YIMBY Country
In 2021, the nation of New Zealand announced the YIMBY rapture. In the country's five largest cities, you would be allowed to build up to eight-story buildings anywhere within a 10-minute walk of mass transit lines. You couldn't be required to build any particular number of parking spaces. And now, you would be able to build up to three three-story townhomes on any residential lot in those large cities. Five years after news of this seismic event lapped up on the shores of my home in Oregon, I wanted to know: What happened next? What happens after the rapture? YIMBY COUNTRY is an independent, one-shot podcast miniseries by Michael Andersen about what happens after a country decides to re-legalize housing. It's told in a series of 30-40 minute interviews with various New Zealanders involved in the aftermath of the world's most successful upzoning campaign.
Episodes
Jack, the New Zealander featured in this interview, is another sort of person every social movement needs: the recruit. To be clear, he's been in housing advocacy for years now. But this co-founder of the advocacy group Greater Ōtautahi -- that's the Māori word for the city of Christchurch -- is a bit younger than his counterparts in Auckland and Wellington were, and eagerly continuing the work of legalizing homes. When we met and ...
Once upon a time, back in the 1500s, someone came up with a new way to say "hot take." It came from the French word "to attempt."
Brendon Harre has both the mind and the heart of an essayist. While working as a psych nurse and periodically bracing himself for flights around the world (he has two sons in Norway), Harre became the first New Zealand writer whose thinking about housing I ran into across the Pacific. The essays on his bl...
I'm not prepared to claim that Eric Crampton and Benno Blaschke are the nerdiest of all the nerds involved with New Zealand's zoning reforms, but they are the only ones who happily self-identified as such on the air with me.
Crampton is the chief economist and Blaschke a research fellow with the New Zealand Initiative, a Wellington-based think tank that is funded a bit like a Chamber of Commerce is in the United States: from dues pa...
Many thousands of people's homes will exist because of people like Marko Garlick.
By day, Garlick works as a lawyer in New Zealand's capital city of Wellington; by night, he lives with a couple roommates in a house they rent near the airport. But it's what he does in between that made me want to talk to him. One of the supervolunteers who translated New Zealand's national upzoning policy into a successful local campaign in Wellingto...
The most important part of what happened to housing in New Zealand in the last 10 years is what happened to housing in Auckland in the last 10 years.
In today's episode, two professionals lay out the numbers.
In short: In 2016, Auckland passed one of the biggest, broadest legalizations of more housing within an existing area that had ever happened in the developed world since the invention of zoning. One in five homes in this major m...
Somewhere along the journey from inspiration to legislation, a good idea needs to be carried along by people like Chris Parker. Parker's work is to map the big abstract facts of his field, economics, across the rocky landscape of politics.
First at the Auckland Council and then for New Zealand's central government, Parker was a key figure in moving his country to the leading edge of housing policy. We talked about why economics seem...
New Zealand's former minister for housing and resource management is a very specific and important sort of legislator: the kind whose power and influence revolve around the fact that he's a bit of a nerd.
During the 2010s, MP Phil Twyford used any means necessary to build a fresh understanding of the housing crisis that was tearing through the lives of his constituents. His conclusions spread to both his political friends and foes, ...
After seven years as a professional YIMBY, I wanted to know: What happens after you win? So I decided to go to the other side of the world and ask.
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