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Works in Progress is an online magazine devoted to new and underrated ideas about economic growth, scientific progress, and technology. Subscribe to listen to the Works in Progress podcast, plus Hard Drugs by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen.
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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.
(00:14:49):
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?
(00:15:26):
Think of the GDP.
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And I thought, there's a reason why their propaganda image is not...
(00:15:31):
oh, we're building a more beautiful house, but it's much bigger and we hate bigger things.
(00:15:36):
And like, yes, there's pretext mixed in there.
(00:15:38):
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.