Thank you for posting this—I’m going to get a bit critical in this comment, but I think this is a super important topic (one that I’ve cared about since long before I seriously engaged with EA), and I’m happy to see someone post about it.
Still, though, I don’t think a convincing case has been made in this post that funding UK housing policy orgs is cost-effective (even though I suspect that it actually is cost-effective—at least, that it crosses the 100x bar). Some thoughts:
- I have doubts about PricedOut as an organisation. I vaguely know a few people who volunteer for them and I think they are generally very interesting, smart, and capable, but I am not particularly convinced that their interventions are sufficiently effectiveness-oriented. Would be interested to know what convinced you otherwise in conversation with them.
- I’m not so sure that this issue really is timely, unfortunately. Gove’s support for Street Votes seems to have been a passing thing, and the window for action may well have closed. This is especially true given the very weak position of the government at the moment: a couple of years ago this government would have had the power to push through reform, but I don’t think that’s true any more. (Consider: the planning reform bill was basically gutted after a single by-election loss last year that, with hindsight, didn’t actually seem to turn on housing and planning; now that the government’s popularity and Tory poll numbers are in freefall, and backbenchers are much more empowered to rebel, the government would probably be much less likely to risk offending its core of homeowning voters and its many NIMBY backbenchers.)
- It seems to me that Street Votes just wouldn’t produce enough homes. There are a few reasons for this, but the big one I’m worried about is culture: while the analyses that have been done are completely correct on the economic incentives, there are pretty strong cultural incentives that point in the opposite direction. The UK (as well as much of the Western world) has a powerful culture of homeownership, meaning not just ‘owner-occupied dwellings are valued’ but that there’s a certain mythology to the goal of owning one’s own home and having control over it. Consider, for example, the incredibly strong political taboo on cutting subsidies on social care even to wealthy homeowners, precisely because paying for social care might require some of them to sell their house—not to become poor, they’d remain wealthy, just to sell their house and start renting. (If you missed the latest re-emergence of this controversy, just look at the tone of this coverage.) I think these will push quite strongly in the direction of people not endorsing building, because the market-driven logic of Street Votes pushes against the mythology of homeownership. Anecdotally, I have discussed Street Votes with a pretty substantial number of homeowners in various contexts, and I very rarely have gotten the positive response that advocates imagine. It’s very hard to measure these cultural effects, which makes it completely understandable that analyses have left them out so far; but I think it’s impossible to ignore them in a full analysis of housing policy, not least because it’s a culture of homeowning that leads to supply restrictions in the first place. Perhaps when push comes to shove, the reality of the economic benefits would overcome cultural hesitancies, but I am not as convinced of the strengths of economic incentives in this area compared to a lot of YIMBYs.
- These orgs seem quite concentrated in and around London. On the one hand, this makes sense, as that’s where the crisis is most acute; but from a political perspective, it seems hard to see how any reform passes in the short run without at least some work in more rural areas,* for three reasons: 1) opposition to reform is concentrated in these constituencies; 2) in the short run, Tory governments are at significant risk of rebellion from MPs representing these constituencies; 3) any potential Labour government would not have increasing housing supply as a high enough priority to force it through without support from CLPs outside London. But reducing opposition in these areas seems substantially less tractable.
Ultimately, I second MaxGhenis’ hope that someone might write up a rigourous and comprehensive EA analysis of housing policy interventions: both your post and the FP report are really solid stuff, but unfortunately they largely leaves out all the positive externalities on climate, migration, quality of life, etc. beyond growth. It’s really these that convince me this is probably an area worth funding. (For example, I am of the opinion that housing policy is the primary driver behind rising inequality in the Western world, and so the downstream effects of improvements to housing policy would be pretty enormous both economically and politically.)
*I’m specifically thinking about the seats the Lib Dems are targeting using the label ‘Blue Wall’.
Thank you for posting this Peter. I agree that the uptake for street votes is likely to be low. (This may be like cryonics, where those who opt for cryonics assign a lower probability to cryonics being successful than those who do not.) I would highlight two things: (a) the fact that the Strong Suburbs report models enormous housing production from an uptake rate of only a few percent, and (b) the enormous, life-changingly large incentives to take up street votes—literally over a million pounds per household in some cases. I have spoken to over a hundred homeowners who are interested. I agree that many comfortable middle class families will not want to be disturbed. But some of those in more difficult circumstances may find the large incentives very appealing.
George mentions the London YIMBY brand but it is worth noting that the broader YIMBY Alliance campaign is a cross country campaign and is highly supportive of street votes. There have been endorsements from politicians from a wide range of areas, in different parties.
John—great that you are participating in this discussion! Could you say more about the prospects that the Tories will take this on? They got burned quite badly from their last attempt at planning reform. Will they try again? A lot of the impetus for planning reform came from Cummings, who has now left.
Is there any chance that Labour could take this on?
Thanks John! We are still getting encouraging signals from the current regime that they would like to take this on, and I am not aware of significant political opposition within the Conservative party; on the contrary, street votes seem to be broadly supported. Their last attempt at planning reform was always going to be deeply controversial because, unlike street votes, it was not designed to be as politically palatable as possible. I cannot say I was surprised that it ran into difficulties.
Street votes are vastly less controversial, because they have gone through years of design changes based on feedback from those most likely to oppose, and considerable work on framing and coalition building. There is still a strong impetus within government for planning reform of some kind. I think any such reform is likely to be included in a wider bill on Levelling Up, and will deliberately be presented in a conciliatory way, not in the contentious fashion that was found in the White Paper.
The key point I think is that this is very much not a non-zero sum game, and the details of the attempted strategy matter hugely. Most analysis misses that fundamental point.
In short, I think there is still good hope. To answer your question, yes Labour could also take this on if it has not happened before the next election. We have listed the current wide coalition of support including Labour and social housing voices at yimbyalliance.org/streetplans. Street votes are now also supported by over 25 Conservative MPs, not all of them listed there. Another paper in similar vein will be published later this month, again with a wide range of endorsements.
I agree that many comfortable middle class families will not want to be disturbed. But some of those in more difficult circumstances may find the large incentives very appealing.
Just to record that this has changed my mind substantially—I think I was being overreliant on anecdotal evidence which suffered from a selection bias I wasn’t taking full account of. Thanks for pointing this out, I’ve now updated towards you.
just anecdotally and on the intuitive level, I could see take-up for this being high in places with fairly transient populations in expensive but bad housing, eg in parts of London. In the row of poorly made and poorly insulated single glazed houses I used to live in Hackney, I think quite a lot of people would take the opportunity to retire ten years early by selling on.
Thanks for this comment! Hard for me to give satisfying answers to everything which is the sign of a particularly good critique IMO. Re: PricedOut I will speak to you privately.
Gove’s support for Street Votes seems to have been a passing thing, and the window for action may well have closed.
Unless you have private information then I don’t really see how you’re inferring this? He publicly supported it around the end of November and has said little since then. My understanding from his public statements are that they are still deciding exactly what to do and how to implement reforms so everything is still to play for.
I agree government instability makes the outlook worse here. What we can infer from the failure of the previous reforms would be a post in itself, but briefly I think they were overambitious, tried to ram through much higher housing targets and took away a bunch of local consent for development. Street Votes does less of this, I see it as a much milder and politically palatable policy. The previous policy immediately got a bunch of opposition in the press and Street Votes has seen very little of that after Gove’s support. Of course, it may see more opposition if it were to become official policy!
Which leads us onto...
I think [the culture of homeownership] will push quite strongly in the direction of people not endorsing building, because the market-driven logic of Street Votes pushes against the mythology of homeownership. Anecdotally, I have discussed Street Votes with a pretty substantial number of homeowners in various contexts, and I very rarely have gotten the positive response that advocates imagine.
I basically agree with John’s comment on this. I would add that streets can also make themselves look nicer by adopting a particular design code for the street, which could lead to some support independent of financial benefits. Most streets won’t do this, but enough might to make it worth it. Or not! But I think the proportion of streets which vote for development is a grey area about which we can reasonably disagree.
from a political perspective, it seems hard to see how any reform passes in the short run without at least some work in more rural areas
Yeah, I don’t have a good answer to this. I would say again that I think these reforms are pretty politically palatable and don’t force as much development onto rural areas as the previous plans.
I second MaxGhenis’ hope that someone might write up a rigourous and comprehensive EA analysis of housing policy interventions
I third this hope! For me, the economic benefits loom largest and are easiest to quantify but certainly there would be many other benefits of improved policy here.
Just on the Gove point: I have no private information, and perhaps I should have hedged more (the verb ‘seems’ was an attempt to communicate uncertainty, but reading my comment back I wasn’t clear enough); but just going on Gove’s patterns of behaviour, I have quite low confidence that he’s still particularly enamoured with Street Votes, albeit with large error bars on that number. Perhaps I am inferring too much from an absence of evidence, but Gove definitely has a pattern in basically all the portfolios he’s held: he appears to value novelty in policy for its own sake, and jumps at a lot of proposed reforms that are radical and ‘clever’; but, precisely because of this, is very fast-moving and goes through policy proposals very quickly, leaving a lot on the table that he seemed to be a big fan of. I make no judgment on the value of this approach, but I think it’s relatively clear that it is Gove’s approach. This is partly explained by the time he spent with Cummings as his SpAd, but only partly—I think it’s more generally just part of his political ‘style’, that maybe he learned from Cummings but has retained since then. The endorsement of Street Votes seemed to me to fit this pattern; and because he’s since become relatively silent on housing policy, my confidence that he still cares much about Street Votes is low. But I’ve got large error bars because (a) I’m inferring from Gove not saying something, which is always a risky way of figuring out what someone thinks (b) my reasoning is based on trying to identify patterns of behaviour in someone I don’t actually know or have any particular insight into, and (c) a lot of the evidence could be explained by the alternative hypothesis of ‘Gove genuinely believes in the policy, but hasn’t said much more because the government has just been putting out fires for the last few months’. My prior for ‘Gove says he likes a policy just because it’s novel and clever, but has no real commitment to it’ is thus doing much of the work here, and you can very reasonably make a different judgment.
I don’t have much to say about the rest of your comment except that, yes, I think your considerations are totally reasonable; I think there are some legitimate differences of judgment here.
Thank you for posting this—I’m going to get a bit critical in this comment, but I think this is a super important topic (one that I’ve cared about since long before I seriously engaged with EA), and I’m happy to see someone post about it.
Still, though, I don’t think a convincing case has been made in this post that funding UK housing policy orgs is cost-effective (even though I suspect that it actually is cost-effective—at least, that it crosses the 100x bar). Some thoughts:
- I have doubts about PricedOut as an organisation. I vaguely know a few people who volunteer for them and I think they are generally very interesting, smart, and capable, but I am not particularly convinced that their interventions are sufficiently effectiveness-oriented. Would be interested to know what convinced you otherwise in conversation with them.
- I’m not so sure that this issue really is timely, unfortunately. Gove’s support for Street Votes seems to have been a passing thing, and the window for action may well have closed. This is especially true given the very weak position of the government at the moment: a couple of years ago this government would have had the power to push through reform, but I don’t think that’s true any more. (Consider: the planning reform bill was basically gutted after a single by-election loss last year that, with hindsight, didn’t actually seem to turn on housing and planning; now that the government’s popularity and Tory poll numbers are in freefall, and backbenchers are much more empowered to rebel, the government would probably be much less likely to risk offending its core of homeowning voters and its many NIMBY backbenchers.)
- It seems to me that Street Votes just wouldn’t produce enough homes. There are a few reasons for this, but the big one I’m worried about is culture: while the analyses that have been done are completely correct on the economic incentives, there are pretty strong cultural incentives that point in the opposite direction. The UK (as well as much of the Western world) has a powerful culture of homeownership, meaning not just ‘owner-occupied dwellings are valued’ but that there’s a certain mythology to the goal of owning one’s own home and having control over it. Consider, for example, the incredibly strong political taboo on cutting subsidies on social care even to wealthy homeowners, precisely because paying for social care might require some of them to sell their house—not to become poor, they’d remain wealthy, just to sell their house and start renting. (If you missed the latest re-emergence of this controversy, just look at the tone of this coverage.) I think these will push quite strongly in the direction of people not endorsing building, because the market-driven logic of Street Votes pushes against the mythology of homeownership. Anecdotally, I have discussed Street Votes with a pretty substantial number of homeowners in various contexts, and I very rarely have gotten the positive response that advocates imagine.
It’s very hard to measure these cultural effects, which makes it completely understandable that analyses have left them out so far; but I think it’s impossible to ignore them in a full analysis of housing policy, not least because it’s a culture of homeowning that leads to supply restrictions in the first place. Perhaps when push comes to shove, the reality of the economic benefits would overcome cultural hesitancies, but I am not as convinced of the strengths of economic incentives in this area compared to a lot of YIMBYs.
- These orgs seem quite concentrated in and around London. On the one hand, this makes sense, as that’s where the crisis is most acute; but from a political perspective, it seems hard to see how any reform passes in the short run without at least some work in more rural areas,* for three reasons: 1) opposition to reform is concentrated in these constituencies; 2) in the short run, Tory governments are at significant risk of rebellion from MPs representing these constituencies; 3) any potential Labour government would not have increasing housing supply as a high enough priority to force it through without support from CLPs outside London. But reducing opposition in these areas seems substantially less tractable.
Ultimately, I second MaxGhenis’ hope that someone might write up a rigourous and comprehensive EA analysis of housing policy interventions: both your post and the FP report are really solid stuff, but unfortunately they largely leaves out all the positive externalities on climate, migration, quality of life, etc. beyond growth. It’s really these that convince me this is probably an area worth funding. (For example, I am of the opinion that housing policy is the primary driver behind rising inequality in the Western world, and so the downstream effects of improvements to housing policy would be pretty enormous both economically and politically.)
*I’m specifically thinking about the seats the Lib Dems are targeting using the label ‘Blue Wall’.
Thank you for posting this Peter. I agree that the uptake for street votes is likely to be low. (This may be like cryonics, where those who opt for cryonics assign a lower probability to cryonics being successful than those who do not.) I would highlight two things: (a) the fact that the Strong Suburbs report models enormous housing production from an uptake rate of only a few percent, and (b) the enormous, life-changingly large incentives to take up street votes—literally over a million pounds per household in some cases. I have spoken to over a hundred homeowners who are interested. I agree that many comfortable middle class families will not want to be disturbed. But some of those in more difficult circumstances may find the large incentives very appealing.
George mentions the London YIMBY brand but it is worth noting that the broader YIMBY Alliance campaign is a cross country campaign and is highly supportive of street votes. There have been endorsements from politicians from a wide range of areas, in different parties.
John—great that you are participating in this discussion! Could you say more about the prospects that the Tories will take this on? They got burned quite badly from their last attempt at planning reform. Will they try again? A lot of the impetus for planning reform came from Cummings, who has now left.
Is there any chance that Labour could take this on?
Thanks John! We are still getting encouraging signals from the current regime that they would like to take this on, and I am not aware of significant political opposition within the Conservative party; on the contrary, street votes seem to be broadly supported. Their last attempt at planning reform was always going to be deeply controversial because, unlike street votes, it was not designed to be as politically palatable as possible. I cannot say I was surprised that it ran into difficulties.
Street votes are vastly less controversial, because they have gone through years of design changes based on feedback from those most likely to oppose, and considerable work on framing and coalition building. There is still a strong impetus within government for planning reform of some kind. I think any such reform is likely to be included in a wider bill on Levelling Up, and will deliberately be presented in a conciliatory way, not in the contentious fashion that was found in the White Paper.
The key point I think is that this is very much not a non-zero sum game, and the details of the attempted strategy matter hugely. Most analysis misses that fundamental point.
In short, I think there is still good hope. To answer your question, yes Labour could also take this on if it has not happened before the next election. We have listed the current wide coalition of support including Labour and social housing voices at yimbyalliance.org/streetplans. Street votes are now also supported by over 25 Conservative MPs, not all of them listed there. Another paper in similar vein will be published later this month, again with a wide range of endorsements.
Just to record that this has changed my mind substantially—I think I was being overreliant on anecdotal evidence which suffered from a selection bias I wasn’t taking full account of. Thanks for pointing this out, I’ve now updated towards you.
just anecdotally and on the intuitive level, I could see take-up for this being high in places with fairly transient populations in expensive but bad housing, eg in parts of London. In the row of poorly made and poorly insulated single glazed houses I used to live in Hackney, I think quite a lot of people would take the opportunity to retire ten years early by selling on.
Thanks for this comment! Hard for me to give satisfying answers to everything which is the sign of a particularly good critique IMO. Re: PricedOut I will speak to you privately.
Unless you have private information then I don’t really see how you’re inferring this? He publicly supported it around the end of November and has said little since then. My understanding from his public statements are that they are still deciding exactly what to do and how to implement reforms so everything is still to play for.
I agree government instability makes the outlook worse here. What we can infer from the failure of the previous reforms would be a post in itself, but briefly I think they were overambitious, tried to ram through much higher housing targets and took away a bunch of local consent for development. Street Votes does less of this, I see it as a much milder and politically palatable policy. The previous policy immediately got a bunch of opposition in the press and Street Votes has seen very little of that after Gove’s support. Of course, it may see more opposition if it were to become official policy!
Which leads us onto...
I basically agree with John’s comment on this. I would add that streets can also make themselves look nicer by adopting a particular design code for the street, which could lead to some support independent of financial benefits. Most streets won’t do this, but enough might to make it worth it. Or not! But I think the proportion of streets which vote for development is a grey area about which we can reasonably disagree.
Yeah, I don’t have a good answer to this. I would say again that I think these reforms are pretty politically palatable and don’t force as much development onto rural areas as the previous plans.
I third this hope! For me, the economic benefits loom largest and are easiest to quantify but certainly there would be many other benefits of improved policy here.
Just on the Gove point: I have no private information, and perhaps I should have hedged more (the verb ‘seems’ was an attempt to communicate uncertainty, but reading my comment back I wasn’t clear enough); but just going on Gove’s patterns of behaviour, I have quite low confidence that he’s still particularly enamoured with Street Votes, albeit with large error bars on that number.
Perhaps I am inferring too much from an absence of evidence, but Gove definitely has a pattern in basically all the portfolios he’s held: he appears to value novelty in policy for its own sake, and jumps at a lot of proposed reforms that are radical and ‘clever’; but, precisely because of this, is very fast-moving and goes through policy proposals very quickly, leaving a lot on the table that he seemed to be a big fan of. I make no judgment on the value of this approach, but I think it’s relatively clear that it is Gove’s approach. This is partly explained by the time he spent with Cummings as his SpAd, but only partly—I think it’s more generally just part of his political ‘style’, that maybe he learned from Cummings but has retained since then.
The endorsement of Street Votes seemed to me to fit this pattern; and because he’s since become relatively silent on housing policy, my confidence that he still cares much about Street Votes is low. But I’ve got large error bars because (a) I’m inferring from Gove not saying something, which is always a risky way of figuring out what someone thinks (b) my reasoning is based on trying to identify patterns of behaviour in someone I don’t actually know or have any particular insight into, and (c) a lot of the evidence could be explained by the alternative hypothesis of ‘Gove genuinely believes in the policy, but hasn’t said much more because the government has just been putting out fires for the last few months’. My prior for ‘Gove says he likes a policy just because it’s novel and clever, but has no real commitment to it’ is thus doing much of the work here, and you can very reasonably make a different judgment.
I don’t have much to say about the rest of your comment except that, yes, I think your considerations are totally reasonable; I think there are some legitimate differences of judgment here.