Ruislip & Eastcote & Northwood Gazette
Say yippee
MEET THE ‘YES IN MY BACK YARD’ FOLK WHO WANT TO SOLVE LONDON’S HOUSING CRISIS
ENOUGH of the housing battles - meet the ‘YIMBYs’ who want to solve London’s housing crisis with diplomacy and planning reforms.
Those who repeat the commandment to “love thy neighbour” have clearly not spent time in local council planning hearings.
But neighbourhood diplomacy should not be declared dead just yet, according to the London YIMBYs.
The movement’s co-founder John Myers concedes that while most Londoners might express concern about the capital’s housing crisis, and seeing homeless people on its streets, it can be another story when they are told the solution is a tower block next door.
“I’d love everyone to be massively altruistic about this. But if you find a way to fix human nature – let me know.”
The group has emerged touting its world-view as the polar opposite to the nimby– the ‘not in my backyarders’ who some say are a key spanner in the works of progress on addressing major housing squeeze climates.
In March, then-housing secretary Sajid Javid accused councils themselves of being the nimbys, ordering local authorities to deliver on housing targets. He told the Sunday Times if councils failed to measure up, they could be stripped of their planning powers and have independent inspectors installed to do the job.
It is amid this kind of pressure that the yes movement is springing up around the world – gaining particular currency in housing shortage-pressure cookers like the San Francisco Bay Area, which is grappling with the impact of Silicon Valley money on local property prices.
London is in the throes of its own housing crisis, and former competition lawyer John Myers and his friends cofounded the YIMBY movement here, in hopes of finding non-partisan solutions for a future without much-need housing blocked by councils and neighbours-at-war.
But that’s not to say the YIMBYs have no empathy for homeowners safeguarding their property values and views, says Mr Myers.
The YIMBYs’ vision focuses on a need for tax and planning reform to cultivate more imaginative forms of “street-by-street” neighbourhood development they believe could help London local authorities support more private market building.
“If you go to residents of a street and you say to them, ‘well look, would you like the ability as a street to set your own design code and to decide, collectively, what additional rights to extend you would have: would you have upwards, sideways or maybe forwards?’”
The YIMBYs are also supportive of neighbourhoods’ rights to balance the protection of aesthetics with a need for more housing.
“If people are worried about their property values then they’re lucky enough to own a home, there’s no doubt about that,” says Mr Myers.
“But there’s a whole range of other things that they cite – it’s not unreasonable to actually like your streets to be pretty and walkable.
“We’d like to enhance and preserve the things about London that make it beautiful. We don’t have to compromise on any of those things: we can have lots more housing and make London even more beautiful – it’s about reviewing our systems to make sure that can work.”
He points out that while some complain about stamp duty, the United Kingdom actually has lower property and council taxes across the board than similar jurisdictions.
One way the YIMBYs believe more affordable housing could be created with greater community input would be to support small builders, whom he says have been pushed out of the construction market due to a dearth of smaller sites.
The YIMBYs’ concept is “street-bystreet” development, which they think will cultivate opportunities for small builders to work in local neighbourhoods, by extending multiple proper-