Virginia Postrel, Columnist

California’s Smart Plan to Let Homeowners Be Homebuilders

The way to blunt Nimby resistance to badly needed housing construction is to give single-family owners a path to profit from new development.

October 3, 2021 at 12:00 PM UTC

By Virginia Postrel

Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and author, most recently, of “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.”

There’s actually room for more.
Photographer: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

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California just gave single-family homeowners more control over their property and, for those in high-demand cities, the potential for a big financial windfall. Eight time zones away in the U.K., the Conservative government is revising its planning bill in ways that could give homeowners a similar boon.

The details and contexts differ, but both approaches recognize a political reality. The way to relieve housing shortages is to build more homes, and it’s easier to legalize construction if existing homeowners realize benefits.