Jack, the New Zealander featured in this interview, is another sort of person every social movement needs: the recruit. To be clear, he's been in housing advocacy for years now. But this co-founder of the advocacy group Greater Ōtautahi -- that's the Māori word for the city of Christchurch -- is a bit younger than his counterparts in Auckland and Wellington were, and eagerly continuing the work of legalizing homes. When we met and spoke in March 2026, he had recently relocated to Auckland and achieved the previously almost unthinkable feat of purchasing a home there as a young adult.

A few days before I left New Zealand, Jack told me how his work has woven through the country's zoning reform story, starting with his time in Dunedin and Christchurch. We also talked about some big possibilities in the pipeline.

You may have noticed quite a delay in the publication of this episode. Re-entering post-sabbatical life back in Oregon meant needing to prioritize some big work and personal demands this summer. But I'm glad to be returning for a few more episodes that I hope will put a bow on this project I've enjoyed so much.

Once upon a time, back in the 1500s, someone came up with a new way to say "hot take." It came from the French word "to attempt."

Brendon Harre has both the mind and the heart of an essayist. While working as a psych nurse and periodically bracing himself for flights around the world (he has two sons in Norway), Harre became the first New Zealand writer whose thinking about housing I ran into across the Pacific. The essays on his blog, "New Zealand Needs an Urbanization Project," became part of the intellectual backbone of New Zealand's YIMBY movement. (While connecting it to other urbanization subjects like transportation, energy, and jobs.)

Harre is also interesting in that, unlike most interviewees for this show, he's from the South Island: New Zealand's less populous but physically larger (and arguably more housing-abundant) half. I met him in the late morning, before he headed to his shift, to talk about:

• His concept of reciprocal intensification, in which neighboring property owners could agree to mutually upzone each other, and his later enthusiasm for the inverse of that in Houston: letting small blocks of property owners opt out of broad upzones
• His fascinating connection between today's housing politics and British agriculture politics during the 1800s
• Why urbanization is so important to economic development in off-the-beaten-path spots like New Zealand (and Oregon)

I personally enjoyed this conversation more than any other for this podcast. I hope you will, too.

I'm not prepared to claim that Eric Crampton and Benno Blaschke are the nerdiest of all the nerds involved with New Zealand's zoning reforms, but they are the only ones who happily self-identified as such on the air with me.

Crampton is the chief economist and Blaschke a research fellow with the New Zealand Initiative, a Wellington-based think tank that is funded a bit like a Chamber of Commerce is in the United States: from dues payments from a wide variety of member businesses. I've described them as the American Enterprise Institute of New Zealand: both earnestly academic and ideologically aligned with the goal of freeing markets from overregulation.

This makes them representatives of an important constituency in most successful YIMBY reforms in the United States: the "reasonable Republican" or pro-business conservative. In New Zealand, where the current right-of-center government controls the path of national zoning reform, this makes them particularly important.

We had a rich conversation about the different ideologies that point to upzoning, about their hopes and predictions for the country's next round of pro-housing legislation, and about whether New Zealand's unusual form of government might have something to do with its unusual national land-use policy.

Discussed:

Crampton and Blaschke's own podcast interviews with public economist Chris Parker, with former housing minister Phil Twyford, and with current housing minister Chris Bishop.

Sam Bowman's 2021 article "The Housing Theory of Everything," in Works in Progress magazine

Blascke's then-upcoming report arguing for price-based accountability in land use instead of speculative housing targets.