NIMBYs are destroying California. They'll do the same to London if we don't stop them.

California, the golden land of promise, blessed by sunshine, fertility and the fruits of liberty. It's in a mess, you might even say dying. For the first time in its history the Golden State has more people leaving than arriving. And the reasons? As Jimmy McMillan once said "the rent's too damned high". California has an acute, almost terminal, housing problem:

The median price for a house now tops $600,000, more than twice the national level. The state has four of the country’s five most expensive residential markets—Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Orange County and San Diego. (Los Angeles is seventh.) The poverty rate, when adjusted for the cost of living, is the worst in the nation. California accounts for 12% of the U.S. population, but a quarter of its homeless population.

Four out of ten Californians pay more than 30% of their income on rent or mortgage, the worst in the USA. And the reason is pretty simple. Californians have voted, agitated, campaigned, petitioned and marched against building new homes - again and again. NIMBYs are destroying California.

This being America, the finger is pointed at the zoning system used by town planners over there and, specifically, zoning only for single family homes. Worse than this, these zones don't just say "you can only build single detached homes here" they also dictate the size of individual plots. And in places where agricultural land sells for $1m per acre, limiting density to at low as 10 homes per acre makes for expensive homes. But it's not just this rather crazy system but that it is made worse by having 90% of the land in the state excluded from development and by having a set of NIMBY-inspired environmental, heritage and ecological policies the main effect of which is to prevent development.

Bob Tilman has spent best part of six years trying to get permission to redevelop his laudromat in San Francisco into an apartment block. There's still no permission and opponents - yes opponents of housing is a city with a huge crisis - have used political pressure, environmental regulations and heritage rules to try and prevent the scheme. Elsewhere in the city the same anti-housing campaigners have stopped the development of a homeless shelter.

We can, from the comfort of civilised England, smile and laugh at California's problems. We can point at the gross hypocrisy of progressive, left-of-centre politicians working with wealthy residents to stop affordable housing. We can even boggle as politicians elected on supposedly pro-housing platforms then spend half their campaigning on stopping housing. But we need to pause for a minute and consider whether, in our 'world city' the same problems are brewing.

Spend even a little bit of time looking into London's housing issues and you'll quickly find all the same conditions we see in California. Not just rising homelessness, sofa-surfing and exploitative, often illegal rentals, but politicians (commonly those progressive left-of-centre politicians like we see in California) saying that the impossible is possible, that we can meet housing need in a growing city without making a lot more land available for housing. There are nice warm words about 'brownfield' sites, talk of increased density and affordable housing provisions, but when the chance comes to get one of those dense development with lots of affordable housing, reasons are quickly found to refuse the development. "It's too tall". "What about heritage". "Ooo Kew Gardens".

This pattern is repeated everywhere as council planning committees indulge loud NIMBY lobbies by drawing up the most restrictive local plan possible with the least amount of housing land allocated they can get away with. And then those same Councils lobby for billions in public money to "solve the housing crisis" - the housing crisis their planning decisions have contributed to. Just about every home counties planning authority is squirming about trying to reduce the self-evident need for them to play a bigger part in meeting the housing demand that a massively successful London brings.

The planning system has a sclerotic local plan process, is obsessed with protecting the 'green belt' at all cost, and is vulnerable to loud, organised anti-housing minorities. We should look at California and take the warning - get the system changed, allow more housing development and put the NIMBYs back in the box. Most people support more housing for families, more affordable housing and a fairer planning system, it's time politicians - nationally and locally - had the balls to face down the anti-housing campaigners and get a nation where the rent's not too damned high.

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