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Why No EuroYIMBYs?
Samuel Hughes asks an excellent question in Works in Progress: Why aren’t there any YIMBYs, or NIMBYs for that matter, in continental Europe? It’s not for lack of high home prices.
Instead, Hughes hypothesizes that underlying NIMBYism is in fact stronger in Europe – strong enough that it is rarely challenged and aroused. There are a lot of empirical claims here, and the story probably differs substantially country to country as it does region to region in the U.S.
One place where there’s outspoken NIMBYism and at least a small YIMBY cadre is Prague, a regular contender for least affordable city in the world. The Liberální Institut talks about housing costs with arguments about markets and regulation that would be familiar to English speakers. The organization translated Alain Bertaud’s book into Czech, Města bez plánu. There’s no German or even French edition (“they ask if I can take out the word ‘markets’,” he tells me). When Alain and I visited Prague, policymakers explained their housing crisis as the result of powerful, highly local governments, none of which wants disruption. We visited Smichov City, a master-planned development on formerly industrial land, but that took years to wend its way through the many tiers of approval.
It’s long past time to retire the idea that high housing costs are an Anglosphere problem. More research, commentary, and advocacy, especially from Europeans, would be a welcome addition to the global YIMBY discourse.
