Works in Progress Podcast

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I was walking through South London the other day,

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and I saw a new but very,

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very ugly building next to an older Victorian,

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admittedly not beautiful,

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but much better looking building.

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So I took a photograph,

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put it on Twitter,

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and said,

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I think the neighbours should have been able to insist that the ugly building was

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designed more like the better looking building.

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Some people agreed, some people didn't.

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And of the people who disagreed,

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a lot of them were YIMBYs,

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like me,

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people who think that it's really,

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really important to build more.

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I thought this was a pretty interesting debate,

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so I thought Samuel,

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Ben,

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and I would sit down and chat about design codes,

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beauty,

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architecture,

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and whether there is a trade-off between building more homes and building them

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beautifully.

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So I have some sympathy with the people who were arguing against you.

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By the way, by the way, as will come obvious, I agree with you.

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But I have some sympathy with the alternative view because I...

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To give an analogy, I've been thinking a lot about bats.

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And over the last 10,

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20 years in the UK,

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a lot of projects,

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a lot of building projects have been stopped or made much more expensive because of

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what people had to do to deal with bats,

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right?

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So the most famous example,

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obviously,

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is HS2,

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the high-speed train line being built between London and Birmingham.

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had to build this £120 million bat tunnel because of a nearby community of 300

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Beckstein's bats,

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which the bat tunnel was not proven to help.

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But if it had saved every single one of the lives,

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assuming that every single one of these bats would have died because of HS2,

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which is not what anyone is assuming,

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and assuming it will save all of them,

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which is also not what people are assuming,

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then each bat is worth like £300,000,

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which I suspect is not what the public values bats are.

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And I suspect that what is actually going on here is there's a lot of pretextual

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support for,

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like,

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they're using the support,

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they're supporting them as a pretext for environmental restrictions because they

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stop or delay or make more expensive a project they don't want to happen,

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right?

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And so there's this big apparent groundswell of bat support,

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but people don't donate to bat charities.

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They don't go and see bats.

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They don't Google bats.

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They don't do anything to do with bats.

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They don't care about bats.

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But they do care about bats stopping development they don't like.

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And when you offer a supposed solution,

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like Sam Dimitriou,

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who's our friend,

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has done a lot of work saying you could do offsetting.

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Like, OK, fine, we're going to kill 300 bats here.

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But what if we created a bat colony for like 30,000 bats over here if every time we did that?

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I'll give you an example.

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Nobody cares.

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Trust gets,

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I think,

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£180,000 a year for all of its activities in the country for horseshoe bats,

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which I believe are quite similar to Beckstein's bats.

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And one of the projects within that it does,

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one of them safeguarded 1,100 bats for significantly less than £180,000.

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That's one of the projects they were doing.

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Safeguarded almost four times as many bats.

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So they're at least 1,000 times more efficient if you care about bats.

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You should not...

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try and block HS2 or make the build a bat tunnel,

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you should give money to the Bat Conservation Trust.

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And like, by the way, I actually believe that.

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If you cared about bats, that's what you should do.

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But people don't.

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They use it as a pretext.

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So I have a lot of sympathy for the pretext story.

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Right.

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So the argument being made by the kind of...

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I want to come up with like a non-pejorative word for the people who disagree with

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me.

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But the argument made by the kind of... Let's call them beauty-skeptical-yimbies.

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The beauty-skeptical-yimbies.

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I mean, they would say that they like beauty.

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They just think that beauty is not arrived at via regulation and things like that.

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But yeah, so the anti-regulation, the anti-aesthetic regulation people...

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basically say this is some combination of people don't care that much.

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People who've never read a book about architecture or architectural heritage and

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have never had a conversation about it and who have never expressed any interest in

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any of these subjects.

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suddenly discover this burning interest in getting the detailing exactly right and

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the sensitive massing and sightlines and immunity and all these things and form a

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whole society to campaign on these things and profess extraordinary distress that

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is caused to them and their family if these things aren't respected.

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And you're like, well, that is a pretext of some kind.

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I think Ben's invented the adjective pretextual.

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But I do think we should... I'm prepared to support it.

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I'm prepared to back you on this.

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I didn't invent it.

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Matt Iglesias replied it to Sam.

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He said it's pretextual.

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And I quote tweeted him.

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Well, for the purposes of this podcast, pretextual means used as a pretext.

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Yeah.

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Pretextual.

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I assumed if such a... So that's one argument.

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Yeah.

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Another argument is this isn't pretextual,

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but these rules won't actually get you the kind of things that people want.

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There's no way to regulate, which is what I would say on loads of regulations.

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I would say the thing that you want to achieve is noble, but this isn't the way to achieve it.

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People have some obviously strong data points here.

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In the world before 1900, there was very, very little design control.

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And on the whole, they built almost nothing that seems ugly to us.

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And today we build masses of stuff that seems ugly to us, even though most

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development control systems have at least some degree of design control.

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Is that right, though?

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So I agree that it's not like there was a government building code design control system.

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And most local governments didn't have design control.

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I like some did.

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You've shown me examples before of Friedenau in Berlin.

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They had to have a certain amount of ornament on them.

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And they had to... You've shown me kinds of roofs that you're allowed and stuff like that.

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But putting that aside,

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often it didn't matter because there were large landowners planning all the things

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and they would...

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they had design codes, right?

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Like,

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so in the Edinburgh Newtown,

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when they were leasing that out,

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they said,

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okay,

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we'll sell this to you,

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but you have to build this,

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roughly this on the plot.

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Yes.

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So that has been done, right?

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That is true.

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So private landowners,

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when they were selling off large sites or selling leases on large sites to small

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developers,

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they completely routinely did design control it.

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And I think, you know, that probably did lead to a better, I mean,

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People at the time must have thought it led to a better centre of development or

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they wouldn't have done it.

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However,

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most cities also have areas which were not in unified ownership and where there

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weren't any such codes operating.

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So Hampstead didn't have a unified landowner.

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I mean, that was an affluent area.

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But even so, without any such mechanism, ended up very nice.

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Or like Clockenwell,

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which was a poor neighbourhood and didn't have any unified ownership or any design

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control.

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Or just like most American cities.

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Right.

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Like Chicago.

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All of Chicago built in the Victorian era is basically all good.

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Like basically every building you go past is really nice.

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Like actually Paris.

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Yeah,

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highly fragmented land ownership in France,

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very limited design control,

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contrary to popular myth,

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and yet superb,

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uniform,

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Parisian classicism.

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So the aesthetic, regulation, sceptical... The people who are angry on Twitter.

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Sam's antagonist.

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Yeah, yeah.

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They've got some strong points.

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And a related argument is this really overcomplicates things.

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Like you are trying to... You're going from saying...

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you should just get stuff built,

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and building houses is really valuable,

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and that's great,

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you're kind of conceding not just the design point,

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but every other point.

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Because if you are accepting design controls,

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then why wouldn't you accept that only union workers can build these things?

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And why wouldn't you accept that they have to be built in these particular environmental ways?

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All of these are part of the chipping away at the

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a project being economically viable, they would say.

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So I just thought it would be interesting for us to sit down and chat about that,

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especially because I have,

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I think,

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shifted quite a lot in my views towards my top-down pro-regulatory,

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yeah,

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communitarian.

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I used to be much more libertarian on this than I am,

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largely under the kind of,

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because you have shifted my mind quite a bit,

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Samuel,

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and you as well,

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Ben.

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So let me give the case for why you should,

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even though I think pretextual things are very important,

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why I think it's still quite a good case and different from imposing labour

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standards,

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the environmental stuff.

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I think that as YIMBYs or pro-building people,

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we actually can't make coalitions with those guys and get lots of homes built,

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whereas we actually can on design things.

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So the case in favour...

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from my perspective, is this.

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In 1930,

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or like pick a different date,

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but in basically every country in the world,

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everyone thought,

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well,

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it's sad sometimes when a building gets destroyed.

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This particular piece of heritage is valuable in some way.

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But ultimately, new buildings are better than older buildings.

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They're like newer phones or newer cars.

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They're just better.

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They've got like better amenities.

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They have all the new technological things.

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There might be a,

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you know,

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a dumbwaiter or a lazy Susan,

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or they might have proper insulation or like they might have,

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wow,

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they've got heating in the walls.

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And now we do have some features like that.

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But in one respect, respect of aesthetics, basically everyone thinks

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with pretty good reason that if you demolish a nice old building,

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it will become a worse new building in respect of aesthetics.

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And that's just the normal view.

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And I...

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That's firstly the view I've experienced all normal people who are not hardcore

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aesthetes in the area,

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because there's a slight difference for people who have studied it very heavily.

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They often have different views.

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But it's firstly my anecdotal experience,

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but also Samuel and I have worked on loads of different pieces of evidence,

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actually asking people,

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doing surveys.

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About 80% of the public has roughly this view.

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If you ask them, here are 10 hospitals, we don't tell them anything else about them.

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Can you rank them how much you like them?

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They basically rank oldest to newest hospitals.

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Not exactly, but they basically rank oldest and newest in how much they like them.

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Certainly the post-1945 ones do strictly worse than the pre-1914 ones.

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Yeah, and it's true for American city halls.

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You see it in everything.

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It's very famous.

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Everyone knows about it.

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But I think this is somewhat important that everyone's baseline background feeling

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is that new buildings are worse in this important respect that they can see.

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And I don't think,

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so the way I'd make this consistent with my,

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it's still mostly pretextual in any individual case.

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I think that in any individual case,

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the reasons why you will be pro or anti-development,

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we usually have like a much wider range of things going into them.

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Like you're worried about who might move in or there's light,

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there are light issues or congestion or parking,

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all the other kinds of externalities that are real,

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but we think are less important than actually building the homes.

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Yeah.

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So that's true.

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But then across the country,

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when you're considering development in general,

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what do I feel about it?

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I think the aesthetic question comes in much more there.

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How positively do I feel about development as a general phenomenon?

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We've often thought with a policy like street boats,

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people on lots of neighbouring streets will be annoyed that a street boat's

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happened and there's a load of development happening near them.

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If the development's attractive, they're still going to be annoyed about it.

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But when the first pictures hit the national papers of the development being done,

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if it looks really ugly and people all around the country think,

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like,

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that's a bad thing that's happening.

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That's not a nice thing.

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That will do a lot of harm to the policy and raise the risks of it being revoked

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through mechanisms of national politics.

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Whereas people look at it like, well, can't argue.

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It's a beautiful development they've done.

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then it was in a slightly stronger position.

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Is there any evidence for that, though?

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Because the anti... I don't know what I'm going to call these people.

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The people who were angry at me, they basically just don't think people care that much.

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Well,

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I mean,

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this is an anecdote,

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but certainly,

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if ever we do any kind of...

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present any images of suburban densification on Twitter,

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or funnel them through the legacy media...

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you have to choose extremely carefully.

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And I'm totally sure that the effect that the images have is hugely variable

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depending on how good the renderings are and how attractive the development looks.

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Let me give you an example.

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If it looks like...

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You can find these occasional examples of a beautiful city like Buenos Aires,

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where beautiful Belle Epoque city,

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and then these ugly modern buildings that are tearing through the old fabric.

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But they are densification, totally legitimate densification.

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If you started presenting those as like,

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wow,

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look at my inspiring example of densification,

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you would get...

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A lot of your natural supporters would go quiet because they'd be like,

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well,

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I am technically in favour of that,

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but I'm not going to be enthusiastic.

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And then lots of other people get really riled up about it.

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Whereas if you show the new building that's actually visually better than the old

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building,

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people respond...

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This is a very specific context.

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This is where people have no stake.

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It may not even be a real street or it's a street in another country or whatever it might be.

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And it's just like,

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do they get some heed-ons out of commenting favourably or criticising this on

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Twitter?

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But in that context,

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which is important for national politics in the ways that our democracies work...

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like, whether it's a pleasing image or an ugly image, is very significant.

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So I think that's one of the... I don't think that's the only argument.

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I do think that is a key argument in favour.

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Not to over-index on,

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like,

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who follows me on Twitter,

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but you remember when the Cambridge expansion was announced?

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Yeah.

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And...

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A small group of people, including me, went on Mid Journey, which was pretty new at the time.

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And at that point, people weren't really used to AI-generated imagery.

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And we told Mid Journey,

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give me six-story Victorian-style mansion flats with a modern tram outside,

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and just tweeted these.

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And this was totally unauthorized, had nothing to do with the announcement.

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But there was suddenly this kind of groundswell of like,

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wow,

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this is actually quite a cool project.

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And the main argument against was, it won't look like that.

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It's not going to look like that.

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That's what we said.

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Yeah,

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we were told by government people and NHLG people they were like,

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oh yeah,

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that totally transformed the way it landed.

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So by the way, I've got an example on the flip side.

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So obviously we've talked about in the past,

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New Zealand has done some impressive upzoning,

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some of which have gone through,

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some of which haven't gone through completely.

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And

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During that time,

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I was trying to find some images of what has actually been done because they did it

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in stages.

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So the original Auckland city plan redo was in 2016, the unitary plan.

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And we were writing this in 2021 or 22 or something, maybe 23, whatever.

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And I wanted to see what happened from the early stages and which they were

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standing around the country.

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And I have to say that basically everything was at best,

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like your two out of 10,

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three out of 10,

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plasticky,

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you know,

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five,

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what Americans would call,

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like the standard five over one type.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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I'm probably in favour of many of them, but reluctantly so.

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But interestingly...

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Having exactly the experience of like,

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yes,

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I am committed to this because of my background convictions,

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although I really am not feeling happy and excited about supporting them.

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But interestingly,

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the main residence group that was campaigning against the extensions of the

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upzonings,

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they didn't use these generic ones.

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They found some extremely ugly,

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like pure flat,

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raw concrete wall with no window front ones that used up every inch of the space

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they were allowed to move into.

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Award winning, award winning.

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Surely this is going to win like New Zealand architecture, award of the year.

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And it was done to like,

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right next to it on both sides,

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implying what has been destroyed before,

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were extremely beautiful,

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like ornate wood carving Victorian bungalows.

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And in my head, I'm like, well, you know, this density is good, but at what cost?

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Think of the GDP.

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And I thought, there's a reason why their propaganda image is not...

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oh, we're building a more beautiful house, but it's much bigger and we hate bigger things.

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And like, yes, there's pretext mixed in there.

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But the reason why that's important is that unlike...

(00:15:43):
Well, we can debate this, but this is my opinion.

(00:15:45):
Unlike the questions about affordability,

(00:15:49):
where ultimately it makes housing less housing pencil,

(00:15:53):
like less viable to build housing under that.

(00:15:55):
Or obviously,

(00:15:56):
union labor in San Francisco,

(00:15:57):
the average contractor is paid something like $170,000 a year.

(00:15:59):
So they have to pay the minimum cost to build a house. $170,000.

(00:16:05):
Yeah,

(00:16:06):
so the minimum cost to build a house is like,

(00:16:08):
literally,

(00:16:09):
if you build the smallest legal house,

(00:16:10):
which is about as big as a parking space,

(00:16:12):
it would still cost you $70,000 to build it.

(00:16:15):
And that's as big as a parking space.

(00:16:18):
It's impressive that they have such low limits.

(00:16:20):
But if you build the average American family house, it would cost like $2 million.

(00:16:25):
And that's just the baseline, the cheapest possible house of the average American.

(00:16:29):
Anyway...

(00:16:30):
Those ones, we can't compromise with them.

(00:16:32):
They inherently reduce the amount of buildable volume and the affordability of that

(00:16:35):
buildable volume.

(00:16:37):
I believe that firstly,

(00:16:39):
as we can see from the UK,

(00:16:41):
older areas are often much denser than what we do now.

(00:16:45):
It is just completely possible to build...

(00:16:47):
buildings that people find popular,

(00:16:49):
that are also five or seven story buildings that fill out the entire plot and fit

(00:16:54):
on enormous amounts of floor space.

(00:16:56):
So we don't actually have to lose volume at all, which is a very important consideration to me.

(00:17:00):
We're not necessarily losing any of the prize in terms of buildable volume.

(00:17:04):
That wouldn't be good enough on its own if it was much more expensive,

(00:17:07):
but it's just not much more expensive.

(00:17:09):
In fact, the cheapest housing type in the UK is like quasi-traditional rubbish,

(00:17:13):
traditional,

(00:17:14):
like relatively badly done,

(00:17:15):
although getting better every year and constrained mostly by like building codes.

(00:17:19):
We should get onto building codes.

(00:17:20):
But like ultimately building quite popular houses,

(00:17:23):
like the best red row houses,

(00:17:24):
one of the mass house builders in the UK,

(00:17:26):
basically popular.

(00:17:27):
The best mass house builder houses in the US are basically popular.

(00:17:31):
They're basically designed that most people like

(00:17:33):
Not the best design that we would think we would share pictures of or whatever,

(00:17:38):
but they're completely fine.

(00:17:40):
So I think that it's just not the case that it's more expensive.

(00:17:45):
And it's also not the case- Well, it's a little bit more expensive.

(00:17:47):
The figure that people bandy...

(00:17:50):
I mean,

(00:17:51):
we've got...

(00:17:52):
Kobe Lefkowitz has just agreed to write for us in the issue up to next on how

(00:17:57):
much...

(00:17:57):
What's the price of beauty?

(00:17:58):
How much does it cost to build?

(00:18:00):
So I await his answer on the exact...

(00:18:04):
But the figure that I get in the British building industry is like 10% more,

(00:18:07):
maybe 15% more to do something which is...

(00:18:12):
a really nice piece of work where everyone was like,

(00:18:15):
wow,

(00:18:15):
that's a very handsome building,

(00:18:17):
rather than the cut price per SIM version or something.

(00:18:20):
Of course,

(00:18:21):
you're going to lease some of that back in higher property value,

(00:18:24):
and you may even get more than 15% back in property.

(00:18:30):
Which raises the obvious question is, do you actually need rules?

(00:18:35):
Why doesn't this happen already,

(00:18:36):
given that people do actually prefer to live in houses,

(00:18:38):
or seem to prefer to live in houses that look nice?

(00:18:42):
In a way, there's a knockdown argument in favour of some kind of design control.

(00:18:49):
which is completely standard practice among large private landowners when they are

(00:18:55):
different to the developer.

(00:18:57):
They lease out plots to developers and development is done by people who are different to them.

(00:19:02):
Completely standard for them to impose some kind of private sector design coding

(00:19:05):
and always has been going back through the centuries.

(00:19:08):
So that is because they internalise the externalities of ugly buildings.

(00:19:13):
If they

(00:19:14):
small builders that they're giving out plots to build these really like ugly shoddy

(00:19:18):
buildings that might in some cases be profit maximizing for those builders but they

(00:19:22):
blight all the properties around them and the underlying landlord cares about the

(00:19:25):
properties around them because they also own the properties around them and so they

(00:19:28):
require people to respect a certain standard.

(00:19:30):
Ben mentioned places like Edinburgh Newtown earlier and there's countless examples

(00:19:34):
going back through history.

(00:19:36):
So that seems to me like if our interest is in maximizing social value

(00:19:42):
Basically, it's a knock-down argument.

(00:19:43):
The market does choose coding to some extent.

(00:19:47):
When there's unified land ownership.

(00:19:49):
When there's unified land ownership,

(00:19:50):
which is the test case for unified land ownership,

(00:19:56):
but the building is being done by someone different to the unified landowner,

(00:19:59):
and therefore the unified landowner has to use a mechanism like a code in order to

(00:20:02):
control their behaviour.

(00:20:03):
Which is a slightly niche set of circumstances,

(00:20:05):
but historically that arose quite often because in some countries you had lots of

(00:20:08):
large landowners

(00:20:10):
But development tended to be done by very small builders for various reasons.

(00:20:14):
And so this sort of code structure occurs quite often.

(00:20:18):
So that's a very strong argument for doing some kind of coding in cases of

(00:20:22):
fragmented ownership in order to replicate the conditions of unified ownership.

(00:20:28):
The obvious issue is there are principal agent problems with public bodies when

(00:20:33):
they impose codes,

(00:20:34):
and we notice that when public bodies do impose,

(00:20:39):
all public bodies do have the power to impose codes whenever they like.

(00:20:43):
All across the West, something like this, I guess, is true.

(00:20:46):
But they do so either sparingly or they often do it badly.

(00:20:54):
And sometimes the codes even seem to make the developments more unpopular after

(00:20:57):
they've been introduced and maybe even a value destroying...

(00:21:01):
Over and above the bill cost effect,

(00:21:03):
value destroying in terms of making a more unpopular product.

(00:21:05):
So I think that's,

(00:21:07):
to my view,

(00:21:08):
the steel man argument against public design codes nowadays,

(00:21:12):
which is the public officials put in control of them,

(00:21:16):
do not code for popular design very effectively.

(00:21:18):
This is what I wanted to get onto, which is actual existing design controls are...

(00:21:26):
normally pretty bad.

(00:21:27):
They're normally very discretionary,

(00:21:29):
for one thing,

(00:21:30):
and I'd like to get into what those actually are,

(00:21:33):
and also then talk about what might work.

(00:21:36):
We were just in Berkeley, or I was in Berkeley anyway, and it's a very ugly place.

(00:21:43):
No offence to the people who live there,

(00:21:44):
I'm sure it's lovely in lots of ways,

(00:21:46):
but it doesn't feel like the richest place in the world.

(00:21:48):
It feels like a poorer part of a second-tier American city.

(00:21:54):
And yet,

(00:21:55):
it was the first place to introduce the kind of modern controls of what you can

(00:21:59):
build,

(00:22:00):
as we know them in the second half of the 20th century.

(00:22:05):
it feels like it's falling apart.

(00:22:07):
One of the reasons is that there's lots of preservationism.

(00:22:10):
There's lots of control over,

(00:22:11):
you can't demolish this,

(00:22:12):
or if you want to build something,

(00:22:14):
it has to be approved by a design committee.

(00:22:17):
The building I tweeted was approved by a design committee.

(00:22:22):
It was in a conservation area in Kennington, in London.

(00:22:26):
A conservation area is meant to say,

(00:22:29):
It's meant to be a design code,

(00:22:30):
but the organization that exists through...

(00:22:33):
I mean,

(00:22:34):
very strictly,

(00:22:34):
it's not a...

(00:22:35):
So,

(00:22:35):
like,

(00:22:36):
design code is a particular kind of design control system where you have precise,

(00:22:41):
like,

(00:22:42):
visual or numerical controls.

(00:22:43):
Yeah.

(00:22:44):
Lots of countries,

(00:22:45):
well,

(00:22:45):
those are used sometimes,

(00:22:46):
but often we will have,

(00:22:48):
a conservation area will have a special document which sets out a bunch of policies

(00:22:52):
which will be very hazily worded and will say,

(00:22:55):
oh,

(00:22:55):
you must respect the scale or must use appropriate detailing in such and such

(00:22:58):
cases.

(00:22:59):
And then it will be left to the...

(00:23:01):
But a conservation area is kind of meant to give some sort of design coherence.

(00:23:06):
You're obviously basically correct.

(00:23:07):
I'm being pedantic.

(00:23:07):
Yeah.

(00:23:08):
And I went through the planning process, so the approvals process for this.

(00:23:14):
And there's something like 35 documents submitted over the course of more than a

(00:23:18):
year to get this thing approved.

(00:23:21):
And I mean, I don't actually know why they wanted to do this, because it's so ugly.

(00:23:25):
So it looks just terrible.

(00:23:27):
We'll flash it up on the screen, but it looks...

(00:23:31):
It looks unbelievably bad.

(00:23:32):
Nobody could possibly think this looks good.

(00:23:35):
But there was a process for that.

(00:23:37):
There were rules,

(00:23:38):
and this is the result of those rules,

(00:23:41):
which seems like a really strong argument against having those rules,

(00:23:43):
right?

(00:23:44):
Yeah.

(00:23:44):
I mean,

(00:23:45):
I was told in Islington,

(00:23:46):
maybe,

(00:23:47):
that the conservation policy is generally...

(00:23:51):
They generally don't allow anything to people,

(00:23:53):
but if they do allow little extensions to old buildings,

(00:23:56):
the extensions have to be in a clearly legible,

(00:23:59):
modernist...

(00:24:01):
You need to be able to see that it's a modern building by putting it in a modernist

(00:24:03):
style.

(00:24:04):
So you would not be allowed to add a classical extension to a classical building

(00:24:08):
from the 19th century.

(00:24:09):
You'd have to add something which was, you know, provocatively, et cetera, et cetera.

(00:24:12):
And

(00:24:13):
It's a very strange thing for the British state to be imposing on the people.

(00:24:17):
What an odd regulation.

(00:24:20):
So there's clearly quite a deep problem there.

(00:24:26):
My own view is,

(00:24:27):
at least in respect of aesthetics,

(00:24:28):
conservation areas probably are a net benefit.

(00:24:31):
Just because although the rules are often quite weird and sometimes bizarre and despotic...

(00:24:38):
They do stop so much clearly ugly stuff that probably if you go around a

(00:24:46):
conservation area in Britain,

(00:24:48):
you'll generally think,

(00:24:49):
yeah,

(00:24:49):
this is a more attractive place than a non-conservation area.

(00:24:54):
But they're performing much less well than they could.

(00:24:57):
And they're performing best when it comes to banning ugly stuff rather than when it

(00:25:01):
comes to specifically enabling beautiful stuff,

(00:25:04):
which is really something public authorities,

(00:25:07):
I think,

(00:25:07):
are very weak at.

(00:25:08):
Yeah.

(00:25:10):
So what I'm interested in and what I personally have in mind is some...

(00:25:17):
So I think one thing that we haven't mentioned is building codes.

(00:25:20):
So a lot of the reason that...

(00:25:22):
Samuel,

(00:25:22):
you're always tweeting these pictures of crazy,

(00:25:25):
horrible new houses that have tiny windows that are weirdly high up above the

(00:25:30):
ground.

(00:25:31):
And all of this is...

(00:25:32):
This isn't just because the developer wants to build a disgusting building.

(00:25:35):
It's because there are rules about energy efficiency,

(00:25:38):
and there are rules about safety,

(00:25:39):
which say you can't have air conditioning,

(00:25:41):
but also the windows can't open this much.

(00:25:44):
And you have to be careful about the window.

(00:25:45):
I think it's like to stop children falling out or something.

(00:25:48):
I guess.

(00:25:49):
The window has to be raised this much above the ground and things like that.

(00:25:52):
99% of the building stock doesn't comply with this, but the idea is new buildings should.

(00:25:58):
That's one reason.

(00:26:00):
So there might be a really pure libertarian – and by the way,

(00:26:02):
I'm not a libertarian on this – there might be a pure libertarian argument,

(00:26:06):
which is if you take all those rules away,

(00:26:07):
then the market will provide the good stuff.

(00:26:11):
There might be another argument,

(00:26:12):
which I am sympathetic to,

(00:26:13):
which is the problem is that we have a discretionary system rather than a kind of

(00:26:17):
rules-based system where there's basically a very clear kind of set of things

(00:26:24):
about,

(00:26:24):
like,

(00:26:24):
if you want to build this,

(00:26:25):
then you can't go ahead and you're not going to have to get approval from anybody

(00:26:29):
except to kind of tick the box that you have built it in this particular way.

(00:26:35):
And then there's a question of who decides what that is.

(00:26:37):
And where I come out,

(00:26:38):
and I think where you guys come out,

(00:26:40):
but tell me what you think,

(00:26:42):
is this is an area where ultra-local,

(00:26:46):
hyper-local democracy works quite well,

(00:26:48):
because it kind of acts as a proxy for the unified landowner that you used to have.

(00:26:53):
Duncan Stott,

(00:26:53):
who's a,

(00:26:54):
I don't think I've ever met him,

(00:26:55):
but he's like a guy on Twitter who I like a lot and is a kind of very big kind of

(00:27:00):
pro-building guy.

(00:27:01):
He argued that there should be a kind of,

(00:27:03):
essentially like a kind of collective land,

(00:27:05):
there should be unified land ownership,

(00:27:07):
but it should be done on kind of

(00:27:09):
collective local locals own the land rather than having what we have right now,

(00:27:14):
which is like you own your little plot.

(00:27:16):
That would be like a common hold.

(00:27:18):
They're bringing common hold for buildings,

(00:27:20):
which is so we previously you have leasehold where you there's like a freeholder of

(00:27:24):
the whole of the tall building and your flat is a leasehold.

(00:27:27):
So you've got it for a certain period of time and then

(00:27:29):
various things have happened over time so that you can renew that and so on.

(00:27:32):
But another thing that you can have is a share of ownership of the overall building

(00:27:36):
or common hold where you have a specific structure,

(00:27:39):
a bit like condominiums in the US that you're in.

(00:27:41):
Yeah.

(00:27:41):
Right.

(00:27:41):
So the old system,

(00:27:43):
the old unified ownership design codes were when the freeholders of these great

(00:27:47):
estates were imposing design restrictions on the leaseholders who quasi-owned the

(00:27:52):
individual properties.

(00:27:53):
and the Ben or Sam system would be a commonhold great estate.

(00:27:59):
I'm not advocating that, but Duncan Stott's argument was that.

(00:28:04):
The underlying neighbourhood is owned by a collective where all the residents have

(00:28:10):
some shares in this company,

(00:28:12):
and then the individual properties have some sort of leasehold style arrangement

(00:28:16):
for the

(00:28:17):
By the way, that does work.

(00:28:19):
Like in microeconomic theory, that seems like the correct system.

(00:28:21):
I don't think it's just theory.

(00:28:22):
So there are systems like this that exist, especially for commercial property.

(00:28:27):
So business improvement districts are basically this.

(00:28:30):
So you set it up.

(00:28:31):
You have to get usually, I mean, really, it varies between countries.

(00:28:33):
But by and large, they have a rule that you have to get...

(00:28:37):
two-thirds by property value and two-thirds of the overall businesses,

(00:28:41):
so double threshold,

(00:28:42):
to approve the creation of a bid,

(00:28:44):
business improvement district bid,

(00:28:46):
and the bid will be given the power to raise funds from the people as a taxation

(00:28:53):
kind of thing,

(00:28:54):
where they owe them money,

(00:28:55):
and then use that to make improvements,

(00:28:57):
and also enforce various things like your litter can't be out in certain times,

(00:29:01):
etc.,

(00:29:01):
etc.,

(00:29:02):
And we have something like this in lots of different countries around the world.

(00:29:06):
And also we have institutions a bit like that running many of our best new public spaces.

(00:29:11):
So like Coal Drops Yard or what's the new square in London Bridge next to Borough

(00:29:17):
Market with Barifina and stuff,

(00:29:20):
that new area there.

(00:29:21):
These are all run by these kinds of systems.

(00:29:24):
And they all have pretty strict,

(00:29:25):
like you don't see any peeling paint on the outsides of their facades.

(00:29:28):
They always look pretty gleaming.

(00:29:30):
And they usually resurface the areas.

(00:29:32):
Like in Chelsea,

(00:29:33):
if you've been to the meatpacking district near Chelsea Market in New York,

(00:29:36):
sorry,

(00:29:36):
in Chelsea,

(00:29:37):
New York,

(00:29:37):
they've resurfaced them all back into stone sets,

(00:29:40):
like what some people call cobbles.

(00:29:42):
And then they've got like nice stone flagstones.

(00:29:45):
I like your commitment to not calling them cobble stones.

(00:29:48):
Cobble stones are specifically the round bulbous stones that are really hard to walk on.

(00:29:51):
Sets being the nice square stones.

(00:29:53):
Yeah.

(00:29:53):
The cobblestones come from the river, whereas sets are just like stones.

(00:29:58):
Cobblestones are very rarely actually used because they're extremely impractical

(00:30:01):
for any purpose,

(00:30:02):
whereas sets are a perfectly good way of facing the street.

(00:30:04):
Yeah.

(00:30:06):
But this bit of Chelsea has a really nice bid.

(00:30:08):
It looks amazing.

(00:30:09):
It's so much... New York is very, very squalid.

(00:30:12):
Even London is a squalid city by East Asian standards, but...

(00:30:17):
New York is an extremely squalid city by London standards.

(00:30:19):
It's very smelly.

(00:30:20):
It's very dirty.

(00:30:22):
And Chelsea markets,

(00:30:24):
not just because it's wealthy,

(00:30:25):
because the other bits of Chelsea are not like this,

(00:30:26):
even though they're clearly more upmarket than other places.

(00:30:29):
The bit run by the bid is amazing.

(00:30:32):
Even their street lamps are attached to buildings instead of coming up in a pole.

(00:30:35):
All stuff like that.

(00:30:36):
There aren't road markings unless they're absolutely necessary.

(00:30:39):
It's amazing.

(00:30:40):
And so this kind of system does work.

(00:30:42):
There's something like this in Bermondsey.

(00:30:44):
There's a... I'm sure... I mean...

(00:30:47):
listeners will not have heard about my banh mi,

(00:30:50):
but there's a guy on TikTok who reviews banh mi sandwiches,

(00:30:54):
which is a Vietnamese sandwich in London,

(00:30:56):
and he's basically gone to every good banh mi place.

(00:30:58):
And the second best one,

(00:31:00):
the best one is in Borough,

(00:31:02):
the second best one is in Bermondsey,

(00:31:04):
and it's about an hour away from where I live,

(00:31:06):
so every so often I go there with my son.

(00:31:08):
And it's in a business improvement district,

(00:31:10):
and it's really noticeably better than,

(00:31:12):
it's got a games,

(00:31:14):
I'm sure this is in

(00:31:15):
I'm sure the bid didn't set up the shop, but it's got a kind of fantasy Warhammer type shop.

(00:31:22):
And the whole place just feels really different to the rest of South London.

(00:31:27):
A lot of South London is fairly squalid feeling compared to the rest of London.

(00:31:30):
I live there, so I can say that.

(00:31:32):
Peckham also tried to do,

(00:31:33):
I think,

(00:31:33):
a business improvement district where they changed the signs.

(00:31:36):
And they,

(00:31:36):
like,

(00:31:37):
you know,

(00:31:37):
the kind of plasticky,

(00:31:38):
really plasticky,

(00:31:39):
horrible signs that you get in a lot of places.

(00:31:42):
For whatever reason,

(00:31:42):
on some street in Peckham,

(00:31:43):
they replaced them with like wooden signs with painted frontage.

(00:31:47):
And it looks much better.

(00:31:49):
So there are very few places that have the power to do this in a residential neighbourhood.

(00:31:53):
Like,

(00:31:54):
I don't actually know of anywhere that properly has this power for residential

(00:31:59):
areas,

(00:32:00):
that has the power for...

(00:32:02):
An interesting feature of the world is that it's easy to set up local governments

(00:32:06):
in places where no one currently lives.

(00:32:08):
Right.

(00:32:08):
And they can be extremely demanding if everyone moves into them voluntarily.

(00:32:11):
So now about between two thirds and three quarters of Americans opt into homeowners

(00:32:16):
associations.

(00:32:17):
Right.

(00:32:17):
So they used to not exist.

(00:32:19):
And then they steadily increase as more of the market is more and more and more and

(00:32:21):
more and more people want to opt into them.

(00:32:23):
They impose incredibly strict design standards.

(00:32:25):
They'll sue you if you have like the wrong kind of vegetables in your back garden.

(00:32:27):
Yeah, they can be incredibly demanding and they charge you a lot of money just to exist.

(00:32:33):
And people nevertheless opt into them and they are value maximising.

(00:32:36):
You save money by opting in total because your house is more valuable.

(00:32:40):
Unimpeachable market data that Americans actually want an extremely invasive,

(00:32:44):
demanding local government.

(00:32:46):
Yeah, it's like complete busybodyism.

(00:32:48):
But like, it's actually what people want.

(00:32:50):
And it makes a neighbourhood that is immaculate.

(00:32:53):
And everything is like, everything is clean, paint is all being done, etc, etc.

(00:32:58):
Anyway, point I make by that, it's easy to create them a new space.

(00:33:00):
Every country finds it easy to set up new government institutions if you're moving

(00:33:04):
into new territory.

(00:33:05):
And institutions a bit like this exist in England and so on, right?

(00:33:07):
Estate management companies are totally

(00:33:08):
They do them on all new building now and they're much better kept up than the ones

(00:33:11):
built 30 years ago because they started doing it.

(00:33:13):
But what's really difficult and has basically never been done in any country as far

(00:33:18):
as I know is creating new local government institutions within existing cities.

(00:33:23):
So the economist Donald Shoup,

(00:33:25):
who recently died,

(00:33:26):
had loads of ideas for doing stuff like this,

(00:33:28):
like parking benefit districts are a famous one.

(00:33:30):
Yeah.

(00:33:30):
Where a local area decides to take control of its parking and they can decide to

(00:33:34):
sell some of it off.

(00:33:35):
They can raise the parking fees or impose fees if it's all free and then use the

(00:33:40):
money for community projects or a security guard or to clean the streets or

(00:33:43):
whatever they like.

(00:33:45):
And they have been implemented, but rarely.

(00:33:48):
So creating new local government institutions in existing places is really difficult.

(00:33:51):
I don't know of anywhere that has a resident improvement district.

(00:33:54):
But I think they should be invented because there are lots of places where the

(00:33:58):
traditional local government forms are just not providing local government in this

(00:34:01):
sense.

(00:34:02):
And they, you know, street like my street.

(00:34:05):
I live in Blackheath, which is a nice bit of London in many respects.

(00:34:09):
We're giving away so much, so much like sensitive detail about where we live.

(00:34:13):
I think it says Blackheath on my Twitter account.

(00:34:14):
So it's OK.

(00:34:17):
Yes.

(00:34:17):
And, you know, there are thousands of houses there.

(00:34:19):
No one's going to find me.

(00:34:22):
They can follow me around, I suppose, if they're a real crazy person.

(00:34:27):
You go down my street and it's broken concrete composite from like three different eras.

(00:34:31):
There were those horrible... So there were flagstones on all pavements in London, right?

(00:34:35):
Someone at some point has stolen them and sold them off for people's private drives

(00:34:39):
and stuff like that.

(00:34:40):
There used to be nice York flagstones everywhere on all the old streets.

(00:34:44):
They're gone like on my street.

(00:34:45):
How do you steal a flagstone?

(00:34:47):
The builders,

(00:34:48):
they get contractors come in and take them all out and then put in the concrete

(00:34:51):
ones.

(00:34:52):
It happens to people's streets quite often.

(00:34:54):
It's like a kind of small-scale council corruption that happened over the last 50 years.

(00:34:59):
So the council permits them to do it?

(00:35:01):
I think someone on the council permits them to do it and says like, oh, it's not safe.

(00:35:04):
We need to get rid of these old stones or something like that.

(00:35:07):
Well, I live in a conservation area in Islington, which is very nice to maintain.

(00:35:10):
Yeah.

(00:35:11):
I actually wonder if conservation areas are partly some kind of they've evolved

(00:35:17):
sort of to provide a premium version of design control for people who are willing

(00:35:21):
to pay for it.

(00:35:22):
It's sort of kind of expensive to live in a conservation area.

(00:35:24):
It means you have to put in loads of planning applications,

(00:35:26):
which you otherwise wouldn't have to do.

(00:35:27):
And there's some stuff you can't do.

(00:35:28):
And you have to have like more expensive types of windows and badly insulated

(00:35:33):
houses,

(00:35:33):
et cetera,

(00:35:33):
et cetera,

(00:35:33):
et cetera.

(00:35:34):
But they're basically popular with their residents.

(00:35:37):
I wonder if that's the socialist local government system in England kind of

(00:35:43):
emulating the exclusionary homeowner associations in the United States and

(00:35:46):
providing a premium local government service to people.

(00:35:50):
suspect there's something a bit like that going on implicitly?

(00:35:53):
So I do think a lot of the beauty things can be done,

(00:35:56):
but I'm not super...

(00:35:57):
I definitely don't think that there's anything we could come up with that would

(00:36:01):
make sure all the buildings were really high standard all the time.

(00:36:04):
One thing that I'm a bit wistful for...

(00:36:08):
I'll start by saying I did a tweet and I felt bad because I really like Mark Carney.

(00:36:11):
I've always liked him as an international figure.

(00:36:14):
And when he was in charge of the Bank of England, I thought, this is our moment.

(00:36:17):
We're going to bring in nominal GDP targeting.

(00:36:18):
It's going to be the greatest thing ever.

(00:36:20):
It didn't happen, but I don't think it was his fault.

(00:36:21):
I think it was thanks to him that nominal GDP targeting was even on the internet.

(00:36:26):
It was so close to bringing in.

(00:36:29):
Insiders I've talked to since then have suggested to me that he almost got it over the line.

(00:36:33):
It was like, it was near run thing.

(00:36:34):
So I've always loved him for that reason.

(00:36:36):
And I thought like quite impressive how he just came in and became PM of Canada in

(00:36:40):
such a short period of time.

(00:36:42):
So I felt,

(00:36:42):
I was like,

(00:36:43):
shall I send this tweet quote tweeting him and like,

(00:36:45):
you know,

(00:36:45):
shitting on him really.

(00:36:47):
Because he did, they announced that they'd done a pattern book basically.

(00:36:51):
So a pattern book of,

(00:36:53):
50 designs of houses that work in every Canadian building code.

(00:36:57):
And they had a GIF where they flashed through them all, right?

(00:37:01):
And every single one was not just ugly, but like a 3, 2, 1 out of 10 style building.

(00:37:06):
It was so bad.

(00:37:08):
They were like, you were trying hard.

(00:37:09):
If you'd just done a box with holes, they would have been better than these buildings.

(00:37:12):
They were all worse than a box with holes.

(00:37:14):
And sorry, I interrupted you.

(00:37:15):
You were going to explain the relevance of this.

(00:37:17):
Oh, yeah.

(00:37:17):
So they've come up with 50 designs that work in every Canadian area.

(00:37:20):
So if you're a small developer, you don't have to go to an architect.

(00:37:23):
You don't have to get any design done.

(00:37:25):
You can just take these designs off the shelf, download them, and then go and build this house.

(00:37:28):
So reducing costs, reducing approvals times.

(00:37:32):
They're compliant with building codes by design.

(00:37:35):
Yeah, exactly.

(00:37:35):
So it's not that you have to build these designs.

(00:37:39):
These designs are just 50 designs.

(00:37:41):
There are probably like a million designs that would fit or 100 million designs.

(00:37:44):
in principle, with slight variations between them.

(00:37:46):
But these are 50 that were... And I was really sad.

(00:37:49):
So I did a tweet about how... And I was like, I hope he doesn't see this.

(00:37:52):
But I want people to know that I'm upset about this.

(00:37:55):
But I do kind of think that a pattern book-based system could work.

(00:38:00):
So there's a myth that... And this already happened on our podcast.

(00:38:04):
So if you're listening carefully, you'll have heard this before.

(00:38:05):
But there's a myth that pattern books were like,

(00:38:08):
these are the only things you're allowed to build.

(00:38:10):
In fact, they were just the same as the pattern books done by Mark Carney.

(00:38:13):
government in Canada.

(00:38:14):
These are ways of being compliant with the rules.

(00:38:17):
Yeah.

(00:38:17):
And produced by, most produced privately.

(00:38:20):
Yeah.

(00:38:20):
It was like, oh, here are, I mean, it wasn't produced by the British state.

(00:38:23):
Exactly.

(00:38:24):
It was just like, oh, builders, you knew the building acts that you'll have to follow.

(00:38:28):
Here's a bunch of designs which are building out compliant.

(00:38:30):
And would they pay the architects to use the pattern?

(00:38:33):
No.

(00:38:35):
Yeah, you license them.

(00:38:37):
And the thing about those pattern books which appeals to people is that firstly,

(00:38:41):
pencil drafting is really nice.

(00:38:43):
Even if you draw a very ugly building in pencil drafting,

(00:38:46):
you're like,

(00:38:46):
damn,

(00:38:47):
that looks really good.

(00:38:48):
And people are particularly good draftsmen in the world where there weren't tools

(00:38:51):
to do it better.

(00:38:51):
And so the drafting is just really good.

(00:38:53):
It looks great.

(00:38:54):
And then also what's so appealing is that they're all good designs.

(00:38:58):
Like in the pattern books, you will not find a building that a normal person would say was ugly.

(00:39:02):
80% of people would say that every building in there was a good looking building.

(00:39:05):
And so your thinking is like,

(00:39:07):
was it only possible to make good looking buildings comply with the building acts?

(00:39:10):
Not at all.

(00:39:10):
It'd be really easy.

(00:39:11):
In fact,

(00:39:12):
someone could do it,

(00:39:13):
like someone now,

(00:39:14):
even if they didn't try,

(00:39:15):
would make the first building they tried would be ugly that complied with the

(00:39:17):
building acts then.

(00:39:18):
Like the building acts didn't generate this.

(00:39:20):
But I've always wondered,

(00:39:21):
could we do a system where,

(00:39:23):
okay,

(00:39:24):
here are 50 things that comply with,

(00:39:26):
or 100 or 200 things that comply with the building codes.

(00:39:28):
Yeah.

(00:39:29):
Also, they're the only things you're allowed to build.

(00:39:32):
Or like 300, 500.

(00:39:33):
Or like, you know, for the neighbourhood, it might be four, right?

(00:39:36):
Because if it's a small enough neighbourhood...

(00:39:37):
Couldn't you just try and say,

(00:39:39):
we're not going to change the existing system,

(00:39:41):
but you are allowed to build...

(00:39:42):
Like these,

(00:39:43):
you know,

(00:39:43):
without going for the constraints on you're not allowed to build anything else.

(00:39:47):
Sure, an extra safe harbour.

(00:39:48):
That would be nice, yeah.

(00:39:48):
If they're good enough, I'd love to do that.

(00:39:50):
So I've often wondered... Because when we were working on street votes...

(00:39:54):
Our idea was literally that.

(00:39:55):
We said the neighbourhood has to come up with a set of pictures which would

(00:40:01):
generate the facades for any conceivable house on the street.

(00:40:04):
And you can only have one if you want.

(00:40:05):
So there's only one facade that you can build on the street.

(00:40:07):
Or you can have a choice of five or ten or whatever.

(00:40:10):
But you have to prepare what will the front look like.

(00:40:13):
Well, there is a kind of example of this.

(00:40:15):
So the South Tottenham case, which you did a podcast on once, right?

(00:40:18):
The...

(00:40:20):
So this was the neighbourhood in North London where the Haredi Jewish community is

(00:40:25):
concentrated.

(00:40:27):
Very large families stuck in these small homes with two or three bedrooms.

(00:40:31):
They launched a campaign to persuade First Haringey and later on Hackney Council to

(00:40:35):
give them a special planning policy

(00:40:37):
allowing them to add,

(00:40:39):
I mean,

(00:40:39):
anyone in the areas,

(00:40:40):
obviously,

(00:40:41):
to add one and a half stories to their homes,

(00:40:44):
subject to a strict design code that basically just says you have to replicate the

(00:40:48):
lower part of the house.

(00:40:50):
It's slightly more complicated than that,

(00:40:53):
but not in any way that basically compromised the logic.

(00:40:56):
So essentially for each homeowner,

(00:40:57):
there was only one extension that they were allowed to do,

(00:41:00):
an exact detailing that they would have to do to correspond to the supplementary

(00:41:05):
planning document.

(00:41:07):
And eventually they managed it.

(00:41:09):
And now,

(00:41:10):
I don't know,

(00:41:10):
like a third of the houses in the neighbourhood now look as though they were built

(00:41:14):
as three and a half storey Victorian houses rather than as two storey Victorian

(00:41:17):
houses.

(00:41:18):
And they look totally fine.

(00:41:20):
I've never seen someone object to it in any way.

(00:41:23):
And I actually think it's a decent piece of evidence.

(00:41:24):
When we put that on Twitter, I mean, that's a good example.

(00:41:26):
When we put that on Twitter...

(00:41:28):
we got almost no negative pushback.

(00:41:30):
We had support from everyone from Michael Gove to the then leader of the Green

(00:41:35):
Party or whatever,

(00:41:35):
who were all going like,

(00:41:36):
yeah,

(00:41:36):
of course,

(00:41:37):
this should be standard practice for loads of neighbourhoods.

(00:41:39):
And I am pretty sure that if we'd done the concrete blocks emerging from the little

(00:41:45):
Victorian cottages,

(00:41:47):
image it.

(00:41:48):
We would not have got that response under those circumstances.

(00:41:51):
As a kind of coding, it's completely possible to write codes like that.

(00:41:55):
Local authorities could write codes like that all the time if they wanted to.

(00:41:58):
It's the really interesting,

(00:42:00):
weird question,

(00:42:01):
which I don't have a good answer to,

(00:42:03):
so I don't propose that we necessarily want,

(00:42:05):
but why they don't do that all the time

(00:42:08):
which is a great puzzle.

(00:42:09):
Default is you can build,

(00:42:11):
like in your case,

(00:42:12):
your Kennington house,

(00:42:13):
you can build that house again.

(00:42:14):
Presumably that house probably sat there originally, like at some point.

(00:42:18):
Maybe it was bomb damage.

(00:42:20):
But in London,

(00:42:22):
generally,

(00:42:23):
except for extremely high-end or weird streets,

(00:42:25):
every house on the street,

(00:42:26):
at least on one side,

(00:42:27):
is basically a copy of every other.

(00:42:29):
Every street is like that, right?

(00:42:30):
Pretty much every street.

(00:42:32):
So it probably already was that original building.

(00:42:34):
So I would like your system of

(00:42:36):
Actually, you did an extreme version of that once, as a keen follower of your tweets.

(00:42:40):
You said you had a picture of a particular Florentine palazzo,

(00:42:45):
like six storeys central Florence.

(00:42:47):
It should be legal to build this anywhere in the country if you build an exact replica.

(00:42:51):
I think what they should do is,

(00:42:53):
and I used to think they should do this for Heathrow and use the money basically

(00:42:58):
replace Heathrow with a city and then use the money from that to build a new airport.

(00:43:02):
Now I've been convinced by Ben that actually Heathrow is quite important where it

(00:43:06):
is,

(00:43:06):
and we don't need to get into that.

(00:43:07):
But my proposal was the design code was Old Town Florence.

(00:43:12):
You just have to prove that the building you're building exists.

(00:43:15):
Any building.

(00:43:15):
It can be a one-story building,

(00:43:17):
it can be a 10-story building,

(00:43:18):
if there are 10-story buildings there.

(00:43:19):
You can build the silica.

(00:43:21):
You can build the dome if you want.

(00:43:24):
I think that would be great.

(00:43:25):
A lot of people would hate that because it's like ultra pastiche.

(00:43:27):
But I think it'd be really fun to have Florence.

(00:43:29):
1932 New York City.

(00:43:30):
Manhattan.

(00:43:31):
I'll be happy with that.

(00:43:34):
Any building in 1932 Manhattan.

(00:43:36):
You could object to that.

(00:43:37):
There are no bad buildings in 1932 Manhattan.

(00:43:38):
Suddenly the developers become furiously interested in historical photography.

(00:43:43):
Yeah,

(00:43:43):
and it's like a cottage industry of building 3D images of all the buildings so that

(00:43:47):
you can get it exactly right.

(00:43:48):
I do actually think,

(00:43:49):
by the way,

(00:43:49):
that it would be within the,

(00:43:52):
I don't know what the word is,

(00:43:53):
but it'd be possible for local governments to impose a,

(00:43:57):
okay,

(00:43:57):
you can apply for something,

(00:43:58):
but you can just automatically build any house that already exists in the

(00:44:01):
neighbourhood again.

(00:44:02):
That seems like something they could just do.

(00:44:05):
And I don't think it would be that complicated to apply.

(00:44:07):
Yeah.

(00:44:08):
I don't know that much about it.

(00:44:10):
It's interesting to look at the regulations imposed by neighbourhood plans,

(00:44:14):
which are kind of hyper-local.

(00:44:17):
I mean,

(00:44:18):
they're direct democratic in the sense that they...

(00:44:20):
So what happens is either these tiny local areas,

(00:44:23):
parishes in the countryside,

(00:44:25):
or these bespoke ad hoc areas of local government called neighbourhood forums in

(00:44:30):
cities...

(00:44:32):
They get together,

(00:44:33):
a bunch of local people will thrash out an additional set of planning policies for

(00:44:37):
their area,

(00:44:37):
and then it goes to a referendum of all the local residents.

(00:44:42):
And if they win a majority,

(00:44:44):
then it becomes local policy and new development has to obey those rules.

(00:44:48):
This has been around for, what, 15 years now?

(00:44:51):
And I think it's seen as...

(00:44:53):
Modestly successful.

(00:44:55):
They probably like neighbourhood plan policies.

(00:45:01):
They probably do lead to more popular design.

(00:45:05):
And supposedly the figure that gets bandied around is they also need to somewhat

(00:45:08):
more design happening because once people are given the ability to control the form

(00:45:13):
of what happens,

(00:45:13):
they're a bit more confident about.

(00:45:15):
I don't know if that's actually accurate, but that's widely claimed.

(00:45:20):
But they're not very effective, right?

(00:45:22):
They missed out the key thing.

(00:45:23):
There was one key thing.

(00:45:25):
I suspect they wanted to do this, but they lost at the final hurdle.

(00:45:29):
They needed to give neighbourhood forums and parishes the power to directly approve

(00:45:35):
stuff without any other authority being able to say yes or no.

(00:45:39):
And also to capture value from permissions they give out in some way.

(00:45:43):
It doesn't have to be like extreme amounts,

(00:45:45):
but just some level of...

(00:45:47):
Then I think they could have been an incredibly powerful tool to getting stuff

(00:45:50):
permitted.

(00:45:51):
But as it happens, they ended up being like, what's the point?

(00:45:55):
They haven't got any way to generate revenues.

(00:45:57):
They don't have any actual powers.

(00:45:59):
They can't do anything without getting...

(00:46:00):
They have to be in line with council policy and council planning documents and all

(00:46:03):
that sort of stuff.

(00:46:04):
They could put... I mean, they could put more effective design controls in place than they do.

(00:46:08):
So they like... Totally possible for...

(00:46:11):
You know,

(00:46:12):
for example,

(00:46:13):
have you followed the site in South Kensington where they,

(00:46:16):
on top of South,

(00:46:17):
around South Kensington station,

(00:46:19):
there's been like a 10 year brouhaha about this sort of one story or like

(00:46:23):
semi-derelict site.

(00:46:24):
It's obviously totally insane and it's extremely valuable area of London.

(00:46:29):
And the owners want to add a load of flats or whatever on the site.

(00:46:33):
And their designs are indeed fairly ugly.

(00:46:36):
And South Kensington obviously hyper-resourced local people who have been

(00:46:40):
conducting lawfare against this development for year after year after year.

(00:46:43):
And it grinds on and on.

(00:46:44):
Now,

(00:46:45):
it would not have been very difficult to,

(00:46:48):
I mean,

(00:46:49):
in theory at least,

(00:46:50):
you could have a neighbourhood forum set up there,

(00:46:52):
impose a set of rules saying you must replicate the design of classic South

(00:46:56):
Kensington townhouses.

(00:46:57):
Yeah.

(00:46:58):
So I want to set out what I believe.

(00:47:00):
And I want to set the record straight.

(00:47:03):
Because I obviously do like to provoke people.

(00:47:06):
I like to start debate.

(00:47:07):
So I am, for one thing, very, very anti-historical preservation.

(00:47:14):
I don't think that it's that important.

(00:47:16):
Except in a case like where...

(00:47:18):
You have a building where something really,

(00:47:20):
really,

(00:47:20):
really is significant specifically about that building.

(00:47:23):
Maybe the Houses of Parliament are a building where there's so much specific

(00:47:27):
history that it's worth preserving it.

(00:47:28):
Well, you are Stonehenge or something.

(00:47:30):
Stonehenge, yes.

(00:47:32):
But most historical preservationism,

(00:47:34):
at least in England,

(00:47:35):
and I think in the US and most of the English-speaking world,

(00:47:40):
takes properties and says that they are significant just because of the way they

(00:47:44):
look or the way they're built.

(00:47:45):
There's nothing specific to that place.

(00:47:48):
It's not like a thing has happened, but you have to keep that building there.

(00:47:52):
I think that's terrible.

(00:47:53):
I think that's like,

(00:47:54):
crazy.

(00:47:54):
I think it imposes mad costs on the people who live there.

(00:47:58):
And I think it ends up with,

(00:48:00):
as in London,

(00:48:00):
you end up with loads of properties that are kind of semi-decrepit because they're

(00:48:05):
much older than they should be.

(00:48:06):
Really,

(00:48:07):
you should just gut the entire thing,

(00:48:08):
or even demolish it and replace it with something new that's built in a more modern

(00:48:12):
way.

(00:48:13):
But I do like the way they look, and I do think it's legitimate.

(00:48:16):
And I suspect a lot of people value historical preservation,

(00:48:20):
not because they think that the actual wood or the actual floor plan inside the

(00:48:24):
building should be preserved,

(00:48:25):
but because they value the way it looks.

(00:48:27):
Strong feeling that we have a finite stock of beautiful things,

(00:48:31):
and that every time we lose one,

(00:48:32):
we're just...

(00:48:33):
losing something which is completely irreplaceable.

(00:48:35):
Totally.

(00:48:36):
And so we should be extremely careful about losing any of them.

(00:48:40):
Every street that's gone is gone forever and we're never getting it back.

(00:48:42):
Right, exactly.

(00:48:43):
And are they wrong?

(00:48:44):
Like, are they wrong?

(00:48:45):
So historical preservationism,

(00:48:47):
I think,

(00:48:47):
might be a kind of coding error where people are trying to get one thing and the

(00:48:52):
only way they have of getting it is doing this other thing.

(00:48:54):
It's actually pretty destructive, I think.

(00:48:56):
Partly because caring about beauty has been delegitimised or it's not felt to be an

(00:49:01):
appropriate planning consideration or it doesn't work well in public discourse or

(00:49:04):
something.

(00:49:04):
Whereas somehow historical heritage value... And it's funny.

(00:49:09):
I was thinking about this the other day, rubbish collection stuff.

(00:49:14):
BBC decided that I was an expert on rubbish collection.

(00:49:17):
So I had a very nice conversation with journalists about it.

(00:49:19):
But isn't it curious that in conservation areas in Britain...

(00:49:24):
You can't have masses of weenie bins outside buildings and there are all sorts of

(00:49:28):
elaborate systems in order to preserve these attractive facades without the visual

(00:49:32):
clutter in front of them.

(00:49:32):
And everywhere else we have all these extremely ugly bins that are massed outside.

(00:49:38):
That's not really a heritage issue at all.

(00:49:40):
That's very clearly an amenity issue.

(00:49:42):
There has no effect upon the historic fabric of the building or the building's

(00:49:45):
historic interest or anything like that.

(00:49:47):
But it's clearly like somehow it can only get into planning policy under the feeble

(00:49:53):
guides of being a heritage consideration.

(00:49:56):
In fact, they're just beauty areas.

(00:49:59):
So I also think that having a lot of discretion about aesthetics is a bad idea,

(00:50:04):
and especially having an expert or a department

(00:50:07):
that is thinking about aesthetics,

(00:50:08):
because they usually get captured by people with bad taste,

(00:50:12):
or sophisticated taste,

(00:50:13):
as you,

(00:50:14):
in your very good article for Works in Progress,

(00:50:18):
have talked about,

(00:50:19):
or challenging taste.

(00:50:22):
And I think that there is a lot of

(00:50:25):
But I think it is very reasonable for people to care about the area that they live in.

(00:50:31):
And so where I fall out,

(00:50:32):
and I think this is the same position that you all have,

(00:50:35):
is that there is some role for local control,

(00:50:39):
or basically local people saying,

(00:50:42):
this is what we want our area to look like.

(00:50:44):
We're not having any experts.

(00:50:45):
We're not having any expert review or anything like that.

(00:50:48):
And we're not saying that the interiors of the buildings have to look any way at all.

(00:50:51):
We're just talking about the facades of the exteriors.

(00:50:54):
To me, that's the... And also, crucially, this doesn't relate to how tall the buildings are.

(00:51:00):
It doesn't relate to density.

(00:51:01):
It doesn't relate to anything like that.

(00:51:02):
It just relates to simply the aesthetics.

(00:51:05):
That's, to me, the kind of minimum viable or the sort of maybe maximum viable program here.

(00:51:11):
Just on your previous historic preservation point,

(00:51:13):
because I really strongly agree with you,

(00:51:17):
there are more extreme cases,

(00:51:18):
which is where we've lost...

(00:51:20):
So when we've lost a really good old thing,

(00:51:23):
right,

(00:51:23):
that would be nice for us to have,

(00:51:25):
the historic preservation view is that we have to leave it as a ruin.

(00:51:28):
It might have been good to conserve it while it was still going.

(00:51:30):
But now that it's gone, it's like extremely inauthentic to bring back a building, right?

(00:51:35):
We just have to have the ruin.

(00:51:36):
And to be clear, like ruins have some value.

(00:51:39):
There's like some romantic feeling you get with ruins.

(00:51:41):
And obviously, you know, rich...

(00:51:44):
Georgians and Victorians might have built ruins in their garden because the ruins

(00:51:48):
themselves were valuable.

(00:51:48):
So I'm not saying we should never have any ruins.

(00:51:50):
But there are some things like the complex of the Acropolis and stuff where it

(00:51:54):
would just obviously be better if we rebuilt it to what it was like.

(00:51:57):
And lots of people,

(00:51:58):
before the complete overtake of preservationism during the 1800s,

(00:52:03):
the 19th century,

(00:52:05):
by the end of the 19th century,

(00:52:06):
every elite person believed...

(00:52:07):
Well,

(00:52:08):
they originally...

(00:52:08):
Yeah, that's basically right.

(00:52:10):
But in like 1830 or something,

(00:52:12):
or in like 1790,

(00:52:13):
they'd been like,

(00:52:14):
yeah,

(00:52:15):
let's build back the old...

(00:52:16):
Even in the 19th century,

(00:52:18):
there was a more nuanced kind of preservationism that was prevalent,

(00:52:22):
which lasts,

(00:52:22):
and to some extent,

(00:52:23):
that survives today in continental Europe.

(00:52:25):
We're like a particularly... So the two broad views are like...

(00:52:30):
preserving these buildings, very, very broad views.

(00:52:34):
We're preserving these buildings because they're good buildings, beautiful, interesting, etc.

(00:52:38):
Or preserving these buildings for the sheer heritage value, the fact that they're old buildings.

(00:52:43):
Then you have a question like,

(00:52:45):
if you could repair,

(00:52:49):
restore an old building which has got authentic decay that's set in over time,

(00:52:55):
If you hold the first view,

(00:52:56):
then that's a way of making the building better,

(00:52:58):
and that's a good conservation practice.

(00:53:01):
Whereas if you hold the second view,

(00:53:02):
then you're falsifying the building,

(00:53:05):
or probably you have to take away some of the historic fabric that's accrued in

(00:53:10):
order to do the restoration.

(00:53:12):
So all the cathedrals of England were in extremely decayed condition by the 19th

(00:53:15):
century,

(00:53:16):
and then they were all quite vigorously restored,

(00:53:18):
mostly by this one architect,

(00:53:19):
Gilbert Scott.

(00:53:21):
That would be very difficult.

(00:53:22):
But in those days, they were like, yeah, these are great buildings.

(00:53:25):
They're worth investing in.

(00:53:27):
The restoration will involve some loss of historic fabric,

(00:53:29):
which you have to do in order to straighten everything up and reform the buildings.

(00:53:36):
But they will make them overall better buildings.

(00:53:37):
Whereas the kind of conservation practice that gradually becomes prevalent in the

(00:53:40):
20th century would be like,

(00:53:42):
No, the historically constituted condition is the thing which now needs to be preserved.

(00:53:46):
The damage is part of its history and needs to be preserved as well.

(00:53:50):
And that's become very ascendant in English conservation practice.

(00:53:53):
It's less so in France.

(00:53:54):
Well,

(00:53:54):
I was about to mention Notre Dame,

(00:53:56):
which is the perfect example of the opposite of what you're describing.

(00:53:59):
People always slipped a bit from this in moments of crisis.

(00:54:02):
Because in moments of crisis,

(00:54:03):
ordinary people,

(00:54:04):
where loads of really good stuff gets destroyed,

(00:54:06):
then you get the rebuilding of Warsaw after the Second World War or something.

(00:54:10):
This is like...

(00:54:11):
Right.

(00:54:13):
So the Venice Charter is a famous document in which this preserve historic fabric,

(00:54:20):
don't restore,

(00:54:21):
don't...

(00:54:22):
The Venice Charter is totally ascendant by this time,

(00:54:25):
but in moments of extreme cultural loss,

(00:54:28):
ordinary people become really interested and the conservation elites often go quiet

(00:54:32):
a bit and like,

(00:54:32):
all right,

(00:54:32):
fine,

(00:54:33):
you could have a bit of restoration there.

(00:54:34):
And that's something

(00:54:34):
Something like that is partly what happened with Notre Dame.

(00:54:36):
But it's also just partly France is more pro-restoration.

(00:54:39):
So Saint-Denis,

(00:54:40):
they're rebuilding one of the old towers and spires which fell down in the 19th

(00:54:45):
century.

(00:54:46):
And I guess the municipality decided, yeah, we kind of like that.

(00:54:49):
It's a very fine table to look better with that.

(00:54:52):
Very hard to imagine that happening in Britain.

(00:54:54):
We've got to rebuild Lincoln's gigantic.

(00:54:57):
Right.

(00:54:57):
Yes.

(00:54:57):
We'd go back to having like the tallest church building in Europe or something.

(00:55:00):
The tallest building in the world for like 100 years.

(00:55:02):
Right.

(00:55:03):
Maybe it might be a little longer.

(00:55:04):
Yeah.

(00:55:05):
Yeah.

(00:55:05):
So I think there's one thing I'm...

(00:55:09):
sympathetic to this older conservation school, which is like, yes, these are great buildings.

(00:55:15):
Their greatness partly comes from age.

(00:55:17):
I do believe Stonehenge,

(00:55:19):
I wouldn't say we should get rid of actual Stonehenge and do a reconstruction of

(00:55:25):
what it would have looked like in the Bronze Age.

(00:55:28):
But a lot of their goodness comes from their character as works of architecture and

(00:55:32):
art and also as just highly functional buildings.

(00:55:34):
So that's

(00:55:36):
Yeah, anyway, that's a long answer to what you were saying.

(00:55:39):
Sorry, I know I diverted you on.

(00:55:41):
That was the first point.

(00:55:42):
Then you had a second point.

(00:55:44):
So the second point was that we're taking it for granted that codes are the way you

(00:55:49):
would do this.

(00:55:50):
But most design review is done...

(00:55:52):
I mean,

(00:55:53):
in London,

(00:55:53):
for example,

(00:55:54):
if you want to build a tower,

(00:55:56):
you have to get a committee to approve the tower.

(00:55:59):
And if it's in the city of London, it has to be architecturally significant, I think.

(00:56:02):
Is that...

(00:56:03):
Is that correct?

(00:56:04):
It's more likely to succeed.

(00:56:05):
It's more likely to be, yeah.

(00:56:06):
So, like, personally, I think you need a lot of background for a skyline.

(00:56:12):
Like,

(00:56:12):
I think the New York City skyline works so well because a lot of the buildings are

(00:56:15):
completely unremarkable and the ones that are remarkable stand out from it.

(00:56:19):
You need that kind of background.

(00:56:21):
The London skyline,

(00:56:22):
which,

(00:56:22):
yeah,

(00:56:22):
I mean,

(00:56:22):
London's great,

(00:56:23):
but,

(00:56:23):
like,

(00:56:24):
the London skyline is very higgledy-piggledy because every tower is trying to be

(00:56:28):
interesting and weird in its own way.

(00:56:30):
And so there's no...

(00:56:32):
There's no background quality to it.

(00:56:33):
There's no scenery.

(00:56:35):
Every tower could be given a special name of the gherkin or shard or walkie-talkie

(00:56:41):
variety or something.

(00:56:42):
It's a slightly ridiculous skyline that you get as a result of that.

(00:56:46):
So the...

(00:56:48):
The appeal of a code rather than a...

(00:56:51):
And this goes into the third point,

(00:56:52):
the third element,

(00:56:53):
which I think is really important.

(00:56:54):
And this is very personal,

(00:56:55):
but the appeal of a code is that,

(00:56:57):
A,

(00:56:58):
it takes out the discretion of people whose interests might be quite weird,

(00:57:02):
or they might have quite bad taste,

(00:57:04):
but sophisticated taste.

(00:57:06):
Obviously, it's quicker and it removes veto points.

(00:57:09):
It depends on what the rules are, obviously, but it can remove veto points.

(00:57:14):
But it feeds into the third point, which is that it should be popularly decided on.

(00:57:18):
It should be decided on by ordinary people who live in that area.

(00:57:22):
And that, to me, is really, really valuable.

(00:57:25):
One of the strong general beliefs I have is that, like,

(00:57:29):
mass media and mass culture and low culture, commercial culture, are really good.

(00:57:34):
Fast food is good.

(00:57:35):
Pop music is good.

(00:57:37):
Hollywood blockbuster films are good.

(00:57:38):
All that is very, very... And that's a personal thing, right?

(00:57:41):
A reasonable person can disagree with that.

(00:57:44):
But I find it personally really appealing that ordinary people also seem to really like this.

(00:57:50):
They don't like the new hot thing in architecture.

(00:57:53):
They like the old thing.

(00:57:54):
I don't know.

(00:57:55):
I find it...

(00:57:59):
very very elegant um with all the things that i i also think are valuable like

(00:58:03):
commercial culture that people just think that georgian buildings look better than

(00:58:08):
new london vernacular buildings um that but you know i'm not making that as a

(00:58:12):
strong policy argument uh i do think i do think there are can in principle you can

(00:58:17):
code for something that's just as ugly as you can i mean as a committee you can

(00:58:21):
yeah discretionary committee you can so it's the yeah

(00:58:23):
And the building regulations are rules, right?

(00:58:26):
The net zero things, we have our rules.

(00:58:28):
So it's just with a crude hand,

(00:58:32):
like,

(00:58:32):
bam,

(00:58:32):
I'm now going to make it really hard to make an ugly building in this extremely

(00:58:35):
straightforward,

(00:58:36):
predictable,

(00:58:38):
highly legible way.

(00:58:39):
So it's, they're not totally, I mean, the advantage of codes is it's

(00:58:47):
probably it's probably a bit easier for lay people to like hold them to account

(00:58:52):
because the rules are there up front and they can say no i don't like that and i do

(00:58:56):
like that whereas if it's

(00:58:59):
a committee of the like high and mighty people using very abstruse language it's

(00:59:03):
very hard for people to put pressure on that or engage with that but it's to some

(00:59:08):
extent they're orthogonal right if you go and it might be true if you have like if

(00:59:14):
you were running the committee who's if you were running the the

(00:59:18):
planning authority dealing with a hypersensitive location,

(00:59:22):
like the old city of Jerusalem,

(00:59:24):
or the Minnesota quarter of Rome or something.

(00:59:28):
There you could think the decisions that have to be made here are so complicated

(00:59:35):
and so bespoke,

(00:59:37):
and each street is layered with 3,000 years of human history and complicated

(00:59:44):
stories.

(00:59:45):
There you think...

(00:59:46):
Maybe a discretionary approach is correct.

(00:59:49):
Ideally, the best system there would be a good discretionary body doing it.

(00:59:54):
The discretionary body of people who have the right objectives and the right

(00:59:56):
competencies,

(00:59:57):
and they'd be able to produce something which was a more premium kind of design

(01:00:01):
control than...

(01:00:03):
a meticulous set of rules.

(01:00:07):
Possibly,

(01:00:07):
but the way you're having to construct that to come up with the circumstance where

(01:00:11):
that is better,

(01:00:12):
by itself,

(01:00:13):
it's the exception that proves the existence of a general rule.

(01:00:18):
I do think that the point that this

(01:00:22):
applies to the people who decide on it relates to the final thing that I think we

(01:00:27):
should talk about,

(01:00:27):
which is incentives.

(01:00:29):
And I don't think we should just go to street votes.

(01:00:33):
Too many of our podcasts end up with us just talking about street votes.

(01:00:37):
But I do think that there is something underappreciated about the power of people

(01:00:42):
deciding on the rules that affect them in a relatively tight way.

(01:00:49):
a few things to say on that that I just I think feed in so one is going back to

(01:00:53):
homeowners associations right you're opting into a homeowners association they're

(01:00:56):
building the whole neighborhood and all the rules at the time at the same time um

(01:01:01):
there there are usually some systems to change it once everyone has moved in

(01:01:05):
they're like kind of quasi-democratic people really hate their like HOAs people

(01:01:09):
people whinge about HOAs they continually opt into them yeah and so I think it's

(01:01:14):
like

(01:01:15):
It's just cheap talk.

(01:01:16):
People whinge about anything where they have to pay money,

(01:01:18):
even if they've decided to pay the money.

(01:01:20):
And after all,

(01:01:20):
of course,

(01:01:21):
what everyone would like most of all would be to be the one property who's exempted

(01:01:25):
from the concerns of the HOAs.

(01:01:26):
They love that their neighbours are forced to do it.

(01:01:27):
That's right.

(01:01:27):
Yeah, exactly.

(01:01:28):
But so with HOAs, what do they do?

(01:01:30):
And that'd be a useful

(01:01:31):
case of like what are the design rules that people opt in opt into when they have

(01:01:34):
the choice I mean they probably really are quite popular design stuff right yeah

(01:01:37):
exactly new American suburbs are built in HOA ones especially HOA ones don't

(01:01:43):
usually have the garage being obviously visible and like there are all sorts of

(01:01:46):
features the urban form may be terrible or whatever but that's to do with

(01:01:48):
completely other economic forces it's low density but like fine and car car

(01:01:53):
dependent,

(01:01:53):
but the things they decide on will be the things that in the marketplace of HOAs,

(01:01:58):
they're the one that offers the thing people want and they opt into.

(01:02:02):
And what we find is something a bit like what you are suggesting,

(01:02:06):
but with a bit of Samuel in it,

(01:02:07):
which is that by and large,

(01:02:09):
it's rules-based.

(01:02:10):
But there is a committee of people deciding whether on the edge cases of all the

(01:02:14):
rules and extreme bits to get out of them.

(01:02:17):
And maybe that's the answer, mostly a rules-based system, but with a bit of edge casing.

(01:02:22):
The tricky thing is,

(01:02:24):
as I said before,

(01:02:26):
it's all well and good having HOAs,

(01:02:28):
and it's all well and good that now half of Americans live in them.

(01:02:30):
But ultimately, these are all the exurbs and suburbs and stuff.

(01:02:34):
And personally, I care a lot more about the...

(01:02:38):
walkable neighbourhoods near the city centre.

(01:02:41):
Or at least I have more personal taste for those places to live in and I go to them more often.

(01:02:45):
So what can we do to try and achieve that there?

(01:02:48):
But then I suspect still they would end up with a vote on a rules-based system and

(01:02:55):
disapproving and adding different rules of what we should do.

(01:02:58):
But I don't know.

(01:02:59):
It's an interesting question.

(01:03:01):
There's such legitimacy for these extremely demanding busybody rules

(01:03:05):
when people are opting into them and everyone thinks like,

(01:03:07):
oh,

(01:03:07):
you know,

(01:03:08):
people we know might be against them because they're restrictive and they see it

(01:03:11):
from the perspective of someone who's already living in the house,

(01:03:14):
having all these nasty,

(01:03:15):
their actions are being constrained from perfect liberty.

(01:03:18):
But like,

(01:03:20):
When you consider that decision on a longer basis, they can move into it.

(01:03:24):
They can sell their house, all those sorts of stuff.

(01:03:26):
They keep opting into them.

(01:03:28):
They whinge, but they generally tolerate them.

(01:03:29):
But if we actually started saying this neighbourhood,

(01:03:32):
if it can get 75% approval,

(01:03:34):
can decide what happens.

(01:03:36):
And lots of people have not opted into that situation.

(01:03:38):
They're having it forced upon them from a democratic majority.

(01:03:43):
maybe even a democratic supermajority, but definitely like a question as to whether it's legit.

(01:03:49):
And ultimately, the local government already has the power to do these things.

(01:03:53):
So if there was legitimacy for doing it, why aren't they already doing it?

(01:03:56):
And so I agree, that's like a very complicated thing.

(01:03:59):
And by the way, although I think in principle,

(01:04:03):
there should be some ways that we can control infill development.

(01:04:06):
I think the problem is kind of solved for large additional developments,

(01:04:10):
large redevelopments of,

(01:04:13):
you know,

(01:04:15):
docs that have gone out of business.

(01:04:17):
Because the externalities are internalised.

(01:04:19):
The externalities are internalised.

(01:04:21):
They roughly get it.

(01:04:21):
Because they have a single developer.

(01:04:23):
Single owner, single design.

(01:04:25):
I'm not saying they make things that I think are perfect, but I don't think there are...

(01:04:29):
regulatory ways we're going to win easily on that.

(01:04:31):
I think that we'd have to actually change our views of how important design is,

(01:04:35):
all these sorts of things,

(01:04:36):
to get better on that.

(01:04:36):
They do well enough.

(01:04:38):
I generally think that large New London developments add to the city rather than

(01:04:41):
detract from it.

(01:04:42):
And contrary to the popular elite view that like Persimmon estates,

(01:04:48):
I mean,

(01:04:48):
Persimmon estates are pretty bad,

(01:04:49):
but they're extremely low value estates where almost no money is done to

(01:04:53):
development.

(01:04:54):
In expensive areas, mass market house builder houses are fine.

(01:04:57):
They're okay.

(01:05:00):
So, yeah, for infill, maybe we can't come up with an answer.

(01:05:02):
Maybe there isn't actually a really good answer of what you do for infill in

(01:05:07):
existing neighborhoods.

(01:05:08):
We can make it going forward have good rules.

(01:05:11):
We can make it for a big place.

(01:05:12):
You can plan for infill.

(01:05:14):
Like if you set up rules now that you can build,

(01:05:16):
you can do these things that I think they'd easily have public support.

(01:05:19):
But it might not be, at least in America, where people are very fiercely independent.

(01:05:23):
Maybe in like Germany,

(01:05:25):
people are like,

(01:05:26):
of course we have rules on infill development because like,

(01:05:29):
Yeah.

(01:05:29):
It's a funny thing.

(01:05:29):
I get asked about this.

(01:05:30):
I'm associated with working on these architectural aesthetics questions.

(01:05:35):
And I always think like,

(01:05:38):
We're talking about how to solve the housing shortage or really thorny questions of

(01:05:42):
infrastructure planning or whatever.

(01:05:44):
I've got a lot to say about the solutions.

(01:05:45):
I think we probably are going to win on these, and we certainly could win on these.

(01:05:50):
Whereas the questions of architectural aesthetics and how to achieve those given

(01:05:54):
the massive principal agent problems and legitimacy problems that you face,

(01:05:59):
it's an extremely thorny issue.

(01:06:01):
And I also think like,

(01:06:02):
well,

(01:06:03):
I'm going to give like a disappointing answer on the area that's supposed to be my

(01:06:06):
like USP policy area.

(01:06:08):
No, I'm actually not sure quite how we're going to solve this question.

(01:06:11):
I think it's very difficult.

(01:06:12):
To push to incentives, because I think that it's like it's been in my back.

(01:06:16):
I'm glad you raised it the whole time.

(01:06:18):
So the key thing is the pretextual thing.

(01:06:21):
People use pretexts when they have an underlying reason to stop development, right?

(01:06:25):
And I think...

(01:06:26):
So many of the Yimby's who are disagreeing with us on this question or disagreeing

(01:06:31):
with you on this question,

(01:06:32):
their view,

(01:06:33):
I think,

(01:06:33):
is that...

(01:06:35):
you basically just have to crush NIMBYs.

(01:06:38):
And the way to do that is to like have ideological wins where you're like

(01:06:41):
constantly keep trumpeting your stuff,

(01:06:43):
get your guys really energized.

(01:06:45):
You convert more people, like you're constantly trying to convert people and so on.

(01:06:49):
And then you win and like you just need to crush like everything in front of you.

(01:06:53):
Like a normal, a standard political campaign type approach.

(01:06:57):
I'm not sure that is the standard political campaign type approach.

(01:07:00):
I think that campaigns often have you trying to buy in groups on the edge to

(01:07:04):
broaden your coalition.

(01:07:06):
But one kind of approach, the energize your base approach, is the Yimby approach.

(01:07:11):
The general Yimby approach.

(01:07:12):
And delegitimize your enemies.

(01:07:13):
Yeah.

(01:07:13):
They think you can't ever change the incentives.

(01:07:16):
So instead,

(01:07:17):
you just have to expropriate their amenity value and turn it into housing value for

(01:07:22):
your allies.

(01:07:22):
And I do think that's a net benefit.

(01:07:25):
That would be a net benefit if they did.

(01:07:26):
At least in some cases.

(01:07:27):
In many cases, yeah.

(01:07:29):
But often hard.

(01:07:30):
My view is that 80% of people in neighbourhood,

(01:07:33):
like the homeowners and NIMBYs,

(01:07:35):
just don't really care that much about development either way.

(01:07:37):
They're like softly anti it.

(01:07:39):
But there are people who are extremely anti it and they're very motivated and they

(01:07:44):
do lots of stuff that makes it seem like the pro-social thing to do is be against

(01:07:48):
development.

(01:07:49):
I saw this in development near me.

(01:07:50):
All the normal people who didn't really care about it at all were like,

(01:07:53):
oh,

(01:07:53):
it's so bad for the local car park to be turned into a three-story block of...

(01:07:58):
a nasty three-story block of flats destroying the neighbourhood.

(01:08:02):
This is the one that Jude Law... Yes, it's unbelievable.

(01:08:06):
But I don't think Jude Law would have come to that view.

(01:08:09):
I don't think he has a strong view about it.

(01:08:10):
I don't think he would have come to that view... Yeah, he's trying to be a good citizen.

(01:08:13):
He's trying to be a good neighbour.

(01:08:16):
He's noticed and he's reasoning from the fact that these guys are really against it.

(01:08:19):
Like they're the hardcore of 10 to 20 campaigning really hard.

(01:08:23):
Now, my view is that we can change the incentives.

(01:08:25):
Like if we can make the 80% just enough benefit from the scheme that they're

(01:08:31):
willing to override,

(01:08:32):
then we can win in like...

(01:08:34):
They'll need to have a mechanism to override them, though.

(01:08:37):
Yeah, of course.

(01:08:37):
That's the other thing.

(01:08:38):
And a thing that people put pressure on us about this sometimes,

(01:08:42):
it's not enough to make it in their interests.

(01:08:43):
It's got to be in their interest,

(01:08:44):
and they've got to then be able to turn their support that they have in that into a

(01:08:48):
mandate.

(01:08:49):
Yeah.

(01:08:50):
Otherwise...

(01:08:50):
Right,

(01:08:51):
Brian,

(01:08:51):
you were just...

(01:08:52):
I heard you talking on the phone earlier about land readjustment in various

(01:08:57):
different countries,

(01:08:58):
and...

(01:08:59):
In that case, it's like there can be a third of trucking landowners.

(01:09:02):
Basically, you can vote by supermajority.

(01:09:05):
Again,

(01:09:05):
like a business improvement district,

(01:09:06):
it's usually two thirds or more,

(01:09:08):
sometimes 80% of landowners by number and then also by value,

(01:09:14):
right?

(01:09:14):
Just so you can't have like loads of small guys screwing over one big landowner.

(01:09:19):
But then you force the last 20% to go along.

(01:09:21):
And then there are loads of countries where that's accepted and you completely bulldoze.

(01:09:24):
Yeah.

(01:09:25):
the NIMBYs,

(01:09:26):
the really hardcore NIMBYs,

(01:09:27):
the 15,000 complaints to Heathrow each year kind of people.

(01:09:32):
Estate regeneration is our classic case in Britain, right?

(01:09:35):
Social housing estates where the housing association wants to demolish the estate,

(01:09:38):
rebuild it at higher densities,

(01:09:40):
make a load of market housing and use the market housing to pay for replacement

(01:09:43):
social housing at a higher quality.

(01:09:46):
20% of residents, or whatever, 10%, really are vociferously opposed to this.

(01:09:51):
And before the 2010s,

(01:09:53):
they would get all the airtime and people had the strong sense that it's a really

(01:09:57):
nasty thing,

(01:09:57):
state regeneration.

(01:09:58):
Maybe it's necessary in some cases, but it's a brutal business.

(01:10:02):
And if you're a compassionate person,

(01:10:03):
then you should probably do the Jude Law thing and express your compassionateness

(01:10:08):
by opposing this process.

(01:10:09):
Yeah.

(01:10:10):
Then they started doing these votes to find out what the majority of people

(01:10:15):
actually think in these cases.

(01:10:16):
Imposed effectively.

(01:10:18):
They were trying to block them, right?

(01:10:20):
They thought, well, we've imposed these.

(01:10:21):
We're never going to get an estate regeneration ever again now because everyone is

(01:10:24):
an imby about their own estates.

(01:10:26):
And it turned out there was exactly your kind of soft support from 80% of people

(01:10:31):
who do,

(01:10:31):
in fact,

(01:10:31):
benefit from this.

(01:10:33):
But they needed this process to turn that soft support into a mandate.

(01:10:35):
And they needed to get something from it.

(01:10:37):
So the analogy that I like... You need the two elements.

(01:10:40):
They need to actually get something from it, and then they need to have power.

(01:10:43):
And that's a good model for lots of problems.

(01:10:45):
And some version of this will be the correct answer in the case of beauty.

(01:10:48):
Yeah.

(01:10:49):
There are a lot of really hardcore libertarian type people who think,

(01:10:55):
especially the Australians,

(01:10:56):
there are so many.

(01:10:57):
I keep waking up to Australians because obviously the time zone thing means I wake

(01:11:01):
up at 6am and I have all these Australian hardcore libertarians telling me,

(01:11:05):
this is my land,

(01:11:06):
nobody should ever be able to stop me from doing anything.

(01:11:10):
I get why people feel that way.

(01:11:14):
The analogy is, to me, like a joint stock corporation, right?

(01:11:18):
We've gone from a world where we had essentially private companies or like family

(01:11:22):
businesses to a world where at the moment there is like extremely fractured

(01:11:25):
ownership of,

(01:11:27):
let's say,

(01:11:27):
companies,

(01:11:27):
but we're talking about land here.

(01:11:29):
Yeah.

(01:11:30):
In most joint stock corporations, you have quite a highly paid CEO.

(01:11:35):
Any normal member of the public will say, that person is paid too much.

(01:11:40):
CEO pay is way too high.

(01:11:42):
That's the standard view, and it's a very unpopular thing.

(01:11:45):
Although I think CEOs are underpaid for interesting reasons,

(01:11:48):
but we might go into it in another episode.

(01:11:51):
But the general view and the prosocial view is,

(01:11:56):
CEOs are way overpaid.

(01:11:57):
They get paid a thousand times more than a normal worker.

(01:12:00):
But as soon as a person becomes a shareholder in a company,

(01:12:03):
and they have a tiny fraction,

(01:12:04):
they have some vote,

(01:12:06):
you do have activists who come in,

(01:12:07):
and you do have some people who say the CEO is overpaid.

(01:12:11):
And sometimes they are, so it's not impossible.

(01:12:14):
But generally,

(01:12:15):
the rank and file ordinary person who bothers to vote,

(01:12:19):
or who delegates their voting to a Vanguard-type fund,

(01:12:23):
or whatever it might be,

(01:12:24):
They will just say, no, I actually don't care that this person is paid this much.

(01:12:28):
Elon Musk can be paid billions of dollars, and that's great because I get money from it.

(01:12:33):
I benefit from it.

(01:12:34):
And I think an analogy, that's how I think about what we're talking about.

(01:12:37):
It's kind of trying to create joint stock corporations in terms of local areas.

(01:12:42):
And I'll give you another example that fits perfectly with that.

(01:12:46):
taking it back to the pretextual point,

(01:12:48):
I don't think people will use beauty as a pretext when they have a very strong

(01:12:50):
incentive to want development to happen.

(01:12:52):
They'll only use as much beauty as is necessary to maximize value.

(01:12:55):
My example for why I believe that's true,

(01:12:57):
which fits perfectly,

(01:12:58):
the Squamish people of Vancouver,

(01:12:59):
when they were building Sunaqua,

(01:13:00):
which is this new big...

(01:13:02):
I drove past it two weeks ago,

(01:13:04):
yeah.

(01:13:04):
Yeah, this big new development.

(01:13:06):
Not beautiful, but that's actually relevant for the point I'm going to make.

(01:13:10):
Strikingly unbeautiful, I would say.

(01:13:12):
Extremely ugly, one of the worst, yeah.

(01:13:14):
But...

(01:13:15):
So they did a vote to see whether they should develop their land when they

(01:13:20):
discovered that they could disintermediate all of their regional,

(01:13:24):
state and local authorities and just go straight to federal building rules.

(01:13:29):
And the guy who was running it for them,

(01:13:32):
I think maybe it was a tribal elder,

(01:13:34):
but the person who was CEO of the project after the vote had gone through...

(01:13:38):
was asked,

(01:13:39):
so there are all these bylaws that you're like,

(01:13:40):
you technically don't have to apply,

(01:13:42):
you know,

(01:13:43):
like the number of aspects that windows have and the minimum space requirements.

(01:13:48):
Are you going to impose any of these?

(01:13:49):
And he said, I'm going to maximise economic value for the community.

(01:13:52):
And so you build the like legally largest buildings with like maxed out in every dimension.

(01:13:57):
And I think that what you see there is that when people have a direct financial

(01:14:01):
interest in development,

(01:14:01):
even when it's 6,000 of them sharing this like big plot of land,

(01:14:05):
yeah,

(01:14:07):
People make something like profit-maximizing decisions.

(01:14:11):
It might not literally be profit-maximizing,

(01:14:13):
but they make something like profit-maximizing decisions.

(01:14:15):
Now,

(01:14:16):
it turns out in this case that the profit-maximizing decision either wasn't beauty

(01:14:20):
or they're wrong and they made a mistake about it.

(01:14:22):
But I think the point there is that people just drop pretexts when they have a stake in it.

(01:14:28):
And we actually can.

(01:14:29):
It may well have been profit-maximizing for the small side.

(01:14:32):
Yeah.

(01:14:32):
And so far the towers are all in a line,

(01:14:34):
so most people will not be looking at the other towers,

(01:14:36):
they'll be looking at the rest of Vancouver.

(01:14:38):
It's only the people driving past on the roadway.

(01:14:40):
Yeah, it's everybody else who sees that.

(01:14:42):
And by the way, the non-architectural aesthetic features are all very good.

(01:14:48):
So it's got good landscaping in terms of greenery that people really like and stuff like that.

(01:14:54):
But the key point here is that people actually can be given a strong interest in development.

(01:14:58):
And when they do, they stop using pretext.

(01:15:00):
They think about what's best and worst.

(01:15:03):
And so I think that's achievable.

(01:15:05):
And then we don't have to worry about whether it's a pretext or not because they're

(01:15:08):
not stopping the development.

(01:15:09):
The development's happening.

(01:15:10):
And then we just get... That's what I'd like to get to.

(01:15:13):
And so final... I think small but not...

(01:15:17):
trivial point is, doesn't this just lock cities into a particular style?

(01:15:24):
It prevents further progress.

(01:15:26):
If you have a design code in an area,

(01:15:28):
almost by definition,

(01:15:31):
you are not allowing innovation in design,

(01:15:35):
in that area at least.

(01:15:37):
Is that not a problem?

(01:15:38):
A lot of people have said,

(01:15:40):
I actually really like the way London's kind of higgledy-piggledy,

(01:15:42):
and I like the differences in styles.

(01:15:44):
And I definitely prefer certain areas, but it would be boring if London all looked the same.

(01:15:50):
So I think the answer to that is pretty straightforward, which is A,

(01:15:54):
The point is to have very local and very bespoke design codes to different areas.

(01:15:59):
I don't want a city-wide design code.

(01:16:00):
I think that would be a disaster.

(01:16:01):
But I want a block, or a few blocks, to have a design code.

(01:16:05):
The other is, just practically, I think it's very unlikely that everywhere would opt into this.

(01:16:12):
If you look at Houston,

(01:16:13):
where we did a piece that talked about people or blocks being able to opt out of

(01:16:17):
the city-wide upzoning,

(01:16:19):
a pretty small share of the city,

(01:16:21):
less than a quarter of the city actually,

(01:16:23):
bothered to do this.

(01:16:24):
Coordinating your neighbours and getting,

(01:16:26):
let's say,

(01:16:27):
a supermajority or even a majority of your neighbours to agree on anything.

(01:16:31):
Transaction costs are pretty high.

(01:16:32):
Yeah, they're pretty high.

(01:16:33):
to agree on anything,

(01:16:34):
let alone a design code where,

(01:16:36):
like,

(01:16:37):
yes,

(01:16:37):
makes sense in a place that is relatively coherent.

(01:16:40):
But if it's not coherent at the moment,

(01:16:42):
it might be really difficult to get even 50% of people to agree on a single

(01:16:45):
approach.

(01:16:45):
I mean, neighborhood planning has something vaguely like, something like that level of uptake.

(01:16:50):
It's not yet 20% of London is neighborhood planned,

(01:16:52):
but it might be that eventually once the various plans have gone through to that.

(01:16:55):
Because I do think that even though probably the last century or so of architecture

(01:17:02):
hasn't been stellar for various reasons,

(01:17:06):
that doesn't mean the next century can't be.

(01:17:07):
We want to have new styles.

(01:17:08):
Definitely want to have new styles.

(01:17:10):
If you looked in the past...

(01:17:11):
there were lots of new styles, right?

(01:17:12):
Like they were all styles that read as traditional to us,

(01:17:15):
except for maybe some edge styles like Art Deco and Art Nouveau.

(01:17:18):
They read as being like, well, like Gaudi style buildings.

(01:17:20):
They read as being a kind of other thing.

(01:17:22):
But all the other ones,

(01:17:23):
like an Italian building,

(01:17:25):
which is like the white stucco ones you see around like where I used to live in

(01:17:28):
Maida Vale or a Georgian building,

(01:17:30):
your normal person could definitely

(01:17:32):
distinguished that they are different kinds of buildings but like ultimately

(01:17:35):
they're roughly the same shape they've got a they've got like a parapet and a

(01:17:39):
straight roof at the top the windows are the same like orientations and stuff and

(01:17:42):
so it's kind of like fashion-y changes rather than like an over underlying so we

(01:17:47):
definitely want new styles we definitely want some changes um

(01:17:51):
I think it becomes a question when we're building enough for that to matter a lot.

(01:17:53):
Like right now, we're just not building that much.

(01:17:56):
If we were building loads of stuff,

(01:17:58):
like whole neighborhoods,

(01:17:59):
then I think we could answer this question.

(01:18:01):
But right now... There's the Bowman Standing Committee who are running their design code.

(01:18:07):
And if people want to build something which isn't currently allowed by the design

(01:18:10):
code,

(01:18:10):
they can lodge an application for this.

(01:18:12):
And then the Bowman committee will process them in some way.

(01:18:14):
And then ultimately, they'll go back every five years or whatever.

(01:18:17):
There'll be a process where it goes back to the local people.

(01:18:20):
And they're like, do we want to add these to our design code list of permitted buildings?

(01:18:23):
Can we do that?

(01:18:24):
I mean, I like the personnel thing.

(01:18:27):
We solved the personnel problem.

(01:18:29):
But I actually,

(01:18:31):
to go back to my,

(01:18:32):
so I think the fudge but actually true answer is that most places just won't have a

(01:18:37):
design code under at least what we're talking about.

(01:18:41):
In a limit case where places did,

(01:18:42):
everywhere had a design code,

(01:18:45):
there would be an incentive for some places to have a very permissive or like a

(01:18:49):
pro-innovation design code,

(01:18:50):
because it would be valuable to allow innovation in some places.

(01:18:55):
That's my kind of limit case answer.

(01:18:58):
There is a potential collectifaction problem where it's value maximising for each

(01:19:01):
neighbourhood to have architectural uniformity.

(01:19:04):
but the city as a whole ought to have a few dissenting areas.

(01:19:08):
But if you only have the votes taking place at the level of each neighbourhood,

(01:19:11):
you don't get any of the dissent that's actually value maximising the level of the

(01:19:15):
city as a whole.

(01:19:15):
So I could see there is a theoretical problem there,

(01:19:17):
but it feels like it's at a margin that's pretty remote from where we are at the

(01:19:21):
moment and maybe a bridge that we can cross when we get there.

(01:19:23):
One of them good problems.

(01:19:24):
Right, yeah.

(01:19:25):
Thanks very much for listening.

(01:19:26):
Check out worksinprogress.co for more.