money from tourism so to the extent that it raises housing costs (and this is kind of just the area within walking distance of where the cruise ships let off etc) it does provide a bunch of revenue to the island.
Is the argument that the one (ex-ante preserved park) should never be adjacent to a metro station because the opportunity costs are too high and we would / should never build Central Park West / East given the opportunity to do it over again, and thus normatively the open land next to this stop *shouldn't* be the ex ante preserved park? How is the ex ante preservation determination made?
EDIT: Also as to the argument that "Building over the one park in an otherwise densely populated area is not the same as building over a field surrounded by other fields and low density homes near a transit centre." -- without a good number to put on the imputed value of a park for public use that competes with the (implied) numbers for private use that are driving Matt's argument here, the point is that denser surrounding development and high housing demand probably drives *up* the opportunity cost of parks rather than down. Sure, *lots* more people benefit from Central Park than from a meadow near Theydon Bois, but the private value of that land is probably even higher used for housing, so even with (much) higher imputed value for public use, the delta between that use and (EDIT: previously mistaken said public) private development n is likely even higher still.
This point is definitely relevant, but I think privately-owned low-value added land probably still provides a public benefit to incumbents -- this is sort of the essence of NIMBY, right? "I'd like my leafy suburb to remain such even if most of the land is nominally privately owned" isn't exactly a an out-there position.
The point being that I think it's credibly it's a matter of degree (i.e. the question "does forgoing building here create too high an opportunity cost?" can be asked equally of parks or zoned private land) rather than kind, although the opportunity cost is almost always going to be much lower for the public park example.
I'm partially familiar with this line of argument (less so with the public-benefit purchase, which I guess abstractly I'm fine with?) but I think it's one of those ones where the principles behind it run into the "sure, it works in practice, but what about theory?" problem.
Specifically, as I understand this proposal, the idea is that people can have preferences about development but the only proper way to reify them is through some formal mechanism of contract (e.g. a private HoA or public-benefit purchase) rather than solving the collective-action problems by statute ('"illiberal zoning").
The public-dedication option seems reasonable in general, and I've chewed on it less, but then if the town owns a bunch of land at the outset it's not clear that it would be improper for them to set conditions on its development (including NIMBY conditions), no?
The more common framing I see is one Matt has brought up where you're free to restrict development but you basically do it as an HoA so that the development patterns are akin to a single (large) private landholder forgoing maximal density of development. The chief trouble being that this seems to basically land you in the world where you have the same outcome as illiberal zoning in the sense of less-dense development, but now people are forced to deal with their busybody neighbors restricting how tall your begonias can be or what color drapes you have instead of setting a basic development pattern and calling it a day -- it risks being strictly worse in practice than just allowing illiberal zoning even if by YIMBY proponents' lights it's sounder in theory.
Also I'm not sure I quite understand the artificial scarcity point - I think the people in question really do value the amenity of looking out at a field or a copse of trees instead of a midrise apartment building -- I know I do. While they might not necessarily enjoying traipsing through private property as they would a park it seems weird to say that they don't value the amenity per se in that context.
Central Park was conceived and created many decades before onerous zoning requirements came to NYC, and it would never be created today, so it seems like a really, really bad example for Ethics Gradient's point
Doesn't this make the parallels with the British greenbelt that much more acute? Matt is basically saying that we should be suspicious of setting aside land near potential development (or at a minimum transit hubs) because the opportunity costs of not building on it are high--but that's actually exactly how we get Central Park in the first place, because path dependency. I think we're talking past each other here.
Matt is lamenting regulations created long after Central Park was created. So I don't see how it could possibly bolster your point
I think Tokyo genuinely is a lot closer to the "fuck all urban green space" model, to be fair. That is, admittedly, absolutely a glib oversimplification but if you have to characterize it one way or the other I'm not sure it's misleading.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tokyo,+Japan/@35.7143609,139.7131006,28299m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x605d1b87f02e57e7:0x2e01618b22571b89!8m2!3d35.6761919!4d139.6503106
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/mtet0z/theres_cities_theres_metropolises_and_then_theres/
I found it very difficult to run in, personally, though not a long sample size (I think about eight nights total spread over a couple of trips; the second time I didn't bother to bring running shoes).
My experience was similar during a similarly short stay. Having eventually found a navigable pedestrian-friendly footpath, my attempts to navigate around the numerous citizens of Tokyo also on it were cut short when (totally my fault) I dodged one set of passersby only to immediately cut in front of the path of an unfortunate cyclist.
This column goes from "labor productivity growth in the UK has stagnated" to "housing seems like a sector with high returns to investment in the UK." Both are true, but I'm not sure what one has to do with the other.
Maybe you can argue that some workers would be more productive if reallocated towards construction or something related. But that's a one-time increase in labor productivity, not a strategy to improve long-term productivity *growth*. Long-term productivity growth is usually driven by technological change.
(Also, note that Kwarteng is probably wrong as well. The same argument applies to what he's saying: reducing corporate taxes might increase investment in physical capital, but that won't necessarily lead to technological improvements either.)
>>But that's a one-time increase in labor productivity,<<
I don't see why it would be a "one time thing" unless housing abundant policy were revoked after a short while. If, moving forward, perpetually, the UK made it easier for workers to live/work in the rich, high productivity London/SE, the gains to productivity for the UK economy should be ongoing.