Should European housing politics be Americanized?

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Europe’s housing shortages are even worse than America’s<br>Why does nobody there talk about zoning?

Samuel Hughes and Works in Progress<br>Jun 16, 2026

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European policy debates often become Americanized because of the American domination of social media. This tends to be troublesome, leading Europeans to see their policy problems through frames into which they do not really fit. But it seems to me that the housing debate in Europe, and especially in continental Europe, might actually be improved by borrowing some ideas from the Americans.<br>Here are some claims that many Americans agree on. They agree that their country has a housing shortage; they agree that it is caused mostly by land-use restrictions, especially zoning, which bans additional housing from being built in suburbs; and they agree that the main cause of these restrictions is suburban NIMBYism. They also think that burdening development with expensive environmental and social obligations often stops them from happening at all by making them economically unviable (they even have a catchy name for this, an ‘everything bagel’). All these claims are, in my view, broadly true.<br>A huge movement, known as YIMBYism (YIMBY stands for ‘Yes In My Backyard’), has developed around these ideas. It includes great scholars like Chris Elmendorf and Ed Glaeser, remarkable campaigners and thinkers like Brian Hanlon, Alex Armlovich, Nolan Gray, Sonja Trauss, Mike Kingsella, Annie Fryman, Emily Hamilton, Salim Furth and Matthew Yglesias, and a forest of organizations like California YIMBY, the Welcoming Neighbors Network, Abundant Housing Massachusetts, Open New York and YIMBY Action. I was once invited to ‘YIMBYtown’, a national conference of YIMBYs, and watched with astonishment as a huge auditorium filled with delegations representing YIMBY organizations from across the republic.<br>An increasing number of British people think that these claims are also true of Britain, with a few provisos to which I will return below. But I have repeatedly been struck by how rare the corresponding views are in continental Europe. Continental Europeans are aware of high housing costs, but they are much less likely to discuss a housing shortage, and even if they do, land-use rules are rarely discussed as its primary cause. There is near-total silence on the question of suburban zoning. YIMBYism is virtually nonexistent in continental Europe. When Europeans do debate housing, they tend to argue about rent controls, expropriation, public housing, and environmental regulations.

It is natural to assume that this is because Europe’s housing shortages are much less bad, and hence that Europeans can afford to focus on questions of distribution and quality instead. But this just isn’t true. In fact, European housing shortages are generally worse than America’s. You can see this in the great dataset assembled by Katharina Knoll and her collaborators, of which we have reproduced a selection above. European house prices were roughly flat in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but they have risen steadily since the Second World War. They are now much higher than American house prices, which remained remarkably stable until recently, and which have only risen rather modestly in the last quarter of a century, though of course much more steeply in a few urban centers like San Francisco and Manhattan. Knoll found that about 80 percent of this increase is attributable to regulatory restrictions on housebuilding.<br>What restrictions are these, exactly? Cities can grow upwards or outwards. Historically they did both: most housing demand has generally been met through outward expansion, but cities have also densified when geographical constraints, fortifications, or transport limitations have constrained outward growth.<br>One possibility is that European housing shortages are caused by constraints on outward expansion, being in this respect unlike American ones, where most cities have been allowed to sprawl with little restraint. To some extent, this is certainly true. As British readers will know, England is the pre-eminent example of this. Since the 1950s England has had a system of ‘green belts’, areas around cities where building is forbidden. Many English cities are not really larger today, in terms of spatial area, than they were in 1945.

A map of Paris in 1937 superimposed on the city today. Source: Samuel Hughes<br>Many continental cities have constraints on outward growth too, but not to the same extent as Britain. In fact, most European cities have grown a lot since 1945. In the image above, a map of Paris from the 1930s is inset in a satellite image of the city today at the same scale. As you can see, the...