My 2nd-Favorite Book on Housing

False modesty aside, my favorite book on housing is my own Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation. (A great stocking stuffer for all ages, BTW). But my second favorite book on housing (booklet, really) is Kristian Niemietz’s Home Win: What If Britain Solved Its Housing Crisis.

Both of our books strive to make superficially dry research thrilling. My gimmick was to embed the research in a graphic novel. Niemietz’s gimmick is to embed the research in science fiction. To be precise, Home Win is a work of “future history” — a story of housing policy reform from 2025-2035, built on what we know in 2024, yet told from the perspective of 2035.

Home Win is ungated, and worth reading cover-to-cover. Here are some highlights to whet your appetite. The book starts with sheer sci-fi YIMBY wish fulfillment:

If you had emigrated from Britain in the mid-2020s and came back today, the sheer scale of new construction is probably the first change you would notice. Britain is building like mad…

Of all the social and economic changes that have taken place over the past ten years or so, Britain’s building boom is turning out to be by far the most transformative one. This may seem counterintuitive at first. If you had asked people ten years ago what they thought the most exciting developments of the near future were going to be, most of them would probably have said something about artificial intelligence, self-driving cars, virtual reality and, possibly, space travel – but certainly not something as mundane as putting bricks on top of other bricks.

Yet it turned out that this boring, unglamorous, old-fashioned industry contained the solution (or at least a big part of the solution) to a lot of the country’s problems. It is a cliché to say that ‘there are no silver bullets’ in politics, but we have since learned that there very much is one, and it has been there the whole time. We just chose not to use it.

Then the book gives us the “back story” — i.e., a summary of current conditions in the real world of 2024:

Britain’s supply shortfall was remarkable because, in the above, we are not comparing the UK to a free housing market unencumbered by supply-side restrictions. Every jurisdiction in every country included in Figure 1 has a statutory land use planning system. Every jurisdiction in every country included in Figure 1 restricts development in some way. And even the most liberal and development-friendly jurisdictions impose at least some planning constraints that most economists who specialise in the subject would probably not consider ideal. So, when we talk about a ‘housing shortage’ in the British context, this is not in comparison to some theoretical ideal. It is in comparison to other housing markets governed by planning laws that are also flawed – just not nearly as flawed as the British one.

More non-sci-fi:

Greenbelts also expanded in size. In 1979 about 5.5% of the land of England was designated greenbelt. In 2022 that figure stood at 12.6% (Rankl and Barton 2022: 15–16), most of it prime real estate in areas of high housing demand. At that stage, they were no longer really ‘belts’, because a belt is not usually wider than the person or object it surrounds. Britain, however, had more greenbelt land than developed land.

In Niemietz’s chronology, Britain’s YIMBY revolution starts (checks calender)… in our current month:

Documents that were leaked years later have since shown that in December 2024 the prime minister was already planning to do what prime ministers usually do when faced with NIMBY opposition: capitulate, U-turn, demote the Housing Secretary, scrap the policy, apologise to the NIMBYs and build nothing. But the YIMBY awakening changed everything. It would have been difficult to present the most popular member of the cabinet as an electoral liability.

Emboldened by this new-found popularity, the Housing Secretary began to thrive in the role of an anti-NIMBY culture warrior, who, far from seeking compromise or accommodation, openly sought confrontation with NIMBYs, teasing and taunting them at every opportunity. The ensuing controversies energised the hitherto dormant ‘YIMBY bloc’ even further.

For the first time, YIMBYism became an actual electoral force. It is not that millions of people had suddenly become urban planning geeks, who avidly awaited the next edition of the Journal of Urban Economics or Land Economics. It was just that all that anger about the housing situation, which had hitherto been unfocused and poorly articulated, suddenly found an outlet. People stuck in substandard accommodation started to blame NIMBYs for their situation, when they would previously just not have seen any connection between the state of the housing market and campaigns to block housebuilding. YIMBY-vs-NIMBY became akin to a culture war issue, much like woke-vs-anti-woke, which meant that sitting on the fence was not an option. The government was forced to pick a side, and somewhat reluctantly, they decided to throw in their lot with the YIMBYs.

Lots of fun speculative behavioral political economy, like:

Taken together, these fiscal changes meant that people who lived in places which allowed lots of housing development would see material improvements in their living standards, changing financial incentives decidedly in a pro-development direction. This had an ambivalent effect on NIMBYism: it made some people ‘more NIMBY’, and others less so. The more ideological NIMBYs felt insulted by what they perceived as a ‘bribe’, and resented the implication that they could be ‘bought off’. Yet the more transactional NIMBYs saw it as a fair compensation for the inconvenience. YIMBYs and agnostics, meanwhile, tended to see it as free money.

So, while the original assumption that NIMBYs were rational actors who could be won over turned out to be illusory, changing incentives was still the right thing to do, on balance. It split the NIMBY coalition, and it turned politically passive YIMBYs into more active ones.

And:

Different aspects of the housing revolution appeal to different parts of the political spectrum. The Left likes its egalitarian aspects: the benefits of the housing revolution have been systematically biased in favour of people in the bottom half of the income distribution. It has made Britain a more equal country in terms of its wealth distribution, and in terms of its income distribution if we look at incomes on an after-housing-costs basis. The political Right likes the increase in home ownership, and the fact that it has made Britain a more family-friendly country. Economic liberals like the increased economic dynamism, the mobility, the productivity improvements and the fiscal savings that resulted from the removal of what they see as the dead hand of government.

In sum: When the world is confusing, academics’ well-worn call for “more research” makes great sense. Once research makes the world clear, though, calling for “even more research” makes little sense. It’s far better to do figure out how to make existing research thrilling — and paint a vivid yet accurate picture of how humanity can use what we know to make the world better.

P.S. In case you haven’t heard, Kristian also wrote one of the all-time best books on socialism. Wonderful work from a beautiful mind.