There's a lot in my city that had construction going on for about a month, they barely got anywhere, and now it's been deserted for a while. It's meant to be a new block of flats, and I know that takes a while, but every time I pass it, I think about the stories of Chinese workers erecting a 57 storey building in 19 days (Though I don't know if that includes wiring, plumbing, etc, or if it's just the concrete shell)
That just seems to be some sort of common construction scam. I've seen it more than once with private construction.
There is a private dental office down the street from me that's has an expansion which somehow took years. Same story. Ton of construction for a month or two, and then nothing happened.
There was a union protest about using non-union labor for a bit. It felt like they were protesting the wrong issue, as no labor was occurring.
In my big tech job we have a pretty small (by public sector standards) red-tape burden but it does exist. It does slow work down and it does increase the activation energy such that some small projects that might otherwise happen simply don't.
Sometimes, I choose to semi-transparrently ignore it. I see this happen at the institutional level too. So there's a spectrum of tactical non-compliance, extending roughly between:
- I do not submit my conference material to PR/legal, I just go to the conference and present without approval. I admit this to my management chain, they are mildly uncomfortable about it but ultimately don't care enough to make my life difficult.
To:
- We have a policy stating that all open source code in our stack must be fully reviewed internally. I think this does genuinely happen for lots of libraries but for the Linux kernel we are in flagrant violation and nobody cares.
I assume there are very good reasons this is not something you can just do in the public sector. I assume there's also a factor in there about how there is no serious constituency in my company that genuinely cares about the PR/legal approvals, whereas the regulations blocking parking spaces are probably ultimately due to someone who really does care about whatever they are supposed to represent.
And yeah I guess I do like the rule of law, I prefer that our governments don't break it. But maybe there's something there.
It is a weird subject - on the one hand, I don't think anyone would argue that the story in the article makes sense from a process perspective. But simultaneously the people who are of the opinion that the regulations burdens should be lightened seem to be in a political minority that can't be much bigger than around 30% of the population. Raising the question - what do the majority of voters actual think about this sort of regulation? Maybe they are just of the opinion that case studies like this aren't representative of reality.
I'd incline to believe that if the US body politic set out to solve this one they'd end up in a position of introducing a loophole for charging projects (ie, increasing bureaucracy) and reducing the regulatory burden wouldn't be an option.
Regulations are like code of a program. It's the business logic of how we want the world to be.
Like all code, it can be buggy, bloated and slow, or it can be well-written and efficiently achieve ambitious things.
If you have crappy unmaintainable code that doesn't work, then deleting it is an obvious improvement.
Like in programming, it takes a lot of skill to write code that achieves its goals in a way that is as simple as possible, but also isn't oversimplified to the point of failing to handle important cases.
The pro-regulation argument isn't for naively piling up more code and more bloat, but for improving and optimizing it.
As a leftie - admittedly one who thinks - I thought the article was actually quite positive and didn't bring politics into it: "What would that look like for something as simple as EV charging stations? Standardized approval processes. Pre-approved vendor lists. Streamlined permitting for routine infrastructure. Clear timelines with accountability mechanisms."
A clear and sensible suggestion. Cool.
Great read, and a great example of America's failure to complete infrastructure projects. I agree with the proposed solutions, and I do hope that some local governments start enacting some of them.
I'm reminded of the staggering cost for a new railroad in the US, that can go up to $4M/mile near urban environments[0]. We need more articles like these and some political courage to get building again!
The legitimate criticism I read against "Abundance" is that for the most part regulations and due process emerged to protect public interests from private capture. In the article the author says we should use "pre-approved vendor lists" or "streamlined approvals" and that sounds great in principle, but could also easily be exploited.
One of the reasons American and German cities are made for cars is because of the influence of their car industry. However, this also pushed out investment in competing alternatives like public transport infrastructure.
1) Somehow he decided euclidean zoning was a leftist project. Most leftists and environmentalists I've ever known hate euclidean zoning and this includes many urban planners. Euclidean zoning exists pretty much because property owners want to be able to exclude nearby land uses. It's fundamentally conservative, especially when the goal is to enforce limited housing density.
2) Setting up euclidean zoning as the main whipping boy and then saying "and also air quality regulations are basically the same thing" is a form of straw-manning the stuff he's arguing against.
3) He sets up a dichotomy between California and Texas ignoring that a lot of California's problems are conservative (downzoning, prop 13) and also ignoring the weaknesses in the Texas model including corporations running roughshod over locals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7_WDzPyoqU) a fragile power grid, huge flooding problems etc. It's possible to look at quality of life metrics and see that Texas is doing quite badly. Also, you had the whole tech moving to Austin thing that already fizzled out.
4) He set up developers as the heroes in the story and apparently got a lot of his info from private equity ride-alongs. He ignores that developers are also often land speculators and are in favor of blocking competitors projects and downzoning areas to keep land value high. (https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/abundance-hudson-yards-west?u...)
Basically Abundance is a way for Ezra Klein and his fellow travelers to repackage Clinton-era triangulation and Obama-era neoliberalism as something completely new, so the party can carry on with its pro-donor agenda and ignore why they keep losing. That's also the reason why it was astroturfed into every left media space with a massive marketing budget.
-I think we underestimate the impact of the cultural assumption that anything the government does will be 10x as expensive, take 10x as long and then not work properly, with nobody ever being held accountable, but lots of people having been paid along the way.
Of all the ambitious, smart people I know, a single one has said he even believes it's a good thing to work for the government. And he doesn't do it because he thinks the experience would be so miserable compared to working in tech.
-Most people don't seem to understand that regulations don't just add up, but compound.
It's not that each individual, well-intentioned regulation is bad (though some are), it's that many regulations intersect and create edge cases.
And when there's regulation/paperwork at every point, it starts to look like an insurmountable barrier. This is true with entrepreneurship in Europe. People aren't against a specific regulation, the perception is that whatever you want to do, you'll have to ask permission from someone, somewhere, fill out 5 pages of paperwork and wait 3 months before you get to talk to a notary and finally change your business' mailing address (real example from Germany)
-It's hard to make a rational case for this because humans are wired to weigh danger more heavily than upside.
We don't have counterfactuals (the cafe that didn't open because of zoning laws, the parks that were never built, etc.)
Even when politicians admit this problem, they then proclaim they want more housing, innovation or whatever, but getting rid of a regulation has some amount of risk.
So then they try to find the "free lunch": a solution that has none of the downside, but all of the upside.
That free lunch doesn't exist and the resulting solution only gets even more complex.
As someone working in a German university in a technical role: I notice new technical contractors absolutely go into this with the mindset that they can extract money for a half-assed job here. I tend to very quickly and meticulously shatter those dreams by being more prepared than the private sector in my requirements.
>It's not that each individual, well-intentioned regulation is bad (though some are), it's that many regulations intersect and create edge cases.
We would never excuse such ignorance of 2nd through Nth order consequences in any other context. Can you imagine "the catholic church wasn't trying to provide cover for abusers, that was just an accidental side effect of protecting their own image"? That'd be laughable.
I read all the articles. I didn't see any mentioning red tape, or regulations.*
All that talk of 'regulations' and 'red tape' is a guess.
This stink of a "Low priority project use as a place-holder, but as soon as even a mouse-sneeze comes up, the resources are put to a better used, and it is kicked down the road"
But (as you say) we are all pre-trained to assume 'red tape / regulations' so we back-fill that explanation, even with no evidence.
*(I Wouldn't mind a second reader, read them fast and searched, may have missed something.)
I agree with the wider point but I think the reality is a bit more complicated than that, policy needs to be written with price signals in mind, or if they are addressing a market failure they satisfy some cost benefit analysis to demonstrate the cure isn't worse than the poision. Regulation can also reduce transaction costs when they address coordination problems where a private solution may be discouraged by a fear of free riders.
Regulations can increase fixed costs or variable costs, but if it leads larger markets for the service or if the reduction in services is seen as a smaller cost than an existing negative externality (like costs required to ensure a private water treatment company isn’t poising a public water way, a cost otherwise handled by the government), despite the regulations these are scenarios where costs pay for themselves.
————————————
HOWEVER, much of town planning and land use policies in English speaking world does none of these things. Maybe with the exception of deciding a street grid which addresses a coordination problem.
What market failure do minimum lot sizes or room size address? There are no positive or negative externalities to smaller rooms or lots, people simply choose not to buy or rent something if it’s too small.
Planners hail mixed use zones as a policy only possible with planning, as if it isn't a solution to a problem of their own creation (mutually exclusive residential & commercial land use zones).
Parking per land use is another awful policy. This is simply something the developers can determine based on their own market research. They are handling the development let them handle the risk.
Free parking is also another poor planing policy, parking is definitely something of value which would be a more productive use willing if it had market pricing.
Floor area caps are just evil, infrastructure charges are a much fairer way of handling increased land usage.
Upper level setbacks are just dumb, as they add so much in terms of costs, often to handle more in terms of support columns, and increase the likelihood of water damage. As a result the top most levels end up costing much more and less for less than they could, which puts development feasibility at risk when building heights are too low (sometimes that is the whole point).
Writ-large, isn't what the article is referring to the plot of 生きる(Ikiru, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru)? My suspicion is that the solution to lack of ability for government to enable building in the US will be the same, writ-large, as in the movie. That is, it will happen, but (I'll stop here, least I spoil the movie for you).
I find it quite interesting that US private industry can be incredibly effective relative to non-US private industry, but the opposite seems to be more the case when it comes to government projects.
The article highlights a failure, which is good, but gives a very surface level review of what failed here. Some gestures are made at environmental review but it's not clear that the root cause here was regulation. If the project needed three redesigns, why? Maybe electrical capacity for 8 high capacity outlets on that site was tricky. Maybe the transformers and their cooling was louder than that site could accommodate. Maybe this was a low priority project and other things kept stealing time from it.
I can think of many reasons why a project like this stalls. And too be clear, regulation could absolutely be one of them. The article just doesn't support that as a root cause beyond conjecture.
In my country, obtaining a permit to build something is so very complicated and long that most people prefer to just build and then pay the fine for building without permits.
The article pretends that the EV charging project failed because of bureaucratic hurdles, but then says 'But they had to switch charging station vendors due to supply chain issues, and the new equipment had “a very long lead time.”' That has nothing to do with bureaucracy, and none of the abundance stuff comes anywhere near addressing it.
From Noah Smith, "America needs a bigger, better bureaucracy":
> In other words, environmental regulation doesn’t threaten America’s economy via a sea of red tape enforced by an army of punctilious bureaucrats. It threatens America’s economy via a plague of lawsuits and pointless paperwork that we implemented as an alternative to hiring an army of punctilious bureaucrats. If we scrapped this legalistic permitting regime and replaced it with an army of bureaucrats, we would still be able to protect the environment just fine, but we would be able to do it without causing insane multi-year delays and driving costs to the moon.
> The nine most terrifying words in the English language are not “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help”. Nine far more terrifying words are: “Please spend four years completing your Environmental Impact Statement.”
[…]
> But even more important is what economists call an “agency problem”. Nonprofits would rather get the government to give them as much money as possible; they would love to rip the government off. And if all the expertise involved in building housing or providing social services resides in the nonprofits instead of the government itself, the government doesn’t have the ability to judge whether it’s getting ripped off. Here’s how I put it in my earlier post:
>> When the government controls the purse strings but only the contractors know how much things should really cost, you get the worst of both worlds — a government that doesn’t know how to save taxpayer money, paying contractors who don’t want to save taxpayer money.
We need to stop calling these insane perverse situations the outcome of "well-intentioned regulations". Every single one of theses regulations passed over the warnings of people at the time who predicted they would cause or contribute to exactly the outcomes we see now. The regulations and their peddlers are about as well intentioned as the carbon fiber submarine dude. The peddlers of these regulations wanted the regulations and ignored everyone who told them something they didn't want to hear. That's not well intentioned. That's behavior on a spectrum from ignorant to malicious.
It’s funny that this is being portrayed as example of abundance being stymied.
This is more about abundance of cars, or abundance of car subsidy in the form of free land and infra. Deregulation of cars and car infra while maintaining the stranglehold on non vehicle land uses.
In a Seattle where land use had actually been reformed, no landowner, public or private, would choose a glorified parking lot as a good use of land. They would build something more important to the public - as evidenced by prices - such as housing or office or some other structure.
Everybody throwing shade a California HSR but uh Texas wanted one starting in 2009 [1], "finished" planning in 2015 [1] and a decade later only has a fancy website to show for it [3].
While California voted in 2008 [4] and broke ground in 2015 and has an impressive ;) 22 miles done in the past decade. And in response to the very slow time, California is blocking CEQA [5] from affecting government projects which will speed up construction [6].
The author does have some points, however they are missing that work is being done on this.
Folks;
Yeah this is a run of the mill dead low-priority project. It happens in private industry, capitalism, communism, the roman empire, etc. Only because government is out in the open, it is easy to see.
I don't have proof, but this stinks of 'Failed project used as a place-holder for schedule slop'. I see is so so so many places.
Somebody, or a lot of somebodies knows this [Refactor AIP / Electric Charge Lot] is not a good idea. Instead of saying 'It's dead' it gets used as a buffer in the project plan. Oh it's there, and if things are every slow enough, it will happen. But even a mouse sneeze will move it out a year, to make budget [time, or $$$ ] for something useful.
Once a year the [ boss / newspaper] will ask "Oh what about, [refactor / Parking Lot]' and somewhere points to the start and end date on the chart. But it's not a priority, and is a placeholder job that gets bumped and shifted for priority work.
It is all over the place, since time began. WWII had it. The Revolutionary War had it. Ford has it. Roman Empire had it. Lockheed Martin has it. Hell, your own house projects have it.
This is just 'A dead project is a placeholder since the org is bad at planning.' It is everywhere.
28 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 59.4 ms ] threadThere is a private dental office down the street from me that's has an expansion which somehow took years. Same story. Ton of construction for a month or two, and then nothing happened.
There was a union protest about using non-union labor for a bit. It felt like they were protesting the wrong issue, as no labor was occurring.
In my big tech job we have a pretty small (by public sector standards) red-tape burden but it does exist. It does slow work down and it does increase the activation energy such that some small projects that might otherwise happen simply don't.
Sometimes, I choose to semi-transparrently ignore it. I see this happen at the institutional level too. So there's a spectrum of tactical non-compliance, extending roughly between:
- I do not submit my conference material to PR/legal, I just go to the conference and present without approval. I admit this to my management chain, they are mildly uncomfortable about it but ultimately don't care enough to make my life difficult.
To:
- We have a policy stating that all open source code in our stack must be fully reviewed internally. I think this does genuinely happen for lots of libraries but for the Linux kernel we are in flagrant violation and nobody cares.
I assume there are very good reasons this is not something you can just do in the public sector. I assume there's also a factor in there about how there is no serious constituency in my company that genuinely cares about the PR/legal approvals, whereas the regulations blocking parking spaces are probably ultimately due to someone who really does care about whatever they are supposed to represent.
And yeah I guess I do like the rule of law, I prefer that our governments don't break it. But maybe there's something there.
I'd incline to believe that if the US body politic set out to solve this one they'd end up in a position of introducing a loophole for charging projects (ie, increasing bureaucracy) and reducing the regulatory burden wouldn't be an option.
Like all code, it can be buggy, bloated and slow, or it can be well-written and efficiently achieve ambitious things.
If you have crappy unmaintainable code that doesn't work, then deleting it is an obvious improvement.
Like in programming, it takes a lot of skill to write code that achieves its goals in a way that is as simple as possible, but also isn't oversimplified to the point of failing to handle important cases.
The pro-regulation argument isn't for naively piling up more code and more bloat, but for improving and optimizing it.
By way of comparison, Project Gemini was conceived in 1961 and Gemini 3 successfully flew in April of 1964.
But I'm sure that 8 EV parking spots is a more complex endeavor somehow...
That is a fairly hopeless aspiration as systems inevitably evolve to perpetuate themselves, not the services they were created to provide.
[0] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/commentary-do-you-want-to-...
One of the reasons American and German cities are made for cars is because of the influence of their car industry. However, this also pushed out investment in competing alternatives like public transport infrastructure.
1) Somehow he decided euclidean zoning was a leftist project. Most leftists and environmentalists I've ever known hate euclidean zoning and this includes many urban planners. Euclidean zoning exists pretty much because property owners want to be able to exclude nearby land uses. It's fundamentally conservative, especially when the goal is to enforce limited housing density.
2) Setting up euclidean zoning as the main whipping boy and then saying "and also air quality regulations are basically the same thing" is a form of straw-manning the stuff he's arguing against.
3) He sets up a dichotomy between California and Texas ignoring that a lot of California's problems are conservative (downzoning, prop 13) and also ignoring the weaknesses in the Texas model including corporations running roughshod over locals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7_WDzPyoqU) a fragile power grid, huge flooding problems etc. It's possible to look at quality of life metrics and see that Texas is doing quite badly. Also, you had the whole tech moving to Austin thing that already fizzled out.
4) He set up developers as the heroes in the story and apparently got a lot of his info from private equity ride-alongs. He ignores that developers are also often land speculators and are in favor of blocking competitors projects and downzoning areas to keep land value high. (https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/abundance-hudson-yards-west?u...)
Basically Abundance is a way for Ezra Klein and his fellow travelers to repackage Clinton-era triangulation and Obama-era neoliberalism as something completely new, so the party can carry on with its pro-donor agenda and ignore why they keep losing. That's also the reason why it was astroturfed into every left media space with a massive marketing budget.
-I think we underestimate the impact of the cultural assumption that anything the government does will be 10x as expensive, take 10x as long and then not work properly, with nobody ever being held accountable, but lots of people having been paid along the way.
Of all the ambitious, smart people I know, a single one has said he even believes it's a good thing to work for the government. And he doesn't do it because he thinks the experience would be so miserable compared to working in tech.
-Most people don't seem to understand that regulations don't just add up, but compound.
It's not that each individual, well-intentioned regulation is bad (though some are), it's that many regulations intersect and create edge cases.
And when there's regulation/paperwork at every point, it starts to look like an insurmountable barrier. This is true with entrepreneurship in Europe. People aren't against a specific regulation, the perception is that whatever you want to do, you'll have to ask permission from someone, somewhere, fill out 5 pages of paperwork and wait 3 months before you get to talk to a notary and finally change your business' mailing address (real example from Germany)
-It's hard to make a rational case for this because humans are wired to weigh danger more heavily than upside.
We don't have counterfactuals (the cafe that didn't open because of zoning laws, the parks that were never built, etc.)
Even when politicians admit this problem, they then proclaim they want more housing, innovation or whatever, but getting rid of a regulation has some amount of risk.
So then they try to find the "free lunch": a solution that has none of the downside, but all of the upside.
That free lunch doesn't exist and the resulting solution only gets even more complex.
We would never excuse such ignorance of 2nd through Nth order consequences in any other context. Can you imagine "the catholic church wasn't trying to provide cover for abusers, that was just an accidental side effect of protecting their own image"? That'd be laughable.
So why does government get the pass?
This stink of a "Low priority project use as a place-holder, but as soon as even a mouse-sneeze comes up, the resources are put to a better used, and it is kicked down the road"
But (as you say) we are all pre-trained to assume 'red tape / regulations' so we back-fill that explanation, even with no evidence.
*(I Wouldn't mind a second reader, read them fast and searched, may have missed something.)
I agree with the wider point but I think the reality is a bit more complicated than that, policy needs to be written with price signals in mind, or if they are addressing a market failure they satisfy some cost benefit analysis to demonstrate the cure isn't worse than the poision. Regulation can also reduce transaction costs when they address coordination problems where a private solution may be discouraged by a fear of free riders.
Regulations can increase fixed costs or variable costs, but if it leads larger markets for the service or if the reduction in services is seen as a smaller cost than an existing negative externality (like costs required to ensure a private water treatment company isn’t poising a public water way, a cost otherwise handled by the government), despite the regulations these are scenarios where costs pay for themselves.
————————————
HOWEVER, much of town planning and land use policies in English speaking world does none of these things. Maybe with the exception of deciding a street grid which addresses a coordination problem.
What market failure do minimum lot sizes or room size address? There are no positive or negative externalities to smaller rooms or lots, people simply choose not to buy or rent something if it’s too small.
Planners hail mixed use zones as a policy only possible with planning, as if it isn't a solution to a problem of their own creation (mutually exclusive residential & commercial land use zones).
Parking per land use is another awful policy. This is simply something the developers can determine based on their own market research. They are handling the development let them handle the risk.
Free parking is also another poor planing policy, parking is definitely something of value which would be a more productive use willing if it had market pricing.
Floor area caps are just evil, infrastructure charges are a much fairer way of handling increased land usage.
Upper level setbacks are just dumb, as they add so much in terms of costs, often to handle more in terms of support columns, and increase the likelihood of water damage. As a result the top most levels end up costing much more and less for less than they could, which puts development feasibility at risk when building heights are too low (sometimes that is the whole point).
Cities have no experience building or maintaining charging stations.
I can think of many reasons why a project like this stalls. And too be clear, regulation could absolutely be one of them. The article just doesn't support that as a root cause beyond conjecture.
> In other words, environmental regulation doesn’t threaten America’s economy via a sea of red tape enforced by an army of punctilious bureaucrats. It threatens America’s economy via a plague of lawsuits and pointless paperwork that we implemented as an alternative to hiring an army of punctilious bureaucrats. If we scrapped this legalistic permitting regime and replaced it with an army of bureaucrats, we would still be able to protect the environment just fine, but we would be able to do it without causing insane multi-year delays and driving costs to the moon.
> The nine most terrifying words in the English language are not “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help”. Nine far more terrifying words are: “Please spend four years completing your Environmental Impact Statement.”
[…]
> But even more important is what economists call an “agency problem”. Nonprofits would rather get the government to give them as much money as possible; they would love to rip the government off. And if all the expertise involved in building housing or providing social services resides in the nonprofits instead of the government itself, the government doesn’t have the ability to judge whether it’s getting ripped off. Here’s how I put it in my earlier post:
>> When the government controls the purse strings but only the contractors know how much things should really cost, you get the worst of both worlds — a government that doesn’t know how to save taxpayer money, paying contractors who don’t want to save taxpayer money.
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-...
This is more about abundance of cars, or abundance of car subsidy in the form of free land and infra. Deregulation of cars and car infra while maintaining the stranglehold on non vehicle land uses.
In a Seattle where land use had actually been reformed, no landowner, public or private, would choose a glorified parking lot as a good use of land. They would build something more important to the public - as evidenced by prices - such as housing or office or some other structure.
Everybody throwing shade a California HSR but uh Texas wanted one starting in 2009 [1], "finished" planning in 2015 [1] and a decade later only has a fancy website to show for it [3].
While California voted in 2008 [4] and broke ground in 2015 and has an impressive ;) 22 miles done in the past decade. And in response to the very slow time, California is blocking CEQA [5] from affecting government projects which will speed up construction [6].
The author does have some points, however they are missing that work is being done on this.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Central_Railway
[2]: https://texascentral.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/...
[3]: https://www.texascentral.com/project/
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail
[5]: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/06/30/governor-newsom-signs-into...
[6]: https://gsppi.berkeley.edu/programs/highspeedrail/docs/Schwe...
I don't have proof, but this stinks of 'Failed project used as a place-holder for schedule slop'. I see is so so so many places.
Somebody, or a lot of somebodies knows this [Refactor AIP / Electric Charge Lot] is not a good idea. Instead of saying 'It's dead' it gets used as a buffer in the project plan. Oh it's there, and if things are every slow enough, it will happen. But even a mouse sneeze will move it out a year, to make budget [time, or $$$ ] for something useful.
Once a year the [ boss / newspaper] will ask "Oh what about, [refactor / Parking Lot]' and somewhere points to the start and end date on the chart. But it's not a priority, and is a placeholder job that gets bumped and shifted for priority work.
It is all over the place, since time began. WWII had it. The Revolutionary War had it. Ford has it. Roman Empire had it. Lockheed Martin has it. Hell, your own house projects have it.
This is just 'A dead project is a placeholder since the org is bad at planning.' It is everywhere.