At the Labour party conference, one buoyant new faction stood out: the yimbys. After hosting a packed reception at Liverpool’s Hilton hotel last Sunday, the new Labour Yimby grassroots group is becoming a much discussed force in UK politics, with Keir Starmer saying he too is a champion of the cause. But does its pro-property development agenda live up to the hype?
Yimbyism was born of the supercharged real-estate boom in Silicon Valley that saw private rents around San Francisco climb to some of the highest in the US. Incoming tech workers began a culture war calling for more condominiums, cleverly adopting the acronym yimby (which stands for “yes in my back yard”) to imply anyone advocating controls on new property development was merely a self-interested nimby (“not in my back yard”) resisting progress.
British yimbys are a broader church than their pro-deregulation California predecessors. Here the movement extends to renewable energy infrastructure and high-speed rail, as well as property development. However, the bedrock of yimbyism, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the claim that building lots of new homes is the only way to solve housing crises.
The theory goes that the crippling cost of British housing, which means that many people are forced to shell out huge proportions of their income to keep a roof over their heads, is the result of market competition from a growing number of people all trying to live in the same places. The yimbys claim that increasing the supply of new homes relative to population growth will cause prices to fall back to affordable levels.
However, the theory does not appear to work in practice. Even though housebuilding in the UK has decreased since its high point in the 1960s, we are still building new homes faster than the population is growing. In 1971 there was almost one dwelling for every three people in the country. Today, there is about one dwelling for every 2.25 people, meaning we actually have more homes per capita right now than we did 50 years ago.
If the yimby hunch that house values fall when the supply of new homes outstrips population growth were correct, we should have seen overall prices come down since the 1970s. In fact, Britain has experienced the exact opposite; five decades of astronomical property-price inflation.
Even in areas with especially high levels of new development, property prices have stubbornly continued to rise. In Croydon, south London, for example, the total number of dwellings has increased by 39% since 1971, significantly outpacing a population growth of just 13% over the same period, but house prices have shot up nonetheless.
Twice as many new homes have been built in London in the past decade as the number of households added to the city’s population, yet average property values in some areas have almost doubled. In some places, rents have even gone up as populations have fallen. The bottom line: increasing the supply of new homes relative to the population simply doesn’t bring down prices as yimbys claim.
“There is no unique housing shortage in Britain today,” the housing lawyer Nick Bano tells me. He points out that we have roughly the same or more homes per capita as many European countries where housing is more affordable. He believes the root cause of intolerable housing costs is not a shortage of homes, but lax rent regulations and dwindling council housing stocks.
Yimby campaigners like to present themselves as plucky upstarts, battling widespread animus over new development, but in fact recent polling showed that 80-85% of Britons would be happy to support new homes in their area, provided basic conditions were met. Where resistance to new housing exists, it is not usually motivated by stereotypical nimby prejudice, but a clear-sighted awareness of local services at breaking point.
For decades, communities have seen estates of boxy, car-dominated, badly constructed new builds, like the one I grew up in, thrown together on the edges of towns, while their libraries and bus routes have closed, with nursery and NHS waiting lists spiralling. Most people are not naive enough to believe that simply handing property developers more land to build more homes will automatically produce good outcomes for their communities, or well designed, sustainable neighbourhoods.
The government has pledged 1.5m new homes this parliament, but in practice that could take many shapes. With an ambitious approach, Labour could create a new generation of well-designed sustainable neighbourhoods, upgrading existing dwellings alongside commissioning new ones, and using regulatory measures to bake in long-term affordability. On the other hand, if building the homes is left to an amped-up version of Britain’s conventional property-development models, with oil- and cement-based materials and no mechanism to guarantee affordability, we risk burning through our carbon budget and locking in car dependency, while failing to make housing cheaper for anyone.
“The truth is that most new development isn’t good enough,” says Matilda Agace, the policy lead at the Design Council, which warns “75% of new housing schemes are poor or mediocre”. For Agace, rushing through more bad developments will create more problems than it solves. “Yimby campaigners are calling for an ambitious housebuilding agenda, but we need to be equally ambitious about the design quality and climate credentials of the homes Britain creates.”
It’s true that decent proposals for well-designed new homes are sometimes knocked back over ludicrous planning objections. But it’s also true that many proposed developments are simply not good enough – lacking social infrastructure or genuinely affordable housing – and are rightly resisted by nearby communities. The mature approach to achieving genuinely aspirational urban change is not to adopt uncritical blanket positions for or against development of any kind, but to weigh each project on its actual merits. That’s not yimbyism or nimbyism – it’s just common sense.
Phineas Harper is a writer and curator
