This is the first time I’ve read someone articulate the “stasis subsidy” argument. It’s a particular framework for thinking about these issues that hadn’t occurred to me, I must confess. But it’s an insightful and elegant way to analyze the US right now. Noah, this is an incredibly powerful article. Thanks. (Would make an interesting book.)
i read this https://byrnehobart.medium.com/the-30-year-mortgage-is-an-intrinsically-toxic-product-200c901746a a couple of years ago and return to it periodically. seems plausible that nimbyism and nimby-enabling legislation is downstream of the ubiquity of fixed-rate 30-year mortgages, which (cyclically) lock the majority of the majority's assets into a highly illiquid, highly levered long position on a 3-block radius — or else (cyclically) unlock everyone all at once.
I read something in contract theory[1] is that people are agreeing to a kind of "social contract" with society writ large and they often make big, expensive, hard to undo decisions quite early in their life based on their understanding of that contract. Deciding what careers to pursue, where to take out a mortgage to buy a house, whether your wife should stop working, whether you need to save for college or just a high school education is enough for your kids, how many children to have, and so on.
But at certain times in history societies relatively suddenly include more stakeholders who, understandably, what some amount of revision of the social contract. But that revision might (probably?) will result in undermining some of the decisions previously made by others. It's a complex system and it isn't like people are good at forecasting how things will turn out in complex systems.
As a common example: people who built up lives in all those middle American factory towns where you could get a job out of high school paying $22/hour at a Ford supplier or whatever. You buy a house, have kids, your wife stays home and raises them. You buy snowmobiles, take holidays. Then the world shifts, the factory shuts down, your wife has to get a job after being out of the workforce for 15 years, holidays are off the table, etc.
Obviously this doesn't mean we should never renegotiate the social contract but this framing -- of making expensive irreversible decisions based on the prevailing social contract when you are 20-something and then being upset when that social contract changes -- made me more sympathetic to the stasis crowd.
[1]: It was either in Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World by Ryan Muldoon or The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society by Gerald Gaus, I don't remember which
In large part I'm 1000 percent "sympathetic" to the stasis crowd. If you live in a tranquil neighborhood, you might very reasonably prefer having 100 households within a quarter mile radius of your back yard than 400 households. I don't blame people for preferring the highest quality of life they can get.
I oppose NIMBYism and the various, other manifestations of the stasis subsidy simply because they cause a lot of problems, and on net, such policies don't (even begin) to pass any kind of utilitarian justification if we're indeed talking about the greater good.
That is to say, while I'm sympathetic, I wouldn't hesitate to take away the subsidy in question if I could.
This often isn't about "tranquility". It can be about building things that can't be built without destroying or damaging neighboring properties. I left a post about that. There seems to be no accountability if a developer builds in an area that can't handle the hardscape. See my post about what happened to my home.
Well yes, there's a finite supply of virgin land. Quite obviously, sometimes when you build new things you're replacing old things. And sometimes that's preferred, because undeveloped land is a precious resource.
So your "solution" would be to use eminent domain to force me out of the home which I bought and paid for and worked hard for to build equity?
You have no clue as to what you are unleashing. Given the massive corruption in our system right now, People in lower income groups will be displaced enmasse in favor of MORE luxury piss-poor construction that no one with an average income could ever afford?
In the corrupt and extreme economy like the US has right now, that is dead certain to create permanent state of destitution of the masses and push yet more money resources and control to the very top.
I will not sign on to that type of dystopia.
And btw, it isn't smart or ecologically valid to do massive building on wetlands. Which is exactly what builders have been doing.
>>So your "solution" would be to use eminent domain to force me out of the home which I bought and paid for and worked hard for to build equity?<<
I have no idea whether your house is situated in an area where we need to install wind turbines or a bullet train. All countries have eminent domain policies for the obvious reason that sometimes important stuff needs to get built. Full stop. It would suck to be forced out of one's home (at minimum we need to have fair compensatory policies). But you know what else sucks? Badly eroded competitiveness driven by an inability to build things. In the main, though, I don't think "insufficient eminent domain takings" are America's main problem in this area. What we mostly need is permitting and legal reform, at least when it comes to infrastructure.
With respect to housing, my view is that eminent domain almost need never play a role. To build more housing we mostly have to: A) establish a non-arbitrary, rules-based system for issuing building permits; and, B) restore property rights. If you've got ten acres and want to put up 500 units in an expensive metro area for humans who need places to live, you ought to be able to do so absent very rare and extenuating circumstances.
(I specified "metro" because I'm open to the idea that, sufficiently far from city centers—call it 50 miles—there may be a justification for policies explicitly designed to preserve wilderness, farmland and open space; but squaring the circle in this regard if anything probably means we need to encourage more *density* in order to make more economical use of land.)
Maybe $22 an hour in today's money, but paychecks in those jobs were nothing to brag about. You could buy a house that, today, nobody would want (my parents had one, now considered slum property although it was OK at the time) and a car that ran for four years before it needed major repairs. One car, so my father could get to work. Our standard of living in 1975 was much worse than most people remember. There was one big advantage - college was very cheap. But most people did not go to college at that time.
My comment was specifically about Janesville, WI, which had its factory idled in December 2008, not 1975. Curious that you assumed it was something that only happened half a century ago
My paternal and maternal families established themselves in the Janesville and Edgerton environs 1856 through 1890. In addition to the Janesville GMC plant closing in 2008, look at the regional impact of the Nunn Bush shoe factory closing long before 2008. My dad worked in the “shoe factory” post his 1933 Edgerton HS graduation in order to save up enough to attend UW Madison, which he did, graduating there in Dec 1942.
Also, from 1917 through to 1972, Highway Trailer provided good jobs to Janesvillians and Edgertonians living around and about its manufacturing plants.
Why is it important that we compete with China? Like what is the end goal of doing that. The purpose of building things should be to increase the quality of life for Americans, not just "compete with China".
We want to retain our dominance in key tech sectors like AI, biotech, etc. or else we would lose a hot war with them should that happen. So far we are ahead in these sectors, but the inability to build simple infrastructure and housing (along with other accumulated inefficiencies) paints a gloomy picture for our future growth in these fields
Right, usually a hypothetical war is given as the reason to compete with China and as such, the argument for working on our infrastructure is basically for defending the country or going to war.
My point is that this is a bad reason to upgrade infrastructure because people don't want to go to war.
Our infrastructure fails us every single day and should be improved, maintained, and built to increase our quality of life not to get us ready for a hypothetical attack.
Rather than thinking of it as a "hypothetical attack", you should think of it as all around fragility. Any reason to be less fragile, whether that comes from a hot war attack, cold war attack, natural disaster, famine, insurrection, climate disaster, supply chain shock, or any number of other possible national maladies, is the point. A robust, competent, and resilient people and infrastructure is the end game. It is important both for national defense and national prosperity.
Your quality of life is increased when your tail risk is hedged.
A common problem when a country is economically uncompetitive is people from wealthier countries come buy properties and businesses pricing the locals out and pushing them to the margins.
Hmm, I need to look at some data for that. Canada possesses one of the most powerful countries in the world, and yet a city like Vancouver has a real estate problem due to Chinese money. I agree that it is an issue, but governance might play a bigger role in that than economic dominance. Sure, China's economy is much greater than Canada's, but I would reason that Canada's economic success make it's real estate more desirable than a relatively less well-off country.
Regardless, I agree that foreigners purchasing on real estate can be a problem.
I've visited the USA 3 or 4 times over the years and the condition of essential infrastructure is, in places, very poor and in urgent need of replacing.
I'm sure this is an important impediment to some things, most obviously housing. But people always talk about the terrible shape of our roads, bridges, rail etc. The failure to maintain this basic stuff can't be the fault of NIMBYs since it's there already.
On another NIMBY point, America is still a largely empty country, and our built environment is pretty ugly. That opens up huge tracts of land to build either greenfield projects/communities or build over the decrepit strip malls and fast food chains that litter all the outskirts of our communities. I can't see any appreciable NIMBY resistance to either of these. But instead progressives keep pushing to build these things in the densest, most expensive areas, the ones that have the means to fund strong resistance. Focus on building a new Phoenix, not a symbolic victory of building cheap housing in Greenwich or wind farm off of Martha's Vineyard.
Transit and housing need to be built in places where people and jobs ARE, you can't just expect to "create a new city in the middle of nowhere" and just let everything else decay into dust.
A vibrant country includes vibrant cities, and that includes renewal and expansion to accommodate current needs, which are constantly changing and growing.
Did I say we should demolish existing cities? If I did, apologies, that's not my intent. New cities can take the pressure off of existing cities. And the 80% of the existing city layout can be used for new and better constructed housing. I just don't understand people like Matt Yglesias who insist on building new housing on the most historic/beautiful/expensive parts of cities. That won't go anywhere and isn't worth the effort. It's also a stupid idea, but that's a topic. for another day.
"Not worth the effort" only because of those regulations, which is what this article is about! If regulations change, then it would be worth the effort.
You can try to build a completely new city, but then you'd essentially have those nonproductive ghost cities located by a desert in China.
You're right, of course. I sometimes use quotes as a form of callout, or to group a set of words so that they are though of as "a single object" that I'm discussing. I realize that may not be proper, or there may be better ways to do that, but I have my (possibly bad) habits. Like excessive use of parentheticals. My punctuation reflects how I think. I'm sure a professional editor would have a field day.
Anyway, I was forced to take a class in high school about urban geography, how and why cities grow and arrange themselves. Cities are interesting things, the confluence of physical geography and the desires and interests of thousands, often millions, of people. They tend to grow organically. Its not a process that can be easily reproduced ex-nihilo. You can try to build a new city, but unless you have all the factors that make a city work, you'll more likely fail.
In my experience (commercial general contractor & developer), the NIMBY problem is very real when it comes to improving existing infrastructure. Much of our infrastructure is over the original design capacity and well past its useful life; upgrading it almost always triggers significant environmental compliance efforts, which abutters use to bludgeon the DOT and drag out the process. In my home state, a project to refurbish 25 miles of a major interstate highway took 40 years from initial planning to completion. During that time, bridges were crumbling, and traffic was gridlocked. Abutters, towns, rail advocacy groups, and environmental groups locked arms to stop the project; in that time, the construction budget doubled from $400,000,000 to $800,000,000.
I’m sorry, but as the party that would typically be on the giving end of a corrupt transaction, I don’t see it as an issue. If I thought for a second I was losing business to competitors that were buying work I’d be on the courtroom steps.
I’m certainly not saying that there have not been cases of corruption in the industry, but it is not the root cause of the delays and cost overruns.
Actually, I said in an earlier post I was a commercial/industrial general contractor and developer, not heavy & highway. I deal with the same regulatory and NIMBY issues noted in an earlier comment, though mine tend to be measured in years, not decades.
Many of Noah's blogs sail over my head, but this one lands right in my wheelhouse; I thought my experience might be relevant to the discussion. Thanks for reading!
Part of my background is in economic and housing development. I don't know of any people in your line who do differently from you - honest developers make this country run and provide us with the homes, factories, retail, and offices we need. My reference was regarding the big infrastructure projects which are either no longer done at all, or which take many years longer than planned and cost exponentially more than initial estimates. That would never fly in your industry or any other sane one - there's only a couple of reasons why a project like CA's high speed rail is the way it is, and it's ... the Big C and the Big G ... corruption and greed. There's also the Big I - which they always blame, but when people continuously make the same mistakes and have the same problems over and over, in most environments, they don't call it "incompetence" since it seems to be on purpose.
Maybe you don't know what "corruption" is - and yes, his comments do back that up. He said he'd do anything to stay in business and that is essential. But the discussion was about major infrastructure. The high speed rail in CA broke ground in 2015, and they have just now started building any of it - I just checked, 39 miles are done of the 119 proposed initial miles that go from noplace anyone wants to go to another place few are interested in traveling. $105 billion has been allocated and apparently $93 billion spent so far. For 39 miles. His words ring so true, and so do yours. This is theft in plain sight and neither of you gives a rat's a$$ as to the general cost (topic of this article) since both of you - are doing fine.
I'm not American so i could be totally wrong but isn't the opposition to building solar and wind in the "big empty spaces" indicative that it's not just a question of choosing the wrong places?
Also... the additional housing is needed in the cities and developed communities because that is where the jobs are. There are tons of old stock dying towns, villages and hamlets in this country with plenty of housing but no jobs or just dead end jobs that hardly pay enough to even afford that housing.
Yes very true - you only have to go outside of NYC about 50 miles in any direction to see those little towns. They mostly have very little jobs going on, just the usual old stores (all of them have a local Dollar store), a few older industries still chugging along on their last legs, and farms, none of which pay good wages.
Well yes, but jobs/economic activity and productivity congregate for economic reasons due to economic geography. The WFH revolution will change that to an extent, but you can't just wave a magic wand and create jobs wherever you want.
(Granted, the Federal government probably should start moving entire agencies in to the middle of nowhere America).
Agreed, but the 'abandon the struggling areas and just tell everyone to move to the big city' thing is both often bad advice and really really annoying.
It's really common among the YIMBY folks to just assume that -of course- everyone would want to move to NYC (or wherever) if we just build enough housing and infrastructure.
Not everyone would move but everything indicates that it would be a huge amount of people, and keeping housing artificially expensive is not helping struggling areas to grow their economies so maybe the best option for the moment would be to make housing affordable so those that want to move are able to do so
But we know that jobs move all the time, from the factory towns to the south after WWII, the tech migration from all over the country to a few small tech centers, and the current migration from snow belt to sun belt. Phoenix, Las Vegas, all the boomtowns in the southwest and elsewhere were nothing and had no jobs to offer before the mass migration. Development creates jobs which creates more development. We are wasting our time battling to build in the few areas that will fight back to supply housing for industries that may no longer be there when the housing is built.
If industries, move, it's veeeery slowly. And some don't. NYC was the financial and media capital of this country 100 and 200 years ago as well.
Heck, Detroit is still the center of the US auto industry, and even when all cars are electrified, I would bet you that auto R&D will be concentrated in or around Detroit rather than the Bay Area or elsewhere.
You really should read up on economic geography and agglomeration effects.
Nonsense. Try using that argument in hollowed out industrial areas where they saw their industries and jobs being moved offshore or down south (where there are no labor laws to prevent abuse) in a very short period of time. They would laugh in your face.
thanks, I never knew that, even though I addressed it a couple of times, including in my opening remarks. But I didn't put it as rudely as you so that helped me understand better. Just to be clear, I'm not advocating moving to dead places but rather new places. And you're going to say, rudely, that people won't move where the jobs aren't. But your textile example shows industries can and do move. New industries are created all the time. The early computer business was centered around Boston, then moved, and the biotech industry replaced it. And I don't know why people will laugh at me for trying to bring new life to their cities (eg Pittsburgh) and not you telling them to give up, you're dead. Lastly, for the sixth time, I'm also saying 80-90 percent of existing "in" cities are ugly and badly used. These are a much easier area to build on with little NIMBY opposition. I'm arguing that Yglesias' idea that we need to build new ugly stuff on top of the most historic/scenic/expensive areas. That won't fly.
Somewhat yes, somewhat no. I was listening to someone who talked about it as, "lakers vs farmers." If you want to put wind on a farmer's land, they may or may not do it, but they are definitely interested and usually ready to discuss it. To them, it's another way of making the land productive.
A "laker" is the owner of that nice home on the water, or even a vacation home. They don't want solar panels where they go to vacation, or see wind turbines from their deck, or god forbid take their boat a different route.
But there isn't opposition to that, unless you're talking about a solar farm in the Rockies overlooking Aspen. The entire middle of the country is empty and flat, and the southwest is a desert.
Of course, if you happen to reside in a desert or farming community and enjoy your unspoiled backyard, you might prefer the solar panels remain in Aspen. The NIMBY problem is by its nature local, one person's desert is another's Aspen.
There is plenty of opposition. Near my home in rural Wisconsin there is a huge battle going on over solar panels going up in former farm fields. Concerns about everything from being unsightly (vs monocrop corn for example), causing issues with pollinators, and on and on.
Well, often there are pieces of infrastructure that need to be replaced, but the general difficulty of doing th at in America means that instead they are badly maintained past their replacement date.
NIMBYism demand a very spread-out and driving-oriented environment, which demands extreme amounts of infrastructure per person, which is too much maintenance over too small a tax base to keep up with properly.
Phoenix is an abomination (both in this regard, and in general). My goal is to create enough capacity in humane, walkable places that the Phoenixes of the world can be returned to nature. Or at least left to the people who actually want to live in them vs. being the only option affordable at scale.
There's also the excessive environmental damage of continued development. Cities are far-and-away the most resource efficient way to live. And (until Covid) cities were undergoing a great revival. So it's not like we have to force people to live in them. We just have to allow them to grow with the population that wants to live in them.
But HOW DO YOU DO THAT with the corruption that is in place. The "solutions" don't do a damn thing for problems at hand. They also do a LOT of environmental damage. If you think construction in cities is benign - you are smoking something you shouldn't. Further, nothing gets done unless it is lining deep pockets with more more, MORE. And the "good" that it was intended to do is nonexistent.
I would argue that most big development has made environmental problems WORSE. The developers WON'T build anything affordable. The wriggle out of all the affordable mandates that cities and towns have put on the books with a one-time payment. The wriggle out of green space requirements, density limits that were set for a REASON and anything else you can name.
Then the YIMBYS wag their fingers, and say ....."But we need affordable housing!!!!!". Then they get what THEY want because it lines the right pockets ... and affordability GETS WORSE because all they put up ALL LUXURY HOUSING! Then people are FORCED to move further away from employment hubs creating massively polluting commutes. Congratulations! Your "big ideas" just made people's lives much worse and also increased our carbon footprint. Well done.
The entire logic behind 90% of all YIMBYism is based on the false premise that volume will solve everything and rental prices will become magically affordable. Well, folks , that isn't WORKING. I've seen this so many times that boggles the mind that people banging their heads against the same damn wall, thinking that we'll hit a "tipping point" and things will suddenly change.
Well, they won't. That's because apartments, condos, and homes have ceased to be shelter and have become investments that many see fit to keep vacant. The relationship between supply and demand that would make this tactic work was severed long ago.
And finally. Having 3/4 of the land mass of nation hollowed out with rural poverty or crumbling industrial centers isn't good for anyone. Eventually, cities have to get by with the fact that they can't support more growth. PERIOD. Try addressing those issues and you might actually get somewhere.
Here's the thing, a lot of what you are saying about the pitfalls of new development might be true, but they are even more true for the only other kind of development we seem to be able to build in the last 30 years: car dependent, McMansion filled exurbs. Those are the definition of luxury housing. New apartments and condos might all be "luxury" housing as well, but at least they're dense and near the center of cities which mitigates the need to build as much new infrastructure and makes mass transit a possibility (or at least people using less gas to get around).
I would also contend that many NIMBYs aren't thinking in a large enough time scale. We have spent 50-70 years building fossil fuel dependent and car centric cities. We have just started in the last decade or so trying to reverse that trend. A new "luxury" apartment building may not become affordable for a decade or more, but at least by building it you create the chance for real urbanism at some point. Saying no to those projects and allowing cities to sprawl endlessly with no counter balance near the center won't do that.
If you build all luxury housing, everyone moves up a notch on the property ladder and that lowers prices.
Housing is used as an investment because NIMBYism makes its value appreciate and that makes it a good investment. Building more housing discourages such speculation because it brings housing prices down.
Oh really? Then explain to me why THE EXACT OPPOSITE IS HAPPENING in major metropolitan areas in spite of a massive increase in rental housing?
Why? Because it's ALL #!%$ING LUXURY HOUSING!!! These a$$holes promised greater affordability that they NEVER for a single second intended to make good on and crushed nice turned nice and decent middle class area into havens where elites only need apply. The middle and working class that was promised more housing was simply displaced. Meanwhile, the slumlords renting rat-infested dumps look at the high rental rates and THEY raise their rents. People desperately need housing near work who have the means, cough up over 50% of their income for a roof and the rest are left homeless or forced further and further away from employment hubs. This has been going on for decades.
I've heard this nonsense over and over and over and over and over and over and over for the past 15 years and it has always worked in the EXACT OPPOSITE DIRECTION.
Like all propaganda, telling the same lie over and over again deludes the masses into thinking it's true. But in the end, it just one big lie.
Because the high price areas are where the people and the jobs are and is where the new housing and infrastructure is needed. Do you know how hard it is to create brand new urban agglomerations?
And btw, a lot of the worst nimbyism is in suburban sprawl areas dominated by strip malls and fast food chains. If you don't see it then you haven't paid attention.
America's largely empty because nobody wants to live in those places.
The main problem is that due to agglomeration effects all the good jobs are and always will be in existing cities, but also we really do have to develop SoCal and NYC. We can't put everyone in the Central Valley, it's a desert!
These comments are so frustrating, not just yours but all the people who lecture me on urban planning. I used Phoenix as a city that is gigantic and growing and relatively new to address people's continued statements that no new cities are possible. People will only live in existing cities etc. It's just not true, but neither is my saying Phoenix is a paradise. It's an ugly sprawl. And I don't even know what the Central Valley is except people use it as a prototypical example of a bad place. But so much of the country is empty and not desert. And I keep offering up the 80% of existing cities that are a disaster zone and car-oriented, and I get back comments telling me I'm an idiot because you can't dump people into deserts with no jobs. I don't need a phd in urban planning to know that that plan is not viable. All I'm trying to do is say the core of most cities has things worth retaining. But I think most angry YIMBY tweeters want to target those areas just to be annoying.
Alex is unaware that he shoves food in his piehole because of the Central Valley. He enjoys all of his protein, fruits, vegetables because of the Central Valley. It is in no way a "desert." People are increasingly moving there - but the ag lifestyle is very different from the city lifestyle and pollution is also pretty bad due to how industrialized agriculture is conducted. It produces 25% of US food.
Thanks for the clarification. The only thing I really knew about the Central Valley was that it was a major agricultural center. But when I was told it was a desert I figured yet again I was being stupid, at least by the high standards of the commenters here.
I don't - fortunately - live in LA any more. I was the development officer for the first, last, and only "green" affordable special needs housing project in the county. It's really sad how people just shove food in their mouth, with no conception of where it comes from. Like the burger was once an animal. Pizza sauce, tomatoes and onions that grew in the ground. The factory of industrialized ag in the CA Central Valley is filled with people who are as smart as, maybe smarter than people who live in cities and push pixels for a living. I personally disagree with the direction industrialized agriculture has taken because it is unhealthy overall, similar to the suburban sprawl and paved-over megalopolises - but then there's people that think one of the world's largest and certainly the most productive and sophisticated agricultural regions is a "desert." Whatever they are doing there with the water? It's beyond me. I know it's jockeying for power and that the "environmental" restrictions that come from time to time are just economic pressure and have nothing to do with any fish or bird that supposedly needs to be "saved." CA's "environmental" movement is a tragic fraud.
You're right, it would be comparatively pretty easy to build a solar and wind farm in the middle of the San Luis Valley. Cheap, too! You can get acres of land for less than $10k.
It would power approximately jack and squat because the people out there largely don't have money to pay for power. They get their water needs met by filling big tanks once or more a week and bringing it back to their homesteads.
We want things built to enhance our built environment because *we live there*, not in the middle of Pennsyltuckey or any place else where the judge is the barber is the diesel mechanic. We should be focusing on where the problems are and bringing those solutions to fruition, not finding some place else to huck 'em.
My husband and I were just talking about "Why do people do this?" Build hideous strip malls, pave over green areas - why did people look at their lifestyle as being car-based? People do not have to live in giant cities. Life is better when it is less-crowded and there are more natural areas. That said - do you really think a "new Phoenix" is a good idea? Most cities are build on or near ... wait for it ... what might it be? Could it be ... water? Ding ding ding ...
The giant cities are what preserves more natural areas; if everyone lives in one dense area then you don't have to develop sprawl over the rest of it.
As for why we did sprawl in the first place, it's mostly government policy; see Strong Towns. It's so expensive to build like that, it would never have happened on its own.
It makes me wonder - which came first? Was this just to sell cars? Vague ideas form in my mind about how people could live better, healthier, and happier - because it's not just cars and roads and slurbia, it's how are people fed? I feel like more local food is extremely important but it seems as though the solutions are only implemented in last-case scenarios like Detroit, where they have open land in the city. Land that has "opened up" - I guess - due to urban decay. Los Angeles could do some of that - I was involved in some projects but I was on plenty of committees where the only person who knew a thing about growing anything ... was me. And I don't know much.
I don't think cities should be full of millions at high density. I've done business plans for businesses that sell energy walls and next-generation solar windows. It's possible to build self-powering buildings and there are a few in the world. But the tech behind solar is environmentally damaging and the panels are not long-lasting and permanent. At lower density, it is easily possible to create regenerative agriculture systems to feed much larger numbers than in the past. In a city like Detroit, there is adequate open space to do this. There are also alternatives to rooftop gardens such as vertical gardening. There's one city ... trying to think of its name ... really high density, super clean, has 10% of veges and fruits from gardens within the ... it's Singapore!!! https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61919430
Wasn't one reason why there was such a big push for sprawl in 1950s America, a desire to disperse the population so that fewer people would be within the blast radius of any given Soviet nuclear detonation?
Well, weirdly we've been ignoring that axiom for a while, and the fastest growing cities are pretty far from water. This will eventually (quickly) become untenable especially due to the already tight water situation in the west. And you're right, Phoenix is a hideous city. I was just using it as an example of a fast growing city that came from nowhere to counter argument that we can only build new housing in existing cities.
Being near water doesn’t help for Southern California; LA and San Diego are basically as dependent on Colorado for water as Phoenix is, although that could be fixed with desalination plants, which environmentalists and NIMBYs also oppose.
Not really. SoCal cities get a bit of water from the Colorado, but most of our water comes from the California Aqueduct (i.e., central/northern CA, mostly from the Sierras). It's Imperial Valley agriculture that gulps most of the Colorado River water coming to California.
Water is fungible, if the imperial valley used the California aqueduct water instead of Colorado river water then that water would not be available for the cities. Phoenix is closer to the Rockies than LA or San Diego are to the Sierras.
Agreed! I was just talking with a couple from Phoenix who had moved here to Florida. They didn't like the lifestyle and said it's getting rapidly worse - congestion, heat, water shortages -
Oh! That's a disaster in the making for sure! I don't have the depth of your experience, but I've read articles about it and it's totally insane. That's what I mean by vested interests not solving anything, but making matters worse.
For once, Noah, I agree with you 100%. And I have a quote for you: "From December 1941 to September 1945 is 4 years. In those 4 years, we defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Today it takes 17 years to add a 5th runway to the Atlanta airport. We are simply not prepared to be a serious country anymore."
Those words were spoken more than 15 years ago by Newt Gingrich, in a speech in Atlanta. I found the quote so unbelievable that I checked it. It's fairly accurate: the first Environmental Assessment is from the early 90's; constructions started in 2002; the runway opened in 2006. Whether it's 12 years or 17... it's way too long to build a necessary and basic public transportation amenity.
I served on the local Planning Commission for Elk Grove, CA (pop approx 150K) from 2006-2014. I can attest that you and Gingrich are correct: we are no longer prepared to be serious about building anything. Boilerplate "environmental impact" statements utterly devoid of useful content but costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce will kill a tree each time they're printed. I used to think this was just being extra-careful, then I saw how the sausage was made. Now I think they're basically make-work for environmentalists who can't get a real job. They're not the only ones though. Union leaders use CEQA (CA's Clean Air / Water Act) to delay any non-union project in environmental litigation for years. It's not about the environment; it's extortion. The moment the developer signs a union-scale, project labor agreement, the lawsuits vanish. The NIMBYism (from both Left and Right) is small potatoes compared to this sort of thing.
God help us if we had to actually tool up for a war. Can't you see it already: "sorry, we can't build battleships because the construction might hurt the endangered sea turtles". I like sea turtles and spotted owls and CA condors too, but at some point, the needs of people factor into the equation. Right now, they pretty much don't.
BTW: Don't tell any of your more lefty friends that you agree with Gingrich about something. They might vote you off the island.
I found another great example this morning. Between 1889 and 1900, we built the Chicago Drainage Canal which reversed the direction of the Chicago River, thus eliminating the cholera epidemics caused by the river carrying sewage into Lake Michigan.
Today there is a lot of (perhaps justified) environmental criticism for this. But it's still a great illustration of how far we're fallen. It takes longer to add a 5th runway to the Atlanta airport today than it did to dig a 28 mile canal with mostly ditch diggers (people, not machines.)
«I like sea turtles and spotted owls and CA condors too, but at some point, the needs of people factor into the equation. Right now, they pretty much don't.»
Grover Norquist: «The growth of the investor class -- those 70 per cent of voters who own stock and are more opposed to taxes and regulations on business as a result -- is strengthening the conservative movement. [...] Now if you say we're going to smash the big corporations, 60-plus percent of voters say "That's my retirement you're messing with. I don't appreciate that". And the Democrats have spent 50 years explaining that Republicans will pollute the earth and kill baby seals to get market caps higher. And in 2002, voters said, “We're sorry about the seals and everything but we really got to get the stock market up.”»
«BTW: Don't tell any of your more lefty friends that you agree with Gingrich about something.»
Newt Gingrich:«For most Americans the speed limit is a benchmark of opportunity. This is not a light insight.
If you have a society where almost every middle class person routinely fudges the law, that’s telling us something. We have laws that matter – murder, rape, and we have laws that don’t matter.
The first thing that every good American says each morning is “What’s the angle?” “How can I get around it?” “What does my lawyer think?” “There must be a loophole!” [...] America is the most incentive-driven society on the planet.»
> Let’s be clear about what an mRNA vaccine physically is. It is an RNA sequence in a lipid nanoparticle. RNA is like DNA but different. “Lipid” means “fat” and “nano” means “small.” To make the vaccine, you cook a bunch of enzymes and reagents and stuff to make the RNA, then put it in a fancy mixer with some special-ass fat. Done.
> An official course of the Moderna vaccine is 200 micrograms. The last time I took 200 micrograms of anything it was on a little paper square with a picture of Felix the Cat. 60kg of a chemical we’ve known how to make for a year would have averted this whole shitshow. Your mother could benchpress enough RNA to save America from Covid.
> The problem is not that it takes a year to cook up a bathtub of RNA, which is basically just cell jism, and blend it with a half-ton of lard. It does take a year, though, to build a production line that produces an FDA-approved biological under Good Manufacturing Practices. It’s quite impressive to get this done and it wasn’t cheap neither.
> The reader will be utterly unsurprised to learn that good in this context means perfect. As the saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of Grandma.
> If 1940s America—or even 1970s America—had had some shortage of super-special surgical glass vials, or some such shit-tier excuse, they would have parked a bathtub of chilled cell-jism-lard in a reefer truck, picked up a couple of half-educated Air Force medics wielding filthy bulk jet injectors, and driven around town with a loudspeaker blaring icecream jingles. Grandma might have gotten hepatitis—but not pneumonia.
> When we diagnose the effort that from end to end will get us all vaccinated in 18 to 24 months, the problem is not in the work or the workers, but the rules and assumptions. “Warp speed” simply meant doing everything by the book, but as fast as possible. This made it, like, five times as fast as usual.
> While this is nice, a process improvement of any such magnitude is unlikely to be anywhere near the limit of diminishing returns. Rather, it indicates that something was seriously wrong with the efficiency of the original process.
> In a situation like this—why should “usual” even matter? Why should there be a book? 1940s America would have thrown away the book and solved this as a one-off, and so would your eight-year-old.
> What ‘20s America should have done was to find the equivalent of General Groves—someone who knew nothing about public health, and everything about getting shit done—and order him to win the war on SARS-CoV-2, with zero rules.
> For example, such an effort would have used good manufacturing practices—but not perfect ones. Since perfect is the official standard, and good but not perfect does not exist, it would have to be invented. That’s something else ‘40s America was good at.
I disagree about the endangered species. Species extinction cannot be undone. The biosphere is a complex interacting system that we depend on for our survival. Allowing any species extinction is pulling a random bolt out of a plane you're flying in. Do it enough times and the plane crashes, and you don't know which bolt will cause that.
Species die all the time. Vast majority of species that ever existed went extinct. Nature is not some well-balanced system of delicate dependencies that, when disturbed, creates a cascading failure which wrecks everything. It's the opposite - it's anti-fragile. Of course there are exceptions.
I was at a dinner with some family who live in western Massachusetts about a year ago. Two items for your consideration.
First, the region had recently voted down a natural gas pipeline proposed to run through the area. Shortly after, the local gas utility started denying all requests for additional connections to the distribution network. This was widely interpreted as corporate retribution instead of, you know, basically fucking Newtonian physics.
Second, the town was considering a repeal of some ordinance that gave property owners effective veto rights over what adjacent property owners did with their, you know, property. I said something to the effect of, "If you want to be sure their construction doesn't impact your quality of life, build further back from your property line," and they looked at me like I was Donald Trump's own asshole. True story.
And you know, these people are liberal as the day is long on the summer solstice, but you're a fool if you think conservatives don't pull the same. Make of that what you will. I personally think America had it coming.
I'm trying to figure out the galaxy brain take that's something along the lines of getting exclusionary zoning declared a hazardous environmental contamination and thus declaring obstructionist policies a valid target of Superfund remediation.... ;)
We had to move from a wonderful neighborhood that was completely destroyed as student housing for the university expanded in to our neighborhood. Most of the students were perfectly fine and sincerely welcomed. But a minority of students insisted on loud parties in their front yard until 4am. When such a party house moved in both just behind us and right next door we finally had to bail and run. Sure, we talked to these neighbors, and their landlords, and the police. Nobody did anything. So if you want to hear a real rant, just keep writing about that. :-)
Why don't we get the government to enforce laws about loud parties at night instead of laws (implicitly) banning all students because they *might* have loud parties?
It seems logical to allow a student housing hall or townhouse development reserved for student use to avoid the spillover. But it is not just students. The Air BnB party houses are also a pox on neighborhoods.
And the bane of people looking for affordable housing. My town has over 1,000 housing units devoted to Air BnB, and restaurants in town closing during the week because they can't find staff to work there, as staff can't find housing. Have grown to loathe Air BnB.
Sounds good to me. The obstacle seems to be that the police have a great many other things to do, which are reasonably defined as being more important.
To be fair to students and young people in general....
We moved from the urban neighborhood near the university out to the suburbs on the edge of town, inhabited by adult white collar professional types. Where upon we were immediately blasted with dog barking from every direction. That's improved substantially in recent years, but we're still only one bad neighbor away from sonic chaos.
Point being, the problem is less students than it is human beings in general.
You have an interesting theory. We should investigate it further with a scientific experiment. Let's try this...
I'll stand out in front of your house blasting a boom box for a couple of hours in the middle of the night a couple days a week. After a month of that we'll send you a survey to see how you wish to define this phenomena.
1) Tom is sensitive to noise.
2) People who impose that kind of racket on their neighbors are assholes.
Just go ahead and post your address and we'll get this study underway. Should be interesting!
So maybe don't live by other humans, then. Life is all about tradeoffs. Complaining about other people when you can do something to maximize your happiness seems weird to me.
Sounds like the university didn't expand student housing, but that students expanded into off-campus housing. It sounds to me like exactly what Noah is saying is a problem: The university unable or unwilling to increase student housing on its own campus.
I think this is an important point and not just specific to college towns. Most Americans just don't want to live somewhere like SF or NYC and will pull out all the stops to prevent their neighborhood from becoming that. That's not a normative judgment, it's just an observation.
The fact of the matter is, it's a cultural problem/incompatibility. If you're relying on police to enforce these kinds of problems you've already lost half the battle. Americans just can't seem to coexist in dense environments that are desirable to most people and it's a small fraction of people who cause all the antisocial behavior.
Think of it another way, if you swapped all the Japanese people in Japan for Americans, would you get the same society? Of course not, it'd probably be chaos. That's not to say that Americans could *never* learn to live in dense Asian/European cities but it'd require a massive shift in social expectations.
SF is hardly that dense, and I think suburb lovers would be very happy with most of it. Similarly, lots of people love LA and NYC, that's why they all live there.
(SF does have real problems but most people aren't familiar with them. Instead they only know about fake problems.)
Everybody can choose where to buy a house. Choosing to live in a neighbood where a college could expand into and then complaining about the inevitable seems. . . short-sighted?
Cultivating a long-term perspective is tough, but if you want to stay in a neighborhood for 50 years, you probably should try to imagine how it could change over those 50 years, especially if there is a university the next neighborhood over (and how realistic are you to expect a neighborhood to not change over half a century?)
Look little dude, the people I was complaining about were waking up other students at 4am too. So were the good students supposed to anticipate that there would be ass hole morons in their class and so not go to college? Again, like I already said, MOST of the students were FINE and were WELCOMED.
There must be a natural law to bureaucracy where the more people you have working in an organisation the harder and harder it becomes to get anything done. Everyone knows that the infrastructure is crumbling and you’d think the Ohio train disaster would wake up legislators and civil servants and yet, still nothing gets done.
In the analysis of subway costs in the US that Noah linked, they found that one of the biggest issues is that decisions were made by inexperienced politicians and political appointees instead of by career civil servants who have gained experiencing by working their way up the ranks. Those inexperienced political appointees then delegate everything to external contractors instead of to the civil servants because there’s some sort of innate fear to trusting people who work for the government. But in the rest of the world outside of the anglosphere, they get things done by trusting the government bureaucracy and developing things bottom-up because they make sense instead of top-down because a politician supported it.
Of course, sometimes a politician does have a place in defining a large country wide effort, but we first need to let educated and experienced civil servants actually do the correct jobs. Also we should send them over to Europe and East Asia to learn how the civil servants over there do it.
That’s really interesting. Here in England our civil service is very bloated and quite inefficient with so many checks and balances (which are good thing in a sense) that it becomes incredibly hard to do anything with speed. Our vaccine program was a notable exception and that was organised by a special Vaccine Taskforce’ - a very small team with just the one job. Has led to debate here whether we should copy start-up model and have lots of small teams moving dynamically on different projects. Alas, have seen little evidence of them putting into practice this idea since.
Yeah, the analysis I’ve seen points to the bureaucracy in the UK as also being bad, but as the rest of Europe generally being better. There’s something of an anglophone bias, where English-speaking civil servants only bother to learn from other English speaking countries, while civil servants in the rest of Europe tend to speak both English and their native language (and often more!) and thus will learn from a broader array of examples.
Essentially the point I’m trying to make is civil servants are probably really competent (as you say is the US) but it’s just the bureaucratic system that prevents them from being able to get anything done!
Mmm, there’s the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, that within an organization there are two groups- those dedicated to the goals of the organization, and those dedicated to the organization itself. The second group always gains and keeps control of the organization.
That disaster, as far as I've understood it from the news, was caused by the poor rail infrastructure. If it wasn't so hard to build then perhaps it would never have happened.
This is nonsense. Not only do you generally not need permission to maintain something, especially when that thing is a freight car, but American private rail companies are so chronically investment-averse that "NIMBYs" can only be a minor part of the cause.
I read that there were some hotbox detectors that didn't work as they should have (e.g. an infrastructure issue), but to be honest the particulars aren't really the point. We can disagree on whether the train derailment is a good example or not (it may not be - and I'm certainly not trying to take away any blame from the train company themselves), the point I was trying to make was simply that large organisations struggle to get things done effectively because of the bureaucratic systems needed to manage that many people.
Feb 27, 2023·edited Feb 27, 2023Liked by Noah Smith
I agree with this post but not every one of its points. E.g., "Meanwhile, across the USA, housing is just not getting built."
I'm not sure this is true, especially for the kind of housing all right-thinking YIMBYs care about: multi-unit construction, especially buildings with 5+ units. That's going up, a lot. Starts are at their highest point since the mid-1980s (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST5F). And when you look at what's in the pipeline -- multi-family units currently under construction -- that's at the highest point since the 1970s, when the huge Boomer generation was just starting to build households (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNDCON5MUSA).
What has only seen a very small increase is new starts of duplexes/triplexes/fourplexes (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNDCON24USA). For whatever reason, these have fallen out of fashion and are being eclipsed by construction of much larger apartment/condo buildings.
What we're seeing instead is a dramatic pullback on the number of starts of *single family homes* (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST1F). And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Feb 28, 2023·edited Mar 6, 2023Liked by Noah Smith
My favorite post yet. The only way out is innovation in atoms, to bypass the regulatory framework and start anew. Self-flying personal cars will change the way we live. It has the potential to fix the transportation and housing problem by enabling short commutes and affordable living far away from the city centers. Unfortunately, we are a good 20 years away from personal flying cars because of battery tech. I wish we could improve upon the current situation, but I think opinions are too entrenched and won’t change without some sort of calamity.. but we can always innovate our way out of it!
This is an example of the tragedy of the anticommons.
From Wikipedia:
"The tragedy of the anticommons is a type of coordination breakdown, in which a commons does not emerge, even when general access to resources or infrastructure would be a social good. It is a mirror-image of the older concept of tragedy of the commons... The "tragedy of the anticommons" covers a range of coordination failures, including patent thickets and submarine patents. Overcoming these breakdowns can be difficult, but there are assorted means, including eminent domain, laches, patent pools, or other licensing organizations."
Essentially, the tragedy of the anticommons means there are too many rights holders and they cannot come to agreement. Much regulation, including zoning and environmental law, creates more rights holders.
The classic Chinese examples are the "nail houses".
Minor quibble: "2/3 of Americans who owns a home" is wrong: 2/3 of households are owner occupied. Any solution that removes net value to the owners will be vigorously opposed for simple pocketbook reasons. Which is why they fight so vigourously with and for zoning.
Boston's "Big Dig" project successfully solved such problems, but at an enormous cost: it was the most expensive highway project of its sort ever. It did so by settling with every stakeholder: no use of eminent domain.
A legislative solution might involve recognizing the values of the overlapping rights, pricing violations of those rights above those values, and allowing specific high-priority projects to simply pay for them (as eminent domain does) without entering the very slow tort system.
"Ikiru" is a brilliant Japanese film by Kurosawa that illustrates overcoming a number of such issues on a very small scale. I'm sure you've seen it, Noah. I don't usually like tearjerkers, but this one is great.
Isn't the "Big Dig" the one where the contractor skimped on the glue and took shortcuts in the construction and the ceiling collapsed and closed the tunnel and killed a lady? I forget how many others were injured but it's a famous civil engineering "Do Not Do" case study used in construction/engineering texts.
Breaking the backs of the NIMBYs and stomping them into the dust is needed if America is to remain competitive. The UK didn’t do that and now it gets to enter a not-so-genteel decline.
This is the first time I’ve read someone articulate the “stasis subsidy” argument. It’s a particular framework for thinking about these issues that hadn’t occurred to me, I must confess. But it’s an insightful and elegant way to analyze the US right now. Noah, this is an incredibly powerful article. Thanks. (Would make an interesting book.)
Thanks!!
i read this https://byrnehobart.medium.com/the-30-year-mortgage-is-an-intrinsically-toxic-product-200c901746a a couple of years ago and return to it periodically. seems plausible that nimbyism and nimby-enabling legislation is downstream of the ubiquity of fixed-rate 30-year mortgages, which (cyclically) lock the majority of the majority's assets into a highly illiquid, highly levered long position on a 3-block radius — or else (cyclically) unlock everyone all at once.
I read something in contract theory[1] is that people are agreeing to a kind of "social contract" with society writ large and they often make big, expensive, hard to undo decisions quite early in their life based on their understanding of that contract. Deciding what careers to pursue, where to take out a mortgage to buy a house, whether your wife should stop working, whether you need to save for college or just a high school education is enough for your kids, how many children to have, and so on.
But at certain times in history societies relatively suddenly include more stakeholders who, understandably, what some amount of revision of the social contract. But that revision might (probably?) will result in undermining some of the decisions previously made by others. It's a complex system and it isn't like people are good at forecasting how things will turn out in complex systems.
As a common example: people who built up lives in all those middle American factory towns where you could get a job out of high school paying $22/hour at a Ford supplier or whatever. You buy a house, have kids, your wife stays home and raises them. You buy snowmobiles, take holidays. Then the world shifts, the factory shuts down, your wife has to get a job after being out of the workforce for 15 years, holidays are off the table, etc.
Obviously this doesn't mean we should never renegotiate the social contract but this framing -- of making expensive irreversible decisions based on the prevailing social contract when you are 20-something and then being upset when that social contract changes -- made me more sympathetic to the stasis crowd.
[1]: It was either in Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World by Ryan Muldoon or The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society by Gerald Gaus, I don't remember which
>>made me more sympathetic to the stasis crowd.<<
In large part I'm 1000 percent "sympathetic" to the stasis crowd. If you live in a tranquil neighborhood, you might very reasonably prefer having 100 households within a quarter mile radius of your back yard than 400 households. I don't blame people for preferring the highest quality of life they can get.
I oppose NIMBYism and the various, other manifestations of the stasis subsidy simply because they cause a lot of problems, and on net, such policies don't (even begin) to pass any kind of utilitarian justification if we're indeed talking about the greater good.
That is to say, while I'm sympathetic, I wouldn't hesitate to take away the subsidy in question if I could.
This often isn't about "tranquility". It can be about building things that can't be built without destroying or damaging neighboring properties. I left a post about that. There seems to be no accountability if a developer builds in an area that can't handle the hardscape. See my post about what happened to my home.
Well yes, there's a finite supply of virgin land. Quite obviously, sometimes when you build new things you're replacing old things. And sometimes that's preferred, because undeveloped land is a precious resource.
So your "solution" would be to use eminent domain to force me out of the home which I bought and paid for and worked hard for to build equity?
You have no clue as to what you are unleashing. Given the massive corruption in our system right now, People in lower income groups will be displaced enmasse in favor of MORE luxury piss-poor construction that no one with an average income could ever afford?
In the corrupt and extreme economy like the US has right now, that is dead certain to create permanent state of destitution of the masses and push yet more money resources and control to the very top.
I will not sign on to that type of dystopia.
And btw, it isn't smart or ecologically valid to do massive building on wetlands. Which is exactly what builders have been doing.
>>So your "solution" would be to use eminent domain to force me out of the home which I bought and paid for and worked hard for to build equity?<<
I have no idea whether your house is situated in an area where we need to install wind turbines or a bullet train. All countries have eminent domain policies for the obvious reason that sometimes important stuff needs to get built. Full stop. It would suck to be forced out of one's home (at minimum we need to have fair compensatory policies). But you know what else sucks? Badly eroded competitiveness driven by an inability to build things. In the main, though, I don't think "insufficient eminent domain takings" are America's main problem in this area. What we mostly need is permitting and legal reform, at least when it comes to infrastructure.
With respect to housing, my view is that eminent domain almost need never play a role. To build more housing we mostly have to: A) establish a non-arbitrary, rules-based system for issuing building permits; and, B) restore property rights. If you've got ten acres and want to put up 500 units in an expensive metro area for humans who need places to live, you ought to be able to do so absent very rare and extenuating circumstances.
(I specified "metro" because I'm open to the idea that, sufficiently far from city centers—call it 50 miles—there may be a justification for policies explicitly designed to preserve wilderness, farmland and open space; but squaring the circle in this regard if anything probably means we need to encourage more *density* in order to make more economical use of land.)
Deal, your property is your property and you have all the rights to it.
At the same time, please explain what right you have to have a say in what your neighbor is building on their own land?
Maybe $22 an hour in today's money, but paychecks in those jobs were nothing to brag about. You could buy a house that, today, nobody would want (my parents had one, now considered slum property although it was OK at the time) and a car that ran for four years before it needed major repairs. One car, so my father could get to work. Our standard of living in 1975 was much worse than most people remember. There was one big advantage - college was very cheap. But most people did not go to college at that time.
My comment was specifically about Janesville, WI, which had its factory idled in December 2008, not 1975. Curious that you assumed it was something that only happened half a century ago
My paternal and maternal families established themselves in the Janesville and Edgerton environs 1856 through 1890. In addition to the Janesville GMC plant closing in 2008, look at the regional impact of the Nunn Bush shoe factory closing long before 2008. My dad worked in the “shoe factory” post his 1933 Edgerton HS graduation in order to save up enough to attend UW Madison, which he did, graduating there in Dec 1942.
Builders and makers need to carry on:
https://www.wispolitics.com/2017/wisconsin-historical-society-the-nunn-bush-shoe-company-factory-in-milwaukee-listed-in-national-register-of-historic-places
Also, from 1917 through to 1972, Highway Trailer provided good jobs to Janesvillians and Edgertonians living around and about its manufacturing plants.
https://mycompanies.fandom.com/wiki/Highway_Trailer_Company
Sure. A lot of people lived like Ralph Kramden. We tend to view the past through sepia-colored spectacles.
Virginia Postrel did a great book on this 25 years ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_and_Its_Enemies
It’s the #1 thing holding back more economic growth and prosperity in the country.
It’s and insane unforced error.
The US will never compete with China with our short sightedness and inability to build.
It’s lunacy.
Defeating the NIMBYs and the NIMBY mindset will be one of the most important tasks of this generation.
Much much more support and amplification of this message is needed Noah (and friends).
Help!
I’ve written about this as well. It’s a tragic own goal. And it’s must change.
https://medium.com/@Greg_Costigan/nimbys-are-destroying-the-future-we-deserve-22b52bc05afe
Why is it important that we compete with China? Like what is the end goal of doing that. The purpose of building things should be to increase the quality of life for Americans, not just "compete with China".
We want to retain our dominance in key tech sectors like AI, biotech, etc. or else we would lose a hot war with them should that happen. So far we are ahead in these sectors, but the inability to build simple infrastructure and housing (along with other accumulated inefficiencies) paints a gloomy picture for our future growth in these fields
Right, usually a hypothetical war is given as the reason to compete with China and as such, the argument for working on our infrastructure is basically for defending the country or going to war.
My point is that this is a bad reason to upgrade infrastructure because people don't want to go to war.
Our infrastructure fails us every single day and should be improved, maintained, and built to increase our quality of life not to get us ready for a hypothetical attack.
Rather than thinking of it as a "hypothetical attack", you should think of it as all around fragility. Any reason to be less fragile, whether that comes from a hot war attack, cold war attack, natural disaster, famine, insurrection, climate disaster, supply chain shock, or any number of other possible national maladies, is the point. A robust, competent, and resilient people and infrastructure is the end game. It is important both for national defense and national prosperity.
Your quality of life is increased when your tail risk is hedged.
A common problem when a country is economically uncompetitive is people from wealthier countries come buy properties and businesses pricing the locals out and pushing them to the margins.
Hmm, I need to look at some data for that. Canada possesses one of the most powerful countries in the world, and yet a city like Vancouver has a real estate problem due to Chinese money. I agree that it is an issue, but governance might play a bigger role in that than economic dominance. Sure, China's economy is much greater than Canada's, but I would reason that Canada's economic success make it's real estate more desirable than a relatively less well-off country.
Regardless, I agree that foreigners purchasing on real estate can be a problem.
We and our allies are less likely to get attacked if we maintain military dominance.
It is not the #1 thing. It is just 1 of many.
A serious lack of ppl educated in a trade is just as much the issue.
I've visited the USA 3 or 4 times over the years and the condition of essential infrastructure is, in places, very poor and in urgent need of replacing.
I'm sure this is an important impediment to some things, most obviously housing. But people always talk about the terrible shape of our roads, bridges, rail etc. The failure to maintain this basic stuff can't be the fault of NIMBYs since it's there already.
On another NIMBY point, America is still a largely empty country, and our built environment is pretty ugly. That opens up huge tracts of land to build either greenfield projects/communities or build over the decrepit strip malls and fast food chains that litter all the outskirts of our communities. I can't see any appreciable NIMBY resistance to either of these. But instead progressives keep pushing to build these things in the densest, most expensive areas, the ones that have the means to fund strong resistance. Focus on building a new Phoenix, not a symbolic victory of building cheap housing in Greenwich or wind farm off of Martha's Vineyard.
Transit and housing need to be built in places where people and jobs ARE, you can't just expect to "create a new city in the middle of nowhere" and just let everything else decay into dust.
A vibrant country includes vibrant cities, and that includes renewal and expansion to accommodate current needs, which are constantly changing and growing.
Did I say we should demolish existing cities? If I did, apologies, that's not my intent. New cities can take the pressure off of existing cities. And the 80% of the existing city layout can be used for new and better constructed housing. I just don't understand people like Matt Yglesias who insist on building new housing on the most historic/beautiful/expensive parts of cities. That won't go anywhere and isn't worth the effort. It's also a stupid idea, but that's a topic. for another day.
"Not worth the effort" only because of those regulations, which is what this article is about! If regulations change, then it would be worth the effort.
You can try to build a completely new city, but then you'd essentially have those nonproductive ghost cities located by a desert in China.
If you think it's easy to "build a new city", you have very little concept of how urban geographies evolve.
I know you're sooo much smarter than I am, but aren't quotation marks meant to quote something in a previous post?
You're right, of course. I sometimes use quotes as a form of callout, or to group a set of words so that they are though of as "a single object" that I'm discussing. I realize that may not be proper, or there may be better ways to do that, but I have my (possibly bad) habits. Like excessive use of parentheticals. My punctuation reflects how I think. I'm sure a professional editor would have a field day.
Anyway, I was forced to take a class in high school about urban geography, how and why cities grow and arrange themselves. Cities are interesting things, the confluence of physical geography and the desires and interests of thousands, often millions, of people. They tend to grow organically. Its not a process that can be easily reproduced ex-nihilo. You can try to build a new city, but unless you have all the factors that make a city work, you'll more likely fail.
Areas are expensive because they're the most desirable places to live.
That's where new housing will be most valuable.
In my experience (commercial general contractor & developer), the NIMBY problem is very real when it comes to improving existing infrastructure. Much of our infrastructure is over the original design capacity and well past its useful life; upgrading it almost always triggers significant environmental compliance efforts, which abutters use to bludgeon the DOT and drag out the process. In my home state, a project to refurbish 25 miles of a major interstate highway took 40 years from initial planning to completion. During that time, bridges were crumbling, and traffic was gridlocked. Abutters, towns, rail advocacy groups, and environmental groups locked arms to stop the project; in that time, the construction budget doubled from $400,000,000 to $800,000,000.
This is true in California - but I still believe corruption is the biggest issue, closely related to NIMBYISM and generalized selfishness.
I’m sorry, but as the party that would typically be on the giving end of a corrupt transaction, I don’t see it as an issue. If I thought for a second I was losing business to competitors that were buying work I’d be on the courtroom steps.
I’m certainly not saying that there have not been cases of corruption in the industry, but it is not the root cause of the delays and cost overruns.
You're a heavy construction general commenting on this article? Sure.
Actually, I said in an earlier post I was a commercial/industrial general contractor and developer, not heavy & highway. I deal with the same regulatory and NIMBY issues noted in an earlier comment, though mine tend to be measured in years, not decades.
Many of Noah's blogs sail over my head, but this one lands right in my wheelhouse; I thought my experience might be relevant to the discussion. Thanks for reading!
Part of my background is in economic and housing development. I don't know of any people in your line who do differently from you - honest developers make this country run and provide us with the homes, factories, retail, and offices we need. My reference was regarding the big infrastructure projects which are either no longer done at all, or which take many years longer than planned and cost exponentially more than initial estimates. That would never fly in your industry or any other sane one - there's only a couple of reasons why a project like CA's high speed rail is the way it is, and it's ... the Big C and the Big G ... corruption and greed. There's also the Big I - which they always blame, but when people continuously make the same mistakes and have the same problems over and over, in most environments, they don't call it "incompetence" since it seems to be on purpose.
He might be who he says he is and he might know what he is talking about. His comments ring true to me.
Maybe you don't know what "corruption" is - and yes, his comments do back that up. He said he'd do anything to stay in business and that is essential. But the discussion was about major infrastructure. The high speed rail in CA broke ground in 2015, and they have just now started building any of it - I just checked, 39 miles are done of the 119 proposed initial miles that go from noplace anyone wants to go to another place few are interested in traveling. $105 billion has been allocated and apparently $93 billion spent so far. For 39 miles. His words ring so true, and so do yours. This is theft in plain sight and neither of you gives a rat's a$$ as to the general cost (topic of this article) since both of you - are doing fine.
You seem to only want to believe what you like. So what would it take for you to change your mind? You just heard from someone in the industry.
It took 12 years to do an interstate highway exit in Connecticut when I lived there. Have no idea when they actually had started planning it.
I'm not American so i could be totally wrong but isn't the opposition to building solar and wind in the "big empty spaces" indicative that it's not just a question of choosing the wrong places?
Also... the additional housing is needed in the cities and developed communities because that is where the jobs are. There are tons of old stock dying towns, villages and hamlets in this country with plenty of housing but no jobs or just dead end jobs that hardly pay enough to even afford that housing.
Yes very true - you only have to go outside of NYC about 50 miles in any direction to see those little towns. They mostly have very little jobs going on, just the usual old stores (all of them have a local Dollar store), a few older industries still chugging along on their last legs, and farms, none of which pay good wages.
That's where the jobs are currently, not necessarily where they will be or must be.
There were jobs in these other areas at one time, after all.
Well yes, but jobs/economic activity and productivity congregate for economic reasons due to economic geography. The WFH revolution will change that to an extent, but you can't just wave a magic wand and create jobs wherever you want.
(Granted, the Federal government probably should start moving entire agencies in to the middle of nowhere America).
Agreed, but the 'abandon the struggling areas and just tell everyone to move to the big city' thing is both often bad advice and really really annoying.
It's really common among the YIMBY folks to just assume that -of course- everyone would want to move to NYC (or wherever) if we just build enough housing and infrastructure.
Not everyone would move but everything indicates that it would be a huge amount of people, and keeping housing artificially expensive is not helping struggling areas to grow their economies so maybe the best option for the moment would be to make housing affordable so those that want to move are able to do so
But we know that jobs move all the time, from the factory towns to the south after WWII, the tech migration from all over the country to a few small tech centers, and the current migration from snow belt to sun belt. Phoenix, Las Vegas, all the boomtowns in the southwest and elsewhere were nothing and had no jobs to offer before the mass migration. Development creates jobs which creates more development. We are wasting our time battling to build in the few areas that will fight back to supply housing for industries that may no longer be there when the housing is built.
If industries, move, it's veeeery slowly. And some don't. NYC was the financial and media capital of this country 100 and 200 years ago as well.
Heck, Detroit is still the center of the US auto industry, and even when all cars are electrified, I would bet you that auto R&D will be concentrated in or around Detroit rather than the Bay Area or elsewhere.
You really should read up on economic geography and agglomeration effects.
Nonsense. Try using that argument in hollowed out industrial areas where they saw their industries and jobs being moved offshore or down south (where there are no labor laws to prevent abuse) in a very short period of time. They would laugh in your face.
thanks, I never knew that, even though I addressed it a couple of times, including in my opening remarks. But I didn't put it as rudely as you so that helped me understand better. Just to be clear, I'm not advocating moving to dead places but rather new places. And you're going to say, rudely, that people won't move where the jobs aren't. But your textile example shows industries can and do move. New industries are created all the time. The early computer business was centered around Boston, then moved, and the biotech industry replaced it. And I don't know why people will laugh at me for trying to bring new life to their cities (eg Pittsburgh) and not you telling them to give up, you're dead. Lastly, for the sixth time, I'm also saying 80-90 percent of existing "in" cities are ugly and badly used. These are a much easier area to build on with little NIMBY opposition. I'm arguing that Yglesias' idea that we need to build new ugly stuff on top of the most historic/scenic/expensive areas. That won't fly.
YIMBYs are so condescending...
Err, no, we’re in touch in reality.
Vegas is a complete disaster area, working on projects for years, so much condemned property everywhere
Somewhat yes, somewhat no. I was listening to someone who talked about it as, "lakers vs farmers." If you want to put wind on a farmer's land, they may or may not do it, but they are definitely interested and usually ready to discuss it. To them, it's another way of making the land productive.
A "laker" is the owner of that nice home on the water, or even a vacation home. They don't want solar panels where they go to vacation, or see wind turbines from their deck, or god forbid take their boat a different route.
The problem is that our system has plenty of veto point for lakers to stop development even if only 5% of the people are lakers and 95% are farmers.
But there isn't opposition to that, unless you're talking about a solar farm in the Rockies overlooking Aspen. The entire middle of the country is empty and flat, and the southwest is a desert.
And there is plenty of opposition to building transmission lines that would make any of that solar power useful.
Of course, if you happen to reside in a desert or farming community and enjoy your unspoiled backyard, you might prefer the solar panels remain in Aspen. The NIMBY problem is by its nature local, one person's desert is another's Aspen.
It's not much use if you can't build transmission.
There is plenty of opposition. Near my home in rural Wisconsin there is a huge battle going on over solar panels going up in former farm fields. Concerns about everything from being unsightly (vs monocrop corn for example), causing issues with pollinators, and on and on.
Well, often there are pieces of infrastructure that need to be replaced, but the general difficulty of doing th at in America means that instead they are badly maintained past their replacement date.
NIMBYism demand a very spread-out and driving-oriented environment, which demands extreme amounts of infrastructure per person, which is too much maintenance over too small a tax base to keep up with properly.
Phoenix is an abomination (both in this regard, and in general). My goal is to create enough capacity in humane, walkable places that the Phoenixes of the world can be returned to nature. Or at least left to the people who actually want to live in them vs. being the only option affordable at scale.
There's also the excessive environmental damage of continued development. Cities are far-and-away the most resource efficient way to live. And (until Covid) cities were undergoing a great revival. So it's not like we have to force people to live in them. We just have to allow them to grow with the population that wants to live in them.
But HOW DO YOU DO THAT with the corruption that is in place. The "solutions" don't do a damn thing for problems at hand. They also do a LOT of environmental damage. If you think construction in cities is benign - you are smoking something you shouldn't. Further, nothing gets done unless it is lining deep pockets with more more, MORE. And the "good" that it was intended to do is nonexistent.
I would argue that most big development has made environmental problems WORSE. The developers WON'T build anything affordable. The wriggle out of all the affordable mandates that cities and towns have put on the books with a one-time payment. The wriggle out of green space requirements, density limits that were set for a REASON and anything else you can name.
Then the YIMBYS wag their fingers, and say ....."But we need affordable housing!!!!!". Then they get what THEY want because it lines the right pockets ... and affordability GETS WORSE because all they put up ALL LUXURY HOUSING! Then people are FORCED to move further away from employment hubs creating massively polluting commutes. Congratulations! Your "big ideas" just made people's lives much worse and also increased our carbon footprint. Well done.
The entire logic behind 90% of all YIMBYism is based on the false premise that volume will solve everything and rental prices will become magically affordable. Well, folks , that isn't WORKING. I've seen this so many times that boggles the mind that people banging their heads against the same damn wall, thinking that we'll hit a "tipping point" and things will suddenly change.
Well, they won't. That's because apartments, condos, and homes have ceased to be shelter and have become investments that many see fit to keep vacant. The relationship between supply and demand that would make this tactic work was severed long ago.
And finally. Having 3/4 of the land mass of nation hollowed out with rural poverty or crumbling industrial centers isn't good for anyone. Eventually, cities have to get by with the fact that they can't support more growth. PERIOD. Try addressing those issues and you might actually get somewhere.
Here's the thing, a lot of what you are saying about the pitfalls of new development might be true, but they are even more true for the only other kind of development we seem to be able to build in the last 30 years: car dependent, McMansion filled exurbs. Those are the definition of luxury housing. New apartments and condos might all be "luxury" housing as well, but at least they're dense and near the center of cities which mitigates the need to build as much new infrastructure and makes mass transit a possibility (or at least people using less gas to get around).
I would also contend that many NIMBYs aren't thinking in a large enough time scale. We have spent 50-70 years building fossil fuel dependent and car centric cities. We have just started in the last decade or so trying to reverse that trend. A new "luxury" apartment building may not become affordable for a decade or more, but at least by building it you create the chance for real urbanism at some point. Saying no to those projects and allowing cities to sprawl endlessly with no counter balance near the center won't do that.
If you build all luxury housing, everyone moves up a notch on the property ladder and that lowers prices.
Housing is used as an investment because NIMBYism makes its value appreciate and that makes it a good investment. Building more housing discourages such speculation because it brings housing prices down.
Oh really? Then explain to me why THE EXACT OPPOSITE IS HAPPENING in major metropolitan areas in spite of a massive increase in rental housing?
Why? Because it's ALL #!%$ING LUXURY HOUSING!!! These a$$holes promised greater affordability that they NEVER for a single second intended to make good on and crushed nice turned nice and decent middle class area into havens where elites only need apply. The middle and working class that was promised more housing was simply displaced. Meanwhile, the slumlords renting rat-infested dumps look at the high rental rates and THEY raise their rents. People desperately need housing near work who have the means, cough up over 50% of their income for a roof and the rest are left homeless or forced further and further away from employment hubs. This has been going on for decades.
I've heard this nonsense over and over and over and over and over and over and over for the past 15 years and it has always worked in the EXACT OPPOSITE DIRECTION.
Like all propaganda, telling the same lie over and over again deludes the masses into thinking it's true. But in the end, it just one big lie.
Because the high price areas are where the people and the jobs are and is where the new housing and infrastructure is needed. Do you know how hard it is to create brand new urban agglomerations?
And btw, a lot of the worst nimbyism is in suburban sprawl areas dominated by strip malls and fast food chains. If you don't see it then you haven't paid attention.
Gosh I never knew any of this, thanks!
Here to help
America's largely empty because nobody wants to live in those places.
The main problem is that due to agglomeration effects all the good jobs are and always will be in existing cities, but also we really do have to develop SoCal and NYC. We can't put everyone in the Central Valley, it's a desert!
These comments are so frustrating, not just yours but all the people who lecture me on urban planning. I used Phoenix as a city that is gigantic and growing and relatively new to address people's continued statements that no new cities are possible. People will only live in existing cities etc. It's just not true, but neither is my saying Phoenix is a paradise. It's an ugly sprawl. And I don't even know what the Central Valley is except people use it as a prototypical example of a bad place. But so much of the country is empty and not desert. And I keep offering up the 80% of existing cities that are a disaster zone and car-oriented, and I get back comments telling me I'm an idiot because you can't dump people into deserts with no jobs. I don't need a phd in urban planning to know that that plan is not viable. All I'm trying to do is say the core of most cities has things worth retaining. But I think most angry YIMBY tweeters want to target those areas just to be annoying.
Alex is unaware that he shoves food in his piehole because of the Central Valley. He enjoys all of his protein, fruits, vegetables because of the Central Valley. It is in no way a "desert." People are increasingly moving there - but the ag lifestyle is very different from the city lifestyle and pollution is also pretty bad due to how industrialized agriculture is conducted. It produces 25% of US food.
Thanks for the clarification. The only thing I really knew about the Central Valley was that it was a major agricultural center. But when I was told it was a desert I figured yet again I was being stupid, at least by the high standards of the commenters here.
I don't - fortunately - live in LA any more. I was the development officer for the first, last, and only "green" affordable special needs housing project in the county. It's really sad how people just shove food in their mouth, with no conception of where it comes from. Like the burger was once an animal. Pizza sauce, tomatoes and onions that grew in the ground. The factory of industrialized ag in the CA Central Valley is filled with people who are as smart as, maybe smarter than people who live in cities and push pixels for a living. I personally disagree with the direction industrialized agriculture has taken because it is unhealthy overall, similar to the suburban sprawl and paved-over megalopolises - but then there's people that think one of the world's largest and certainly the most productive and sophisticated agricultural regions is a "desert." Whatever they are doing there with the water? It's beyond me. I know it's jockeying for power and that the "environmental" restrictions that come from time to time are just economic pressure and have nothing to do with any fish or bird that supposedly needs to be "saved." CA's "environmental" movement is a tragic fraud.
You're right, it would be comparatively pretty easy to build a solar and wind farm in the middle of the San Luis Valley. Cheap, too! You can get acres of land for less than $10k.
It would power approximately jack and squat because the people out there largely don't have money to pay for power. They get their water needs met by filling big tanks once or more a week and bringing it back to their homesteads.
We want things built to enhance our built environment because *we live there*, not in the middle of Pennsyltuckey or any place else where the judge is the barber is the diesel mechanic. We should be focusing on where the problems are and bringing those solutions to fruition, not finding some place else to huck 'em.
My husband and I were just talking about "Why do people do this?" Build hideous strip malls, pave over green areas - why did people look at their lifestyle as being car-based? People do not have to live in giant cities. Life is better when it is less-crowded and there are more natural areas. That said - do you really think a "new Phoenix" is a good idea? Most cities are build on or near ... wait for it ... what might it be? Could it be ... water? Ding ding ding ...
The giant cities are what preserves more natural areas; if everyone lives in one dense area then you don't have to develop sprawl over the rest of it.
As for why we did sprawl in the first place, it's mostly government policy; see Strong Towns. It's so expensive to build like that, it would never have happened on its own.
It makes me wonder - which came first? Was this just to sell cars? Vague ideas form in my mind about how people could live better, healthier, and happier - because it's not just cars and roads and slurbia, it's how are people fed? I feel like more local food is extremely important but it seems as though the solutions are only implemented in last-case scenarios like Detroit, where they have open land in the city. Land that has "opened up" - I guess - due to urban decay. Los Angeles could do some of that - I was involved in some projects but I was on plenty of committees where the only person who knew a thing about growing anything ... was me. And I don't know much.
Well...There is hydroponics and roof top gardening. But that won't feed a city of millions.
I don't think cities should be full of millions at high density. I've done business plans for businesses that sell energy walls and next-generation solar windows. It's possible to build self-powering buildings and there are a few in the world. But the tech behind solar is environmentally damaging and the panels are not long-lasting and permanent. At lower density, it is easily possible to create regenerative agriculture systems to feed much larger numbers than in the past. In a city like Detroit, there is adequate open space to do this. There are also alternatives to rooftop gardens such as vertical gardening. There's one city ... trying to think of its name ... really high density, super clean, has 10% of veges and fruits from gardens within the ... it's Singapore!!! https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61919430
Wasn't one reason why there was such a big push for sprawl in 1950s America, a desire to disperse the population so that fewer people would be within the blast radius of any given Soviet nuclear detonation?
Well, weirdly we've been ignoring that axiom for a while, and the fastest growing cities are pretty far from water. This will eventually (quickly) become untenable especially due to the already tight water situation in the west. And you're right, Phoenix is a hideous city. I was just using it as an example of a fast growing city that came from nowhere to counter argument that we can only build new housing in existing cities.
Being near water doesn’t help for Southern California; LA and San Diego are basically as dependent on Colorado for water as Phoenix is, although that could be fixed with desalination plants, which environmentalists and NIMBYs also oppose.
They should never have built so many large cities in the area - desalinization could help, I agree, and what would the harm be?
Not really. SoCal cities get a bit of water from the Colorado, but most of our water comes from the California Aqueduct (i.e., central/northern CA, mostly from the Sierras). It's Imperial Valley agriculture that gulps most of the Colorado River water coming to California.
Water is fungible, if the imperial valley used the California aqueduct water instead of Colorado river water then that water would not be available for the cities. Phoenix is closer to the Rockies than LA or San Diego are to the Sierras.
It's fungible after you build multi-billion dollar aqueducts to move it around.
Agreed! I was just talking with a couple from Phoenix who had moved here to Florida. They didn't like the lifestyle and said it's getting rapidly worse - congestion, heat, water shortages -
Oh! That's a disaster in the making for sure! I don't have the depth of your experience, but I've read articles about it and it's totally insane. That's what I mean by vested interests not solving anything, but making matters worse.
The cost of “build nothing” also shows up in demographics. I know many people who would have more children if not for extreme housing costs.
For once, Noah, I agree with you 100%. And I have a quote for you: "From December 1941 to September 1945 is 4 years. In those 4 years, we defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Today it takes 17 years to add a 5th runway to the Atlanta airport. We are simply not prepared to be a serious country anymore."
Those words were spoken more than 15 years ago by Newt Gingrich, in a speech in Atlanta. I found the quote so unbelievable that I checked it. It's fairly accurate: the first Environmental Assessment is from the early 90's; constructions started in 2002; the runway opened in 2006. Whether it's 12 years or 17... it's way too long to build a necessary and basic public transportation amenity.
I served on the local Planning Commission for Elk Grove, CA (pop approx 150K) from 2006-2014. I can attest that you and Gingrich are correct: we are no longer prepared to be serious about building anything. Boilerplate "environmental impact" statements utterly devoid of useful content but costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce will kill a tree each time they're printed. I used to think this was just being extra-careful, then I saw how the sausage was made. Now I think they're basically make-work for environmentalists who can't get a real job. They're not the only ones though. Union leaders use CEQA (CA's Clean Air / Water Act) to delay any non-union project in environmental litigation for years. It's not about the environment; it's extortion. The moment the developer signs a union-scale, project labor agreement, the lawsuits vanish. The NIMBYism (from both Left and Right) is small potatoes compared to this sort of thing.
God help us if we had to actually tool up for a war. Can't you see it already: "sorry, we can't build battleships because the construction might hurt the endangered sea turtles". I like sea turtles and spotted owls and CA condors too, but at some point, the needs of people factor into the equation. Right now, they pretty much don't.
BTW: Don't tell any of your more lefty friends that you agree with Gingrich about something. They might vote you off the island.
I found another great example this morning. Between 1889 and 1900, we built the Chicago Drainage Canal which reversed the direction of the Chicago River, thus eliminating the cholera epidemics caused by the river carrying sewage into Lake Michigan.
Today there is a lot of (perhaps justified) environmental criticism for this. But it's still a great illustration of how far we're fallen. It takes longer to add a 5th runway to the Atlanta airport today than it did to dig a 28 mile canal with mostly ditch diggers (people, not machines.)
«I like sea turtles and spotted owls and CA condors too, but at some point, the needs of people factor into the equation. Right now, they pretty much don't.»
http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0903/0903norquistinterview.htm
Grover Norquist: «The growth of the investor class -- those 70 per cent of voters who own stock and are more opposed to taxes and regulations on business as a result -- is strengthening the conservative movement. [...] Now if you say we're going to smash the big corporations, 60-plus percent of voters say "That's my retirement you're messing with. I don't appreciate that". And the Democrats have spent 50 years explaining that Republicans will pollute the earth and kill baby seals to get market caps higher. And in 2002, voters said, “We're sorry about the seals and everything but we really got to get the stock market up.”»
«BTW: Don't tell any of your more lefty friends that you agree with Gingrich about something.»
https://aspace-uwg.galileo.usg.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/124552
Newt Gingrich:«For most Americans the speed limit is a benchmark of opportunity. This is not a light insight.
If you have a society where almost every middle class person routinely fudges the law, that’s telling us something. We have laws that matter – murder, rape, and we have laws that don’t matter.
The first thing that every good American says each morning is “What’s the angle?” “How can I get around it?” “What does my lawyer think?” “There must be a loophole!” [...] America is the most incentive-driven society on the planet.»
It reminds me of Moldbug's take on covid vaccines (which were figured out in Jan 2020, yet weren't deployed until about a year later): https://graymirror.substack.com/p/2020-the-year-of-everything-fake
> Let’s be clear about what an mRNA vaccine physically is. It is an RNA sequence in a lipid nanoparticle. RNA is like DNA but different. “Lipid” means “fat” and “nano” means “small.” To make the vaccine, you cook a bunch of enzymes and reagents and stuff to make the RNA, then put it in a fancy mixer with some special-ass fat. Done.
> An official course of the Moderna vaccine is 200 micrograms. The last time I took 200 micrograms of anything it was on a little paper square with a picture of Felix the Cat. 60kg of a chemical we’ve known how to make for a year would have averted this whole shitshow. Your mother could benchpress enough RNA to save America from Covid.
> The problem is not that it takes a year to cook up a bathtub of RNA, which is basically just cell jism, and blend it with a half-ton of lard. It does take a year, though, to build a production line that produces an FDA-approved biological under Good Manufacturing Practices. It’s quite impressive to get this done and it wasn’t cheap neither.
> The reader will be utterly unsurprised to learn that good in this context means perfect. As the saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of Grandma.
> If 1940s America—or even 1970s America—had had some shortage of super-special surgical glass vials, or some such shit-tier excuse, they would have parked a bathtub of chilled cell-jism-lard in a reefer truck, picked up a couple of half-educated Air Force medics wielding filthy bulk jet injectors, and driven around town with a loudspeaker blaring icecream jingles. Grandma might have gotten hepatitis—but not pneumonia.
> When we diagnose the effort that from end to end will get us all vaccinated in 18 to 24 months, the problem is not in the work or the workers, but the rules and assumptions. “Warp speed” simply meant doing everything by the book, but as fast as possible. This made it, like, five times as fast as usual.
> While this is nice, a process improvement of any such magnitude is unlikely to be anywhere near the limit of diminishing returns. Rather, it indicates that something was seriously wrong with the efficiency of the original process.
> In a situation like this—why should “usual” even matter? Why should there be a book? 1940s America would have thrown away the book and solved this as a one-off, and so would your eight-year-old.
> What ‘20s America should have done was to find the equivalent of General Groves—someone who knew nothing about public health, and everything about getting shit done—and order him to win the war on SARS-CoV-2, with zero rules.
> For example, such an effort would have used good manufacturing practices—but not perfect ones. Since perfect is the official standard, and good but not perfect does not exist, it would have to be invented. That’s something else ‘40s America was good at.
I disagree about the endangered species. Species extinction cannot be undone. The biosphere is a complex interacting system that we depend on for our survival. Allowing any species extinction is pulling a random bolt out of a plane you're flying in. Do it enough times and the plane crashes, and you don't know which bolt will cause that.
Species die all the time. Vast majority of species that ever existed went extinct. Nature is not some well-balanced system of delicate dependencies that, when disturbed, creates a cascading failure which wrecks everything. It's the opposite - it's anti-fragile. Of course there are exceptions.
I was at a dinner with some family who live in western Massachusetts about a year ago. Two items for your consideration.
First, the region had recently voted down a natural gas pipeline proposed to run through the area. Shortly after, the local gas utility started denying all requests for additional connections to the distribution network. This was widely interpreted as corporate retribution instead of, you know, basically fucking Newtonian physics.
Second, the town was considering a repeal of some ordinance that gave property owners effective veto rights over what adjacent property owners did with their, you know, property. I said something to the effect of, "If you want to be sure their construction doesn't impact your quality of life, build further back from your property line," and they looked at me like I was Donald Trump's own asshole. True story.
And you know, these people are liberal as the day is long on the summer solstice, but you're a fool if you think conservatives don't pull the same. Make of that what you will. I personally think America had it coming.
I'm trying to figure out the galaxy brain take that's something along the lines of getting exclusionary zoning declared a hazardous environmental contamination and thus declaring obstructionist policies a valid target of Superfund remediation.... ;)
We had to move from a wonderful neighborhood that was completely destroyed as student housing for the university expanded in to our neighborhood. Most of the students were perfectly fine and sincerely welcomed. But a minority of students insisted on loud parties in their front yard until 4am. When such a party house moved in both just behind us and right next door we finally had to bail and run. Sure, we talked to these neighbors, and their landlords, and the police. Nobody did anything. So if you want to hear a real rant, just keep writing about that. :-)
Why don't we get the government to enforce laws about loud parties at night instead of laws (implicitly) banning all students because they *might* have loud parties?
It seems logical to allow a student housing hall or townhouse development reserved for student use to avoid the spillover. But it is not just students. The Air BnB party houses are also a pox on neighborhoods.
And the bane of people looking for affordable housing. My town has over 1,000 housing units devoted to Air BnB, and restaurants in town closing during the week because they can't find staff to work there, as staff can't find housing. Have grown to loathe Air BnB.
Sounds good to me. The obstacle seems to be that the police have a great many other things to do, which are reasonably defined as being more important.
To be fair to students and young people in general....
We moved from the urban neighborhood near the university out to the suburbs on the edge of town, inhabited by adult white collar professional types. Where upon we were immediately blasted with dog barking from every direction. That's improved substantially in recent years, but we're still only one bad neighbor away from sonic chaos.
Point being, the problem is less students than it is human beings in general.
Reading your posts it seems as though you need to move to a more rural area since you are sensitive to your neighbors noise
You have an interesting theory. We should investigate it further with a scientific experiment. Let's try this...
I'll stand out in front of your house blasting a boom box for a couple of hours in the middle of the night a couple days a week. After a month of that we'll send you a survey to see how you wish to define this phenomena.
1) Tom is sensitive to noise.
2) People who impose that kind of racket on their neighbors are assholes.
Just go ahead and post your address and we'll get this study underway. Should be interesting!
So maybe don't live by other humans, then. Life is all about tradeoffs. Complaining about other people when you can do something to maximize your happiness seems weird to me.
Sounds like the university didn't expand student housing, but that students expanded into off-campus housing. It sounds to me like exactly what Noah is saying is a problem: The university unable or unwilling to increase student housing on its own campus.
Sounds like another failure to build - an effective police force. That’s becoming all too common.
These failures to build interact with each other and the problem snowballs.
I think this is an important point and not just specific to college towns. Most Americans just don't want to live somewhere like SF or NYC and will pull out all the stops to prevent their neighborhood from becoming that. That's not a normative judgment, it's just an observation.
The fact of the matter is, it's a cultural problem/incompatibility. If you're relying on police to enforce these kinds of problems you've already lost half the battle. Americans just can't seem to coexist in dense environments that are desirable to most people and it's a small fraction of people who cause all the antisocial behavior.
Think of it another way, if you swapped all the Japanese people in Japan for Americans, would you get the same society? Of course not, it'd probably be chaos. That's not to say that Americans could *never* learn to live in dense Asian/European cities but it'd require a massive shift in social expectations.
SF is hardly that dense, and I think suburb lovers would be very happy with most of it. Similarly, lots of people love LA and NYC, that's why they all live there.
(SF does have real problems but most people aren't familiar with them. Instead they only know about fake problems.)
So maybe don't live in a college town.
Everybody can choose where to buy a house. Choosing to live in a neighbood where a college could expand into and then complaining about the inevitable seems. . . short-sighted?
We were in that neighborhood before the problem student's parents were born.
Were you there before the university was built?
Cultivating a long-term perspective is tough, but if you want to stay in a neighborhood for 50 years, you probably should try to imagine how it could change over those 50 years, especially if there is a university the next neighborhood over (and how realistic are you to expect a neighborhood to not change over half a century?)
Look little dude, the people I was complaining about were waking up other students at 4am too. So were the good students supposed to anticipate that there would be ass hole morons in their class and so not go to college? Again, like I already said, MOST of the students were FINE and were WELCOMED.
But here you are posting about them and you moved. So was it fine and welcomed or not?
There must be a natural law to bureaucracy where the more people you have working in an organisation the harder and harder it becomes to get anything done. Everyone knows that the infrastructure is crumbling and you’d think the Ohio train disaster would wake up legislators and civil servants and yet, still nothing gets done.
In the analysis of subway costs in the US that Noah linked, they found that one of the biggest issues is that decisions were made by inexperienced politicians and political appointees instead of by career civil servants who have gained experiencing by working their way up the ranks. Those inexperienced political appointees then delegate everything to external contractors instead of to the civil servants because there’s some sort of innate fear to trusting people who work for the government. But in the rest of the world outside of the anglosphere, they get things done by trusting the government bureaucracy and developing things bottom-up because they make sense instead of top-down because a politician supported it.
Of course, sometimes a politician does have a place in defining a large country wide effort, but we first need to let educated and experienced civil servants actually do the correct jobs. Also we should send them over to Europe and East Asia to learn how the civil servants over there do it.
That’s really interesting. Here in England our civil service is very bloated and quite inefficient with so many checks and balances (which are good thing in a sense) that it becomes incredibly hard to do anything with speed. Our vaccine program was a notable exception and that was organised by a special Vaccine Taskforce’ - a very small team with just the one job. Has led to debate here whether we should copy start-up model and have lots of small teams moving dynamically on different projects. Alas, have seen little evidence of them putting into practice this idea since.
Yeah, the analysis I’ve seen points to the bureaucracy in the UK as also being bad, but as the rest of Europe generally being better. There’s something of an anglophone bias, where English-speaking civil servants only bother to learn from other English speaking countries, while civil servants in the rest of Europe tend to speak both English and their native language (and often more!) and thus will learn from a broader array of examples.
Essentially the point I’m trying to make is civil servants are probably really competent (as you say is the US) but it’s just the bureaucratic system that prevents them from being able to get anything done!
Mmm, there’s the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, that within an organization there are two groups- those dedicated to the goals of the organization, and those dedicated to the organization itself. The second group always gains and keeps control of the organization.
Funnily enough I happened to read Freddie deBoer’s post (https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-yimby-movement-demonstrates-social) soon after making this comment and he quoted the Iron Law of Institutions and it feels so relevant.
The important thing to remember about that law is that it was written by a crank sci fi author boomer and doesn't necessarily have to be true.
I have no idea how your takeaway from the East Palestine derailment is "we need less bureaucracy".
That disaster, as far as I've understood it from the news, was caused by the poor rail infrastructure. If it wasn't so hard to build then perhaps it would never have happened.
This is nonsense. Not only do you generally not need permission to maintain something, especially when that thing is a freight car, but American private rail companies are so chronically investment-averse that "NIMBYs" can only be a minor part of the cause.
I read that there were some hotbox detectors that didn't work as they should have (e.g. an infrastructure issue), but to be honest the particulars aren't really the point. We can disagree on whether the train derailment is a good example or not (it may not be - and I'm certainly not trying to take away any blame from the train company themselves), the point I was trying to make was simply that large organisations struggle to get things done effectively because of the bureaucratic systems needed to manage that many people.
I agree with this post but not every one of its points. E.g., "Meanwhile, across the USA, housing is just not getting built."
I'm not sure this is true, especially for the kind of housing all right-thinking YIMBYs care about: multi-unit construction, especially buildings with 5+ units. That's going up, a lot. Starts are at their highest point since the mid-1980s (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST5F). And when you look at what's in the pipeline -- multi-family units currently under construction -- that's at the highest point since the 1970s, when the huge Boomer generation was just starting to build households (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNDCON5MUSA).
What has only seen a very small increase is new starts of duplexes/triplexes/fourplexes (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNDCON24USA). For whatever reason, these have fallen out of fashion and are being eclipsed by construction of much larger apartment/condo buildings.
What we're seeing instead is a dramatic pullback on the number of starts of *single family homes* (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST1F). And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
It's due to increased land costs and pent up housing demand. Builders make more $ on MF homes
For whatever reason, there's a lot more MF housing being built these days.
The kind of article I love most from Noah- unexpected topic, explanation why it matters and a cool name to visualize the problem
My favorite post yet. The only way out is innovation in atoms, to bypass the regulatory framework and start anew. Self-flying personal cars will change the way we live. It has the potential to fix the transportation and housing problem by enabling short commutes and affordable living far away from the city centers. Unfortunately, we are a good 20 years away from personal flying cars because of battery tech. I wish we could improve upon the current situation, but I think opinions are too entrenched and won’t change without some sort of calamity.. but we can always innovate our way out of it!
Excellent article! This is a very similar situation in Canada.
This is an example of the tragedy of the anticommons.
From Wikipedia:
"The tragedy of the anticommons is a type of coordination breakdown, in which a commons does not emerge, even when general access to resources or infrastructure would be a social good. It is a mirror-image of the older concept of tragedy of the commons... The "tragedy of the anticommons" covers a range of coordination failures, including patent thickets and submarine patents. Overcoming these breakdowns can be difficult, but there are assorted means, including eminent domain, laches, patent pools, or other licensing organizations."
Essentially, the tragedy of the anticommons means there are too many rights holders and they cannot come to agreement. Much regulation, including zoning and environmental law, creates more rights holders.
The classic Chinese examples are the "nail houses".
Minor quibble: "2/3 of Americans who owns a home" is wrong: 2/3 of households are owner occupied. Any solution that removes net value to the owners will be vigorously opposed for simple pocketbook reasons. Which is why they fight so vigourously with and for zoning.
Boston's "Big Dig" project successfully solved such problems, but at an enormous cost: it was the most expensive highway project of its sort ever. It did so by settling with every stakeholder: no use of eminent domain.
A legislative solution might involve recognizing the values of the overlapping rights, pricing violations of those rights above those values, and allowing specific high-priority projects to simply pay for them (as eminent domain does) without entering the very slow tort system.
"Ikiru" is a brilliant Japanese film by Kurosawa that illustrates overcoming a number of such issues on a very small scale. I'm sure you've seen it, Noah. I don't usually like tearjerkers, but this one is great.
Isn't the "Big Dig" the one where the contractor skimped on the glue and took shortcuts in the construction and the ceiling collapsed and closed the tunnel and killed a lady? I forget how many others were injured but it's a famous civil engineering "Do Not Do" case study used in construction/engineering texts.
Yes it is. However, on such an enormous project, it is not unusual for SOMETHING to be messed up. That was not characteristic of the project overall.
For that and other corruption by contractors, see the Wikipedia article for a brief synopsis.
Breaking the backs of the NIMBYs and stomping them into the dust is needed if America is to remain competitive. The UK didn’t do that and now it gets to enter a not-so-genteel decline.
great point