People should read Ryan Avent and Andrew Lainton

Just a quick post to point anyone interested in housing and planning issues towards two people currently writing up a storm on these issues.

Ryan Avent blogs for the Economist but has a long-standing interest in urban economics and housing in particular. He has just come out with a slim Kindle-only book, The Gated City, which is concerned with the negative aggregate consequences of anti-density building restrictions in America's most productive places, its cities. I'm reading it at the moment and am very impressed, and incidentally the argument applies just as much to London as it does to San Francisco. Ryan wrote an op-ed for the NY Times summarising the book here.

Then there's Andrew Lainton, who I hope everyone with a passing interest in the NPPF debate is following. It's always good to see someone who manages to be both expert and consistently interesting writing so much, but with the kerfuffle about the NPPF I think Andrew has really found his issue, and he deserves that shout-out from George Monbiot today.