We’re all looking for the guy who did this

This week: who’s to blame for the housing crisis? Also: some more notes on street numbering; and a map of English and Welsh cultural regions.

In Yiddish humour, a Jewish ex once told me, a schlemiel is the type of loser who always spills the soup, a schlimazel the one it always lands on.¹ On the internet, the guy in the hot dog costume says we’re all trying to find the ones who did this, while the people who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s faces party are stunned to learn that the leopards would eat their faces. Both memes convey the bafflement of people who were complicit in creating some mess or another. But one is for the mark; the other for the perpetrator.

In the past 48 hours I’ve seen the Campaign to Protect Rural England’s latest demand that somebody, somewhere, do something about the rural housing crisis compared to both. In many areas across the rural south, the pressure group notes with apparent shock, the average two-bed property will now cost a household more than half of its take home pay. Homelessness is up 40% in just five years; building enough homes for the 300,000 people on the rural waiting list will take 93. What impact the charity’s furious objections every time anyone tries to build any actual homes has had on this is left to the reader to decide. We’re all trying to find the people who did this.

Whether all this is merely cynical, though, I’m not so sure. Yes, the CPRE wins attention and money for exaggerating the threat to the countryside. But institutions, particularly federated ones, frequently contain a range of views. And housing genuinely does seem to be an area in which people struggle to connect their views on development with actual policy outcomes.

Consider the other housing article which multiple people sent me this week in a transparent attempt to raise my blood pressure, this time courtesy of the Guardian:

I knew, despite having some sympathy with the central argument, that I was going to hate it from the standfirst alone: the assertion that there is “already enough housing stock” is quite simply wrong. (Even if there weren’t already a backlog of unmet demand, which there is, the UK population is growing at a rate of over half a million a year.)

And true to form the piece goes on to make a number of inaccurate claims. That there can’t be a shortage of housing because household numbers have consistently been below housing stock figures. (The opposite is physically impossible: you can’t form a household if you don’t have a house.) That the UK has roughly the international average number of homes per capita. (These figures are out of date, have the UK way below the most obviously comparable nations, and anyway national figures are the wrong metric: the presence of spare housing in Blackpool is of no use whatsoever to the population of Oxford.)

Bano concludes that the only problem is that homes are too expensive – and that this can be blamed entirely on a class of landlords and rentiers. That’s very comforting, but also too simplistic: such a class is as much a symptom of housing shortage as its cause. I don’t want to underplay the role of either a long period of low interest rates, or the rise of buy to let as an asset class, since both clearly have had an impact. But I suspect there are other reasons that some on the left are pushing back on the idea that housing supply is the problem.

One is that we struggle to grasp stories about systems: to persuade people, it helps to identify characters and preferably a villain. This desire to put a face on structural forces is a phenomenon which Michael Shermer, in his work on conspiracy theories, has referred to as “agenticity”, and it’s just one reason why economic crises and plagues down the century have so frequently been blamed on the sort of people who were minding their own businesses coming up with multiple words for idiots. Another issue is that vast numbers of us have Twitter poisoning²: it’s always tempting to take the opposite stance from another faction, just because we find them annoying.

The biggest attraction of the “We have enough homes!” argument, though, is that it absolves everyone who isn’t a landlord. We don’t need to make difficult decisions that might affect us, through the noose of construction or the loss of green space. All we need is to punish the bad people.

But we don’t have enough houses. And when people stand in the way of building more, by campaigning against them or claiming everything would be fine if only we got rid of the baddies, they contribute to the very situation they claim to want to address. Politicians, after all, don’t chase what is right, but what is popular. When it comes to solving the housing crisis, they’re all Leopards Eating Faces parties, because face-eating leopards are what enough of the public demand. There’s soup everywhere – and we’re the guy who did this.

Here’s how I spent my Saturday

Reading my own words into a microphone, growing, as I did so, increasingly annoyed at whichever overly-verbose and pretentious dick had insisted on writing quite so many long, multi-clause sentences with foreign pronunciations and rhythm-dependent jokes in them.

There are still, at time of writing, around 240 pages to record.

Anyway: the audiobook of A History of the World in 47 Borders, read for good or ill by yours truly, will be out 25 April, same day as the hardback and ebook editions. As ever, pre-orders do wonders for trade orders, bookshop placement and sales down the line, so please get in now. Go on, I’ll be your friend.

Those who’d like to hear my voice rather sooner may be interested to note that I was on Paper Cuts this morning with Miranda and Esther Manito, talking about – this’ll shock you – Kate Middleton and the housing crisis.

Some further notes on house numbering

Back in January, I wrote a lengthy explanation of the various street numbering systems employed around the world. This, it soon turned out, was one of those topics which was far more complex and interesting³ than I’d expected going in, so I ended up with a load of off-cuts and unwritten bits I’d meant to include but gave up on for space reasons.

This, then, is part two – everything I didn’t find room for the first time. Here’s part one, if you want to refresh your memory, but either way, a quick precis. That first piece talked about the four most common systems of house numbering: the “European system” we’re all used to, which runs odd numbers consecutively down one side of the street, and even consecutively down the other; the older but less practical “horseshoe system” used on cul-de-sacs or certain old streets, in which numbering runs around a street in a (generally) clockwise direction; the “American system”, where non-consecutive numbering refers to block numbers or distances, and tells you something about where you are; and the “East Asian” one, where plots are numbered by age and which exists largely to give visitors a migraine. 

That covers much of the world – but given the difference in scale between that world and this newsletter, you’ll be unsurprised to learn this was an over-simplification. 

1. The Central American country of Costa Rica, in the words of the Costa Rica Daily, uses  an “idiosyncratic system of addresses that relies on landmarks, history and quite a bit of guesswork”. It did have a formal system of addresses based on numbered blocks once – but as its cities grew in an unplanned disordered way, that number scheme stopped making sense, and was eventually ignored altogether. Instead, “Every address in Costa Rica is in relation to something else, and sometimes to things that no longer exist”:

“My apartment, for instance, is three houses down from the local high school. The high school’s official address is 300 meters east of the elementary school. The elementary school’s address is across the street from the church — or next to the bar, depending on your piety... Perhaps the best examples are the places identified by their relation to an antiguo higuerón — a fig tree that was felled long ago, but lives in perpetuity as a navigational waypoint.”

This is obviously brilliant, if you think the main purpose of a system of addresses is providing residents with opportunities to show off their local knowledge, but it’s terrible if you actually want a functioning country: a 2010 study found that the use of informal addresses cost the economy $720m a year due to lost mail and lost productivity. Little surprise when even actual government bodies give their address as “detrás de los puestos de Papaya-Sandía-Melón” – “beyond the papaya and watermelon stands”.

2. Here’s an incredible sentence from Wikipedia for you: “After Verizon was caught inflating prices in 2002, Verizon reached an agreement with the state to supply $15 million to create at least 450,000 new street addresses.”