Street votes and the Senakw experiment

Our friends at the Centre for British Progress (with Labour Together) are out with a new paper on street votes—a mechanism that lets residents of a given street collectively hire an architect, agree on an upzoning plan, and vote to allow new housing, with value capture flowing to the consenting homeowners. The bottom-up mechanism design is interesting precisely because it doesn’t require preemption: you can imagine it mattering most in jurisdictions where state overrides have proven elusive, like Long Island in New York. In a galaxy brain sense, the most successful “street vote” of all time may be Senakw in Vancouver, where the Squamish Nation—exercising sovereign planning authority over ~10 acres near downtown—voted for thousands of rental units that will house tribal members and generate billions in revenue. They proved that single family zoning in high-opportunity areas is often NOT profit-maximizing, contra the simplest “pop” version of the Homevoter Hypothesis. With a tribal voting mechanism to allow it, the Squamish Nation’s people voted for abundance. UK Street Votes won’t be allowed to unlock as much density as Senakw, but Senakw shows how the incentives and voting could play out.