Don’t crush the NIMBYs
We are not Margaret Thatcher. And the NIMBYs are not the unions.
The website CapX runs an entertaining (and depressing) column called NIMBY Watch. A few highlights:
Planning permission for student flats in Edinburgh on the site of an ‘iconic’ scrapyard (it was used in the film Trainspotting 2) was refused after 126 locals objected.
A rather charming proposed block of flats in North London which is apparently “too tall, too bulky and too dense” draws the ire of Benedict Cumberbatch.
Left-wing MP Jeremy Corbyn opposes social housing in his constituency.
Councillors alchemically turn ‘villages’ into ‘towns’ to take advantage of a loophole in the Government’s green belt policy, so they have to build fewer houses.
Building some flats on the site of a station car park, which is half an hour by train from central London, is bad because it will “mean people only live in Redhill for a short time, making the town centre more transient.”
99-year-old actor says ‘let them arrest me!’ in protest against building some more tennis courts – in Wimbledon.
These news stories are clearly ridiculous, and (unlike housing) are not in short supply. Outrage is a common reaction to stories like this. It is particularly bitter to note that the objections tend to come from older people – boomers who bought their houses for a pittance and are now trying to pull up the drawbridge behind them.
Some people who are in favour of building more homes channel this outrage into a desire to ‘crush the NIMBYs’. In practice, this means major reforms to land-use planning which will impose more housing on them top-down, as well as a rhetorical stance that tries to paint the NIMBYs as selfish and entitled.
I think that ‘crush the NIMBYs’ is fundamentally the wrong approach. It gets the politics of liberalising housing wrong, because ‘crush the NIMBYs’ is synonymous with ‘crush the electorate’.
Everybody is a NIMBY about something. Even YIMBYs have their limits. Mine is the construction of ‘the Sphere’ in Stratford. This revolting 100m-tall orb, a copy of the one in Las Vegas, would be covered in LEDs. As well as being tacky, it would shine bright light directly into nearby flats. I welcome virtually all development near me, but I would chain myself to the barricades in protest against the Sphere if I lived nearby.
The Sphere is my limit. Most people’s limits will be breached much sooner. And they vote. The coalition of every political party is made up of NIMBYs. Shire Tories are NIMBYs. People in ‘left behind’ towns who vote Reform are NIMBYs. Labour voters in big cities are NIMBYs. Not all voters are NIMBY to the same degree, and I suspect that less wealthy voters are less NIMBY – ‘if you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose’ – but that doesn’t change the fundamental political calculus that every party’s base consists primarily of NIMBYs.
I am optimistic that these attitudes can be changed, slowly. I think that a large housebuilding programme would probably make people less NIMBY over time, as long as it meets two conditions:
The developments are good quality – people need to see that ‘building more houses’ doesn’t necessarily mean building more Barratt boxes. If new houses improve an area, people will object to them less.
Locals do not feel that houses are being imposed on them by a distant government in Westminster, or a useless council. There needs to be an element of consent.
Starting this flywheel effect is hard. Successive governments have tried and failed to reform planning for the past decade. The reforms proposed in 2020 by Robert Jenrick are instructive: once it became clear that they were going to lead to more housebuilding everywhere, including in Tory seats, the Conservative Party rose up in rebellion, and after the Lib Dems won the Chesham and Amersham by-election on an anti-housebuilding programme, the reforms were dead. This is what happens when you are perceived as wanting to ‘crush the NIMBYs’.
An objection to this line of argument might go – What if we managed to get a leader who is willing to make difficult decisions, and risk temporary unpopularity, in order to do what they think is right, and rewrite the political economy of the country at the same time? In other words, crush the NIMBYs just as Margaret Thatcher crushed the trades unions.
There are several problems with this theory. Most fundamentally, it is much easier to crush your opponents than it is to crush your own supporters. The unions were not Conservative-aligned. And it would be more accurate to say that Thatcher crushed the union leadership, who were never going to support her, rather than the union members, many of whom had conservative attitudes and were potential Conservative voters. Policies like requiring secret ballots for strikes took advantage of the disconnect between the militant leaders and the more moderate grassroots.
It is also important to remember the sense of crisis that gripped the country in the late 1970s. The 1970s were a decade of endless strikes; adding to the pain were high inflation, an IMF bailout, and IRA terrorist attacks. There was serious talk of a Right-wing coup d’état. The ‘Winter of Discontent’ in 1978–79 was six months before Thatcher came to power; symbolically, even the gravediggers had downed spades in a cold, harsh winter. In these circumstances, ‘crush the unions’ starts to look like the sensible, prudent thing to do, rather than a radical subversion of the postwar settlement.
There was also a disconnect between elites and the median voter. The median voter was fed up with the strikes: political elites were as well, but felt there was nothing they could do about it, following the experiences of both Conservative and Labour governments who were unable to bring the unions to heel. Thatcher was able to exploit this gap, by credibly promising and then delivering on what the people were demanding.
Exploiting policy disconnect is one way to achieve radical change, because its advocates can play the trump card of ‘give the people what they want’. This applies across the political spectrum. Right-wing populist movements exist largely because of the gap between elite beliefs on immigration and those of the median voter. But the same could be said for the New Deal in America, which exploited the gap between the laissez-faire American elites and the public who were demanding a much stronger government response to the Great Depression.
Unfortunately no such policy disconnect exists when it comes to housebuilding. The median voter is a NIMBY. In fact, the 95th percentile least NIMBY voter is still a NIMBY. Voters get what they want, which is no housing in their backyard.
There is another problem with ‘crush the NIMBYs’. Any system of land-use planning will still have the problem of local objections.
The British planning system is sometimes described with the curious phrase, ‘plan-led and discretionary’. Each local planning authority is supposed to prepare a Local Plan, which sets out how the area will develop. This is not, however, a zoning code: it does not specify which forms of development must be given planning permission. It is at the discretion of the planning authority as to whether a development should be given planning permission, and in making its decision it needs to take into account all ‘material considerations’ to strike the right ‘planning balance’. The Local Plan (and national planning policies) are always material considerations, and very important ones, but the planning balance in a specific case might justify deviating from them.
This means there are two places where NIMBYs can object: at the preparation of the Local Plan, and after a developer has applied for planning permission. A common YIMBY proposal is ‘flexible zoning’: in effect, the Local Plan becomes a document saying what you can and cannot build by right, without needing to get discretionary permission.
This would remove one veto point. But it would not change the other. NIMBY energy would simply be redistributed to the headwaters of the process, the preparation of the Local Plan.
What if we simply stopped asking NIMBYs for their opinion? This, too, would not work. The basic problem is that local residents have become rather accustomed to being consulted. Taking that right away is very difficult, and risks a backlash: top-down pro-housing policies often struggle to get cross-party consensus. There are votes to be won by opposing housebuilding.
There is also a steelman case for taking locals’ views into account: the planning disasters of the 1960s, when ugly modernist housing estates and urban motorways tore the heart out of cities, were caused by a ‘planner knows best’ attitude. Elites thought that this was The Future, while ordinary people who had to put up with it knew that it was awful – and, like all cases of policy disconnect, it was fertile ground for political entrepreneurs who could exploit the gap. NIMBYism owes a lot to the failures of modernism.
‘Crush the NIMBYs’ could be slightly insultingly called cargo cult YIMBYism. The term ‘cargo cult’ is overused, and many people have forgotten its origins. During the Second World War, the inhabitants of isolated Pacific islands saw aeroplanes land, bringing with them cargo of useful things. The islanders wanted them to come back. So (according to Richard Feynman) they made runways, lit beacons, made a hut for an air traffic controller to sit in with bits of wood on his head like headphones. Needless to say, the planes did not land, because the islanders had got themselves into a muddle. They thought that the form of landing planes was the whole picture.
To call something ‘cargo cult’ means that a person confuses the outward signs of a thing with the thing itself. ‘Crush the NIMBYs’ is downstream of a view that Linda, aged 70, who writes into the council to protect her ‘cherished local car park’ is the NIMBY problem, rather than just a symptom of it.
Is ‘crush the NIMBYs’ at least useful for firing up the footsoldiers of the movement? I am not sure this is the best strategy. In Britain, power is extremely centralised: changing the planning system can be done by a single Act of Parliament (and many tweaks can be accomplished by ministerial fiat). The people you need to persuade are the politicians, their advisors, and the civil service.
We have, as it happens, had some success with persuading them: nearly everybody seems to accept we have a housing shortage in principle. Keir Starmer described himself as a YIMBY (although I’m not sure he understood what it meant), and his government is determined to build more homes. Even when politicians oppose housing developments, they usually phrase it with the overture “We all support the clear need for homes for young people and families” followed by the inevitable “but”. We have won the first step of the argument.
But the next stepping stone, which is much harder to reach, is converting this support-in-principle into actual policy. There are various reasons why this has not happened yet, which seem to be down to the internal politics of the Labour Party. The point is that rage bait will not help make policy. In fact, it could well hinder it, because it negatively polarises people. NIMBYs will understandably feel insulted if they are portrayed as grasping boomers who need to be put in their place. They will mobilise against us. And there are rather a lot of them.
Cargo cult YIMBYism will not help us build more houses. It will lead us to advocate policies that fall apart upon first contact with political reality, and give us a reputation as sneering philistines who want to demolish all that people hold dear about the country. It is naïve and self-indulgent.
This is not to say that we should give up. I do not think that the planning system as it currently exists is a law of nature: there are ways of overcoming the NIMBY problem which involve making housing popular among people who would otherwise object to it. Showing ‘political bravery’ is not enough.
Most importantly, we must proceed from understanding what that problem actually is: in other words, understanding why NIMBYism exists in the first place. That will be the subject of my next post on this topic.
this is a great post except for your opposition to the sphere
love the sphere
would move next to it
One thing I've never quite worked out is why YITBYism (Yes In Their Back Yard) has not emerged as an equilibrium. Why didn't the Tories force building in most of inner London (west London exempt, obviously)? Why isn't Labour building in the Lib Dem/Tory marginals in the home counties?