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.
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.