HistoryNewsPolitics

YIMBY Country

Michael Andersen

In 2021, the nation of New Zealand announced the YIMBY rapture.

In the country's five largest cities, you would be allowed to build up to eight-story buildings anywhere within a 10-minute walk of mass transit lines. You couldn't be required to build any particular number of parking spaces. And now, you would be able to build up to three three-story townhomes on any residential lot in those large cities.

Five years after news of this seismic event lapped up on the shores of my home in Oregon, I wanted to know: What happened next?

What happens after the rapture?

YIMBY COUNTRY is an independent, one-shot podcast miniseries by Michael Andersen about what happens after a country decides to re-legalize housing. It's told in a series of 30-40 minute interviews with various New Zealanders involved in the aftermath of the world's most successful upzoning campaign.

Play

Open in

10 episodes
Avg 34 min
English

Episodes 10

Newest Oldest Longest

All10 Unplayed10 In progress0 Played0

#9
Monday · 58 min
The Evaluator
OK, let's recap. But first, I wanted some help. Eleanor West is an urban policy analyst who wrote a 35-page master's thesis and also an essay (with Marko Garlick) in Works in Progress magazine summarizing the intellectual history and procedural execution of New Zealand's remarkable zoning reforms since 2016. Her appearances on the UCLA Housing Voice and Good on Paper podcasts inspired my time in New Zealand and, eventually, this show. So I was honored that Eleanor was up to join me for the final episode of this miniseries, in which I offer for her consideration (and yours) a series of conclusions I came to based on my time in her home country and my conversations for this show. She agrees with most, has different angles on a few, and adds the flesh of experience to all of them. Thanks to everyone who's been part of making YIMBY Country possible, first of all the guests for their time. I hope you've enjoyed listening to it; that you learned something you didn't know about New Zealand; and that it might move you to do something to make your own corner of the world a little better. If you'd like to follow my other work, I go by @andersem on Bluesky, X, and LinkedIn. It's possible that someday, there might be a second season, but not for a long time. However, this show will stay on the internet for the forseeable future. If you've enjoyed it, please share it, rate it, and tell your friends.
#8
October 29 · 43 min
The Councillor
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.
#7
September 13 · 29 min
The Torchbearer
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.
#6
July 23 · 30 min
The Essayist
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.
#5
July 16 · 47 min
The Nerds
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.
#4
July 4 · 29 min
The Campaigner
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
#3
July 3 · 27 min
The Quants
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.
#2
June 17 · 27 min
The Theorist
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.
#1
June 9 · 45 min
The Architect
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
June 1 · 4 min
YIMBY Country - Trailer
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.

Showing 1–10 of 10 episodes