YIMBY Country

Councillor Julie Fairey is part of what you might call the YIMBY faction on the Auckland Council, a regional "super-city" government created in 2010 to run the newly combined cities of New Zealand's most populous metro area. She regularly bikes to work from her relatively close-in ward, which includes both some wealthy enclaves and a working industrial harbor and has no one racial or ethnic majority group.

Her Albert-Eden-Puketāpapa ward also happens to be home to five train stations where the central government has specifically allowed buildings of 10 to 15 stories. Fairey and I spoke in October 2026 about being pinched between a set of zoning reforms she essentially supports, a central government she often finds annoyingly clueless, and an electorate with a vast array of opinions.

Fairey is the final regular guest in this miniseries. We'll be back in a few days with one final episode.

Some relevant links:

The Wikipedia entry for her council ward, including a link to her own page.

A news story about some of the flooding that followed Tropical Cyclone Gabrielle soon after Fairey took office in 2022.

A map of Plan Change 120 and its amendments, Auckland's most recent effort (as of mid 2026) to finally comply with the zoning standards imposed by New Zealand's central government since 2020.

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 spoke in March 2026, he had recently relocated to Auckland and achieved the previously almost unthinkable feat of purchasing a home there as a young adult.

A few days before I left New Zealand, Jack told me how his work has woven through the country's zoning reform story, starting with his time in Dunedin and Christchurch. We also talked about some big possibilities in the pipeline.

You may have noticed quite a delay in the publication of this episode. Re-entering post-sabbatical life back in Oregon meant needing to prioritize some big work and personal demands this summer. But I'm glad to be returning for a few more episodes that I hope will put a bow on this project I've enjoyed so much.

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 blog, "New Zealand Needs an Urbanization Project," became part of the intellectual backbone of New Zealand's YIMBY movement. (While connecting it to other urbanization subjects like transportation, energy, and jobs.)

Harre is also interesting in that, unlike most interviewees for this show, he's from the South Island: New Zealand's less populous but physically larger (and arguably more housing-abundant) half. I met him in the late morning, before he headed to his shift, to talk about:

• His concept of reciprocal intensification, in which neighboring property owners could agree to mutually upzone each other, and his later enthusiasm for the inverse of that in Houston: letting small blocks of property owners opt out of broad upzones
• His fascinating connection between today's housing politics and British agriculture politics during the 1800s
• Why urbanization is so important to economic development in off-the-beaten-path spots like New Zealand (and Oregon)

I personally enjoyed this conversation more than any other for this podcast. I hope you will, too.

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 payments from a wide variety of member businesses. I've described them as the American Enterprise Institute of New Zealand: both earnestly academic and ideologically aligned with the goal of freeing markets from overregulation.

This makes them representatives of an important constituency in most successful YIMBY reforms in the United States: the "reasonable Republican" or pro-business conservative. In New Zealand, where the current right-of-center government controls the path of national zoning reform, this makes them particularly important.

We had a rich conversation about the different ideologies that point to upzoning, about their hopes and predictions for the country's next round of pro-housing legislation, and about whether New Zealand's unusual form of government might have something to do with its unusual national land-use policy.

Discussed:

Crampton and Blaschke's own podcast interviews with public economist Chris Parker, with former housing minister Phil Twyford, and with current housing minister Chris Bishop.

Sam Bowman's 2021 article "The Housing Theory of Everything," in Works in Progress magazine

Blascke's then-upcoming report arguing for price-based accountability in land use instead of speculative housing targets.

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 Wellington, Garlick is one of Margaret Mead's "small group of thoughtful, committed citizens" who can and will change the world.

We spoke about what motivates him, what worked, how it felt to win, and what he thinks New Zealand will need to change next.

Upzoning New Zealand - a summary of New Zealand's story, co-authored by Garlick and Eleanor West

Up-zoning New Zealand: the localisation of a globally mobile policy idea - West's own longer paper on the story, mentioned by Garlick

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 metro area, about the population of the City of Phoenix, has been built since. Home prices have fallen 20 percent from their pandemic peak, but the homebuilding continues: even after a post-peak slowdown it seems to have settled 50% faster than its pre-2016 pace.

In short, the Auckland Unitary Plan worked as intended.

Here's how Gary Blick, the current chief economist for Auckland's regional government, and Ryan Greenaway-McGrevy, an urban economics professor at the University of Auckland, lay out the story. At the end, I offer two takeaways for cities elsewhere:

• Upzoning is a way of helping cities adapt to unknown futures. Auckland just happened to upzone right before its upzoning would be badly needed.
• Auckland's reforms were remarkable not just for their size (many more homes are now legal per square kilometer) but for their uniformity across a huge area (the same rules apply across a metro of 1.8 million people).

If you'd like to see an illustrated summary of Gary's conversation, here are the slides he was sharing with me as we talked.

Here are Ryan's recent academic publications.

Here is a short thing I wrote summarizing Auckland's outcomes, with some photos of recently built homes.

Here is Joseph Politano's excellent digest of Ryan's key findings.

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 seems to be on so many New Zealanders' minds, why housing developers should have to pay for their own pipes, and what Americans should remember to be proud of.

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, leading his country to do something none ever had - even as he was driven from his ministry and his party from power.

We spoke about how that all went down, the oddly durable new politics it unlocked, and the dilemma of getting credit for big ideas.

Discussed in the show:

"Up-Zoning New Zealand: The localisation of a globally mobile policy idea" by Eleanor West

the "leaky homes crisis" of poorly built homes in New Zealand from 1988-2004

KiwiBuild, the NZ Labour Party's failed attempt to build 100,000 publicly subsidized homes by 2028

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.