Should European housing politics be Americanized?

"Should European housing politics be Americanized?" asks Samuel Hughes. American policy frames usually map badly onto European debates, but housing is an exception: Europe's housing shortages are arguably worse than America's, with European house prices now above US levels and roughly 80% of the postwar increase attributable to regulatory restrictions on building. Despite that, YIMBYism is effectively nonexistent on the continent, and housing arguments often default to rent control, zero-sum expropriation without new construction, and public housing. Hughes's sharpest move is historical: zoning was arguably invented in Europe, and he walks through Berlin's 1905 villa-colony scheme to show the same map performing the same exclusionary function 120 years later. I went in a little nervous about how a British writer would explain American YIMBYism abroad, but Sam’s argument was novel and deftly executed.