Why I'm not a NIMBY or a YIMBY

Plus: Braverman's phoney war on tents

The longer read: Why I’m not a NIMBY or a YIMBY

The YIMBY vs NIMBY culture war has been growing in housing discourse in recent years. 

For those unversed, NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard) are groups who tend to oppose new housing development. The name (derogatory) is applied to them by those who think they get in the way of perfectly good housing development and exacerbate the housing crisis as a result.

YIMBYs meanwhile have adopted the grammatically unsatisfying Yes In My Backyard to show they support building new homes. The acronym goes right back to 1993 and the movement probably traces its routes to tech workers being priced out of Californian cities as the Silicon Valley boom took off.

YIMBYs tend to adopt a simple argument about the housing crisis. They see it as wholly a problem of undersupply caused by planning restrictions. Ergo, if we eliminate planning restrictions, supply will grow to match demand and everyone will be able to afford a house again. 

The movement is increasingly influential. Sir Keir Starmer has declared himself a proud YIMBY, while recent (and abortive) Conservative efforts to reform planning were very YIMBY-inspired. 

They are quite an online community and their preferred methods of argument are the memes, sneering sarcasm and name calling which will be familiar to veterans of other battlegrounds in the culture wars. It's not true of all of them (some of my best friends etc etc), but dare to imply you don't support unlimited house building on Twitter and you’ll see what I mean.

The NIMBYs meanwhile are harder to find on social media, but are very active in planning meetings, local papers and council elections. In other words, they exist in the arenas where house building decisions actually get made. 

They too can be quite unpleasant. Their attacks on local councillors can get vastly out of hand (I’ve heard of death threats being issued by people concerned about the impact of a housing development on local parking). It’s not true of all of them (some of my best family members etc etc), but it’s also certainly there. 

Unusually for the culture wars, this is a generational fight on the right rather than the left of British politics: parish councillors and politically-engaged older homeowners are lined up against very-online young economic liberals. The two tribes probably sit on opposite sides of many exceedingly dull Christmas dinner tables in the Home Counties, which may explain some of the vitriol. 

The trouble is that neither group has particularly good solutions to the UK’s housing crisis.

NIMBYs will often claim that the UK does not have a major need for new housing - pointing to the number of empty or under-occupied properties, and arguing that on a bedroom-by-bedroom basis we actually have ample housing already. 

This might be true on a spreadsheet, but unless you are suggesting forcibly evicting pensioners it doesn't help us very much.   

Most of the UK's land is still agricultural, and we should be claiming some of it for housing as our population grows, especially around existing transport infrastructure. 

The YIMBYs are right that planning law and local opposition is a major block here, and our failure to release this land drives us instead to densify brownfield sites within our existing cities, which in turn vastly inflates land values and consequently house prices. This drives gentrification and prices young people out.    

But YIMBYs also flatten a complicated problem into a simple solution. Just lifting planning restrictions would not immediately result in developers flooding the market with enough housing to bring prices down. 

Our market is completely dominated by larger volume housebuilders, who really act more as land speculators and whose business model - by its very nature - places profit above supply. 

They make complicated and sophisticated calculations about the value of land they buy and the maximum profit that can be extracted from it. 

This means that a large site obtained by a volume house builder will be subject to a calculation of its absorption rate - the amount of homes which can be released per quarter to maintain the highest possible profit margin. The rate of housebuilding follows accordingly. 

This is why the UK’s eight largest builders were able to pay shareholders £16 billion in dividends over the last 18 years, without significantly increasing the supply of new homes. The Sheffield Hallam University report which compiled this figure said private builders’ “failure to build in sufficient quantity is not some kind of temporary aberration” but “integral to their business model”.

Removing planning restrictions will not change this, but will simply put more land into the developers’ pipelines. They will keep maintaining their profit margins and we will stay priced out. 

The truth is that this country has only ever come close to building enough homes when it has put major investment into council housing.

Since the 1990s, lower income groups have had to look to private rent to find housing, which has made homes which were once the affordable end of the sales market a goldmine for private landlords. This in turn has taken away the first step onto the property ladder for this generation of young professionals. But you fix this with more social housing not just more overall supply.

It is also inescapably true that a planning system is more than 'red tape' holding back the wisdom of the market, despite comments last week by the leader of the opposition. Take flood risk. 

Even under the current system we build thousands of homes in ‘Flood Zone 3’, the areas of the country where there is a heightened risk of flooding. 

This not only puts the new occupants at risk (and can stop them obtaining insurance), but it also makes flooding worse elsewhere because when it does flood, water is displaced by the new development.

What this shows is that developers only have a short term incentive to build homes and extract the profits. They will be long gone by the time floods come and we need a system capable of forcing them to think about longer term questions like this. 

Planning is also the lever through which local authorities can extract infrastructure contributions and affordable housing for developers, or decide that the right use for a certain site is actually leisure, public services, workspace or greenery depending on local needs. 

Planning is, in summary, the means we have as a democratic society to have some say in how our land is used. We should be suspicious of anyone who wants to abolish it. 

This is not to say there are not major failures in the current planning process - currently a typical planning application for a large scheme requires about 15 reports, and local authorities are woefully under-resourced when it comes to making a meaningful assessment of them. 

The result is endless money spent on consultancies and extraordinary delays before we get to the final decision. 

But this is cured by more funding for local councils to hire good staff, and giving them proper powers to make good decisions swiftly - even if some local residents disagree. 

Planning reform has proved a difficult question for decades in the UK. But there is probably a political space which speaks to both those anxious for new homes and those who want to see some element of control over where and how new housing is built. After several aborted attempts at extreme reform, finding that space is really the only way forward. 

But the more we follow the culture war imperative to retreat into camps, ridicule, name call and dismiss our opponents, the less likely we are to find it. 

The shorter read: Suella’s phoney war on tents

The home secretary's notorious weekend Twitter screed, which branded street homelessness a lifestyle choice, was hardly original. 

Braverman joins a line of politicians going back to the Tudor-era introduction of the Poor Laws to react to rising, visible homelessness by blaming the homeless. 

It is, of course, just as wrong now as it was then. An excellent report by Shelter from December 2018 looked into why people end up sleeping rough and found that the overriding reason was the loss of a settled home, often through eviction but also through relationship breakdown or the loss of a family member.

Despite Braverman's claim that help is always available, many of the people Shelter spoke to had been turned away by the local council, after being told they were “intentionally homeless” or lacked a local connection. 

Given the proximity to Remembrance Day, Braverman may want to consider that another major cause was “leaving an institution or the military”. Some of the tents she wants to take away will be keeping the rain off troubled ex-servicemen. 

There is also adult autism - with one study suggesting there are a hugely disproportionate number of autistic people in the rough sleeping population. 

The government promised to end rough sleeping by 2024, but has done nothing to seriously try and achieve this, allowing rough sleeping figures to rebound to their pre-pandemic peak and wasting the major progress made by the Everyone In drive in the pandemic.

Ministers have apparently lost faith in Housing First, with pilots in Liverpool and Manchester never expanded - despite proven international evidence that they can get people off the streets quickly and permanently. Insiders say the Treasury has blocked a wider roll out, believing it is not sufficient value for money.

Given the findings from the Shelter report, the ban on no-fault evictions promised since 2019 would have helped and so would simply provided more resources for local services to step in at the end of tenancies.

There are also good projects with proven success out there, like Milton Keynes or the YMCA’s Dynamic Pathway to Independence. A government with a serious ambition to tackle this issue could take these models national.

It is profoundly depressing that instead of any of this, we have landed on criminalising homeless charities for reacting to the lack of other support by providing the basic form of shelter available.

(An aside - a fondness for the use of the full force of criminal law, easily the state's most expensive and coercive arm, is a troubling inconsistency for so-called small state devotees like Braverman. Really, they seek a small state for business, but a big and very aggressive one for peaceful protestors, asylum seekers or rough sleepers). 

The question about this tents policy, though, is does it really matter? Braverman’s days as home secretary look numbered, and her party appears to be on its way out of power anyway. This cruel and absurd policy will never be implemented.

But dragging rough sleepers into the culture war does matter. 

The Vagrancy Act 1824 - which criminalised rough sleepers and resulted in ridiculous use of magistrates courts to try and fine destitute people for causing nuisance - was finally repealed in 2022. But it has not yet been replaced. If Braverman succeeds in making it seem woke to think that we should help rough sleepers, if she promotes the myth that could help themselves if they only wanted to, we should worry about what it will ultimately contain. 

For Braverman and her ilk the policy detail is hardly the point. She has an imaginary voter in her head: the type of person who likes to say rough sleepers in the town centre are all just foreigners or addicts who should get a job or go back where they came from. What matters to her is not that the policy makes any sense but that this voter thinks she speaks for them, and remembers that when the next Tory leadership contest rolls around.

Seen in this light, perhaps ridicule is a better response than serious engagement. 

With which in mind, I will end by saying that it is a bold move for a government that increasingly resembles a circus to seek to ban tents.  

See you next week. 

Quote of the week

"No-one should be criminalised simply for having nowhere to live" 

Boris Johnson, 2021. How times have changed. 

My book Show Me The Bodies is one year old this week. You can buy a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Show-Me-Bodies-Grenfell-Happen/dp/0861546156