YIMBY Country

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.