Eye2theLongRun

As NZ struggles to reform the RMA, some idea of the impact of NIMBY problems as well as the catyclismic events required to nullify them can gained from this:

The London Blitz and the NIMBYs

by Tyler Cowen December 11, 2021 at 2:16 pm in

NIMBYs can be so bad that they make the London Blitz look good:

We exploit locally exogenous variation from the Blitz bombings to quantify the effect of redevelopment frictions and identify agglomeration economies at a micro-geographic scale. Employing rich location and office rental transaction data, we estimate reduced-form analyses and a spatial general equilibrium model. Our analyses demonstrate that more heavily bombed areas exhibit taller buildings today, and that agglomeration elasticities in London are large, approaching 0.2. Counterfactual simulations show that if the Blitz had not occurred, the concomitant reduction in agglomeration economies arising from the loss of higher-density redevelopment would cause London’s present-day gross domestic product to drop by some 10% (or £50 billion).

Here is the full paper by Gerard H Dericks and Hans R A Koster, via tekl.