We Can’t Build, and it’s Very, Very Bad: On the Politics of Urban Growth
Leaving aside the specific policy barriers to building—strict zoning, onerous permitting processes, environmental review laws that empower litigious neighbors, and so on— most jurisdictions and states across the United States struggle to build housing and infrastructure, and most policymakers fail to adequately serve the public good.
But why?
In “Why Can’t We Build? Explanations And Reasons For The Building Crisis,” Yale law professor David Schleicher goes beyond the specific policy explanations for why building is difficult to get at the deeper structural and governance reasons why building housing and infrastructure is so difficult.
Key Takeaways:
- First, decisions about building are mostly made at the state and local levels; and the elected officials responsible for building do not face meaningful electoral competition or an informed electorate that can evaluate their performance.
- Second, “authority is too local.” Local control over land use privileges the voices of incumbent residents and structurally excludes outsiders and would-be in-movers from decisions about housing growth, while the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and state-level “mini-NEPAs” give neighborhood groups disproportionate power to block infrastructure projects.
After walking through the basic facts and deleterious effects of the U.S.’s inability to build – ”we can’t build and it is very, very bad,” he says – Schleicher turns to what he describes as the explanations for why we don’t build: restrictive local zoning that is resistant to efforts at state level streamlining; onerous environmental reviews that invite costly and time-consuming litigation; insufficient state capacity due to outsourcing of critical skills and services; high labor costs; inefficient transit project design; and so on.
Schleicher makes the case for identifying which limits actually bind construction to “help pro-growth figures understand which political deals are worth making.”
Finally, we arrive at the two structural reasons why we cannot build. First, the state and local governments that are the central players in regulating the built environment are “defined by a lack of competition and public attention.” Voters mostly do not know much about their state and local elected officials, and their accomplishments in office have little effect on whether their party wins election; so there is little accountability for the actual performance of government. In this environment, unrepresentative but well-organized minority groups can exercise disproportionate power to block widely-beneficial projects.
Second, and relatedly, “authority is too local.” Veto power for housing is invested in both local governments and neighborhood-level politicians like city council members and aldermen who put parochial concerns over regional needs. Laws like NEPA empower neighborhood groups to block infrastructure projects, resulting in defensively-designed infrastructure and lengthy, costly litigation.
To counter these structural issues, Schleicher recommends organizing statewide coalitions to pass state-level land use reform, rather than city-by-city rezonings; citywide zoning changes instead of neighborhood-level reforms; streamlining environmental review for infrastructure; and putting highly-visible city- and state-level elected officials in charge of transit agencies.