2014年经济学人 住房 灵活的反对（在线收听）

Housing

Nimble opposition

A new study confirms suspicions about what drives planning decisions

ON A road called Glyders, in Benfleet, east of London, it looks as though every house is on the market. But the crucial words “for sale” are missing from the estate agents'signs, and have been replaced with “RAGE:Residents Against Glyders Expansion”. The locals are protesting against plans to build 35 new homes on farmland at the end of their road. “Look how narrow this road is,” says Susan Baillie, whose husband, Robert, runs the campaign. “It will never cope with the additional traffic.” The Baillies organised the signs, which are sponsored by the estate agent. The irony seems lost on the residents.

Local opposition to new housing developments is common across Britain. It has long been argued that such opposition—NIMBYism to its critics—is linked to home ownership. Homeowners, unlike distant landlords, vote in local elections and receive planning consultations in their postboxes. They lose out from development in multiple ways. Loss of green space reduces their quality of life and increased supply of housing suppresses prices. Landlords managing diversified portfolios are less exposed to the value of one property. The idea that planning decisions are driven by the desire of homeowners to maximise house prices is known as the “home-voter hypothesis”.

On October 24th the Institute for Government, a think-tank, released a study supporting this theory with data. It looked at English local planning authorities (LAs) between 2001 and 2011 and found that for every additional ten percentage points in the proportion of homes that are owner-occupied, 1.2 percentage points were knocked off growth in the housing stock. Average growth was 8.8%, so the effect was marked. The authors are cautious about making a causal claim, but the correlation was observed after controlling for the number of planning applications and the amount of available land. A rough calculation suggests that, without the NIMBY effect, one million more homes would have been built during the period.

That would have helped alleviate an acute shortage of British housing. In 2004, a government report by Kate Barker, an economist, found that 240,000 new homes were needed every year. Only 138,000 homes were built in 2013. Due to the shortfall, houses are eye-wateringly expensive and, since 1952, home ownership has become a more distant prospect for almost every new generation (see chart).

In a book released in September, Ms Barker argues that England's planning system is fragmented and slow. LAs are required to have a medium-term plan which meets targets for development agreed with central government. But both the overall plan and individual developments can be held up. LAs find it difficult to work together on proposals which cross boundaries, and vacillate on whether to build on brownfield land, which has old buildings on it, or greenfield sites, which developers prefer. The green belt around many towns constrains development. And locals see few of the fiscal benefits from new homes, so there is little incentive for them to build.

Thankfully, public attitudes are shifting. Rising house prices used to be celebrated as a sign of economic strength; now, most see expensive homes as bad for Britain. Politicians are responding: both big parties have promised more building.

This shift is not on display in Benfleet, which is part of a local authority—Castle Point—with the joint highest rate of home ownership in the country. Admiring the view from one resident's garden, it is hard not to sympathise with the local campaign. But every home was a newbuild once, and the costs of the housing shortage are not visible from an Essex garden.