Re: Ls Land Anya Forbidden Fruit
Edelmiro Jimale
The last minute of this trailer hits the audience over the head with two things. The first is that Anya Taylor-Joy may never smile in this movie and she will be an old school animation-style TNT bomb waiting to go off. The young version of Furiosa appears to have perfected the art of the motorcycle skid stop, which makes sense seeing how the vehicle we see her mom driving earlier in the trailer is a motocross bike as well.
The bit of the trailer where it appears like Furiosa is trying to snipe Dementus had me grinning from ear to ear. The shot grazes the building, we see Dementus giggle, and snap cut to him holding a rocket launcher firing back. Miller delivers the goods on the type of action humor that I personally like to see.
We get one answer with Furiosa picking up some brass knuckles, scissors and cutting her hair. A classic sign of character change. It is used often, but it would appear that Miller is leaning into some of the most popular story landmarks. The trailer begins with Furiosa taking a forbidden fruit. Dementus has an idea of manifest destiny, and the whole premise is about trying to return home. Miller is leaning into the simplicity of storytelling, only to blow us away with how he will visually blow us away.
So in this essay, I want to look beyond the usual arguments about the details of Tory and Labour policy, or the rows over planning targets (though I obviously have strong views on all of those) to set out an approach to planning reform that could be both extremely effective and politically achievable, drawing on the best examples from overseas. I will start by setting out how the housing shortage is affecting the young. I then look at rent controls, which are frequently implemented by cities to handle rising rents, but tend to have unintended consequences and worsen the underlying cause of the problem, as well as calls for radical planning liberalisation, which might address the underlying problem but have the opposite challenge that they are virtually impossible to implement. And in the final section, I outline a series of practical policies that really could make a difference.
The average British home has long been substantially smaller than those of other large European nations, and this trend is even more marked with new-builds today. Our housing stock is the oldest in the world, meaning that much of it was built at a time when a much larger proportion of the population lived in large households: this means that there are especially acute shortages of homes suited for the young, as well as for the elderly and for single people of all ages. Much of it is poorly insulated and expensive to keep warm.
This is the most important reason why many people want to live in population centres, and why their doing so tends to boost the economy as a whole. Yet postwar Britain has deliberately thwarted this process.
This situation has persisted so long that it feels completely normal to those of us in Britain. But in fact, this makes a significant international outlier. The surface area of metropolitan Paris today is three or four times greater than it was in 1939. That of London is almost unchanged: in most places, the capital stops today where the builders laid down their tools when they went to war.
The economic growth that has been foregone through this is enormous. A famous study found that spatial policy constraints had lowered US growth by 36% between 1964 and 2009. British spatial policy is more restrictive than most places in America, so it is likely that our figure is even higher.
These figures may sound abstract, but what this means is not just more individual wealth but more resources for hospitals, schools, social care, the justice system, and the other public services that British people care about.
These effects, as I mentioned, are felt by more or less everyone. But for homeowners, there is a consolation: rising house prices. Some 63% of British households are still owner-occupiers, and the value of many of these homes will have increased enormously in recent decades.
Yet young people are very unlikely to belong to this group. As mentioned above, only 28% of 25- to 34-year-olds owned their own home in 2019, a fall from 51% in 1989. Even then, the great majority of this 28% will only be on the first rungs of the housing ladder, hoping vainly to trade up, maybe to a family house like the one they grew up in. Almost none of them will have a house that is larger or more centrally located than they need, allowing them to move down the housing ladder (or, traditionally, outside the capital) in return for genuine riches or a larger property. Indeed, many cannot even afford to enter the private rental market: the proportion living with their parents has risen by around half since 2000, to 28% in 2020.
The social effects of this are only just beginning to be grasped, from falling birth rates to abandonment of mainstream political parties. If the shortage is not addressed, they will mount steadily in the years ahead.
The shortcomings of British planning policy are not, on the whole, the product of villainy or conspiracy. The post-1947 system was created with good intentions, and its failure was not orchestrated by any one individual. But it is now systematically redistributing advantages and opportunities from poorer and younger people to richer and older ones. So as well as generating massive deadweight losses, it is one of the most regressive policy programmes of modern British history. Few areas can be so important to the prospects of young British people today.
On the face of it, the argument for rent control is appealing. The most common version is that rents are rising not because landlords are working to increase the value of the property, but simply because housing is scarce, so it is unearned wealth extracted from those to whom it rightfully belongs. Capping rents therefore does not deprive people of the legitimate fruit of their labour, but simply prevents a privileged minority from capturing more unearned income. Although it will not in itself address the shortage of housing, it will mitigate one of its main malign effects on young people.
The standard argument against rent control is that it reduces housing supply in the long term by disincentivising homebuilding. At some levels, this is obviously true. If rent control forces rents below the point at which they cover build costs, building to rent will become uneconomic. But this would not necessarily be the outcome in the areas of Britain where housing is most scarce. In London, floorspace value is typically three or four times higher than build cost, so in theory rents could be depressed greatly without making new building unviable.9 (In practice this is not so true as those figures suggest, since much of this value is already captured by the Community Infrastructure Levy, affordable housing requirements, stamp duty, and so on: indeed, some development is already being pushed all the way into unviability by all this).
Another notorious issue with rent control is that it disincentives maintenance. If a landlord maintains a property poorly, its market value declines. Under normal conditions, this is bad for the landlord: they must either lower the rent to match the declining value of the property, or they will not be able to find tenants for it. But if the rent is fixed below market value anyway, the landlord essentially loses nothing by letting the property decay to the point at which its market value equals the controlled rent. If the landlord can charge 500 per month, at which rate they will easily be able to find tenants regardless of the state of the property, they will be unlikely to address repairs with the enthusiasm they might if it meant the property being empty for longer.
Again, there are numerous historical examples of this. In France, tight rent controls were imposed during the First World War and retained through the interwar period. As a result, only 6% of dwellings had a bathroom in 1951, compared to 42% in West Germany, while as late as 1946, 63% of dwellings did not have running water. Meanwhile, East Germany retained Nazi-era rent controls all the way to German reunification, causing a spectacular decay of its buildings that was often remarked upon by visitors. As recently as 1989, 24% of all East German homes had no private toilet.
Sadly, political reality means that the 1894 Plan and its close cousins are unfortunately unachievable. Partly because crashing prices like this would annihilate most of the asset wealth of the homeowning majority of the population. And partly because people would see a wave of building sweeping across their neighbourhoods, with eight-storey mansion blocks starting to appear on every suburban street in areas of acute housing scarcity.
Of course, the 1894 Plan is not a realistic proposition: serious supporters of planning reform know that a move of this scale would be out of reach, and none (to my knowledge) are actively advocating it. But it does show that politically achievable planning reforms need to have a minimum level of political durability to pass and to remain passed. Indeed, we are now approaching two generations of failed efforts at reform, each of which has collapsed in the face of the NIMBY backlash.
The politics of development are sometimes presented as a zero-sum conflict between a privileged older generation of homeowners and a deprived younger generation of renters: each can win only by crushing the other.
As we have seen, it is certainly true that young people suffer especially from the housing shortage. But what happens if we reject the adversarial framing, and seek ways to make development popular across the generations?
It turns out that, precisely because of the scale of the housing crisis, the benefits of reform are sufficiently great that you really can create a broad based majority in favour of building more homes.
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