The Nerds
The Campaigner
The Quants
The Theorist
The Architect
I'm not prepared to claim that Eric Crampton and Benno Blaschke are the nerdiest of all the nerds involved with New Zealand's zoning reforms, but they are the only ones who happily self-identified as such on the air with me. Crampton is the chief economist and Blaschke a research fellow with the New Zealand Initiative, a Wellington-based think tank that is funded a bit like a Chamber of Commerce is in the United States: from dues payments from a wide variety of member businesses. I've described them as the American Enterprise Institute of New Zealand: both earnestly academic and ideologically aligned with the goal of freeing markets from overregulation. This makes them representatives of an important constituency in most successful YIMBY reforms in the United States: the "reasonable Republican" or pro-business conservative. In New Zealand, where the current right-of-center government controls the path of national zoning reform, this makes them particularly important. We had a rich conversation about the different ideologies that point to upzoning, about their hopes and predictions for the country's next round of pro-housing legislation, and about whether New Zealand's unusual form of government might have something to do with its unusual national land-use policy. Discussed: Crampton and Blaschke's own podcast interviews with public economist Chris Parker, with former housing minister Phil Twyford, and with current housing minister Chris Bishop. Sam Bowman's 2021 article "The Housing Theory of Everything," in Works in Progress magazine Blascke's then-upcoming report arguing for price-based accountability in land use instead of speculative housing targets.
Many thousands of people's homes will exist because of people like Marko Garlick. By day, Garlick works as a lawyer in New Zealand's capital city of Wellington; by night, he lives with a couple roommates in a house they rent near the airport. But it's what he does in between that made me want to talk to him. One of the supervolunteers who translated New Zealand's national upzoning policy into a successful local campaign in Wellington, Garlick is one of Margaret Mead's "small group of thoughtful, committed citizens" who can and will change the world. We spoke about what motivates him, what worked, how it felt to win, and what he thinks New Zealand will need to change next. Upzoning New Zealand - a summary of New Zealand's story, co-authored by Garlick and Eleanor West Up-zoning New Zealand: the localisation of a globally mobile policy idea - West's own longer paper on the story, mentioned by Garlick
The most important part of what happened to housing in New Zealand in the last 10 years is what happened to housing in Auckland in the last 10 years. In today's episode, two professionals lay out the numbers. In short: In 2016, Auckland passed one of the biggest, broadest legalizations of more housing within an existing area that had ever happened in the developed world since the invention of zoning. One in five homes in this major metro area, about the population of the City of Phoenix, has been built since. Home prices have fallen 20 percent from their pandemic peak, but the homebuilding continues: even after a post-peak slowdown it seems to have settled 50% faster than its pre-2016 pace. In short, the Auckland Unitary Plan worked as intended. Here's how Gary Blick, the current chief economist for Auckland's regional government, and Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy, an urban economics professor at the University of Auckland, lay out the story. At the end, I offer two takeaways for cities elsewhere: Upzoning is a way of helping cities adapt to unknown futures. Auckland just happened to upzone right before its upzoning would be badly needed. Auckland's reforms were remarkable not just for their size (many more homes are now legal per square kilometer) but for their uniformity across a huge area (the same rules apply across a metro of 1.8 million people). If you'd like to see an illustrated summary of Gary's conversation, here are the slides he was sharing with me as we talked. Here are Ryan's recent academic publications. Here is a short thing I wrote summarizing Auckland's outcomes, with some photos of recently built homes. Here is Joseph Politano's excellent digest of Ryan's key findings.
Somewhere along the journey from inspiration to legislation, a good idea needs to be carried along by people like Chris Parker. Parker's work is to map the big abstract facts of his field, economics, across the rocky landscape of politics. First at the Auckland Council and then for New Zealand's central government, Parker was a key figure in moving his country to the leading edge of housing policy. We talked about why economics seems to be on so many New Zealanders' minds, why housing developers should have to pay for their own pipes, and what Americans should remember to be proud of.
New Zealand's former minister for housing and resource management is a very specific and important sort of legislator: the kind whose power and influence revolve around the fact that he's a bit of a nerd. During the 2010s, MP Phil Twyford used any means necessary to build a fresh understanding of the housing crisis that was tearing through the lives of his constituents. His conclusions spread to both his political friends and foes, leading his country to do something none ever had - even as he was driven from his ministry and his party from power. We spoke about how that all went down, the oddly durable new politics it unlocked, and the dilemma of getting credit for big ideas. Discussed in the show: "Up-Zoning New Zealand: The localisation of a globally mobile policy idea" by Eleanor West the "leaky homes crisis" of poorly built homes in New Zealand from 1988-2004 KiwiBuild, the NZ Labour Party's failed attempt to build 100,000 publicly subsidized homes by 2028
After seven years as a professional YIMBY, I wanted to know: What happens after you win? So I decided to go to the other side of the world and ask.