At the Labour party conference, one buoyant new faction stood out: the yimbys. After hosting a packed reception at Liverpool’s Hilton hotel last Sunday, the new Labour Yimby grassroots group is becoming a much discussed force in UK politics, with Keir Starmer saying he too is a champion of the cause. But does its pro-property development agenda live up to the hype?

Yimbyism was born of the supercharged real-estate boom in Silicon Valley that saw private rents around San Francisco climb to some of the highest in the US. Incoming tech workers began a culture war calling for more condominiums, cleverly adopting the acronym yimby (which stands for “yes in my back yard”) to imply anyone advocating controls on new property development was merely a self-interested nimby (“not in my back yard”) resisting progress.

British yimbys are a broader church than their pro-deregulation California predecessors. Here the movement extends to renewable energy infrastructure and high-speed rail, as well as property development. However, the bedrock of yimbyism, on both sides of the Atlantic, is the claim that building lots of new homes is the only way to solve housing crises.

The theory goes that the crippling cost of British housing, which means that many people are forced to shell out huge proportions of their income to keep a roof over their heads, is the result of market competition from a growing number of people all trying to live in the same places. The yimbys claim that increasing the supply of new homes........

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