With think tank Progress Ireland, the yimby movement here is powering up

In a document laying out its pitch, the team behind Progress Ireland talk a lot about powers of persuasion.

“A core competency of our org will be persuasion,” it says. 

They’ll bag high-profile endorsements, curate pitches to politicians to present win-win proposals, build relationships with civil servants, and publish “data-rich” primers, it says.

“We will socially de-risk ourselves with officials by appearing as friendly faces at department conferences, policy launches and speaker events,” says the document.

Their credibility will grow over time, it says. After all,  “Ireland is highly conformist and is more prone to deference to elite or expert consensus than our British counterparts”.

The strategy seems to be paying off.

There’ll be a public consultation this summer to seek feedback on changes to, among other things, allow for small homes in back gardens without planning permission, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage James Browne said on 4 June. 

That’s a change that Progress Ireland has pushed for, although its idea is modelled on these cabins as long-term rentals, while the government has said it’s not yet settled if they’ll restrict use to family members or not.

It also isn’t a new idea for Ireland. Versions have floated around for years. 

But that it has now again come to the fore suggests the growing influence of the think tank in the housing debate – and with it a louder voice for arguments in support of deregulation and the role of private-market supply in solving Ireland’s affordable housing crisis.

How this idea was first built out for Ireland in recent years – by a researcher at a different think tank, but who moved in similar circles – also hints at the influence of ideas from yimby movements elsewhere, boosted by big-tech money.

There’s some diversity among those identifying as “yimbys”, but generally they focus on deregulated planning and zoning laws as a way to increase market-priced housing supply and, through that extra supply, make housing affordable.

Sean Keyes, the head of Progress Ireland, says the organisation is totally independent in its work. 

Its funders – who are listed transparently on its website – know they can’t have a say, or even be perceived to have a say, in what they work on, he says. “There’s complete independence.”

“We don’t have an ideological answer to everything. The throughline is that we want Ireland to be better at building,” Keyes says. They’ll look at solutions wherever they find them, he says.

The ideas

One raison d'etre for Progress Ireland is to bring solutions from elsewhere, says Keyes.

The problems that Dublin is suffering from have been litigated backwards and forwards elsewhere for decades, he says. “In southern England, coastal United States, New Zealand, coastal Australia.”

Those places are far ahead in solving these, he said. “There’s like an agenda which is very well-evidenced, and I think is very applicable to Ireland, which demanded to be heard here.”

Progress Ireland doesn’t just work on housing. 

But, as with other organisations loosely connected to the growth and abundance-focused “progress movement” – such as the Institute for Progress in the United States, and the Centre for British Progress in the United Kingdom – housing is a pillar of its work.

So far, Progress Ireland has mostly lobbied on two housing policies, both focused on planning changes and densifying cities and towns, and both inspired by policies elsewhere.

The first idea – of street votes or street plans – argues for giving residents on a road the chance to pre-agree acceptable development through a ballot, say replacing detached homes with apartment blocks.

The second idea is for the government to relax planning rules to allow small homes of between 25sqm and 40sqm in gardens and backyards without planning permission.

But it was actually a researcher called Robert Tolan – working at a think-tank he got going called the Better Planning Alliance – who first built out those ideas for Ireland in recent times, he says.

They weren’t his ideas to start with, he says.

In mid-2022, Tolan left a job in finance in London and moved back to Ireland, he said. “I came home trying to work out what to do next.”

In August 2022, he emailed loads of people for advice on next steps or possible internships, he says. 

He sent a generic email through to the magazine Works in Progress, a publication which is part of Stripe. Ben Southwood, a founding editor at Works in Progress, replied.

Southwood is the former head of housing at the think-tank Policy Exchange in the United Kingdom, and at the Adam Smith Institute, and has also had three Emergent Ventures grants. 

Tolan had just been looking for general projects, he says, not thinking of housing policy or particular policies. (He told interviewers of the Merge Club podcast, the same in August last year.)

“They took me on to work on a housing project,” said Tolan, on the phone. 

At first, he got money from Polaris and Entrepreneur First – which is backed by tech money – for some of his work, he said. They look for unusual people, he said. 

Southwood put him in touch with John Myers, of the Yimby Alliance in the UK, who had developed the street votes proposal there. Tolan worked on that under his guidance, Tolan says. 

In August 2020, Myers wrote a post for 1828, a website in the UK, in which he pointed to the UK government’s interest in street votes, which was “exciting for neoliberals” as it “would let each single street of residents pick a design and allow themselves to replace drab bungalows or dreary semi-detached houses with stunning terraces or mansion blocks, with five times as much housing and, over time, potentially millions of homes”.

Myers is currently on the board of the recently formed UK think-tank the Centre for British Progress. 

“I didn’t suggest that at all,” says Tobin, of the street votes proposal. “They gave me this task to build a quantitative model for a proposed policy on Ireland which became the whole Street Plans thing.”

As Tolan tells it, that policy was a bit drag-and-drop.

Some aspects of the street votes proposal are original in that the calculations are adjusted in light of the Irish planning system, he says. “But then in many respects it’s almost a carbon copy of the UK proposal.”

After a bit, Southwood suggested that Tolan contact Tyler Cowen, an economist at the Mercatus Center, a free-market think-tank that runs out of George Mason University in the United States, Tolan says. 

Tolan emailed Cowen in March 2023. Tolan and Cowen had a call, and Cowen quickly granted him $20,000 through the fund Emergent Ventures.

Emergent Ventures was set up in 2018, to give fast grants to support “entrepreneurs and brilliant minds with highly scalable, ‘zero to one’ ideas for meaningfully improving society”, its website says.  The programme was seeded in part with funding from libertarian Peter Thiel.

“I thought it was very random,” says Tolan. “That money then was for my time. But it was explicitly to develop yimby policies for Ireland.”

With that money, he said, he worked to further develop the street votes idea, and also the idea of changes to allow for small backyard homes without planning permission, and to work on setting up the Better Planning Alliance as a lobby group. 

He was “coached” on a lot of that by Myers, he says.

When he got the Emergent Ventures funding, it also led him to link him in with more similar-thinking researchers in the United States and United Kingdom, he said. 

“Pretty much anybody I wanted to speak to, I could. And, like, I certainly learnt a lot from them,” he says.

He could draw on advice from Emily Hamilton and Salim Furth, both research fellows at the Mercatus Center, he said, and Nolan Gray, who used to be a research fellow at the Mercatus Center and is now the research director at California YIMBY.

“You can see in everything I produced, you can see the influence of the American kind of stuff from the Mercatus Institute,” he says.

You can also see the influence of the Adam Smith Institute and Policy Exchange  in the UK, says Tolan. “They’re very right-leaning think tanks.”

Tolan has never worked for Progress Ireland. 

But the two policies that he looked at are similar to the first two housing policies developed and put forward by the think tank.

That Progress Ireland honed in on those happened organically, says Keyes, the head of Progress Ireland.

When Tolan decided he was to leave the Better Planning Alliance and take up the job in New York, Seán O'Neill McPartlin took over the work.

O'Neill McPartlin is now head of housing at Progress Ireland.

O'Neill McPartlin says he had reached out to Tolan because he saw his work on housing and thought, with his policy background, that he could help work on the issue, one of the most important facing the country.

He took over and finished setting up the Better Planning Alliance as an entity and continued that work, as Tolan was stepping down, he says.

When Progress Ireland was getting going later, they went back to the idea of small homes and street votes as these passed their “important, tractable and neglected” tests for ideas to pursue, said O'Neill McPartlin.

He got help and feedback from loads of people, including those who had worked on similar policies before, but he definitely wouldn’t say he was “coached” by anyone on those, he says.

“I was and am particularly interested in policies that enable sustainable growth in existing areas,” said  O'Neill McPartlin.

Keyes said Progress Ireland chose to run with the small homes idea, which has been knocking around for ages, “because they are a simple, proven and straightforward idea for making housing more affordable and abundant, in the places it’s most needed, for the people who need it most”.

And, he had already organically started to research something similar to “street plans” as far back as 2018, he says, looking at how stakeholders within an area could be incentivised to alter planning.

He saw online later that Southwood, and a guy called Samuel Hughes had fleshed that idea out – and spoke to Southwood for a podcast at The Currency on his “street votes” idea in 2021, he says.

O'Neill McPartlin later, after he was working with Tolan, found his way to Keyes, he says. 

And, none of those people that they have had those exchanges with – Southwood or Hughes for example – fund Progress Ireland at all, he says. 

The money

Progress Ireland currently lists eight donors on its website as giving more than €5,000 a year.

Those include Emergent Ventures, administered by Tyler Cowen, and run out of the Mercatus Center. The economist has called for a model of “state-capacity libertarianism”, based on the idea that “strong states remain necessary to maintain and extend capitalism and markets”. He also sits on The Growth Commission, an organisation set up by former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss.

Progress Ireland donors also include Stripe’s billionaire founders Patrick and John Collison. One of Stripe’s early political donations in the United States was to grant $1 million in May 2018 to California Yimby – an organisation criticised in the past for ignoring the needs and voices of those on the lowest incomes. 

Patrick Collison has also been powering up the “progress movement”. In July 2019, he penned an op-ed for The Atlantic, together with Cowen of Emergent Ventures, calling for a new “science of progress”. 

Progress Ireland’s donors also include Open Philanthropy, a donor in the effective altruism movement.

Open Philanthropy recently announced a new “abundance and growth” fund, to build, among other things, on the “catalytic role” it has played in funding the yimby movement, a statement said.

An internal FAQ sheet for Progress Ireland suggests that the team has sought to diversify its funding.

“How will you avoid getting pidgeonholed as right wing tech bros?” the document poses.

The policy ideas it picks should help, it says. And also, branding, as “we will brand ourselves in a neutral way that is unobjectionable to left and right”.

But also, “We will seek to raise funds from diverse sources: environmental action groups, and philanthropies, as well as private donations from individuals,” it says.

Keyes, the head of Progress Ireland, says its funders are diverse. “If you look at all these people together in a room, they look quite different to me.”

The Collisons are successful tech entrepreneurs, he said. 

Open Philanthropy is a foundation that is rigorous in assessing what it funds, doing so by the principles of effective altruism, he said. “They’re very very far from ideological. They’re the exact opposite.”

Cowen, the economist who runs Emergent Ventures, is hard to pin down, Keyes says. “He’s not easy to put in a box.”

Also, “we don’t represent the interests of an industry,” Keyes said later by email. “No funder benefits financially from our policies. They back us because they believe in our project.”

Big numbers

Progress Ireland put big headline figures on its two first housing policies.

“Ireland could build 350,000 small homes in gardens,” says the headline of a “one pager” last September.

“A new route through planning could unlock 150,000 new homes,” says the top of another the same month.

Critics argue, though, that the potential for hundreds of thousands of quality affordable homes is overplayed and the complications and downsides of the changes are overlooked.

O'Neill McPartlin rejects that, he says. “We were very conscious of not overplaying the potential benefits of our policies so we based our models on conservative assumptions”.

“We never claimed any single idea would solve the housing crisis,” he said. Several reforms are needed for that, he says. 

They even published the models they are working off, so people can scrutinise, says O'Neill McPartlin.

Tolan, the researcher who first developed the proposal for the small homes in Ireland in recent times, gave a lower figure of at least 6,700 homes in Dublin. 

The modelling is by its nature simplistic, he says. “I think when you model anything in social science, you’ve got to make very, almost egregious, assumptions.”

He modelled lower uptake, he says. 

Whereas the Progress Ireland headline figure – to get to the 350,000 that “could” be created – counts anyone who has the space, and could viably develop it, as doing so, assuming they are “rational”, says Tolan. 

In other words, they would tap into their home as a money-making opportunity, rather than favouring privacy or keeping green space.

Indeed, says Lorcan Sirr,  a senior housing lecturer at TU Dublin, “There is a thread of deregulation running through all these proposals which assumes that less regulation will mean more construction, but the real world doesn't work quite that simply.”

And, building small homes outside of a proper planning process has wider implications too, says Sirr, the senior housing lecturer.

“If we allowed everyone to build what they wanted in their back gardens then the state would quickly lose track of what was being built and the associated services they would require,” he says. 

“There are also engineering issues, like run-off water from concrete platforms, that have been ignored or the proposers weren't aware of,” he says.

Philip Lawton, a geography professor at Trinity College Dublin, takes issue with the big headline figures too. 

Progress Ireland’s modelling extrapolates from a sample of 200 homes, says Lawton. But it’s just not possible to lift off from that number and say that up to 350,000 structures are possible, he says.

Ireland has such diverse urban forms, he said. Within the urban fabric of Dublin, there’s the Georgian City, the Victorian City, and 20th-century suburbia with semi-detached homes, he says.

There’s also the question of what these structures that are built could be used for in reality, says Tolan. “In places where they are legal, they do turn into other things.”

His and Progress Ireland’s modelling assumes the small homes – which are known elsewhere as “accessory dwelling units” (ADUs) – would be long-term rentals.

But in Seattle, about 10 percent of ADUs are licenced short-term lets, says research by that city’s government, published in mid-2024. 

In Los Angeles, about 30 percent of ADU owners surveyed used them as long-term rentals, found research by an academic at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The rest were used as family residences, guest rooms, business spaces, and so on, it says. 

Keyes, the head of Progress Ireland, says it’s up to the state to settle on how to regulate short-term lets. “We’ve never advocated for using them for short-term lets.”

But “if someone skirted the rules using them for short-term lets, that would also alleviate pressure, right?” he says. “That would be one fewer person using a short-term let somewhere else in the city.”

“We’re saying this will help. We’re saying building more homes, building more rooms, will alleviate rent pressure,” says Keyes.

If renting is allowed, how affordable the rents would shake out to be is also hard to discern from the experience of other jurisdictions. An “ADU” can mean a host of different size and quality structures.

The UCLA research found that landlords renting these small homes to friends and family charged less than the average, and those renting to non-related tenants charged similar-to-average rents. 

But taking size into account, it says, “rental rates for ADUs are higher on average than rental housing across the city”. 

“No, they are not affordable to low-income renters, but they are to moderate income renters in some regions,” says Karen Chapple, professor emerita of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley who has looked in the past at rental rates for ADUs in California. 

And, “I always say that providing housing for moderate-income renters keeps them from gentrifying the low-income units, so it’s a win that way”, she says.

Progress Ireland’s modelling allows for homes that are 25sqm – so, 32 percent smaller than the current minimum for new studios in the city, which is set at 37sqm. 

So, the think-tank’s model puts the rents of viable small homes in Dublin at between €1,300 to €1,560 a month – which it says would be 15 percent lower than market rate. 

Bedrock beliefs

Progress Ireland has bedrock beliefs, says Keyes. “We’re in favour of abundance as a solution. That’s our North Star.”

After all, add 1 percent to the overall stock of housing, all things being equal, then you would expect house prices to drop by roughly 1.5 percent, he said.

He shared a table from research by Ian Mulheirn in the United Kingdom, who was chief economist at “Renewing the Centre” at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

The paper does say that, but it also concludes that “current policy focus on boosting supply does not offer a solution to the housing crisis and a fundamental rethink is badly needed”.

That’s because “no plausible rate of supply would significantly reverse the price growth of the past two decades”, it says. 

And factors other than supply shortages seem to have driven the explosion in house prices, the paper says, pointing to tumbling mortgage interest rates, and in some areas, global investor demand.

Later by email, Keyes says that he accepts the figures Mulheirn quotes. But not his “quirky analysis” that goes with it. 

“The relationship between housing supply and house prices is a bit complicated … but it’s not totally illegible. It still conforms broadly to a supply and demand framework,” he says.

Keyes also points in the other direction, to Houston, the US’s fourth biggest city, as a case study in how abundance in supply, any supply, can drive affordability – this time, through deregulated planning and zoning. 

Houston has cracked its homelessness problem to greater degree than many coastal cities, says Keyes. “Houston reduced homelessness by 63 percent in 12 years by building like crazy.”

Houston is often spotlit by advocates of deregulation. In particular, they highlight the impact of changes to rules on plot size for homes in 1998. 

Before then, detached family homes had to have a plot of 5,000sqft (465sqm), but the city of Houston reduced that, and to get buy-in, communities could opt-out of the ordinance and stick with the mandatory higher lot sizes.

But none of that was central to tackling homelessness, says Fryda Ochoa, the communications manager at The Way Home, which oversees the push to reduce homelessness in Houston.

“The primary driver that allowed us to decrease our homelessness by more than 63% was our collaborative approach and influx of funding,” she says.

In 2011, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) made Houston a “priority community” for addressing homelessness, she said. Because it was deemed, up to then, as having been bad at handling homelessness, she says.

So, Houston got technical assistance and resourcing to shift from managing homelessness to solving it, she said. 

A coalition of organisations ran a four-day event, with 450 stakeholders, to develop a plan to prevent and end homelessness, she said. They began working together, rather than in silos.

An influx of flexible federal funding, including disaster-relief funding after 2017’s Hurricane Harvey and the Covid-19 pandemic, also meant they could do more, she says.  

Housing supply and gentrification

Asked about Ochoa’s comments on how Houston tackled homelessness, Keyes said that, “Homelessness is a symptom of housing shortages.” 

“I know there’s more detail to the Houston homelessness story than this,” said Keyes. But “Houston’s success was made possible because there is slack in the housing market, which was made possible because Houston builds tonnes of homes”.

The changes in 1998 in Houston allowing for greater density on plots, with opt-out provision for local communities, have been put forward – including in Works in Progress, the Stripe magazine, and by the Mercatus Center – as a solution to be copied in solving housing crises elsewhere. 

It is cited as an inspiration in Progress Ireland’s pitch for street plans, allowing a street’s residents to vote on permitted denser development. 

And Harris County – which has a population of more than 5 million and of which Houston is the county seat – has added a substantial number of homes in recent years. 

Between 2005 and 2018, it added an average of 30,600 homes a year, according to a report by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Texas. 

Most in that period were single-family detached homes. But almost 10 percent were townhomes, often built in place of single-family homes.

However, those topline figures on supply do still hide complexity.

“The positive is macro, the negative is micro,” says  Bill Fulton, an urban planner, and former head of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research in Texas. “Which is so often the case in public policy about land.”

“I think generally speaking, it’s true, if you increase overall supply even with high-end stuff eventually that will trickle down and help the whole market,” he says.

Broadly, affordability is likely to be better than if those homes had never been built, he says. 

But direct impacts can vary, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, he says. Many townhomes have been built in already gentrified areas, but not only.

And “one of the things that happens, it may be that people with more modest incomes are immediately displaced by people with higher incomes in specific locations”, he says.

They’re seeing gentrification in parts of Houston, with white affluent households moving into what would be traditionally Black or Hispanic neighbourhoods, he says.

“What’s happening there is that single-family homes that are either owned or rented by long-time residents are being bought by developers for putting up six or eight townhomes,” he says. “Which are varying prices, but generally more expensive.”

One neighbourhood saw old single-family homes demolished and the lots left vacant, as land owners waited for land values to rise and interest rates to change, he says. Density even fell in parts, as smaller households replaced extended families, he says. 

Those displaced families moving out of these gentrifying neighbourhoods are often moving to cheaper and older suburban neighbourhoods – and becoming more car dependent, he says.

Housing supply and affordability

Despite the 1998 plot-density changes that yimbys point to, and the city’s additions to its housing supply, general affordability of housing in Houston is still a growing problem.

Of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, Houston ranks in the top five for struggling lowest-income renters, shows research for the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Home ownership is in decline. More than half of rental households are “cost-burdened”, spending 30 percent or more of their income on housing. 

“What we found is that even with that, even with an enormous amount of supply being added, that prices are still rising faster than incomes,” says Fulton.

The idea that supply alone will bring down house prices is unrealistic, says Sirr, the housing lecturer at TU Dublin. 

He points to research from the Bank of England, which found that “the rise in real house prices since 2000 can be explained almost entirely by lower interest rates. Increasing scarcity of housing, evidenced by real rental prices and their expected growth, has played a negligible role at the national level”. 

Lower interest rates drive up prices as, when the cost of borrowing is lower, people can borrow more yet have the same mortgage repayment each month, he says. Rents are a bit different, he says.

Ireland’s Central Bank has also said that supply is only one factor of many that influences price, including population growth, wage growth and interest rates, he said. 

Still, Keyes says Houston is largely affordable.

For ordinary people who work in schools and coffee shops, and so on, three-bed homes in Houston are affordable, he says. “Just go on Zillow,” referring to America’s version of Daft.ie. 

Later by email, Keyes said he didn’t say that Houston had solved all housing challenges. 

Just that “places that have built the most, are the places where more people get to live good lives, spending less on housing, than the counterfactual where they build only as much as peer cities,” he said.

Supply, regardless of the model used to provide the housing, is what is important, Keyes says. 

Vienna – whose cost-rental homes are often pointed to by advocates of off-market housing – has a state-led model and Houston has a private-led model, he says.

“They both have affordable housing. But what they have in common is abundance,” says Keyes. “There are multiple ways to crack a nut.”

He resists the idea of looking for affordability through other housing models. 

“The idea that if you want to make housing affordable, you build a special category of affordable housing and focus on that, I think that’s a mistake,” Keyes says.

“I think that the best way to do it is for abundant housing all the way up and down the system,” he says.  

But then, he also says that there does need to be some kind of social housing for those on the lowest incomes. “I do think you do need a safety net, a housing safety net.”

Progress Ireland has looked at how the social housing budget could go further, he says. And, he likes the cost-rental model as it gets the government to focus on construction costs, he says. 

But, “We would like market rate homes to be affordable to 4/5ths of people, so the state can concentrate resources on those most in need”, said Keyes.

Keyes says the changes Progress Ireland is looking to push – making it cheaper to build, relaxing the rules around planning – are good for anyone trying to build any kind of housing. 

“Everything that we’re doing works for everybody,” he says.