YIMBY Country

OK, let's recap. But first, I wanted some help. Eleanor West is an urban policy analyst who wrote a 35-page master's thesis and also an essay (with Marko Garlick) in Works in Progress magazine summarizing the intellectual history and procedural execution of New Zealand's remarkable zoning reforms since 2016. Her appearances on the UCLA Housing Voice and Good on Paper podcasts inspired my time in N...

Councillor Julie Fairey is part of what you might call the YIMBY faction on the Auckland Council, a regional "super-city" government created in 2010 to run the newly combined cities of New Zealand's most populous metro area. She regularly bikes to work from her relatively close-in ward, which includes both some wealthy enclaves and a working industrial harbor and has no one racial or ethnic majori...

Jack, the New Zealander featured in this interview, is another sort of person every social movement needs: the recruit. To be clear, he's been in housing advocacy for years now. But this co-founder of the advocacy group Greater Ōtautahi -- that's the Māori word for the city of Christchurch -- is a bit younger than his counterparts in Auckland and Wellington were, and eagerly continuing the work of...

Once upon a time, back in the 1500s, someone came up with a new way to say "hot take." It came from the French word "to attempt." Brendon Harre has both the mind and the heart of an essayist. While working as a psych nurse and periodically bracing himself for flights around the world (he has two sons in Norway), Harre became the first New Zealand writer whose thinking about housing I ran into acro...

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...

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 su...

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 zoni...

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...

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 b...

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.