Unusually, I'll say 'fair play' to this lot. The story from The Daily Mail has all the hall marks of classic selfish NIMBYism:
For generations, Cow Field has been enjoyed by families and dog walkers. But when it went up for auction there were fears that the beauty spot would be bought by developers for a housing estate... The field, in Whaley Bridge on the edge of the Peak District, has been eyed by builders for decades, and in 1995 a planning application for more than 30 homes was narrowly rejected.
Here's Whaley Bridge in context: about eight miles outside the M60, surrounded by fields for miles around but handily it has its own railway station, about 45 minutes from central Manchester:
The twist in this tale is that they put their hands in their own pockets and bought the field for its agricultural value of £122,000, which is sort-of-free-market NIMBY-ism (although in a truly free market without third parties being able to enforce planning restrictions, that field would have been worth five or ten times as much).
Which raises an interesting question: there are about 50 million acres of undeveloped/farmland (including The Hallowed Greenbelt) in the UK (i.e. 85% - 90% of the surface area), so why don't the NIMBYs (about 90% of the adult population*), just chip in £5,000 or £10,000 each; buy up the whole lot, slap mutually enforceable restrictive covenants on it all and thereby guarantee the permanent decline of the UK and the UK economy for all eternity?
Think about it: there'd never be another new road, railway, airport, housing estate, factory, sewage works or power station!
What's not to like?
* UPDATE, OK, somewhere between 57% and 83% according to the FT of three years ago. But a vast majority. It doesn't change the logic.
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
NIMBYs Of The Week
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15 comments:
Compulsory Purchase
Not enough NIMBYs for that plan, Mark. Thankfully, they are rarer than you make out.
How about doing the reverse - make it incumbent on every community to agree (unanimously) a fixed amount of land within the community (so many square metres per head) to be designated development land, to be bought and sold by the community council and the profits to be shared amongst the community. That would keep the retired folk busy for years!
It's not as high as 90%. It's owner occupiers outside of cheaper locations, and in locations which are not developed. If you live in the centre of most towns, you aren't likely to get anything horrific developed - the land is developed apart from a tiny amount of town parks (which aren't going to disappear).
Likewise, some rural areas aren't gentrified and have low land values, so don't mind development. Lots of Wiltshire is farmers growing cows and pigs (unlike Marlborough which grows delicatessans, art galleries and public schoolboys).
B, JT, 90% may be exaggerated, but the FT did some survey or other in which 83% replied that they didn't want any new development in their area. And don't forget there's an overlap with The Greenies, who don't want any roads, power stations etc to be built.
B, as to your plan - wouldn't LVT come to the same thing? If 'the community' wants more money, it just dishes out planning permission for another acre near the village or town and hey presto, there's another £1 million coming in every year (or whatever).
Mark, it depends if you trust the "Saint UK Index". I suspect they did their survey in the Chilterns, or somewhere like that. My experience is the same as JT's - in the (real) countryside it's only the incomer retired folk who are NIMBYs.
No, LVT wouldn't come to the same thing, as tax money never finds it way directly back into people's pockets. Even the benefits you receive are unrelated to the tax you pay. The beauty of my pie-in-the-sky idea is that those most directly inconvenienced by the new development can hold out for the largest slice of the loot.
B: "LVT wouldn't come to the same thing, as tax money never finds it way directly back into people's pockets."
True, apart from the same creaming off might happen under your plan. But they can take the piss less with an in-your-face tax than with stealth taxes.
"Even the benefits you receive are unrelated to the tax you pay"
False. The benefit you get (above and beyond universal benefits) is directly correlated to the tax you pay in exchange. Or would you say that the benefit that tenants get is not in proportion to the amount of rent they pay?
B, I could paraphrase that last sentence as well:
"The beauty of Land Value Tax is that those most directly inconvenienced by the new development will get an automatic tax reduction to compensate them"
Mark - would all those people pay £5-10K for the privilege of not having development?
I don't get all this anti-Green Belt rhetoric.Most of the early ones were a straightforward reaction to ribbon development: there was a 1935 Ribbon Development Act.Do you really want to drive up the A5 and see houses lining the road all the way up to the Chilterns outside Dunstable ?
JT, I do not know. Maybe some people aren't bothered, maybe some would free ride, maybe some farmers would hold out for higher prices etc, but it is not beyond the realms of probability.
DBC, The Hallowed Greenbelt is bigger than all the urban areas put together! You could fit a new Manchester/Salford conurbation in the gap between the existing one and this particular NIMBY hellhole.
And I doubt very much that people would want to live alongside a main road in the middle of nowhere (but there again, maybe they would - what is so terrible about that?)
DBC,
Do you really want to drive up the A5 and see houses lining the road all the way up to the Chilterns outside Dunstable ?
That's a pretty huge strawman. No-one is suggesting ribbon development. We're just suggesting that there's actually plenty of land to build on.
If you built another town the size of Wokingham within the borough of Wokingham (housing 33,000 people), the rural population would have to go through the extreme hardship of suffering a population density of 714/sq.km instead of 706/sq.km. Oh, the horror.
We don't have a shortage of space except when you get within quite a short distance of the major cities. We could increase the housing south of Watford Gap by 10% and there would still be plenty of green spaces.
JT, we could increase the housing south of Watford Gap by hundreds of per cent and there would still be plenty of green spaces!
This story looks like extortion to me, aided by the State.
The buyers were able to apply vexatious actions courtesy of Byzantine planning laws to reduce the value of a neighbours land then buy it at a discount when said owner was forced to sell.
My bet is that very soon, say less than a generation away from the current owners their offspring will realise they are sitting on a fortuen and force the sale.
Or the current owners establish some sort of Trust, which like all such small trusts will eventally wither away and the land sold anyway.
Or they will 'transfer it to the community' under some sort of covenant, that will again be broken when the 'community' is shortt of a few readies, and hey presto we are back where we started.
Far from bringing development to a halt, wouldn't this be the perfect solution?
Once it's in place, chuck out the planning restrictions. Then if a developer wants to build something the locals don't like, the developer has to supply a big enough quantity of money to become owner of the land. Perfect. The market will sort out the value.
To build on land that has inherent natural beauty, and value because it is not built on, the owners (local NIMBYs) can put whatever value they like on that and not sell until that value is exceeded.
But... hold on, we've already got that system, private ownership of land is allowed -- shock horror. All that is necessary is to throw away the planning system.
All that is actually needed is to persuade people that they are not the passive cattle that the government thinks they are and that they can act to buy whatever land they object to developers having themselves. Chuck away a few taxes to leave people enough disposable cash that it becomes possible and job done.
I suspect that the NIMBYs will actually do nothing of the sort -- they don't want to spend their own money, they simply want to stop others spending their money.
Where I live we've recently been fighting to get a wind turbine proposal blocked (I suppose that makes me a NIMBY, but I'm doing it because I recognise what a ridiculous waste of subsidy those things are). The locals had a meeting and the organisers said "we need X amount to fight this". In the meeting I thought "no problem, look at all the people here, that's only £200 per person -- in a very affluent area". I stumped up my money. I later found out that they hadn't raised what they needed. Couldn't believe it -- all the NIMBYs talk the talk but won't put their hands in their pockets.
In the end it didn't matter -- it got cancelled anyway. My point still stands though: if NIMBYs were trained that the way to object to planning is with a bigger chequebook, their objections would have far more sensible values written against them.
OP, that's a free market solution. And excellent anecdotal.
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