Why Can’t We Build?
The symposium asks a broad, but extremely important question: “Why Can’t We Build in America Anymore?” That the topic is so general speaks to the sweeping scope of the problem. Today, America arguably cannot build—or builds too infrequently and too expensively—housing, particularly in our richest metropolitan areas; public infrastructure, like new subways or bridges; and privately provided infrastructure, like power stations and transmission lines.
This lack of building has caused a host of huge economic and social problems. A lack of housing, particularly in our highest-demand regions, has restricted economic growth, exacerbated economic inequality, and increased segregation. A failure to build infrastructure economically has increased fiscal burdens, decreased the quality of public services, and stymied efforts to expand transportation access. A lack of dense housing and high costs for green energy infrastructure have even slowed the “green transition” and increased greenhouse gas emissions. And that is just the start. Despite a generation of low interest rates and innovation in many non-physical realms, there are few physical monuments that we will pass to future generations—where are today’s Brooklyn Bridges or Hoover Dams?—and the inability to build heightens political tension, as scarcity makes our political controversies into zero-sum crises.
But why can’t we build? This Essay will argue that it is necessary to answer the question in two different ways—with what the Essay will call explanations and reasons. There are, of course, specific rules and policies that increase the cost of building—for example, zoning regulations or a lack of talented planning officials in transport agencies. These are explanations for why building is so hard and costly. While it is crucial to identify these explanations, they cannot explain why jurisdictions pass such costly rules in the first instance. To understand this issue, one must turn to either enduring legal structures or macro-political forces. The reasons for America’s building drought must turn on structural or political factors that transcend the outcome of individual elections and that can explain variation over time (it was not always this hard to build) and across geographies (it is much harder and more costly to build in some places than others).
If one seeks to figure out the drivers of the building crisis, one needs to offer both explanations and reasons. In order to pass meaningful and sustainable reforms that make it easier to build, we must devote careful attention to both the explanations that identify what stands in the way of building and the reasons why governments adopt these harmful policies. Only with a clear understanding of both can those seeking change build productive political coalitions, seize opportunities to catalyze construction and ensure that whatever gains are secured are enduring. This Essay will argue that we have fortunately made progress, albeit slowly, on both fronts and, more importantly, that actions taken by at least some reformers show a genuine understanding of both explanations and reasons.
As Part II of this Essay will discuss, we know a great deal about the explanations for why it is hard to build, yet our knowledge is often too general. For instance, we know that land use regulations limit the supply of housing, but we do not know which particular rules bind supply most strictly in given cases. We know even less about limits on building in other areas, but there is enough evidence to make pretty good suggestive hypotheses on the general drivers of cost inflation on infrastructure. Even so, it is not completely clear which types of reforms would be most effective.
Happily, researchers and activists are building new ways to weigh the respective effects of different barriers to building—tools like the National Zoning Atlas and the Transit Cost Project. Given reformers’ cramped schedules and finite political capital, such efforts are crucial for policy development. These efforts promise to help reformers prioritize between different reforms and build political coalitions. Amassing political support for remedial policies—i.e., policies that are effective in removing restrictions on building—often requires making deals with groups that demand their own cost-generating rules (for instance, labor groups that support zoning reform if paired with requirements to use union labor). Sorting regulations by their efficacy will help pro-growth political figures discern the deals to take from those to leave on the table.
Evidence is also developing on the question of why jurisdictions adopt costly limitations on building even when most scholars and leading politicians, including the President and most governors of both political parties, deride them. Part III, the heart of this Essay, will argue that the central reason for the building crisis is that the entities that are most responsible for building are not particularly accountable to, or particularly reflective of, mass opinion among the people who would use houses and infrastructure. This can be divided into two types of reasons that best explain the myriad explanations for a lack of building: (1) the absence of competition in and popular attention paid to state and local politics, and the resulting entrenchment of rules intentionally adopted to limit building in the 1970s and 1980s; and (2) localism, or the devolution of authority over key aspects of building to small local governments. There are, of course, reasons for these reasons. Changes in media, for instance, help explain declining interest in and competition over local politics. The desire for racial exclusion and a targeting of public resources help explain land use localism. But reforms aimed at these two overarching, macro-political reasons lie at the core of many of the best and most interesting policy changes of the last decade.
