Monthly Archives: September 2021

Micha Onufryjuk/PAP

The Polish army has completed the construction of an 80-kilometre section of a barbed-wire fence along its border with Belarus, the defence minister said on Sunday.

The project is designed to protect both Poland and the European Union against illegal migration.

"Eighty kilometres of a 2.5-metre-high fence have already been built, and more than 130 kilometres of military barriers have been laid," Mariusz Blaszczak said on Sunday in Olsztyn, north-eastern Poland.

He added that a net is also being added to protect animals from being injured on both sides of the fence.

In recent weeks Poland, Lithuania and Latvia have observed increasing numbers of migrants crossing into their territories from Belarus. The three countries have accused Belarus of deliberately sending migrants to their borders in an effort to destabilise the EU.

On August 25, the Polish army began the construction of barbed-wire fencing on the Polish-Belarusian border designed to keep illegal migrants out of Poland. Ultimately, it will secure the country's land border sections. The construction of a 150-kilometre-long stretch of the fence is planned at the first stage. The next stage will involve the building of a further 97 kilometres of fencing.

On September 2, Poland declared a 30-day state of emergency in the regions bordering Belarus to stem a migration crisis. The emergency laws will cover 183 localities in the border zone including in the vicinity of the village of Usnarz Gorny where, on the Belarusian side of the Polish-Belarusian border, a group of migrants have been trapped for over a month.

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Fence on Belarus border in progress - MoD The First News - The First News

For decades, enthusiasts preferred the manual transmission. You cant blame us. An automatic held back a sports car the way wet concrete would a Kentucky Derby winner.

Thats no longer the case. A good dual-clutch or conventional auto shifts quicker than we can think. So why do so many of us prefer a stick today? We commandeered two Acura NSXesthe iconic original and its tech-laden successorto figure it out. The shifter in the 1991 NSX feels absolutely perfect. Ive never enjoyed shifting more. Moving the lever sends a tactile echo up the ideally sized shifter into my hand and forearm. Its precise but easy. Light but hardly flimsy.

This story originally appeared in Volume 6 of Road & Track.

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Acuras 270-hp 3.0-liter V-6 howls the 3000-pound coupe around the canyons outside Malibu. VTEC is present, but less noticeable than in later Hondas. Peak power is up high, but tall gearing prevents you from spending much time near the 8000-rpm redline. Shame, because Hondas engine can do it over and over again.

The cabin feels like a billion hours were spent on ergonomics. Only a bus has better forward visibility. Functional? Extremely. Glamorous? No. Look inside a Nineties Accord and youll recognize the buttons. The plain black gauges are a missed opportunity to remind you that youre driving something special.

But its rewarding to drive, regardless of speed. The unassisted steering is so light on-center I mistook it for sloppy, but every millimeter of steering angle changes the cars trajectory. Turn into a corner and you feel the body lean a few degrees before it takes a set. Midcorner bumps are given the attention of water flowing around a pebble. Theres no Sport mode or brake-vectoring wizardry. I earned every downshift, apex, and tidy exit. It never felt like I was driving an Accord.

Aside from the sound, the NSX feels just as special and exotic as its Italian contemporary, the Ferrari 348. It deserves every accolade. The NSX is as thrilling to drive as it is important to the evolution of the automobile. I climbed out smiling, feeling the last hundred-or-so turns in my shoulders, and slipped into the bright yellow successor.

In 1997, Ferrari offered the F355 with an F1 style paddle-shift gearbox, a new innovation that saw the clutch operated by a computer instead of a foot. Other companies followed soon after. But those units had a single clutch, which kicked hard enough to move your hairline back. The manual remained king.

Jose Mandojana

The dual-clutch transmission changed that. A good one switches gears faster than you can read the word shift without upsetting the car. Customers loved them. In 2019, 85 percent of BMW M3s were dual-clutch. Want a C8 Corvette with more than two pedals? Strap a bike to the roof.

The 2021 NSXs nine-speed dual-clutch is an excellent example of the duality of this technology. In automatic mode it shifts smoothly, working with the electric motors, exceptionally comfortable seats, and adaptive suspension to deliver one of the most sublime supercar commuting experiences.

Turn the drive selector to Sport Plus and the character completely changes. The 500-hp twin-turbocharged 3.5-liter V-6 behind you is more alert and eager. Sandwiched between the engine and transmission is an electric motor that provides torque fill while turbo boost builds. Each front wheel also has its own electric motor that aids in acceleration, torque vectoring, and regenerative braking. All in, you get 573 hp to fling you to 60 in 3.1 seconds on a wave of turbo whistle and intake anger. The hybrid systems in the Ferrari SF90 and Porsche 918 Spyder are not too different, but those cars cost between five and 10 times what the Acura does. The old cars numbers seem adorable.

Few cars corner with the ease and speed of this NSX. Turn the slightly square wheel and the nose follows, almost imperceptibly guided by the electric motors. Theres a concert of computing happening around you, but all I sense is crazy, accessible speed. The seats need more thigh bolstering, and I didnt like the muted feedback from the brake-by-wire system, but the agility and accuracy of the nose commands respect.

Jose Mandojana

Both cars were exciting to drive, but I enjoyed the 1991 more: shifting, rev-matching, all the things that give us pride. Why?

I had a theory: nerve endings. You have 17,000 mechanoreceptors in each hand, mostly in your fingertips, able to detect objects as small as an eyelash. The soles of your feet have 200,000 nerve endings, which help with balance or signal that the fuzzy thing under your arch is the tail of your cat.

A car with three pedals involves all four limbs at once; paddles only require three. More limbs, more nerve endings being stimulated, more dopamine, more driving pleasure. Right?

Dr. Loretta Breuning, founder of the Inner Mammal Institute and author of several books about the brains pleasure systems, disagreed.

If it were just what you said, then everybody would feel it, Dr. Breuning said. But its only certain enthusiasts . . . The reason is our happy chemicals turn on when we do something that turned them on in the past. So, everyone that loves to drive old cars today had an early experience of loving to drive old cars.

If using more limbs led to more pleasure, then everyonenot just gearheadswould prefer driving a manual transmission. Market data disproves that. Instead, its all about what you experienced in your formative years, particularly from childhood through adolescence.

Few Cars Corner With The Ease And Speed Of The NSX.

Those early connections are strong thanks to neuroplasticity: the brains ability to learn. Thats how we pick up new skills, store memories, and recover after a traumatic brain injury. Connections made through hands-on experience are the strongest.

Early experiences have an even stronger effect because of myelin, a chemical that coats your neurons and makes them more efficient. Its like giving your brain fiber-optic internet. Dr. Breuning explains this in her book 14 Days to Sustainable Happiness. When you let electricity flow into a pathway you myelinated in youth, things make sense instantly. We have a lot of myelin before age eight and during puberty, so your repeated experiences in those years built the core neural networks that you have today.

Jose Mandojana

Neural connections tell our brains when to release one of four primary chemicals: dopamine, the feel-good neurotransmitter; oxytocin, the love hormone; serotonin, involved with our sense of status; and endorphins, our built-in pain relievers. Our hobbies can give us powerful doses of neurotransmitters: Dopamine can be activated by food, sex, or collecting. Oxytocin creates that happy feeling you get from being with your kids, friends, or car club. The first time someone let you sit in their cool car, or drive it, you got a flood of serotonin.

These chemicals influence almost everything about us, including the cars we like.

Over a 45-minute phone call with Dr. Breuning, I saw the building blocks of my automotive affinities laid out like an electrical schematic. When I was five, my dad let me shift his International Scout while he drove, which made me feel importantserotonin. At 15, I joined a muscle-car club, making me feel welcomedoxytocin. Cars became my primary hobby as my cerebral wires made new adolescent connections. My discussion with Dr. Breuning changed how I look at the enthusiast community and the groups within it. Mammalian behavior explains silly rivalriesFord vs. Chevy, imports vs. domestics. We like what our tribes like. Think back to your childhood and I bet youll recall experiences that shaped your tastes today.

We subconsciously judge cars using criteria that set into our gray matter not long after we learned that ice cream is delicious and electrical sockets hate fingers.

As for the NSXes, theyre both great and flawed. No matter the generation, you sit too high in a cockpit full of shared parts. The old NSX is loud on the highway, and the new one is as dull on the inside as it is stunning on the outside. The original was a Ferrari that worked; the new one is the only hybrid supercar under $500,000.

Which is better? Ask your lizard brain.

Jose Mandojana

Jose Mandojana

1991 Acura NSXPrice:$60,000 (base when new) Engine:3.0-liter V-6Output:270 hp/210 lb-ftTransmission: 5-speed manual Curb Weight:3010 lb

2021 Acura NSXPrice:$157,500 (base)Powertrain:3.5-liter twin-turbo V-6, 3 electric motorsOutput:573 hp/476 lb-ftTransmission:9-speed dual-clutch automaticCurb Weight:3878 lb

See the original post here:

The Acura NSX Exemplifies the March of Progress - RoadandTrack.com

This past week brought us two items of interest that may have been overlooked by some amid the more pressing news of the week.

Even if you are not necessarily a fan of grande vanilla bean frappuccinos or artisan soups, sandwiches or pizzas, the recently approved plans for a Starbucks coffee shop in the Mohawk Acres Plaza on Black River Boulevard and the ribbon-cutting of the newly-opened Crust Kitchen & Bar, 86 Hangar Road West in the Air City Lofts complex on Griffiss Park are welcome and important news.

Both restaurants demonstrate not just a sizable investment and commitment to the community, but these developments show that efforts to diversify and grow the local economy and the partnerships between state and local officials; the Griffiss Local Development Corp., MV EDGE, the Oneida County Industrial Development Agency, Empire State Development and other economic development organizations; and a host of private developers are working, despite the lingering COVID-19 pandemic.

Griffiss Park is bustling from the Innovare Center to the Air City Lofts to the Orgill Distribution Center and just about all spots in-between. Employees at DFAS, at Rome Lab and other companies on the sprawling business and technology park, many of whom have all lived elsewhere, are demonstrating that Rome is a great place to live and the amenities they desire from cappuccinos to calzones are following.

We appreciate the investments of those in our community whether from new or longtime investors; however it is important to take note that among those investing in Romes future is a third generation entrepreneur, Chris Destito, whose grandparents and later father and uncles made both The Beeches and The Savoy nationally renown. We wish him equal success in his venture with the Crust Kitchen & Bar.

For those of us old enough to remember young Christophers father, the late Chris Destito, his sons commitment to the community is hardly surprising. During his life, the elder Chris Destito was perhaps the regions greatest advocate and cheerleader. No agency, organization nor individuals problems or needs were too big or too insignificant to him. Though he would never take credit for a thing, there is nary a local philanthropic organization or non-profit human service agency that didnt receive his assistance or wisdom. Decades after many of his efforts almost all done on his own time and at his own expense these agencies, this community, and a new generation continue to benefit.

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Pair of new businesses are signs of ongoing progress - Rome Sentinel

Just a few hours after World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic introduced its first content update, the newly-introduced raids have been cleared. The first guild to achieve this was the EU-based guild Progress.

The two raids added to the Burning Crusade Classic earlier today were Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep. And as youd expect, guilds were quick to gear up and attempt to become the first to clear the pair of raids.

Progress, based on realm Firemaw, were the very first to get through both raids, as well as the first to complete Serpentshrine Cavern killing Lady Vashj. They were beaten to be the first to kill Kaelthas by the guild SALAD BAKERS who opted to clear Tempest Keep first.

Ultimately, the race came down to Progress and another guild BEEF BAR with the final boss of each respective raid being eliminated within one minute of another, resulting in Progress coming out on top.

You can check out some of the highlights from the action where Progress took down the two final raid bosses, courtesy of guild member Tetsus stream.

With BEEF BAR coming in second place only one minute behind Progress, the rest of the top 10 wasnt far behind with SALAD BAKERS 10th placing run taking just under an hour longer than first place.

Here you can check out the first 10 guilds to clear the pair of raids and their respective times.

Originally posted here:

Progress continues WoW Classic dominance with world-first clear of Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep - Dot Esports

No one knows for sure just how good or bad crop yields and production will be until the combines get rolling. And that time is coming soon.

But early word from farmers is mainly positive and may fall in line with recent USDA forecasts of record corn and soybean yields across the Northeast, Michigan and Ohio.

Heres what some farmers across the region had to say about their crops thus far, and some things they did new this season:

Jim Hershey, Elizabethtown, Pa. Ill just say things are looking good, but my crop consultant found tar spot in my corn, he says about his corn. So there might be some management changes that have to go into effect for another year. It came on late, but once its here, it can be more pronounced, especially in corn after corn.

For his soybeans, Hershey doesnt like to predict anything and its still early, but he says enough rain in August will likely result in a good crop.

His says his winter wheat was top notch, with some of the wheat coming in at a 64-pound test weight. Im not sure the yield was quite tops, but the quality was the best I ever had, he says.

Scott Miller, Elsie, Mich. Miller farms 2,400 acres, including 150 acres of wheat, and 1,000 acres each of corn and soybeans. Things have been pretty good for the most part, he says, though tar spot hit his corn hard.

Weve been hearing rumblings about lower test weight, high-moisture corn. Soybeans could be the best beans I ever had. The potential is out there, he says.

His winter wheat was hit by drought early on and didnt make average yield in most places.

One thing he tried new this year was relay cropping on a 20-acre parcel. Last year Miller planted winter wheat in 8-inch rows, and came back this spring and no-tilled soybeans in between the rows to get them started. He then cut the wheat above that.

Ive seen it for years in different parts of the country. Its got enough of a promise that were going to do it again," he says.

Spreaders were busy emptying out manure storages on land surrounding the Kreider dairy complex outside of Manheim, Pa.

Chip Bowling, Newburg, Md. Things have been slow thus far in the combine for Bowling, who planted 450 acres of corn and 1,200 acres of soybeans this season.

The corn isnt drying down as quickly as it normally does this time of year on his southern Maryland farm, but yields have been solid with the combine reading more than 200 bushels in some places.

The corn crop here in southern Maryland looks exceptionally good, he says.

Full-season and double-crop soybeans are also looking good, but like many growers, Bowling is hesitant to predict any sort of yield.

His wheat crop struggled to get going as cool, wet conditions slowed down planting this spring. Still, he says hes pleasantly surprised by how it yielded. Hes even considering growing a more hard red winter wheat next year, as some local buyers are asking for it.

We finally got some varieties that will yield well here, so we may try that, he says. Well plant as much cover crops as possible. Something we may do thats different is carbon markets. We possibly might get into that. Were doing some homework on that.

Russ McLucas, McConnellsburg, Pa. McLucas growers 180 acres of corn, 80 acres of soybeans, 220 acres of wheat and around 150 acres of grass hay.

Silage is coming in about average this year, he says, with most of the crop being chopped at around 68% moisture with good quality.

His wheat crop was really good with a 60- to 62-pound test weight on average and no docks for vomitoxin. The first cutting of grass hay was good and then the spicket shut off.

Its been dry. We got a little bit of second cut but not enough. It was what it was, McLucas says.

Something new he rolled out this year was a 12-row Harvest International planter with all the precision planting stuff on it.

We were very impressed with the planter, he says. A lot of things are hype and BS. This planter is not hype or BS.

Meghan Hauser, Castile, N.Y. Fourth cutting was just placed in the bunks at Table Rock Farms. Hauser and crew grow 1,800 acres of corn and alfalfa to feed a herd of 1,150 dairy cows.

After two years of really short hay, Hauser says this years crop has been amazing. Corn silage chopping will start soon, she says, and thus far the crop looks good.

One thing her cropping crew started this year was planting green in spring, though she admits that the cover crops got away from them a little bit, making it tough to get silage planted.

There is a lot of promise, and we keep learning about it, she says. We continue to learn. Thats the fun thing of farming.

A farmer near Robesonia, Pa., works ground that was recently harvested for corn silage.

Ryan Crane, Exeter, Maine. Crane and crew grow 1,500 acres of potatoes and 2,100 acres of corn within a 200-mile radius in central and southern Maine. Corn and potatoes are grown in rotation, but some small grains winter rye and oats are mixed in, too.

Overall, corn is looking fairly good, he says. He plants a wide range of maturities, from 72- to 89-day varieties. Hes expecting 150 bushels in his 72- to 78-day fields, up to 170 bushels in his 80- to 85-day fields, and up to 200 bushels in his 89-day fields.

On grain, its good to get it planted right. We do two fertilizer products at planting. Good seed depth, spacing. We really to keep the planter calibrated right, he says. We do some fertility in spring, then a sidedress blend based on soil sampling.

Potato yields are variety dependent, but Crane is expecting some fields to average 400 cwt in some places. Thats pretty exceptional. I wouldnt be surprised if its 450 in some places; 300 is usually doing good, he says.

Steve Reinhard, Bucyrus, Ohio. Reinhard and his brother, Tim, run a seed and chemical business just outside Bucyrus near Toledo.

Like many growers, Reinhard says armyworm took a toll on his alfalfa fields this season.

He says soybean yields will be lower because of the cold, wet May. They could not recover to full potential. Some of my best-looking beans had some sudden death, he says. In all, the beans will be average to slightly above-average, but not a huge crop.

Some tar spot was found in his corn, but he doesnt expect it to reduce yield.

A little water damage early drowned out spots. I have heard some early-harvested test weights may be a little lighter than expected. It was very hot and dry in late August, Reinhard says.

Penn States annual crop tour visited 110 corn and soybean fields across the state, sampling sites with typical management practices for their respective counties. This years crop, while variable from field to field and even within the same field, appears to be promising for yield and quality. For more information, go to Penn State Extension.

Here's some results per region:

More here:

As harvest starts, some positive reports from growers - Farm Progress

End poverty in all its forms everywhere. Ensure gender equality and empower all women and girls. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns. These are a few of the aspirationsmember states are targetingby 2030 through the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Recent reports from the U.N., however, beg the question: Was 2030 a pipe dream?

TakeGoal 13, which focuses on combating climate change: The reportissued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)last month raised thousands of pages of red flags about our progress. Another report from the U.N. published this month puts the spotlight on the SDGs yet again. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, U.N. Development Programand U.N. Environment Programopen a report about food systems by stating:With eight years remaining, we are falling far short of the trajectory needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Authors cite speed and comprehensiveness as needed but lacking.

In calling out lack of speedy and comprehensive action to reshape food systems in support of the SDGs, the U.N. agencies take aim at agricultural subsidies in particular.

"Current support to agricultural producers worldwide works against the attainment of the SDGs, the targets of the Paris Agreement and our common future, the reports forward reads. This support is biased towards measures that are harmful and unsustainable for nature, climate, nutrition and health, while disadvantaging women and other smallholder farmers in the sector."

Assessing support for agricultural producers in 88 nations, the U.N. reportplaces global agricultural subsidies at $540 billion a year, or 15 percent of total agricultural production value. The agenciescontendthat over two-thirds of this support is price-distorting and largely harmful to the environment. They estimate the value of these subsidies could increase to $1.8 trillion a year by 2030.

Sugar, beef, milk and rice are some of the most subsidized commodities in the world, the report outlines and all of these productsare either nutrient-poor or carbon-intensive, if not both. Authors calculate that eliminating agricultural subsidies entirely could mean avoiding 11.3 million tons of carbon equivalent emissionsby 2030, but they warn that the costs to farmer incomes and food prices would only exacerbate poverty and undernourishment essentially supporting one SDG while sacrificing many others.

In short: Governments needto redirect financial assistance and the U.N. report outlinessix steps to do it. These include: estimatethe support already provided to agricultural producers, identifyand estimatethe impact of this support, designan approach and reforms to repurpose support in more productive directions, estimatethe impact of the new strategy, reviewand refinethe strategy, implement it,and monitoroutcomes.

The action itemsthe U.N. agencies pose for governments underscore that simply eliminating agricultural subsidies won't work.Funds must be redirected for governments to reap the benefits and for sustainable agricultural systems, such as regenerative agriculture, to grow.

Repurposing agricultural support can improve both productivity and environmental outcomes, saidAchim Steiner, administrator of the U.N. Development Program (UNDP),in a recent statementoutliningtheeconomic benefit of actually following through with the U.N.'s recommendations. This change will also boost the livelihoods of the 500 million smallholder farmers worldwide, many of them women, by ensuring a more level playing field, he said.

Whilestrategies must be country-specific, the U.N.also emphasizes that global coordination is needed, if only to standardize the monitoring and reporting of financial support. A good place to begin international cooperation? The reportpoints to the U.N. Food Systems Summit, taking place on Thursday as part of Climate Week,and recommends that repurposing agricultural support be placed at the top of the agenda.

Image credit:Roman Synkevych/Unpslash

Continued here:

Agricultural Subsidies Are Hindering Progress On the SDGs - Triple Pundit

Consumer goods brands giant Ultimate Products has signed a deal with Oprah Winfrey-backed WW, formerly known as Weight Watchers.

The Oldham-headquartered listed company's kitchenware brand, Progress, has signed a license endorsement with US firm.

The agreement will see Progress and WW collaborate to develop and promote "value-for-money" products that can help to prepare and cook nutritious and healthy foods.

READ MORE: Tesco, Aldi, M&S and Morrisons supermarkets acquired by real estate investment giant in 113.1m deal

A range of 'Progress by WW' products will be launched across the small domestic appliances and cookware categories. These will include air fryers, health grills, soup makers, nut milk makers, slow cookers, blenders, food processors, food steamers, chopping boards, knives, utensils, and kitchen gadgets.

Progress was established in 1931 and was acquired by Ultimate Products in 2015 and relaunched in 2016. Its customers include Tesco, Argos and Amazon.

Simon Showman, chief executive of Ultimate Products, said: "We are thrilled to be partnering with a brand of WW's global renown, heritage and standing.

"Their endorsement of the historic Progress brand is a fantastic seal of approval, and we are delighted that 'Progress by WW' will help to inspire people to choose a healthier lifestyle.

"By buying one of these products, customers will also be playing their part in creating a more sustainable, greener and cleaner future thanks to our innovative new 'Buy me & plant a tree' initiative."

Anna Hill, GM of WW UK, added: "At WW, we want to make it as easy as possible for people to follow a healthy lifestyle.

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"Meal planning, food preparation and cooking at home are a big part of that, so we're delighted to have launched Progress by WW with Ultimate Products.

"We hope this wide range of WW licensed products will help inspire people on their wellness journeys and we look forward to seeing the range on supermarket shelves and online."

Continued here:

Ultimate Products' Progress brand signs deal with Oprah Winfrey-backed WW - Business Live

Last time, I chronicled Frances success at boosting homebuilding in greater Paris. This time, I look at the industrial worlds laggards in abundant housing.

Might the boldest new examples of leadership for abundant, low-carbon housing come from two of the worst places in the world at providing itand from opposite ends of the political spectrum?

By one measure, the United Kingdom and its former colony New Zealand have the worst housing records around (see Figure 1). Like their Anglosphere peers Australia and Canada, they govern homebuilding in ways that give neighborhood obstructionists vast power, yielding tight restrictions on new homes. And they provide little incentive for local leaders to welcome more homes. Consequentlyinevitablythey endure housing shortages on an epic scale, with surging and astronomical prices.

Yet recently, from these bastions of NIMBYist exclusion have sprung bracingly ambitious efforts at reform. The government of New Zealands progressive Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has implementedand the government of UKs conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson has proposedefforts to disempower residential obstructionism and unleash construction of vastly more in-city housing. In Johnsons words, build, build, build! Such pro-housing reforms could make these countries unexpected models for Cascadia and other tech-booming places.

When it comes to housing politics, the United Kingdom and its most Anglicized former colonies such as New Zealand are the worst in the world at providing abundant, affordable housing, according to Professor Paul Cheshire, who studies housing internationally at the London School of Economics. But they are not actually destined to fail: indeed, they have certain advantages. Like Japan and France, the UKs largest part, England, and New Zealand have strong national governments with centralized regulatory, tax, and spending systems. They couldthey have begun topromote abundant housing through national policy. The problem is that, unlike Japan and France, they long ago delegated control over real-estate development to local governments, while, unlike Germany, giving them no incentive to welcome new homes.

In the United Kingdom, this modern supercharging of local obstructionism dates to a near-ban on development during World War II. Then, in 1947, the post-war Labour Party government of Clement Attlee enacted the Town and Country Planning Act, which led to some of the worlds strictest development controls: not only tight containment cordons around cities to stop sprawl but also limits on building heights and a system by which almost every building erected needs to win the affirmative consent of local town councils, who can deny permission for any reason or for no reason at all.

Such local, discretionary permitting did not immediately close off construction; the post-war consensus on housing was go-go. But over time, handing power to localities had exactly the same effect as it does in North America today: it gave homeowning local voters (homevoters, in theorist William Fischels term) a veto over change. By a generation later, as homeownership grew (it more than doubled to 70 percent of households in the second half of the twentieth century), localities everywhere were tightening the screws on new construction. After peaking around 1970, the number of homes built annually in the UK has fallen by more than half, even as the nations population has grown by more than a third.

Germany has a decentralized system of development regulation, like the United Kingdom, but it provides strong incentives to local authorities to welcome homes. German localities get money from higher levels of government based partly on how many residents they have. In the United Kingdom, localities gain no such funds. In fact, they end up paying for any new facilities needed to serve newcomers, such as schools or parks, but get scant financial help from London. The countrys revenue system pools some locally collected taxes and fees and shares these elsewhere, so even the local tax windfalls from new development tend to leak away to the chancellor of the Exchequer in London. The housing scholar Christian Hilber, also at the London School of Economics, wrote me by email:

There is an alliance of local residents who do not like local development and . . . local politicians who do not even increase their fiscal revenue when they permit development . . . . The consequence is an extremely restrictive planning system and a massive affordability crisis that has been getting worse over the last 40 years.

Since the 1970s, the United Kingdom has built about half as many new homes as Germany, despite a similar population. From the mid-seventies to the present, UK home prices have tripled, adjusted for inflation, while Germanys have remained roughly stable, as shown in Figure 1. UK home prices are staggeringly high: in London they were, in one careful comparison, almost twice as high per square foot as prices in Paris, and more than three times as high as Tokyos. Rents were similarly astronomical.

New Zealands record is, if anything, worse. A country of five million peoplejust a little larger in area and population than Oregonit is a mid-sized exporter of farm and forest products perched on the periphery of the global economy. But its housing prices are more like those one might expect in a global hub of finance or technology. The average price of a New Zealand house in late 2020 was about US$500,000, which is roughly 50 percent more than the US average.

New Zealand real-estate prices have not always been high. They only skyrocketed over the last 40 years. Since 1980, adjusted for inflation, they have grown fivefold. Thats a larger increase than in almost any of the 25 affluent countries included in the database from which Figure 1 is drawn. Since 1995, New Zealands prices have grown faster than those of any other country. Since 1992, home prices in New Zealands principal city, Auckland, have risen faster than all but one of the cities included in the Economists global house-price index; they have outpaced San Franciscos notoriously escalating prices by 175 percent.

An even better measure of affordability than house prices themselves is the ratio of prices to average incomes. On this measure, New Zealand has gone from good to awful in a single generation. The Auckland-based husband-and-wife team of economists Shamubeel and Selena Eaqub assembled more than 80 years of time-series data on these ratios from official sources for their 2015 book Generation Rent. They have updated it since then and shared the data with Sightline. Figure 2 shows that from before World War II until the late 1970s, average housing prices tracked income: it cost about two years worth of annual earnings, on average, to buy a house. Then after the late 1970s, residential real estate climbed the walls: by 2021, it took almost nine years of income to pay for a house, a national price-to-income ratio as high as almost any in the world.

Rents have followed prices into the heights. As independent housing analyst and urbanist Brendon Harr of Christchurch, New Zealand, put it, with characteristic understatement: Renting in New Zealand is bad. The countrys poorest fifth of households spends almost 45 percent of their income on rent. Thats more than their counterparts in all but one of the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). For poor renters, in other words, New Zealand is the second worst country to inhabit in the developed world. (The worst is Chile. In third place iswho else?the United Kingdom.) Consequently, by one measure at least, homelessness and extreme housing deprivation are more common in New Zealand than in any other OECD countryroughly four times the same metric for the United States.

A severe housing shortage born of residential lockdown is at the root of these alarming statistics, although other factors, such as changed banking regulations and, during the pandemic, bargain-bin interest rates, have aided and abetted the spectacular inflation of real estate values. New Zealands Town and Country Planning Act of 1977 (later incorporated into the omnibus 1991 Resource Management Act) paved the way for local governments in most of the country to make it difficult to get permission to build apartments and houses. The Eaqubs pieced together a century of data on the number of permits localities have given to builders, including estimates for the years before 1950. Figure 3 shows that before the late 1970s, the number was almost always at or above eight new homes per year for every 1,000 residents in the country, a level at which housing shortages did not develop, and prices tracked incomes. The major exceptions, on the left end of the data series, were during the Great Depression and World War II. After the late 1970s, the number drops to a lower plateau and stays there almost every year.

New Zealands affluence has been rising and household size decreasing over the past century. One would expect the number of permits to increase over the century, as more people gained the means and desire to live on their own. Instead, house building has yet to match the levels that were normal half a century ago and earlier. Once homebuilding slowed in the late 1970s, prices began to rise. With each passing year of under-building, the shortage became more acute and prices rose higher. Fortunately, since 2016, building has begun a resurgencemore on that below.

New Zealand is an exceptionally centralized state, and its planning system has always been hierarchical in principle, with the national government in Wellington setting goals, regional governments drawing schematic plans, and local governments filling in the details of zoning. Still, the actual practice has put great power in local hands. Restrictive zoning, including bans on apartments in most areas, has resulted, just the same as in the United Kingdom and parts of North America.

Whats more, like the United Kingdom, New Zealand has a system of revenue that provides scant help to localities that add housing. Localities raise their funds through property taxes that are largely locked at low and steady rates by political tradition and voter sentiments. Local New Zealand governments have collected the same paltry share of economic output in taxes since the 1800s. Whereas central governments in many countries help bankroll local infrastructure, Wellington pays little. Localities are thus left with the full tab for urban services that new housing requires, from water and sewers to transit and streets. Caught between voter hostility to property taxes and the sticker shock of needed capital projects, most local leaders just stonewall: why zone for new homes at all?

Overall, local control in the absence of incentives to welcome housing has yielded residential lockdown, unusually tight markets, and massive house-price inflation. The situation is dire enough that not only home seekers and housing reformers but also mainline financial interests are alarmed, fearing a recession-inducing collapse of the real-estate market. In December, New Zealands largest bank, ANZ, called for intentionally deflating the housing market by building much more housing. It asserted that New Zealanders need to be willing to accept a lack of capital gains in housing, or even be willing to stomach a fall in our asset values, while incomes catch up.

Fortunately, in both the United Kingdom and New Zealand, elected leaders have begun to overturn the status quo, unlocking housing construction by righting the imbalance of power with local authorities.

In New Zealand, the action came from the left. In July 2020, Jacinda Arderns Labour government issued a sweeping new policy, the National Policy Statement on Urban Development (NPS-UD), which revised and strengthened planning guidance for all regional and local bodies, instructing them to ensure that land and housing markets are functioning well, which it defines as yielding stable prices and rising residential density. Defining stable prices as a national public policy goal may sound mundane, even blindingly obvious, but its almost never done. In Cascadia, Canadian and US policies aim, implicitly if not explicitly, for rising values.

Going further, the NPS-UD jumped ahead of town and city planners and specified that they must, by August 2022, rewrite their rules so as to:

Again, the scale of these changes is staggering, when compared with what North American jurisdictions have achieved so far. Californian reformers have been trying since 2018 to win a reform that would implement a similar six-story rule, and they have yet to win passage in even a single chamber of the state legislature. New Zealands Ministry for the Environment, which oversees planning, announced its version of the California plan in July 2020 and implemented it the following month.

The reforms did not come out of the clear blue sky. Various expert and citizen groups had been talking up similar ideas, and Auckland had completed a new regional plan in 2016 that reduced carpark quotas and upzoned parts of the city. Indeed, Aucklands new plan partly explains the recent upswing in homebuilding shown in Figure 3. (In 2015, perhaps not coincidentally, the first city of New Zealands Anglosphere neighbor Australia also shifted its posture on housing: the regional government of greater Sydney assigned stepped-up housing targets to its member localities, which forced them to make zoning and other changes. Homebuilding rose dramatically.)

Still, Arderns Labour government was not exactly responding to a groundswell of public support. Considering the circumstances, it acted with impressive boldness. The country was in the middle of its COVID-19 winter lockdown, and the Labour Party held power only tenuously, thanks to a precarious coalition with the Greens on the left and the populist New Zealand First Party on the right. Most leaders would not challenge localities housing prerogatives in such a time, but Labour did itjust three months before an election. Fortuitously, Arderns exemplary pandemic leadership won the party a landslide in October 2020, securing itself an outright legislative majority.

Strengthened by the election, the government is now planning further reforms, including a top-to-bottom rewrite of the countrys laws on natural resource management, including land-use planning. Through this rewrite, in 2022, the abundant-housing principles of the NPS-UP may work their way into law.

Independent housing analyst Harr wrote me by email that the changes have not caused much controversy with the public, probably due to the surreal Covid times. Also, the parliamentary opposition, the conservative National Party, has been in disarray since losing the October 2020 election. Whats more, because the NPS-UD is mostly a deregulatory effort, it aligns with the National Partys conservative ideology. The party has been at least half-heartedly supportive of it. As in Oregon and California, Arderns pro-housing reforms have won left-right backing.

In August 2020, the month that New Zealands Labour government implemented the NPS-UD, the United Kingdoms Conservative government announced a proposal of even greater boldness for the most populous jurisdiction of the United Kingdom, England. This biggest shakeup of the planning system in decades, in the words of Foreign Affairs, would speed and streamline homebuilding by stripping localities of discretionary authority over many building projects.

Introducing the proposal, Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote, Thanks to our planning system, we have nowhere near enough homes in the right places. Its time, he said about the planning system, to tear it down and start again. Calling for radical reform unlike anything weve seen since the Second World War, he termed the proposal a whole new planning system for England. One that is clearer, simpler and quicker.

The proposal calls for local zoning authorities to divide all land into three categories: one for conservation, where few building permits would be issued; one for renewal, where infill development would be allowed when it conforms with local rules for middle housing and gentle density; and one for growth, where building permits would be much easier to get and localities would have less power to intervene. Discretionary permitting would give way to by-right permitting, as on the European continent: if your project checks the boxes, authorities must OK it. Local councils would stop spending their time judging building proposals one by one. Instead, they would write clear, simple, and prescriptive rules. Developers could then design structures that obeyed the rules and be assured of winning permits.

Less noted by the news media, the proposal also includes experiments with hyperlocalismthe innovative plan developed by London YIMBYs John Myers and allies that I described earlier in this series. Under hyperlocalism, residents of individual city blocks gain authority to upzone their own block by supermajority vote under certain conditions. Conceived as a way to flip the valence of homeowners self-interest, giving them a big enough stake in well-designed infill development to overcome their customary aversion to change, hyperlocalism holds great theoretical potential. It needs a chance to get started and perfected in the real world. If it does, widespread replication might follow.

Given the wide range of zoning rules allowed, though, obstructionist localities could quash homebuilding simply by writing intentionally onerous rules. Thats what has happened in Cascadia, which has something closer to by-right permitting than most of North America. To safeguard against such subversion of its purpose, the Johnson government added teeth to its proposal: the central government would assign ambitious targets for new homes in each locality. If a locality didnt hit its numbers, London would step in.

The Johnson proposal is stunningly bold. If those targets were implemented, it would bring a big improvement in English housing undersupply. But so far, its only a white paper, not a policy. The Tories did make two noteworthy reforms promptly and outvoted Labour opponents in Parliament to make the changes stick: one allows two extra stories subject to discretionary approval in some residential zones, and the other allows more conversions of vacant commercial buildings to residential uses. Both reforms have limits, but they mark an auspicious start.

The key questions, of course, are when the government will introduce a bill in Parliament to create its new planning system and what exactly it will include. Since the end of a three-month public-comment period in October 2020, the government has said little. What it has said has mostly been backpedaling. Eleven months after Prime Minister Johnson said of the planning system that he would tear it down and start again, Housing Minister Robert Jenrick said, I dont think we need to rip up the planning system and start again. He also announced a delay in action on the proposal, until late this year or next, and a slew of other steps that weakened the 2020 proposal. The (London) Times reported on September 11, 2021, without citing its sources, that the proposal, once finalized and released, will substitute designated growth sites for a wholesale rezone and will include housing targets that are not mandatory.

The cause of this delay and retreat is undoubtedly political. The proposal kicked up a hornets nest of concerns, not only from Labour and its allies but from Tory members of Parliament. As many as 100 Conservative MPs may oppose the plan, which would be more members than even Johnson can spare to lose. His smashing December 2019 landslide victory gave him the biggest Conservative majority since the 1980s, but his margin was still only 84 members. In June 2021, it dropped to 83: the centrist Liberal Democrats shellacked the Conservatives in a special election in a suburban seat the Tories had held since 1974. Some observers blamed the housing plan.

Still, its too soon to write an obituary for Johnsons ambitions. He has not shied from controversy in the past, including courting intra-party conflict and even purging dissident MPs. Cross-party support is conceivable, as seen in New Zealand and Cascadia. And even a watered-down version of his proposal might still be one of the most dramatic moves against residential lockdown in recent history. The initial scope of his plan is so large that even a quarter of a loaf would be a lot of bread.

Whats more, says John Myers of London YIMBY, even in in the absence of other proposals, implementing hyperlocalism could be a game changer, both for England and for other places like it. A parliamentary bill for a strong form of hyperlocalism has gained momentum, with endorsements from an impressively diverse array of interests, including both opponents and supporters of Johnsons broader plan. On September 14, the Daily Telegraph reported, the government embraced the bill and indicated it would incorporate its tenets into its still-pending planning bill.

The differences between New Zealand and Englands successes to date are mostly a function of the institutional and legal structures in which they operate. New Zealands Ministry for the Environment has authority to guide local land use policy, while in England, Parliament holds that power. New Zealands reforms, therefore, are well under way, while most of Englands have yet to move from policy whitepaper to draft legislation. In time, Parliament will act on Johnsons proposal, and we will see what comes of it.

But even before the denouement in England, Cascadia and its housing-scarce peer regions in North America can draw two lessons from Ardern and Johnsons actions.

First, bold and decisive leadership from above is indispensable. Local housing shortages are a tragedy of the commons: each elected official in a small, local jurisdiction within a large, modern metropolis gains little and risks much by allowing more housing. Only action coordinated from a higher level can yield large rewards and small risks.

Second, housing abundance is an agenda owned by neither left nor right. Indeed, if deployed adroitly, it is a political opportunity for either. Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Jacinda Ardern are tribunes of the two great opposing traditions of Anglosphere politics: Conservative and Labour. They have spent decades arguing with each others political philosophies and running campaigns against each others co-partisans (although in different countries, of course). Both won historic electoral landslides in the last two years, demonstrating their immense gifts as leaderstheir abilities to identify and activate public sentiment in favor of their party.

And both seized, perhaps surprisingly, on abundant housing through national land-use planning reforms as policy initiatives worth attempting. Both did so by asserting an overriding public interest in abundant housing. And both sought to advance that interest by righting an imbalance between local and national control over homebuilding.

The countries with dominion in CascadiaCanada and the United Statesare federated countries, not unitary ones like England and New Zealand, and control of land use is in the hands of subnational governments. Where land use policies are concerned, the analogous figures to Johnson and Ardern are therefore not the US president and the Canadian prime minister. Rather, they are the governors of the states and especially, the premiers of the provinces. These executives have the political positions, andin the case of the Canadian premiers who lead parliamentary governments like those in the rest of the Anglospherethe legislative powers to emulate the UK and New Zealand.

The question, therefore, is which Cascadian governor or premier will first emulate Jacinda Ardern or Boris Johnsonleaders whose countries are among the worst places in the world for affordable, low-carbon, urban housing but whose actions, one from the left and one from the right, aim to swiftly transform their countries from epicenters of residential lockdown to showplaces of abundant housing.

Will it be a governor from the left, such as Oregons Kate Brown, who has already signed a first-in-the-nation statewide middle-housing law, or Washingtons Jay Inslee? Will it be a governor from the right, such as Alaskas Mike Dunleavy, Idahos Brad Little, or Montanas Greg Gianforte? Or will it be British Columbias labor-aligned New Democratic premier John Horgan, who leads a province with striking similarities to New Zealand both in government structure and in housing shortage, and whose party, like Arderns, leaped during the pandemic from a tenuous coalition government to an outright majority?

And whoever does it first, will they be able to mobilize enough legislative votes to tear down exclusionary old rules and build, build, build abundant housing in compact, low-carbon communities?

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Yes, Other Countries Are Making More Progress on Housing, Case 4: The United Kingdom and New Zealand - Sightline Institute