50 Shades of Planning: Episode 132 – The YIMBY Crowd

“‘The moment has come’: pro-building Labour YIMBYs are set to raise the roof” was the title of a piece in the Observer ahead of the Labour Party Conference.

For many of the most ambitious of the new cohort of Labour MPs, this is the fashionable campaign of the moment, not for economic growth but as a social justice movement – and one that many of the new millennials entering parliament hope to stake their careers on.

Inside Labour it is not a left-right divide, but some of its champions are prepared for it to mean internal party conflict between those who are radicalised on the housing crisis, and more nervous colleagues in rural or suburban seats won for the first time by Labour who might be tempted to retreat into nimbyism on local issues as a way of trying to keep their seats.

The point about first time Labour MPs retreating into NIMBYism is interesting in the context of the proposed changes to the standard method that is currently being consulted upon, but it was the point about YIMBYism not being a left-right divide inside Labour that Sam Stafford found most interesting because of a piece in the New Statesman back in April called ‘Not all YIMBYs are your friends – the pro-housing coalition is less united than it seems’ (link also below).

As it so happens, Sam approached the people quoted in the New Statesmen piece about recording a chat about the politics of housing and met four of them recently to do just that.

The four are John Myers, co-founder of the YIMBY Alliance; Robert Colville, columnist and Director of the Centre for Policy Studies; Jonn Elledge, journalist, author and fan of local government reorganisation; and Aydin Dikerdem, Cabinet Member for housing on the London Borough of Wandsworth.

They were going to talk about whether Kier Starmer’s self-declaration as a YIMBY marks the movements arrival into the political mainstream; whether the ends, more housing, is more important than the means; and who should get a say over what goes where and why. Some of that they did, but the remainder of the conversation, as Listeners will hear, goes off in all kinds of directions.

50 Shades of Planning is the podcast by planners and for planners so if you would like to use it as a platform for sharing anything you think that we need to be talking about then do please feel free to get in touch with me via [email protected].