ECONOMIST - AUTHOR - BROADCASTER

Rosenthaler Platz in Berlin is a busy hub to the northeast of the city centre. The last time I sat on the U-Bahn here, the train slowed down and then passed through a creepy, dimly-lit and empty station with only East German border guards on the platform. It was the summer of 1989, just three months before the wall came down. Rosenthaler Platz was what was called a “ghost station”. The underground was constructed before the wall went up in 1962 and this was one of the stations which was boarded up when the city was divided. The trains from West Berlin passed through East Berlin, weaving right through the middle of the city, only to re-emerge back into the West and literally into the light.

Today it is buzzing with foreign students, start-ups and cafes that have turned themselves into communal workspaces. In fact, the one I am in, Oberholz provides a vision of what much of work life in the future may be like: semi-autonomous, creative teams working together on a project by project basis, hiring space in a cafe for a limited time rather than being full-time employees with full-time tenancy in a fixed office. Right now this is still only a small minority of workers but it could become the norm.

Let’s look at the housing shortage through the lens of planning permission objections. We rarely think about the impact on house prices of individuals or groups of individuals opposing planning permission.

Each objection may be legitimate but, in the aggregate, planning objections have a knock-on effect on the availability and cost of housing. Indeed, the trade-off between individual rights and the collective good, so evident when planning restrictions are sought via objections, goes to the very heart of macroeconomics.