Twilight of the Mansards

How the YIMBYs fell for Gove, then Labour - and have now gone insane

One could be forgiven for assuming that the label ‘YIMBY’ (short for ‘Yes In My Back Yard’) indicates nothing more than the endorsement of development wherever it may occur, and perhaps also support for the kind of planning reform that would enable such a flurry of construction to occur. Yet the British ‘YIMBY movement’ is something far more defined. It originates with the publication of the report ‘Yes in my Backyard’ by John Myers, published by the Adam Smith Institute (then directed by Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood, who spent much of the subsequent decade as the leading public advocates for the movement); YIMBYism today is as much a niche subculture and an attitude towards political engagement as it is a specific political platform.

The principal policy advocated in the original paper was ‘Street Votes’. It would have introduced the right for residents of any given street to adopt a design code endorsed by a supermajority of approximately 60%, and to rebuild their street at a higher density within the bounds of that code. The intention was that, having enacted this policy, the owners of suburban terraces would eagerly rebuild their cul-de-sacs as Georgian mansion blocks complete with fresh mansards, and sell them at great profit.

The motivation behind this policy was simple: everyone in government knew that more building would be required if Britain was to have any hope of returning to meaningful economic growth, yet every attempt at planning reform in recent decades had ended badly after pushback from homeowners who would suffer the direct costs of nearby building (including important costs such as pressure on public services, and really important costs such as tarnishing the view of local fields from their living room window). This Gordian knot could be cut, so the YIMBYs believed, by cutting homeowners in on the upside of development, aligning the rabid selfishness of the British Boomer with the public interest to neutralise NIMBYism for good.

Yet to call Street Votes a mere ‘policy’ is understating its importance. For the British YIMBY, it is the solution on which Britain’s future prosperity hinges and which, if implemented, would see all other problems — even those which are seemingly unrelated — resolve themselves naturally and without political confrontation. Like the Land Tax for the Georgists (or the tariffs for the Trumpists), Street Votes became the central article of the YIMBY faith — and they set to work seeking its passage.

YIMBYism from Gove to Starmer

There was, however, one unfortunate obstacle stubbornly squatting on the path to utopia. Somehow, a government — any government — would have to be converted to their newfound faith. As with all political agendas, several options presented themselves to the disciples of this oikodomophilic doctrine.

They could have sought the power to implement the policy themselves. There were two ways to do this. As self-proclaimed right-wingers, they could have either sought positions as conservative housing SPADs or even MPs. However, since this was 2017 and the Conservatives were committed to leaving the EU and reducing immigration, this would have meant these affirmed neoliberals would have to abandon their open borders liberalism for the vulgar populism of the day. Otherwise, they could have stirred the rabble and set up a grassroots YIMBY movement like in other countries, which politicians would have no choice but to pay attention to. However, for those used to working in think tanks, actual lobbying and public debate outside SW1, which came with public scrutiny and the risk of high-profile losses, seemed particularly unattractive to this cohort of sensible high-status people.

That left only one choice remaining: directly winning over those who already hold power, and persuading them to take up the cause. Thus, they adopted the strategy of framing YIMBYism in general and Street Votes in particular as a technocratic measure acceptable to the kind of sensible, centrist people who dominate establishment parties and the civil service.

Given that the Conservatives were in power from 2017 to 2024, this manifested in the publication of some variant of a ‘Street Votes solve everything’ report in every available centre-right or developmentalist think tank to draw the party’s attention: Policy Exchange, the Centre for Policy Studies, and Create Streets to name a few. These documents were adorned with attractive pictures of Georgian terraces and extensive lists of endorsements by C-list politicians and assorted urbanists, in an effort to make it seem as though the idea (which nobody outside of Westminster had ever heard of as they had not bothered to popularise it) was backed by a tremendous wave of popular support.

Eventually, this strategy paid off — catching the attention of Michael Gove, who was appointed housing secretary in 2021 and remained in position until the general election of 2024. Unbeknownst to our heroes, however, Gove had ulterior motives. He had been put in his position not to make building houses easier, but to reverse an earlier attempt at planning reform made by his predecessor (none other than Robert Jenrick), and in doing so to placate NIMBY Tory backbenchers. In 2020, an attempt to introduce a streamlined zoning system which would have reduced the ability of local planning authorities to block developments and thereby allow more housing to be built had met with opposition from MPs and voters alike, ultimately leading to the loss of the Chesham and Amersham by-election in 2021. Johnson backtracked, fired Jenrick, and replaced him with Gove under explicit instructions to jettison the reforms and appease reactionary backbenchers at all costs.

Endorsing Street Votes was an effective political strategy for Gove. He could obtain the endorsement of every centre-right policy wonk as a YIMBY hero while continuing to appease Conservative backbenchers by scrapping all attempts at conventional planning reform. For the YIMBYs, supporting the housing secretary and keeping silent about his complete capitulation to anti-housing interests was a price worth paying if he could implement Street Votes — which, after all, was the silver bullet that would solve the housing crisis.

Gove, to be fair, did take the first step towards Street Votes with his 2023 planning bill (which became the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act in October of that year), creating the legal framework through which such local referenda could be carried out. Yet, in what was either a clever manoeuvre to run out the clock or an unfortunate failure to overcome insurmountable scheduling challenges (you be the judge), Gove was ultimately unable to fulfil his side of the bargain. In a skilful act of bureaucratic time-wasting, he began a ‘consultation’ on implementation instead of actually implementing the policy before the 2024 general election. It should be noted, however, that Gove did find the time to pass and implement policies that severely damaged British housebuilding, including setting up the building safety regulator, which cratered what little housebuilding was left in London, and scrapping mandatory housing targets for Tory shires in the South of England. Deliberately or not, the result was that YIMBYs achieved nothing and got rug-pulled by a Tory party that was entirely uninterested in delivering their agenda.

Having passed a useless law gathering dust in Hansard and enabled the construction of a grand total of zero new houses, the YIMBYs moved on to lobbying the Labour party after their entry into government in the hopes that the new government might finally push their policy through. As with Gove, they saw what they wanted to see in the empty promises of Keir Starmer. Taking his vague indication of an intention to build more and his commitment to siding ‘with the builders, not the blockers’ as evidence, many went so far as to predict that Labour would be a more amenable partner than the Tories, at least some of whom harboured sympathies out of commitments to markets and deregulation. Hopes were apparently so high that some even declared victory soon after Starmer’s election, with supporters going as far as to host a podcast called ‘How the YIMBYs won’.

Back in the real world, however, the YIMBY movement faced a serious problem in their attempts to lobby the Labour party: namely that their leaders were all noted free-market neoliberals whom policymakers in Labour despised on ideological grounds. To overcome this issue, they would need to find members of the Labour party who could be convinced to lobby on their behalf. Unsurprisingly, this was a task easier said than done — as it turns out, a career in Thatcherite think-tanks turns one’s personal network rather blue, and they knew no one in the upper echelons of Labour’s inner circle.

After what must have been an exhaustive process of barrel-scraping, they were eventually able to track down David Lawrence, a Labour Party think-tanker who had to step down as a parliamentary candidate after he could not prove that a £500,000 donation from crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, which he had received, was not used for his political campaigning. He agreed to publish the inevitable ‘Progressive case for Street Votes’ from his new (and suspiciously well-funded) think tank.

This strategy of courting the Labour Party appears to have fallen flat given that no street has voted. This is not surprising given that the majority of Labour members, MPs and housing ministers do not believe in the central tenet of YIMBYism that planning regulations are bad and more private-sector housing is a good thing. The few pro-housing members of the Labour Party are marginalised and hated. The mainstream Labour view of the housing crisis is that it is primarily a shortage of council housing, and any policy that allows any more private housing, and god forbid allows anyone in the south of England to make any money, is suspect. What the Labour party is interested in is making more of the existing housing stock council housing and distributing it to their voters at the expense of the working population, rather than building anything. Whatever generic rhetoric any Labour leader deploys cannot change this basic fact.

Mansardism: YIMBYs on crack

Bereft of meaningful political contacts after the fall of the Conservative Party and increasingly replaced as figureheads by new kids on the block (perhaps most notably the Cummings-endorsed cross-party YIMBY campaign group Looking for Growth of Lawrence Newport), members of the YIMBY movement have retreated into increasingly bizarre theory rather than actual political lobbying.

Most notable among these efforts has been Southwood’s work in the new magazine he co-edits with Bowman, Works in Progress, in which he attempts to construct ‘a universal world history of Street Votes’, or ‘Mansardism’ for short. His story begins with the Glorious Revolution, the main benefit of which (according to his article ‘How smashing the NIMBYs created modern capitalism’) was not, as is commonly assumed, the foundation of Parliamentary government. It was instead that it enabled ye olde streete votes. This came in the form of land enclosure, which required a supermajority of landowners to proceed. Likewise, the construction of infrastructure required a majority vote in parliament, and thus can be described as a similar phenomenon. Reflected in these processes, the immortal Spirit of Street Votes provided the basis for modern capitalism and, by extension, all technological progress of the last quarter millennium.

Yet, somehow, Southwood suggests, we today have lost sight of the basic wisdom that all political problems can be solved by bribing a majority of the population to align them with the necessary outcome before offering a vote on the issue which is sure to be won. As a result, we are unable to pass Street Votes and solve the housing crisis. Why is this?

Southwood’s latest Substack post posits an answer: modern architecture. His case rests on the ideas of one Samuel Hughes, a ‘philosopher’ whom Southwood describes as ‘one of the most important thinkers in the world’, and to whom he has provided a regular platform in the pages of his magazine to develop his latest thinking in public. According to Hughes’ thesis, English society in the post-Glorious-Revolution era was comfortable with allowing aristocratic families to construct a ‘Gentle Density’ of attractive Georgian terraces with mansards (from which the term ‘Mansardism’ derives) because the buildings they were erecting were just so damn beautiful. In fact, the public was so enamoured with these beautiful buildings that they concluded society itself must be running smoothly, enabling unprecedented trust in the government, a relaxed attitude towards the turbulence of capitalism, and the foundation of a high-trust society.

Here enters the villain of Southwood’s story: modern architecture. This aesthetic aberration is so objectively ugly that its use from 1945 onwards has led to a breakdown in social order, the collapse of trust in institutions, and as such, the emergence of a rabid reactionary opposition to any construction whatsoever.

Of course, the immediate question if this is true is why anyone allowed modern architecture to proliferate in the first place, if its effects are so uniformly deleterious. Interestingly, Southwood and Hughes reject any economic imperative behind the transition. Instead, their main theory appears to be that modernists somehow convinced architects and urban planners that their innovations were high status, whilst traditional architecture was low status. As a result, nobody dared to pass legislation mandating attractive traditional styles, because that would be embarrassing, so instead they simply made redevelopment impossible to save face — despite the enormous economic cost of doing so.

In this history, Street Votes becomes something more than a neat policy trick, ascending to the status of a universal truth of both good urbanism and government, deliberately forgotten by all but a Petrarchan few. The failure of its advocates could therefore be described not as evidence of a flawed political strategy, but instead as the inevitable consequence of decades of brainwashing by nefarious ‘modernists’, and the failure of the planning and architecture establishments to see the objective truth that resulted. And thus, only by evangelising about the goodness of Street Votes can we return to constructing attractive buildings again and resurrect the economic prosperity and political stability that Europe and America enjoyed in the halcyon days of the 1930s, before modern architecture.

Conclusion

It is clear that the British YIMBY movement has reached a political and intellectual dead end. British YIMBYism failed because it was never a true movement. It had no mass appeal or membership, just one endlessly repackaged idea: that they could pass Street Votes and that this would completely solve the housing crisis. Constrained to only one half of the neoliberal lesson on democracy — strictly that of public choice theory, in which voters’ preferences are reducible to ‘self-interest’ — they were blindsided by the rational interests of political actors themselves. The rather icky business of developing a saleable platform, and worse yet, developing relationships with more open-minded, but ‘low-status’ alternatives to established actors is perhaps still verboten to the YIMBY 1.0.

With no mass support, they were reduced to trying to use existing politicians and parties to advance their aims. However much they wished to use politicians for their own gain, it was skilled politicians who instead used them. Gove manipulated them to secure the support of centre-right think tanks in exchange for endorsing a policy he failed to deliver. Meanwhile, the modern Labour Party was not interested in a ‘progressive case’ for a policy they were inherently suspicious of and which was designed by their opponents.

Ultimately, the lesson of this affair is that politics is not about how smart you think you are or how good your idea is. It is an extremely personal endeavour, built on trust and individual connections with those able to garner mass electoral support for a platform of different policies that includes, but is not limited to, what you want. Anyone advising any party on policy must be able to credibly show that they support the party and the coalition of voters that it mobilises. It is not a measure of using your intelligence and skills to convince politicians to adopt your extremely clever idea, but instead the hard graft of building a collection of policies that you, the party’s members, and its voter base can endorse. It is not easy, and sometimes involves compromise, but it is better than failing and writing fantasy literature about having discovered the secret of civilisational trust itself.

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This article was written by John Thermidor, Contributing Editor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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