There is one big difference between SLAPP and your proposed SOPPPP. SLAPP plaintiffs (i.e., the people who alleged that they have been SLAPPed) are typically weak civil society actors, and SOPPPP plaintiffs would be strong developers. SLAPP defendants are typically evil rich guys; you SOPPPP defendants would be "Protect the Butterflies" associations. If the SOPPPP laws had any teeth to them, they could scare a lot of good-faith objections away.
Perhaps your SOPPPP laws would need to resemble some matrimonial laws: forcing the monied party to pay the litigation fees of the unmonied party. Although that doubtless has its own problems.
And another issue: any bogus "Protect the Butterflies Association" would doubtless be incorporated and judgment-proof. Would you go after the members?
It seems like introducing American libel law would solve the problem, since US news organizations basically don't worry about it (except in the new case of having to bribe Donald Trump, which seems like the exception that proves the rule). Is there a reason that this hasn't been on the UK policy menu? Do people there like the stricter libel standards?
US news organisations worry about it a lot more than you'd think (and US news organisations tend to have a stronger culture of fact-checking than British ones anyway, which means they build things into the cost base which we regard as crazy impositions).
The trouble - as I alluded to but edited out because it was a tangent - is that policy changes don't actually work in the libel case because it's not really a policy problem. The thing that bankrupts you in UK libel is the incredible expensiveness of lawyers, and UK lawyers are incredibly expensive because their opportunity cost is the potential earnings from really lucrative corporate work. So there's no real way of making libel non-ruinous because it's part of the deep structure of the British economy that we have this very valuable intangible asset in the common commercial law of England & Wales.
(in fact, British libel "reform" has succeeded, to the point where real libel tourists and bad actors go to Ireland these days, a much more plaintiff friendly jurisdiction. But it working hasn't had the desired effect).
Lots of people suggest that what we really need is a non-judicial, less expensive process in which issues of fact and fairness could be decided. I agree with this personally, but when I say things like "how would that differ from a press regulator, which I know you hate" it causes aarguments.
Re: US news organizations and fact checking: mighta been true prior to the importation of a different business model by the Australian guy, R.M.
Of course, if you are familiar with the history of journalism you may recall the so-called "Yellow Journalism" period a century-ish ago when newspapers competed for eyeballs by offering up wars and emotion, similar to today.
The South African import, E.M, pursues a similar business model, but puts himself at the center of it, unlike the shy mogul, R.M.
The "supermarket tabloids," which are mostly faded away here, were always in the infotainment biz, with stories about celebs and UFOs, only loosely connected to fact (but the readers didn't care.)
Kinda like "professional wrestling," which has a loose connection to actual wrestling, but is big on entertainment.
Now, it is all kayfabe, all the time, including politics.
Look who has risen to the top in our gamified, adolescent country: Mr. Beast, ruler of Youtube, and another guy whose name I can't think of at the moment.
This is exactly what our founding fathers were hoping would come to pass.
«Is there a reason that this hasn't been on the UK policy menu? Do people there like the stricter libel standards?»
Again I am reminded of "The Purpose Of The System Is What It Does" principle. In the USA some wealthy political factions spend big money to "sponsor" policies like looser libel standard and that balances those that spend big money to try to "sponsor" policies for stricter ones, only the latter matter in the UK.
«policy changes don't actually work in the libel case because it's not really a policy problem. The thing that bankrupts you in UK libel is the incredible expensiveness of lawyers, and UK lawyers are incredibly expensive because their opportunity cost is the potential earnings from really lucrative corporate work.»
I guess that lawyers in Dyfed or Ayrshire have plenty of opportunities of “potential earnings from really lucrative corporate work”. Perhaps instead one of the purposes of the system is to have an implicit oligopoly of lawyering in particular in London to price out access to the law from the little people. Some people may remember that some recent government raised the application fee to labor tribunals to over £1,000 to discourage lawfare persecutions by employees against poor weak employers (and a court quashed that, somewhat performatively) and that legal aid funding is minimal.
Another difference is the SOPPPP initiator typically has what is at base a relatable and reasonable objection, in a way that a SLAPP initiator doesn't. There is a genuine and sympathetic loss of amenity. Most people very much like living next to fields for kids to play, walking/dog walking, and they present a more agreeable view than even the most lovely of gentle-density blocks of flats. And having a building site on your doorstep is bloody miserable.
Sometimes that loss of amenity is outweighed by the greater good, but I don't think we can paint people objecting as bad and wrong in the way we can people who are ashamed of things they've done and want to stop people talking about them.
I'm reminded of that cunning YIMBY wheeze for regeneration/densification where instead of the existing residents being moved/compulsorily purchased out of the picture entirely, they share in the uplift in value. That's only just practical in that context, though. When you scale it to e.g. a whole village that doesn't want a neighbouring field built on, there will be so little value uplift when divided by all those losing amenity that they probably wouldn't see it as a win for them.
This is a fair point (I wrote about this abyss in the post titled "we wanted human capital we got human beings"). I'm planning on writing a follow up post, expanding on a footnote which I had to remove because it was out of control, on the general subject of "why isn't protecting property prices are valid thing to object about?". The summary of the post is that we don't tax the gains accruing to property owners from infrastructure, even though are excellent reasons for doing so. But there are even stronger tax reasons for it not being feasible, and so it's a matter of buy the ticket take the ride; the unfairness to property owners of being at risk of disemenity from infrastructure is just part of the risks of owning property
I don't know if anyone's noticed but "amenity" is almost exactly the same thing as economists' "utility", a sort of general-purpose scalar unit of goodosity.
«the SOPPPP initiator typically has what is at base a relatable and reasonable objection, in a way that a SLAPP initiator doesn't. There is a genuine and sympathetic loss of amenity.»
The key naturally is that such amenity is monetized in high property prices for incumbent owners, even whose without kids or dogs or who keep their curtains always drawn:
«Most people very much like living next to fields for kids to play, walking/dog walking, and they present a more agreeable view than even the most lovely of gentle-density blocks of flats.»
That the NIMBYs claim those amenities as an extensions of their property means that NIMBYsm is a confiscation of other people's (the owners of those fields) property rights to make the most money from selling their own property, and the right of those who buy those fields to make money from their own property by building on them. Socialism for us, but not for them: nothing new.
In effect the claim of the NIMBYs is that their 3-bed semis give them an overriding property right in their whole area, including stopping new builds, or new roads, or new hospitals, or new schools, or any new infrastructure such that any other property right in that area is subordinate to their right of incumbency.
It will perhaps not surprise you that this is going to turn into an argument about what counts as "bad faith," and you may want to get ahead of that. In similar contexts in the US, the requirement is usually that the alleged process-abuser both didn't believe that the claim asserted had merit (subjective bad faith) and also that a reasonable person in the process-abuser's position couldn't have believed that the claim asserted had merit (objective bad faith).
You appear to be going for something more like intent to delay -- the claim may or may not have merit, but the process-abuser doesn't really care about the claim, but just wants to create delay. The problem with an intent-to-delay standard for bad faith is that mixed motives in this context are incredibly common. What do you do if the alleged process-abuser only cares about trees a little, and cares about delaying the project much more, but does have a reasonable argument that the trees ought to be protected? If the answer is the court should exercise practical judgment about how much caring-about-trees is enough, okay, but you may be setting up a system that is going to have more satellite litigation about motives than you think.
(SLAPP motions in the US require a showing that the defamation claim doesn't have merit, by the way. They just make it easier for the defendant in the defamation claim to prove lack of merit earlier. So if you wanted to borrow that set of mechanisms, you'd need to build in some way for the court to decide whether the allegedly obstructive conduct had a valid legal basis, and you wouldn't be able to go after, e.g., abusively motivated tree-protection measures that were nonetheless authorized by law.)
I actually think it might be easier in the SOPPPP case, because people who use SOPPPPs at present seem to be unable to stop themselves from saying things like "could the council officers advise us about how we could stop this?" at minuted meetings. Presumably they would get a bit smarter over time, but sufficient to the day. (Example: Richard Tice literally giving a speech putting us all on notice that any objection to a green energy project from Lincolnshire councils should be seen as prima facie bad faith).
When you get a really difficult situation like this, isn't that nature's way of telling you you are either:
A. Trying to solve the wrong problem
B. Trying to solve it the wrong way
C. It cannot be solved at present.
D. It is actually a dilemma, not a problem
E. It is a benefit, so leave it alone.
F. It is not your problem to solve.
You always have to consider the persistent motivations of all the actors, such as the desire of "game players" to game the system, the desire of narcissists to "have it all," and the desires of many not to be bothered.
I saw the same things happening where I live almost 50 years ago when the suddenly "woke" owners of property found environmental objections to development that might decrease their future property valuations.
Let me point out that many people who are affected by these policies often have no say in them. They don't yet live in the town, or haven't been born yet. Yet the decisions are made solely by people according to present-day calculations of cost/benefit to themselves.
Maybe the fact that the legal process is like a swamp indicates that only swamp creatures should go into it; the rest of us stay out.
Sometimes actual solutions seem crazy, such as non-violent opposition movements in India and the US. Simplistic solutions have more immediate appeal, so they advance in the marketplace, which is why we have McDonald's and McMAGA all over the place, and not McGandhi or McJesus, who were ridiculed, then murdered.
Our mental maps are so flawed, and lately we can't even navigate to the mall without Google Maps. Maybe we need to look to some other fields for ideas, such as biology or fluid dynamics, fields that are complex or "counter-intuitive." How do they solve problems?
For example, in aircraft, sometimes you reduce total drag (resistance) by creating some very specific drag:
One of my friends, the former World Gliding Champion Doug Jacobs, told me that in the summer the drag created by insects smashing into leading edge of the wing was enough to cut his plane's performance by 20 percent. It depends on where the turbulence is. The leading edge is bad. He told me this while wiping the bugs off with a towel and a bucket of water.
The answers are not always obvious. Formula 1 racers use wings to keep the cars on the ground! They don't make the tires better at gripping, they made the car body better at gripping.
We need some ideas from out in left field....
or right field...
or middle field...
Speaking of naming rights...when deciding how to report on the "woke environmentalists," aka property owners, our reporter at the local paper and I were laughing about whether to call them "outraged citizens" or a "pressure group," the two major terms in use at the time. Maybe this naming problem is just a feature of the environment, like a swamp. The swamp creatures have to live somewhere, don't they? Just not in my back yard.
«many people who are affected by these policies often have no say in them. They don't yet live in the town, or haven't been born yet. Yet the decisions are made solely by people according to present-day calculations of cost/benefit to themselves.»
For at least a thousand years the greatest english virtue has been incumbency and Thatcher and Blair and their successors won many elections by rewarding it generously.
The house on the hill in real estate (and Monopoly) is "location." In the law it is "possession."
Both inherently favor the status quo.
It's been quite a while since I had a slight connection as a supplier to the local real estate profession, but my experience with it showed that the highest motivation for the realtors was "status." When the local market went through a recession, they would put off paying any vendors they could (like me), in order to keep up the payments on their leased Mercedes Benzes. Losing the Benz would have been a huge loss of face.
Sort of like MAGA today.
The feeling of "winning" is a drug. The feeling of "losing" can be a huge motivator in politics, and elsewhere. Even when you were born on top of a mountain.
«the SOPPPP – a Strategic Objection Purely to Protect Property Prices. [...] And once you’ve named something, you can stigmatise it. [...] So – I think one useful reform (that wouldn’t even cost anything!) would be to introduce the SOPPPP concept to planning»
But that is... SOCIALISM! :-)
Our blogger seems to wish for the jackbooted thugs of the state to confiscate the right of affluent Middle England voters to their entitlement to rising property prices redistributed to them from the lower classes; a right gifted to them by Thatcher and Blair, and their successors.
Also to he seems to think that to weaken one of the ways they enforce that entitlement is to "stigmatise" it! I guess that there it is possible that they are going to give up a near doubling of their after-tax income because of the stigmatisation, but would think they are more thick-skinned than that.
Our blogger also seems to me to imply that SOPPPPs are an inadvertent mistake that has randomly emerged in the planning system, but I have read somwhere that the Purpose Of The System Is What It Does and that may well include SOPPPPs.
«Bad faith use of the legal system is incredibly corrosive of public trust»
In my naivety I would think that the Purpose Of The System Is What It Does applies to “Bad faith use of the legal system”, and perhaps I am too simplistic but I think that corroding public trust is also one of the purposes of the system.
«it’s much more antisocial behaviour than painting graffiti on a bus stop.»
But using every opportunity to make renters pay > 50% of their after tax earnings to their landlords and making property prices so high that first time buyers and upgraders are priced out or make do with shrinking houses and flats by doubling up is highly prosocial: it greatly helps Middle England propertied voters pay for longer and more comfortable cruises in the greek islands or for newer and more upscale cars or for longer winter holidays in the caribbean.
I do not get surprised when I read some well-meaning suggestion of some policies to improve the situation of the lower classes even if the chances of them being adopted is nugatory because what matters is the political will and very powerful political lobbies have been making lots of money since 1980 with the politics of redistributing upwards from the lower classes. Defeating those politics is hard.
A turning point in Australian debates about NIMBY/YIMBY housing policy was the incautious observation by a NIMBY councillor that "heritage is often our last line of defence against overdevelopment". That marked the shift of heritage from "veto point" to "one planning issue among many"
"abyss" was a speech to text error above for "a bit", but in many ways I think I will let it stand
The "talking cure" didn't work, except in a funny way!
"Abyss" is about right.
"We think nirvana is found
by digging a deep hole
in the ground."
Oh, it's not?
There is one big difference between SLAPP and your proposed SOPPPP. SLAPP plaintiffs (i.e., the people who alleged that they have been SLAPPed) are typically weak civil society actors, and SOPPPP plaintiffs would be strong developers. SLAPP defendants are typically evil rich guys; you SOPPPP defendants would be "Protect the Butterflies" associations. If the SOPPPP laws had any teeth to them, they could scare a lot of good-faith objections away.
Perhaps your SOPPPP laws would need to resemble some matrimonial laws: forcing the monied party to pay the litigation fees of the unmonied party. Although that doubtless has its own problems.
And another issue: any bogus "Protect the Butterflies Association" would doubtless be incorporated and judgment-proof. Would you go after the members?
Protect the Butterflies are more evil than any man and will deserve any penury put upon them
It's called reification. It's been a standard rhetorical practice for thousands of years. It works.
Good call, yes. I should have realised that was what I was talking about when I wrote the post
It makes sense to reify reification.
It seems like introducing American libel law would solve the problem, since US news organizations basically don't worry about it (except in the new case of having to bribe Donald Trump, which seems like the exception that proves the rule). Is there a reason that this hasn't been on the UK policy menu? Do people there like the stricter libel standards?
US news organisations worry about it a lot more than you'd think (and US news organisations tend to have a stronger culture of fact-checking than British ones anyway, which means they build things into the cost base which we regard as crazy impositions).
The trouble - as I alluded to but edited out because it was a tangent - is that policy changes don't actually work in the libel case because it's not really a policy problem. The thing that bankrupts you in UK libel is the incredible expensiveness of lawyers, and UK lawyers are incredibly expensive because their opportunity cost is the potential earnings from really lucrative corporate work. So there's no real way of making libel non-ruinous because it's part of the deep structure of the British economy that we have this very valuable intangible asset in the common commercial law of England & Wales.
(in fact, British libel "reform" has succeeded, to the point where real libel tourists and bad actors go to Ireland these days, a much more plaintiff friendly jurisdiction. But it working hasn't had the desired effect).
Lots of people suggest that what we really need is a non-judicial, less expensive process in which issues of fact and fairness could be decided. I agree with this personally, but when I say things like "how would that differ from a press regulator, which I know you hate" it causes aarguments.
Are UK lawyers really that much more expensive than US lawyers?
they are if you lose! (the big difference is the UK "loser pays" convention)
But also, have people considered changing that?
Come to think about it, not really no. I haven't myself to be honest
Liked "Have people considered changing that?"
An imaginary dialogue:
Socrates: Why have you not considered changing this?
Pupil: Dunno.
Socrates: So, you expect the problem to solve itself?
Pupil: Dunno.
Socrates: This is what I get for talking with your sort of people.
Trust me, the alternative (the so-called “American Rule”) is worse.
Ah, that makes sense.
Re: US news organizations and fact checking: mighta been true prior to the importation of a different business model by the Australian guy, R.M.
Of course, if you are familiar with the history of journalism you may recall the so-called "Yellow Journalism" period a century-ish ago when newspapers competed for eyeballs by offering up wars and emotion, similar to today.
The South African import, E.M, pursues a similar business model, but puts himself at the center of it, unlike the shy mogul, R.M.
The "supermarket tabloids," which are mostly faded away here, were always in the infotainment biz, with stories about celebs and UFOs, only loosely connected to fact (but the readers didn't care.)
Kinda like "professional wrestling," which has a loose connection to actual wrestling, but is big on entertainment.
Now, it is all kayfabe, all the time, including politics.
Look who has risen to the top in our gamified, adolescent country: Mr. Beast, ruler of Youtube, and another guy whose name I can't think of at the moment.
This is exactly what our founding fathers were hoping would come to pass.
Never.
Score is Fantasy 1, Truth 0.
Perhaps lawyers rates for libel cases specifically should be capped?
"It causes arguments" is a clear sign that you are on the path of righteousness, but the bad peepulls don't wanna do it.
Ask any parent how "Clean up your room" goes down.
Stick to your guns. We will back you up on this.
«Is there a reason that this hasn't been on the UK policy menu? Do people there like the stricter libel standards?»
Again I am reminded of "The Purpose Of The System Is What It Does" principle. In the USA some wealthy political factions spend big money to "sponsor" policies like looser libel standard and that balances those that spend big money to try to "sponsor" policies for stricter ones, only the latter matter in the UK.
«policy changes don't actually work in the libel case because it's not really a policy problem. The thing that bankrupts you in UK libel is the incredible expensiveness of lawyers, and UK lawyers are incredibly expensive because their opportunity cost is the potential earnings from really lucrative corporate work.»
I guess that lawyers in Dyfed or Ayrshire have plenty of opportunities of “potential earnings from really lucrative corporate work”. Perhaps instead one of the purposes of the system is to have an implicit oligopoly of lawyering in particular in London to price out access to the law from the little people. Some people may remember that some recent government raised the application fee to labor tribunals to over £1,000 to discourage lawfare persecutions by employees against poor weak employers (and a court quashed that, somewhat performatively) and that legal aid funding is minimal.
Another difference is the SOPPPP initiator typically has what is at base a relatable and reasonable objection, in a way that a SLAPP initiator doesn't. There is a genuine and sympathetic loss of amenity. Most people very much like living next to fields for kids to play, walking/dog walking, and they present a more agreeable view than even the most lovely of gentle-density blocks of flats. And having a building site on your doorstep is bloody miserable.
Sometimes that loss of amenity is outweighed by the greater good, but I don't think we can paint people objecting as bad and wrong in the way we can people who are ashamed of things they've done and want to stop people talking about them.
I'm reminded of that cunning YIMBY wheeze for regeneration/densification where instead of the existing residents being moved/compulsorily purchased out of the picture entirely, they share in the uplift in value. That's only just practical in that context, though. When you scale it to e.g. a whole village that doesn't want a neighbouring field built on, there will be so little value uplift when divided by all those losing amenity that they probably wouldn't see it as a win for them.
This is a fair point (I wrote about this abyss in the post titled "we wanted human capital we got human beings"). I'm planning on writing a follow up post, expanding on a footnote which I had to remove because it was out of control, on the general subject of "why isn't protecting property prices are valid thing to object about?". The summary of the post is that we don't tax the gains accruing to property owners from infrastructure, even though are excellent reasons for doing so. But there are even stronger tax reasons for it not being feasible, and so it's a matter of buy the ticket take the ride; the unfairness to property owners of being at risk of disemenity from infrastructure is just part of the risks of owning property
I don't know if anyone's noticed but "amenity" is almost exactly the same thing as economists' "utility", a sort of general-purpose scalar unit of goodosity.
«the SOPPPP initiator typically has what is at base a relatable and reasonable objection, in a way that a SLAPP initiator doesn't. There is a genuine and sympathetic loss of amenity.»
The key naturally is that such amenity is monetized in high property prices for incumbent owners, even whose without kids or dogs or who keep their curtains always drawn:
«Most people very much like living next to fields for kids to play, walking/dog walking, and they present a more agreeable view than even the most lovely of gentle-density blocks of flats.»
That the NIMBYs claim those amenities as an extensions of their property means that NIMBYsm is a confiscation of other people's (the owners of those fields) property rights to make the most money from selling their own property, and the right of those who buy those fields to make money from their own property by building on them. Socialism for us, but not for them: nothing new.
In effect the claim of the NIMBYs is that their 3-bed semis give them an overriding property right in their whole area, including stopping new builds, or new roads, or new hospitals, or new schools, or any new infrastructure such that any other property right in that area is subordinate to their right of incumbency.
It will perhaps not surprise you that this is going to turn into an argument about what counts as "bad faith," and you may want to get ahead of that. In similar contexts in the US, the requirement is usually that the alleged process-abuser both didn't believe that the claim asserted had merit (subjective bad faith) and also that a reasonable person in the process-abuser's position couldn't have believed that the claim asserted had merit (objective bad faith).
You appear to be going for something more like intent to delay -- the claim may or may not have merit, but the process-abuser doesn't really care about the claim, but just wants to create delay. The problem with an intent-to-delay standard for bad faith is that mixed motives in this context are incredibly common. What do you do if the alleged process-abuser only cares about trees a little, and cares about delaying the project much more, but does have a reasonable argument that the trees ought to be protected? If the answer is the court should exercise practical judgment about how much caring-about-trees is enough, okay, but you may be setting up a system that is going to have more satellite litigation about motives than you think.
(SLAPP motions in the US require a showing that the defamation claim doesn't have merit, by the way. They just make it easier for the defendant in the defamation claim to prove lack of merit earlier. So if you wanted to borrow that set of mechanisms, you'd need to build in some way for the court to decide whether the allegedly obstructive conduct had a valid legal basis, and you wouldn't be able to go after, e.g., abusively motivated tree-protection measures that were nonetheless authorized by law.)
I actually think it might be easier in the SOPPPP case, because people who use SOPPPPs at present seem to be unable to stop themselves from saying things like "could the council officers advise us about how we could stop this?" at minuted meetings. Presumably they would get a bit smarter over time, but sufficient to the day. (Example: Richard Tice literally giving a speech putting us all on notice that any objection to a green energy project from Lincolnshire councils should be seen as prima facie bad faith).
Snap! I mentioned an Australian example before reading this
When you get a really difficult situation like this, isn't that nature's way of telling you you are either:
A. Trying to solve the wrong problem
B. Trying to solve it the wrong way
C. It cannot be solved at present.
D. It is actually a dilemma, not a problem
E. It is a benefit, so leave it alone.
F. It is not your problem to solve.
You always have to consider the persistent motivations of all the actors, such as the desire of "game players" to game the system, the desire of narcissists to "have it all," and the desires of many not to be bothered.
I saw the same things happening where I live almost 50 years ago when the suddenly "woke" owners of property found environmental objections to development that might decrease their future property valuations.
Let me point out that many people who are affected by these policies often have no say in them. They don't yet live in the town, or haven't been born yet. Yet the decisions are made solely by people according to present-day calculations of cost/benefit to themselves.
Maybe the fact that the legal process is like a swamp indicates that only swamp creatures should go into it; the rest of us stay out.
Sometimes actual solutions seem crazy, such as non-violent opposition movements in India and the US. Simplistic solutions have more immediate appeal, so they advance in the marketplace, which is why we have McDonald's and McMAGA all over the place, and not McGandhi or McJesus, who were ridiculed, then murdered.
Our mental maps are so flawed, and lately we can't even navigate to the mall without Google Maps. Maybe we need to look to some other fields for ideas, such as biology or fluid dynamics, fields that are complex or "counter-intuitive." How do they solve problems?
For example, in aircraft, sometimes you reduce total drag (resistance) by creating some very specific drag:
https://www.juliantrubin.com/encyclopedia/aviation/boundary_layer.html#google_vignette
One of my friends, the former World Gliding Champion Doug Jacobs, told me that in the summer the drag created by insects smashing into leading edge of the wing was enough to cut his plane's performance by 20 percent. It depends on where the turbulence is. The leading edge is bad. He told me this while wiping the bugs off with a towel and a bucket of water.
The answers are not always obvious. Formula 1 racers use wings to keep the cars on the ground! They don't make the tires better at gripping, they made the car body better at gripping.
We need some ideas from out in left field....
or right field...
or middle field...
Speaking of naming rights...when deciding how to report on the "woke environmentalists," aka property owners, our reporter at the local paper and I were laughing about whether to call them "outraged citizens" or a "pressure group," the two major terms in use at the time. Maybe this naming problem is just a feature of the environment, like a swamp. The swamp creatures have to live somewhere, don't they? Just not in my back yard.
«many people who are affected by these policies often have no say in them. They don't yet live in the town, or haven't been born yet. Yet the decisions are made solely by people according to present-day calculations of cost/benefit to themselves.»
For at least a thousand years the greatest english virtue has been incumbency and Thatcher and Blair and their successors won many elections by rewarding it generously.
The house on the hill in real estate (and Monopoly) is "location." In the law it is "possession."
Both inherently favor the status quo.
It's been quite a while since I had a slight connection as a supplier to the local real estate profession, but my experience with it showed that the highest motivation for the realtors was "status." When the local market went through a recession, they would put off paying any vendors they could (like me), in order to keep up the payments on their leased Mercedes Benzes. Losing the Benz would have been a huge loss of face.
Sort of like MAGA today.
The feeling of "winning" is a drug. The feeling of "losing" can be a huge motivator in politics, and elsewhere. Even when you were born on top of a mountain.
Someone else has a bigger mountain. Envy!
https://genius.com/Janis-joplin-mercedes-benz-lyrics
«the SOPPPP – a Strategic Objection Purely to Protect Property Prices. [...] And once you’ve named something, you can stigmatise it. [...] So – I think one useful reform (that wouldn’t even cost anything!) would be to introduce the SOPPPP concept to planning»
But that is... SOCIALISM! :-)
Our blogger seems to wish for the jackbooted thugs of the state to confiscate the right of affluent Middle England voters to their entitlement to rising property prices redistributed to them from the lower classes; a right gifted to them by Thatcher and Blair, and their successors.
Also to he seems to think that to weaken one of the ways they enforce that entitlement is to "stigmatise" it! I guess that there it is possible that they are going to give up a near doubling of their after-tax income because of the stigmatisation, but would think they are more thick-skinned than that.
Our blogger also seems to me to imply that SOPPPPs are an inadvertent mistake that has randomly emerged in the planning system, but I have read somwhere that the Purpose Of The System Is What It Does and that may well include SOPPPPs.
«Bad faith use of the legal system is incredibly corrosive of public trust»
In my naivety I would think that the Purpose Of The System Is What It Does applies to “Bad faith use of the legal system”, and perhaps I am too simplistic but I think that corroding public trust is also one of the purposes of the system.
«it’s much more antisocial behaviour than painting graffiti on a bus stop.»
But using every opportunity to make renters pay > 50% of their after tax earnings to their landlords and making property prices so high that first time buyers and upgraders are priced out or make do with shrinking houses and flats by doubling up is highly prosocial: it greatly helps Middle England propertied voters pay for longer and more comfortable cruises in the greek islands or for newer and more upscale cars or for longer winter holidays in the caribbean.
I do not get surprised when I read some well-meaning suggestion of some policies to improve the situation of the lower classes even if the chances of them being adopted is nugatory because what matters is the political will and very powerful political lobbies have been making lots of money since 1980 with the politics of redistributing upwards from the lower classes. Defeating those politics is hard.
A turning point in Australian debates about NIMBY/YIMBY housing policy was the incautious observation by a NIMBY councillor that "heritage is often our last line of defence against overdevelopment". That marked the shift of heritage from "veto point" to "one planning issue among many"