From the Northampton Herald & Post:
Residents are up in arms about plans to develop a small Northamptonshire village, that will see its size increase by a third.
A development in Litchborough for 29 new homes in the next five years is causing concern to locals. Rob Hamblin, of Litchborough Residents’ Association said: “These new plans represent a 30 per cent increase in the number of houses and potentially as much as a 35 per cent increase in the population of the village.'
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Muh, Far Right
2 hours ago
16 comments:
But can you not see, there is not enough land there? Matrix!
What they don't see, the matrix has blinded them, is that it will increase the value of land on the whole in the area because of the extra people and amenity. And it will increase the quality of life... on the whole
RS, they know the land is there, but they think that new development will adversely affect their house prices (maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't). That is all that matters to them.
Er hang on, it WILL increase the value of the land... on the whole
Look across history to see what increases the value of land the most. Increased population plays the bigger part.
The story as presented doesn't fill me with much hope that the "development" will be much of an asset to the village, unless you take the view that any new housing has got to be good. The sort of developer who is more prepared to raze an historic building than repair it is likely to produce an uninspiring identikit housing estate.
Having said that, the opposition by the Resident's Association on the grounds of size rather than anything else is pure NIMBYism and to be deplored. University College are probably all out for profit maximisation and have spent no money on anything approaching design.
RS, that is not important to the NIMBYs. They are like the Party Officials in the Eastern Bloc - they don't care about how small the overall pie is, they just want to have a bigger slice than the others. They might gain £10,000 by allowing new development, but if others gain £100,000 then that is anathema to them.
B, sure, some new housing IS ugly or boring, but there is no natural law that says this must be so. And they usually look nicer once the trees have grown, the bricks have weathered a bit and so on.
Yes agreed to all. We are all right. Just talking in different contexts.
As you know I always talk political economy. For those averse to fancy language this means the production and distribution of wealth for ALL. What happens on the whole, in the aggregate, in the end.
You have been talking in terms of personal economy when you discuss behaviour of NIMBY's. The distribution of wealth for the one or the few. Politics
Neither are wrong. Just that the latter always produces less, more wastefully with more misery. NIMBY's cannot see this as individuals. In the end we all pay for that selfishness and ignorance.
This idea is obviously a great challenge for a libertarian who thinks social activity is wrong in general but is quite happy to take any gains from it.
No problem. It is what it is.
Apologies for using fancy terms or if I have not made it clear enough
X
Hello Mark. I have a problem with your definition of NIMBY which seems to include anyone who doesn't want a lot of houses built adjacent to their property. I understand your concerns about the selfish nature of some of these people but for the term NIMBY to be truly valid it requires an identifiable group of people who can be viewed as holding the exact opposite view. In other words, we need to find a group of people living adjacent to relatively unspoilt countryside who would welcome a 2 thousand home Barratt estate or a group of activists looking to expand their village by 33%. I would settle for a few less dramatic examples but I fear that the problem is that such groups seem to be in short supply. This suggests that accusing any one group of being NIMBY is pointless as the evidence suggests that the whole population could actually be at least partially NIMBY with the exception of a few people who are intellectually anti-NIMBY but unprepared to demonstrate any practical adherence to their beliefs. If this is the case then I fail to see how calling every group that opposes any development for any reason NIMBY can ever be productive as all this can ever achieve is a hardening of attitudes and a more divided society. Your statement that people only oppose development because of their selfish love of their property values is only true in some cases. There are many other reasons why people oppose specific developments and to suggest otherwise is unhelpful. It surely makes more sense to stop calling people names and engage in a reasoned debate if any progress is to be made. Unless we can get away from the concept of what appears to be a few urban antis attacking pretty much the whole of the rest of the UK population then I fail to see where the argument is taking us as a society. I cannot understand the logic of those who veto all development and expansion on principle but neither can I understand those who believe that continual development and urbanisation is a universally beneficial concept. Both ideas seem archaic in the 21st century.
I'm bored, so for the sake of an argument, I'm a NIMBY.
You can't travel around Britain without noticing that for every picturesque old village, there is an ugly new town parasitically attached to it.
Now, I can see the practical argument, the old village already has utility plumbing, so it makes sense to piggy back off it. But given, as you assure us, Britain is less that ten percent built up, wouldn't it be less trouble and please everyone if new towns were placed on green field sites?
Well no, it wouldn't. And the reason is, nobody wants to live in a sterile, modern new town. They actually want to live in a pretty little village. So I would argue the NIMBYs are quite correct, the aim of the new town attached to their village is to appropriate something belonging to them and share it with somebody else. Y'know, comrade style.
CO,: "we need to find a group of people living adjacent to relatively unspoilt countryside who would welcome a 2 thousand home Barratt estate or a group of activists looking to expand their village by 33%."
The anti-NIMBYs are easy to identify - they are the people who would be happy to buy a newly built home. Or any home, for that matter, seeing as all homes were newly built at one stage. Do you live in a house, out of interest?
"the evidence suggests that the whole population could actually be at least partially NIMBY"
Sadly, you are quite right on this one. I am probably the only practising anti-NIMBY and have always resolutely refused to sign any petition against anything new being built, regardless of what it is.
RLJ: "You can't travel around Britain without noticing that for every picturesque old village, there is an ugly new town parasitically attached to it."
There's no need for the 'new town' to be ugly (although in the 1960s - 1980s it was pretty horrible) and further, it's the pretty village that is the parasitically attached to the new town. Presumably most of the people in the pretty village work in and commute to and from the new town. Without those jobs, the houses in the village would be worth a lot less.
I can see where this is coming from: when you buy a house in a small, picturesque village, there is an implied understanding that this is how the village is and a huge council estate or ugly new development won't be stuck on the side. You'd be pretty pissed off if your house halved in value and your view was wrecked (one reason you bought the house) and your village had turned into a small town all at the same stroke.
By the same measure you'd be upset if you bought the Mona Lisa and someone grafittied it.
EKTWP: yer average young family is unable to buy a house on anything like the same favourable terms as previous generations, partly because of a Socialist policy of preventing the free market from increasing supply to match demand. There are broadly two ways to sort this out:
a) Build loads more houses and hope for the best.
b) Encourage more efficient allocation of existing houses by replacing as many taxes as possible with LVT. This has the advantage that if the new development reduces the value of your house, you get a commensurate reduction in your LVT bill.
Or the NIMBYs in Litchfield can do the decent thing and buy up the surrounding few hundred acres of farmland at £5,000 - £10,000 per acre and just refuse to build on it.
PS, if I bought the Mona Lisa, I'd insure it against that sort of thing. I am not preventing other artists from creating new paintings. And by owning it, I am not forcing young families into a lifetime of debt, am I? Completely daft analogy, if you don't mind me saying.
Agree, they should put their monies where their mouths are and buy the surrounding fields to prevent building.
My point with the Mona Lisa was that you buy it because it looks pretty. If you get insurance money that is not really consolation for the fact that it has been ruined. The analogy was only meant to extend to the unspoilt nature of its beauty, not any of the other things. It is still crap, but the only other analogy I could think of was buying a house in a picturesque village....
MW
Ah the genius of Ronald Coase comes to call. Of course, the best theoretical solution for the NIMBYs is to buy up the development land but, as you and I have discussed over the years, what is the "value" of that land? If it has planning permission for your favoured 2,000 unit estate, the land is far more valuable than as purely, say, agricultural land. Anyone selling that land (if he's got any sense) would attempt either to get planning permission direct or find a buyer who will load a development bonus into the price.
Accordingly the NIMBYs would have to pay the same development-loaded price to the seller: how much easier to go the political route and label the land "green belt"! The political route penalises the owner of the land and benefits the NIMBYs. (Hey, am I coming round to a rationale for LVT which wasn't my intention at all?). Even so, in this case, I would be a NIMBY because, even if the value of my house rose due to the development, I could be pretty sure that the quality of my life would go down.
So, as previous commenters have implied, not all NIMBYs are NIMBYs to increase the value of their property (although this might be a general side-effect of NIMBYism). They are - or I am - a NIMBY to preserve a quality of life to which it is difficult to attach a price although Coase would (I think) repeat that the price is, in fact, the price you would be prepared to pay to stop the development.
However, it's not as simple as that. The reality is that the developer's profit is to a great extent the return due to attaining planning permission: it's a profit earned on political not economic grounds*: and almost everything to do with land is political rather than economic although the economics bit might signal, if only approximately, the "value" of the subject matter. The political bias is why Coase's argument - and yours too - about NIMBYs buying up the land to prevent development is only true up to a point. It's the admixture of politics (in which I include the NIMBYs' efforts to maintain a quality of life) and economics which makes the problem so difficult to resolve.
It's no good bashing NIMBYs and damning them as being solely or mainly interested in house price inflation. Typically, s/he has motives well outside the economic sphere (but which admittedly have economic consequences). If I have to fight to stop Barratts building an eyesore down the road which will ruin my quality of life then I will. I sympathise with those unfortunates who are condemned to buy a house within that eyesore but, frankly, why should I suffer?
*On a personal note: many years ago I was in partnership with an architect: the purpose of the partnership was to obtain planning permission on London real estate and sell on the property to a developer. It was obvious to us - and the profitability of the partnership attested to this - that the profit of developing property is almost completely a function of expertise in obtaining the permission than in the construction/selling end. As it happens I sold my interest in the partnership (a very nice return thank you) because I found that dealing on the one side with local authority planning departments and councillors and on the other with property developers was the opposite of pleasure. One moral of this story is that - as any NIMBY will tell you - money isn't everything.
U, that is a very fair and accurate summary of the world as it is. Whether it leads to an anywhere near optimal outcome is a separate issue.
"The reality is that the developer's profit is to a great extent the return due to attaining planning permission: it's a profit earned on political not economic grounds"
Exactly. It's a straight battle between the owners of already developed land and owners of undeveloped land with planning potential. But it's younger people (and ultimately the whole economy) who are the inevitable collateral damage.
But all roads lead to LVT - that developer's profit is (as you correctly point out) largely a windfall profit on getting planning, ergo, the landowner who gets planning is tapping into privatised tax collection, i.e. benefits on the back of 'communal efforts'. Whereas the NIMBYs want to keep that source of value for themselves.
" One moral of this story is that - as any NIMBY will tell you - money isn't everything."
Correct. Which demolishes yet another objection to LVT, especially if it replaces income tax etc (see New Zealand).
I should have pointed out that one of the main generators of NIMBYdom as AFAICS is a problem with the system. What most NIMBYs are concerned with is not numbers but aesthetics. However Local Authorities are not concerned, by and large, with aesthetics, they are concerned with numbers. Thus when existing residents know,having looked at the plans, that a new estate of houses will be an aesthetic disaster, they cannot oppose it for that reason, they have to talk about "overdevelopment" and even bats and badgers, because those are the arguments the LA is empoered to listen to. For example, a local developer got permission to build quite a large estate on the outskirts of the village where my parents live, easily increasing its size by a third, but there was little opposition, because the new houses were built to look like part of the village, with a mixture of small terraces and detatched houses built along roads and streets in the same way as the old houses.
I do think that the poor quality and uniform blandness of new houses from the 30's to the 80's has a lot to do with the rise of NIMBYism, and if the NIMBYs have forced the developers to cut their profits a bit by respecting local vernacular traditions, that's got to be a good thing. The problem is that few developers are prepared to do this, they'd rather game the system, pay bribes, sorry, offer "planning gain" and build boring boxes.
B, that's music to my ears.
Let's have regulations on build quality - longevity, sound and fire insulation, minimum room sizes etc - let's have new buildings that look nice (or if in doubt, make them look similar to existing ones) - just let's scrap the quantitative restrictions.
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