YIMBYs are reformists, not fundamentalists. The policy changes we call for will enable more public and private housing alike.
In only his second-most controversial column of the week, Guy Rundle wrote on June 13 (“To build better cities, we need to build better YIMBYs“) that the YIMBY movement is “utterly misdirected”. The article, however, betrays fundamental misunderstandings of both YIMBYism and the contemporary housing crisis.
Let’s begin with Rundle’s critique of our focus on private housing supply. It is completely true that YIMBYs across Australia and the world are primarily focused on increasing the supply of private housing — and for good reason. Because, outside of terminally online public housing maximalists, most people actually want to own their own homes.
For better or for worse, home ownership is considered the Australian Dream, and we don’t see that dream dying anytime soon. People want to own their homes, and so YIMBYs push for policies that will enable those people to own housing within vibrant cities themselves, rather than on the amenity-scarce fringes.
We do this advocacy in the context of more people than ever wanting to live in Australian cities. Insofar as the demand for Australia’s cities might be construed as a “problem”, we see it as a good problem to have — and one that is entirely manageable through the government’s suite of tools for supply-side reform.
No doubt the Andrews government in Victoria is considering every one of these tools at its disposal ahead of the telegraphed supply-side planning reforms coming later this year. This may include potential mass upzoning, a reduction in heritage overlays, or the streamlining of planning processes. Ideally, YIMBY Melbourne would like to see all of this, and more. We must see systemic changes undertaken in order to increase housing supply.
The left-NIMBY caucus, of which Rundle seems to be a member, takes a narrow view of this project. They take our focus on increased development and affordable private home ownership and paint it as a sort of free-market fundamentalist project.
This could not be further from the truth. Rather, as per a recent column I wrote for Launch Housing’s Melbourne Zero campaign, YIMBYs very much recognise public, social, and affordable housing as essential parts of Australia’s housing ecosystem. We also recognise that the same planning system Rundle claims to not be a significant factor in constraining supply has held up several Victorian government housing builds for more than half a decade each.
Planning delays like this have seen Victoria’s social housing supply increase by an abysmal 74 units over four years, alongside skyrocketing social housing applications. This isn’t just a case of not enough money being thrown at the issue, either. The state government consistently falls short of its current, insufficient social and affordable housing targets. If the housing affordability crisis is, as Rundle claims, a vague series of failures tied to capitalism, and caused by the greed of evil developers, then why do government and non-profit projects also end up in the lurch?
It’s because the planning system is broken. This tangled web of state and council processes, of overlays and ordinances, of third-party objections, local council planning meetings, ministerial interventions, perverse incentives, tax inefficiencies, and VCAT — it’s a nightmare, folks.
And to his credit, Rundle identifies the troubled system in his article, at least to some extent. He points toward some minor items — such as Airbnbs, negative gearing and (troublingly) foreign property ownership.
Many of these things are worth talking about. And contrary to the article’s assumptions, YIMBYs are broadly in favour of negative gearing reform — we just don’t see it moving the needle very much. We also have a similar attitude toward Airbnb. But Rundle’s specific focus on foreign investment is blatant dog-whistling. If he is concerned about vacant properties (overblown, as per SGS Economics & Planning) then he should talk about that, rather than focusing on the tiny percentage of vacant homes owned by foreign nationals.
All of this and more bothered me about Rundle’s article. But the thing that bothered me most was how he chose to end it. At the very end of the article, after a 3000-word laundry list of reasons not to build, not to worry about supply, not to worry about planning reform — after all of that, he throws up the mea culpa: we do need to build more, he says, and quickly. But it has to be done in the exact ways he demands. And also — maybe not in his backyard.
Disclosure: Jonathan O’Brien is the lead organiser for the housing advocacy group YIMBY Melbourne.
Are you a YIMBY or a NIMBY (or something in-between)? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Given the opportunity to present the YIMBY case in detail, and to challenge the detailed arguments I made about the movement, O’Brien fails. Let’s go through it:
Home ownership: O’Brien suggests that I’m against home/apartment ownership. There was no criticism of home ownership in the article, and O’Brien can quote none. I’m in favour of expanded home ownership, and I’ve previously criticised the left for advocating German style high public housing rates in a country with a home ownership tradition.
What I did focus on was the concrete process of supply when the private sector dominates. I pointed out:
O’Brien answers none of these points. He cannot, because he wants to preserve a naive faith in the responsiveness of the market.
But the whole point of the private sector is to control supply for the maximisation of profit. Sometimes that means managing and enforcing scarcity. This is both left and right economics 101. If the price of apartments rise at a fast clip, it makes more sense to build less rather than more, and keep costs lower for a higher rate of return. If land prices rise beyond a certain clip, then building on a vacant site depreciates its vacant land value. This is why 60% of land released on Melbourne’s outer fringes 20 years ago remains undeveloped. O’Brien didn’t reply to that either.
Here’s the challenge for YIMBYs:
Figures, states and papers please, as I provided. In the absence of that, I and many others will conclude that YIMBYs are simply anti-state zealots, waging a political-culture war.
Finally two things: I have never been anti-home-ownership, O’Brien’s spurious claim against me, in the absence of a real case. I think the state should create housing corporations to build build-to-sell affordable apartment blocks, with some restrictions on resale and multiple ownership. O’Brien and others need more imaginative solutions like this, rather than focusing on the preservation of bluestone cottages as the reason people cant get a flat.
Secondly, for the record, I’m not a NIMBY, as I own no property, and have no back yard. I fight heritage battles to preserve the best parts of one of the most beautiful cities in the world, because I live here. There are ways to increase the social equity of home ownership and centrality, without destroying it. O’Brien and others need to make the case for it, rather than lazily refusing to reply to specific arguments, and using cheap labels in their place.
Instead I’ve advocated state housing corps building affordable apartments for purchase, with limits on their later resale (you have to sell the apartment back to the housing corporation, at a pegged rate). This system
dammit, those last three lines are an orphan para. The reply ends on ‘…in their place.’
Hope to see you back writing articles Guy as well as commenting upon them here at Crikey. I hope that good sense prevails and that this happens sooner rather than later.
Good to see you were allowed a rebuttal, Rundle.
My “in moderation” comment was quickly moderated – and deleted. For the crime of expressing words of support of Rundle.
Half of mine get ‘moderated’. What a euphemism.
Let’s see about the one below …
I said nothing controversial, didn’t even fully support Rundle’s previous article, but did mention he’s the one remaining reason I still subscribe to Crikey, which has become very mediocre in the past years. If he’s gone, I will be too.
The automatic AWAITENINGED of all comments on the weak-as “2023/06/19/crikey-editorial-2” has resulted in such a backlog the poor, overworked madBot machine tenders have been backburning comments wholesale.
And then not noticing when they are reposted and then allowed to see the light of day.
That entire shameful episode was the final nail in the coffin for many of those yearning for a return to the rigorous journal of yore.
welcome to the moshie, GR. (crowd surfing – it ain’t quite the same). the editing here is just as hit-n-miss, but the dope’s heaps better and you don’t have to lick anyone’s a*se. the chicks are
hottersmarter, too.onwards, comrade. thnx again & good luck. chrs.
Good to see your reply to this naïve concoction of name calling (left caucus of NIMBYism??) devoid of any concrete analysis. The problem of unoccupied dwelling whihc O’Brien dismisses as dog whistling is not rebutted by the analysis of the SGS website he uses, which depends on geographical areas of analysis (SA4’s) far too large to indicate the sort of phenomenon of suburban areas with elevated numbers of unoccupied apartments you were referring to. But calling someone a racist is a cheap way to close down discussion.
Hope there will be more of your writing on Crikey soon.
I came here to state he had done a poor job turning you into straw man but you beat me to it. Most of his focus seems to be on things developers want and things they whinge about. As is usually the case, there is a dressing of those ordinary people being disadvantaged used for cover. In this presentation they and the developers are equal victims. Big business lobby groups (ahem peak bodies) pull the same trick constantly, throwing up poor suffering small businesses as cover for their demands. There are some pertinent problems noted but no criticism of, for example land banking or stronger and better, not weaker, planning.
And who funds and is associated with YIMBY Melbourne anyway? Who mows the AstroTurf?
Sorry, but some of that just doesn’t make sense, specifically this para:
“But the whole point of the private sector is to control supply for the maximisation of profit. Sometimes that means managing and enforcing scarcity. This is both left and right economics 101. If the price of apartments rise at a fast clip, it makes more sense to build less rather than more, and keep costs lower for a higher rate of return. If land prices rise beyond a certain clip, then building on a vacant site depreciates its vacant land value. This is why 60% of land released on Melbourne’s outer fringes 20 years ago remains undeveloped. O’Brien didn’t reply to that either.”
How exactly, when the price of apartments is rising quickly, does it make sense not to build them?
Because of how much capital you might have, given rising costs, and marginal utility. Say apartment prices are going up by 25% pa, but materials and labour by 35%. You can build between 6-8 apartments with your existing capital, equipment etc, make a tidy profit. Or 12-16 over 2 years. If you try to build 16 in one year, you will need extra workers, trucks etc, borrow for extra materials costs etc. The profit per unit will narrow to 15%. So why not slow it down? If the land itself is appreciating by 15%, and materials costs and interest rates are rising, there’s a case for not building at all, and getting free money for no risk.
As can be seen by the spec home builders who’ve gone broke in this credit squeeze….and the land bankers who haven’t…
Because if you’re a big developer with a lot of stock of unsold apartments, then hanging around and selling them slowly while prices continue to rise is better for you.
The core problem is people like the author don’t actually believe cities exist, and that Melbourne’s hitherto exemplary urban realm and its heritage structures aren’t things of tangible benefit to everyone.
The author links to his own hodge podge of outright lies about what a heritage overlay actually constitutes. He either doesn’t understand or is being deliberately deceptive, and on either basis he stands throughly and morally condemned.
The problem here is that there is no qualitative analysis, no systems analysis, just a desparate notion that building anything at volume anywhere is going to somehow get an entire generation of people into housing easier.
It isn’t. Because heritige is not does not and cannot stopping densification. The reality is that the inner regions of our cities were carved up at their creation into small narrow lots which are now some of the most highly valued land anywhere in the nation. Developers are simply not interested in paying premium prices for these tiny little lots and then sitting on them for 10 years waiting for the nighbours to sell up and agglomerate the sites into something that can be profitable for them to redevelop.
If heritage is stymying development (which is something a heritage overlay doesn’t do but which zoning specifically does) then why when you go for a walk around the half developed areas in brunswick off Sydney Rd and off lygon street are there still acres of single storey smash repairers with no heritage overlay on them and already of a size that would make them profitable for a developer in araeas already zoned for density all sitting there undeveloped? Because the supply side has its own pace and its own limitations – as demonstrated very clearly by the present building downturn being driven by inflated construction costs.
The unfathomable thing is that a bunch of people who claim to know anything about how the property markets operate have somehow hit on the aspect of the entire planning system that least inhibits densification – heritage overlays as their totemic issue to try and get a generation of people into property ownership.
The sheer stupidity of the thinking coupled with the crass barbarism, the ignorance of how much of both tangible and abstract value that Melbourne lost through the post-war wave of demolitions, the willingness from a bunch of people demonstratively posseseed of no sense of history, no sense of culture, no sense of community, no sense of aesthetics, no sense of how placemaking, urban amenity and social welfare are all linked fantasising the somehow removing heritage protections is going to see the most expensive and highly subdivided land transform within their or even their childrens’ lifetimes into stratatitled skyscraping housing equity is just completely delusional.
And you’d be happy to leave them to their own delusions if they weren’t trying to wreck all the things that make Melbourne a place people want to live in the first
That’s whats wrong with neoliberalism in general, and that’s why the ever-so-juvenile-named “YIMBY” movementm which has its roots there inherits all its terminal sicknesses. It’s an entirely values-free dogma – a qualitative abyssal plain and ultimately so delusional a religion, so wedded to puritanical theories of how neat lines of supply and demand govern every aspect of existence – in spite of every obvious evidence that’s not how the world actually works – that it is both doomed to failure and yet capable of wreaking immense destruction to the collective factors that enrichen and ennoble humanity.
And the more their solutions don’t solve their misdiagnosed problems, the more house prices continue to climb, the more young people struggle to achieve home ownership, they will just scream for more and more deregulation.
Yet the giant heffalump in the room is the fact that we are the most highly urbanised nation on earth trying to fix an entire generational housing crisis within the narrow geogrpahies within coo-ee of basically only 2 CBDs in Sydney and Melbourne. The failure of the Australian housing market is primarily our wholesale failure at regional development. But the geographic discrimination is wrought on a class of people most of the middle class YIMBY set (more interested in whether they can get an apartment near a university and a cafe) aren’t interested in advocating for.
As someone who has spent a lifetime advocating for both greater density in established areas and for heritage, watching this lot dim-wittedly stumbling round drunk in the dark and threating to smash all the fine china before even getting close to finding a lightswitch is too depressing to even be comical.
“Home ownership is considered the Australian Dream.” No, my friend, an affordable, decent rental is the Australian Dream for a third of the population. Home ownership is gone, at least for the lifespans of many renters. You probably don’t rent. You do not see what it is like from where the rest of us are, the older, the poorly paid, the precariat, the ones lacking parents with wealth. There is no dream here. Your intentions may be good, but your aims need to come down to earth.,
Judge for yourself:
“We think people should be able to do what they want with the land and property they own, without being subject to arbitrary definitions of “neighbourhood character” passed down by Heritage professionals with narrow visions of what community and land use should look like.”
https://twitter.com/yimbymelbourne/status/1669661795592859660
To me that tweet to me sounds like YIMBY Melbourne is more about private property rights fundamentalism than delivering afdordable housing. When pointed out to them that open slather, regulation free “I can do what I want it’s my property” is highly problematic for a whole range of reasons all we get is silence from them.
“We think people should be able to do what they want with the land and property they own”.
That has zero to do with planning and creating good urban environments.
Yes but it would give them right to hike the rent or divide the bedrooms or demolish and build a multi-story box.
An unsustainable McMansion with 5 bathrooms and not a blade of grass or vegetation. The solution to the housing crisis! 😉
Bring back the author who wrote the original article – the only reason I still subscribe to this increasingly tedious publication.
Referred to so obliquely as a longer comment with that author’s name went straight into the ‘awaiting moderation’ vortex.