Home building is the largest manufacturing job in the nation.
Want to bring manufacturing jobs to the US? You don't need some insane tariff policy, all you need to do is allow people to build housing on land that they own.
Home building is rampant in some areas, it's just not in the insanely VHCOL coasts.
Tax incentives or other reasons to have companies offer jobs in places like Milwaukee or Boise reduces housing pressure on the big cities.
What we used to have is smaller (in area) cities, who were not governed in lock-step, and if housing was needed, entire new cities would pop up (sometimes called suburbs, but check them - often they're their own legal entity).
Studies have found if you JUST upzoned and deregulated SF & NYC 30 years the avg income across the country would be %25 - %35 richer today.
building out the VHCOL cities is the fastest path to high growth and social mobility. These are far and away the country's most productive places (even for low skilled work) and build up, reducing housing cost, and bringing in migrants and making them more productive turbocharges growth.
I live in a VHCOL coast (the Bay Area) and am trying to add onto my house. Contractors are quoting broadly between $500-$1000 per square feet for an addition, for an ADU, or for a new house. We need both YIMBY procedure reforms and also somehow to bring down construction costs. I’m hopeful prefab/modular can help.
A big part of that is contractors have to pay Bay Area costs to operate. Other parts of the country $1000 a square is strictly "brand new really nice mansion" territory.
There's so much demand for housing and construction in the Bay Area, that with the stroke of a pen (figuratively), you could increase building activity by 100x. That would create a huge price spike at first, but construction businesses would expand and others would move to the area, more housing would be available for workers outside of the highest income bands, which would increase supply. It would be a virtuous cycle that could continue for quite a while.
We used to have completely different technologies in the world. For better or worse the modern economy depends much more on agglomeration and cities are more important than ever. Work from home didn't change this as some people thought it would.
We need to unlock our economic centers if we want to survive.
It is home to (or adjacent to the home of) the most valuable companies in the world.
The reason it doesn’t look like Shenzhen is because 1) Americans invest a huge portion of their life savings into their homes which means 2) preventing that asset from depreciating is important and 3) scarcity is the easiest way to accomplish that and 4) homeowners have disproportionate political power to do so.
As long as these (by national standards) mediocre houses keep appreciating, homeowners will fight change.
The US has also exercised eminent domain historically. We can do it. American cities weren’t all government property before Uncle Sam put highways through many of them. It might be wise to revisit this for other improvements.
When the Chinese government exercises eminent domain, my understanding is that many people want their homes to be targeted because of the (comparatively) lucrative payouts. Cash neutralizes concerns 1, 2, and 3.
Now that people in California have held their homes long enough, buying them out is a lot more expensive. There are better ways to make the numbers work, though.
It's not trivially obvious that upzoning would be bad for property values. If it becomes possible to build a giant apartment building on a plot of land in a high-demand area, that makes developers willing to pay substantial sums for it. (The homeownership paradigm does cause various other problems, though.)
Not just that, having more housing makes it possible for even more companies to move in. Apple/Google/Meta are great but they are trillion dollar companies and can afford to pay top dollar. There are many others who would like to. I believe adding more housing would induce a ton of demand.
such a broad subject, with so many stakeholders.. really, starkly different stakeholders.. yet the topic is "Industrial Policy" so, worth a mention is a collection of thinkers in the USA and elsewhere, who envisioned synergetic clusters of heavy industry.. where the waste products of one can be handled or repurposed into another distinct endeavor, at close range.. also limiting the brownsfields left as industry moves on.. one search term is "Industrial Ecology" .. Ford Motor Company sponsored some unique works at that time, with that thinking.. all the more relevant today
Our lack of building is directly tied to dollar reserve currency policy. We export a lot of dollars; other countries export goods to the US and end up with dollars. The things they can invest their dollar in are dollar-based assets. That results in the massive consumer sector and bubble dynamics. Simultaneously, calls to "reinvest in America" fall on deaf ears, because this reserve currency model needs free trade, and free trade allows capital to uproot and leave a place, whether in a direct sense or through creative loopholes. So long as the balance sheet of the assets is prioritized, the country cannot invest in its people, because that will show up as a cost(in tax, benefits, or regulation). Balance-sheet efficiency means consolidating and centralizing profits while outsourcing costs, and what is actively supported by policy and investment is whatever the market is hyped for(dot coms, social media, crypto, AI), which results in technical development towards the ends of oligarchs. Nothing new can be built unless it's pitched in terms of profit and market share.
The current regime is the endgame: The distortions grew large enough to cause a flip to mercantalist policy-making and winner-loser dynamics. It has a short-term logic to it, but it is also incompatible with where we are. All the biggest businesses in modern America were built around dollar debt, consumerism and outsourcing, and all the workers were likewise tied to either the fortunes of these businesses or the government itself. All it'll do is produce a crisis, which can only resolve through a more holistic policy framework.
Lack of urban building has nothing to do with the reserve currency (beyond making imported housing materials cheaper) and everything to do with NIMBY's steering municipal politics to choke development.
Yeah nimbyisn isnt just blocking homes. Its rampant for every project. High speed rail in california has spent billions and years fighting nimbys. Every factory, every buisness, every job often faces nimbyism to try and keep out economic growth because the area will be slightly buiser lmao.
As I understand it, the problem building high speed rail in California isn't that people are trying to stop it, but rather that everybody who has the power to throw up roadblocks realizes that they can use it to extract something from the state.
Not endorsing here but it's not like that's not over entirely nothing. Our car-centric infrastructure means anywhere that is busy is basically impossible to navigate, which... I mean nearly every other G20 nation has a much more diverse transportation system than us, and car focused infrastructure is by far the most inefficient way to move people. It's why I'm still a remote worker despite loving my job, coworkers, and the office: I don't want to deal with commuting in a major metro. Numerous others who work where I do regularly clock commutes in the 30 minute range to travel 10 miles. It's absurd.
And it's not JUST inconvenient, it's costly. Living in a place with more people and more traffic means you pay higher insurance premiums and spend more on fuel, unless you have an EV of course.
Again I don't mean to fully cosign NIMBYism I'm just saying, especially with the shit way the United States goes about building, it isn't a position completely without merit.
NIMBYism ensures that cars will be the only way to access any areas, because any public transit projects which would reduce traffic get blocked. Roads are the lowest common denominator so they happen.
There’s no reason 280 and 101 can’t also have corresponding high speed rail lines to cut commute times from San Jose to SF down from 2 hours to a fraction of that.
At the risk of being That Guy, traffic on high-demand corridors is not caused by building too much or too little or the wrong things; it is caused by lack of congestion pricing. If you don't have that, then you'll have congestion anywhere people want to be, regardless of whether you build lots of roads or build lots of trains or don't build at all. Building roads or trains might (or might not) still be a good thing to do, in the sense of creating more economic value by increasing throughput and so making more marginal trips viable, but that induced demand means the roads will still be congested. Whereas if you have congestion pricing you can just decide how much congestion you want to tolerate and set it at whatever level achieves that.
The problem with the 'induced demand' paradigm is that it leads to cities not investing in infrastructure, and often designing the city to be hard to enter or exit, and impossible to bypass. This is one instance where there are many examples of the 'slippery slope' coming to pass.
If we want people to take mass transit, we should make it better, instead of making everything else terrible.
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. "Induced demand" isn't a policy paradigm; it's just the observation that if you make it easier for more people to get somewhere, then more people will go there. Without congestion pricing, the only equilibrium (until you exhaust all demand, which isn't going to happen in hot metro areas) is the one where the roads are congested enough to deter the next marginal person from using them. With congestion pricing, you can choose a different equilibrium without the deadweight loss of people stuck in traffic. The question of how much to invest in infrastructure, and what kinds, can then be addressed separately in whatever way makes sense given local conditions.
Everyone that I’ve ever heard mention ‘induced demand’ with respect to roads does so while advocating against the construction of additional infrastructure capacity for passenger vehicles (cars). This correlation is consistent enough that it does indicate some sort of ‘induced demand paradigm’.
I agree that ‘congestion pricing’ does impact traffic, but it does so by changing the cost function, and granting the city government additional revenue from (usually poorer) people who it is not accountable to.
Yes, it's definitely the case that a lot of mass transit advocates are confused about this and talk about induced demand in an unproductive way.
New York City's congestion pricing scheme was approved at the state level, so it's not true that people living outside the city didn't get a say—though people from New Jersey didn't, and can reasonably complain.
It's theoretically possible that congestion pricing could be welfare-reducing if peak demand is inelastic enough. If this were happening, then (1) traffic wouldn't fall much unless the price were raised to extremely high levels, and (2) frequent commuters would be ones most harmed by the policy and would be its most fervent opponents. In New York, we see the opposite: traffic has fallen sharply and frequent commuters are the policy's biggest fans (https://pfnyc.org/news/new-poll-ny-voters-say-congestion-pri...). Similar things have been seen internationally in other cities; people often initially resist having to pay for something they're used to getting for free, but once it's in place, it's durable and popular because people don't want to go back to traffic jams.
Whether congestion pricing is welfare-positive really depends on your utility function. I think rich commuters probably like it, and poorer people who need to drive for work probably hate it. My concerns are more related to political accountability, political incentives, and discrimination against non-voters, all of which exist here.
You have the cause backward. Induced demand is the observation that because people cannot get someplace they already want to go they are going something else instead.
The whole point of a city is all the things you can do. If you don't want to go someplace then what are you doing in a city - there are plenty of nice cheap places to live in very rural areas where you can sit in your house going nowhere. Thus cities need to build infrastructure to such that there is no induced demand and the people there can do what they want.
Note that I didn't specify what they build. Most cities should be building metro systems not roads.
Induced demand is only a problem for transportation methods like driving that aren’t scalable. With a metro, you just add more trains and more frequent departure times. Of course such an “ambitious” plan requires political will and less veto power for current residents.
Congestion pricing isn't sufficient for the majority of American cities. If you have a major city with few to no inter-city transit options except cars, all the congestion pricing in the world won't shift transit modalities in the short to medium term because alternatives simply don't exist, at least until you price out the lower wage earners entirely and drop aggregate demand. You need to build out public transit options first to provide alternatives that people can take to mitigate the pressures of congestion pricing, but that takes us back to the original point.
Indeed, everything's always easier when there's a greater wealth of transportation resources available and people have more options. Ideally there should be enough road and/or train capacity to get everyone where they want to go.
If that's not the case, then congestion pricing works by putting pressure on people to stay off the roads at peak times if they can. This is, in fact, a good thing to do; if not everyone who wants to use the roads can do so at once, because there aren't enough roads, then it's most efficient to give the space to those who most need it by willingness to pay. (Regressive distributional impacts of this can be addressed with the revenue that congestion pricing raises, e.g., by cutting consumption taxes.) Making people sit in traffic does no good at all and is just wasteful.
But if you want not just to eliminate that waste, but to actually increase people's mobility, then you need to build enough roads or trains. Whether that's worth the cost depends, as always, on local conditions.
(To be clear, the goal from this perspective is not to "shift transit modalities"; it's to get people where they're going without making them waste time in traffic. Sometimes that means getting more of them onto trains, and sometimes it doesn't.)
> everything's always easier when there's a greater wealth of transportation resources
It’s not just easier. If there are no other options, it doesn’t matter what congestion toll you put. The only option is car.
> putting pressure on people to stay off the roads at peak times if they can
Sure, but for most people the demand for transportation before and after normal working hours is inelastic. A smart policy takes that into account and doesn’t inconvenience people for going to/from work.
The real effect of congestion charges when there isn't good other options is whoever enacts them is voted out of office and anything they might have done to give people other options is scrapped as well. NYC can get away with them in the dense parts because there are enough options that the people who vote there mostly use transit and so they don't pay the price anyway and thus don't care.
California might also take note that the same induced demand argument works for housing. Currently the reverse is happening, as California fails to meet demand (and costs skyrocket) the state failing to grow like it could.
> Again I don't mean to fully cosign NIMBYism I'm just saying
In my city, the same people who are against housing also oppose transit. They don't want the city to grow, whether successfully or unsuccessfully. If you tell them we can build transit and create walkable neighborhoods, and growth can be a positive rather than a negative, they hate that idea just as much as if we grow and it's a gridlocked disaster. Maybe even more so.
There is a reason for all the restrictions. Some of it is bad reason, but we have done some really stupid things as well. Anyone who wants to be YIMBY (which includes me) needs to come up with ways to figure out how not to do the bad as well.
If you went looking in China, you'd find plenty of really stupid or bad things that happened as a result of the government's ability to easily requisition land for public use. Ruined ecosystems, displaced families, corruption, the works.
But it's quite obvious that any large-scale building would result in at least some of that. There is no way to "figure out" how to avoid all harms or how to avoid at least some broken eggs in the basket. Personally I'm all for North Americans figuring out what a "greater good" is, but the idea that it'll actually happen is laughable; we can't, we won't, we'll simply fester in what we have.
Urban renewal, massive concentrated public housing, and highway construction through cities burned a lot of goodwill towards building. I'm very pro-building, but there's a lot of scar tissue (physical and mental) from last century.
Yglesias's position, which he's articulated in a number of posts over the years, is that procedural barriers are a poor and ineffective way of preventing this failure mode, because they don't differentially retard bad projects compared to good projects; they just slow down everything, and impose other costs besides. You might like this if it's your considered opinion that change is in general bad, but I think most sane people recognize that that's not the case.
According to this position, the thing to do is to reduce the influence of bureaucrats and courts over what kind of building is allowed, and instead concentrate authority in a small number of elected officials who are empowered to do whatever they judge best—while making very clear to voters that those elected officials are responsible for whatever outcomes come of this, so that if those outcomes are bad (as judged by voters), the officials won't be reelected. In short, let democracy do its job.
The issue with this is that perception of outcomes is subjective, and if you sell yourself well (and bribe elderly voters), you will get away. The most indebted city in my country is led by a clan who managed to now own via trust multiple villa, gold ingot from nowhere, and whose 'leader' was arrested and convicted for corruption. They enriched themselves way more than a public servant salary could do (especially with their living standards) and repeat that their wealth is from an hidden inheritance. People from that city still vote for them.
I've been a temp at the equivalent of the IRS in my country. We had unbelievably inefficient processes. Some of it was because of very old software, but most of it was simply procedures, my main example is that the person approving a rebate/delay can't know or guess who's asked for it. I had to check if they were eligible, then anonymize them, then send the data to someone I don't know (to be exact, if it was the first year you asked for a delay i could automatically approve it without a seal of approval). Hopefully nowadays they have better software that helps them do that (explaining he situation without letting too much details slip was hard, but a good use of LLMs I would guess?)
He shares this position with Ezra Klein, who has articulated it at some length in his new book "Abundance" (written with Derek Thompson of the Atlantic).
That could be a good policy insofar as residential zoning goes, but you probably don't want to abolish all rules about things like environmental impact for large-scale construction projects; you just don't want to let arbitrary people who dislike a project for arbitrary reasons block it on pretextual environmental grounds.
Not always. Robert Moses is most well known for the evils we are talking about and he was strictly New York (though he was able to get federal money in latter years)
In part it's because SF is relatively old. BART is 50 years old, and New York Subway is over 100 years old.
Check back on China's gleaming rail system and newly constructed cities in 50 or 100 years.
You can bet it will look older and more tired, an ageing snapshot of a once in a century construction boom. Especially if China experiences several lost decades like Japan, which is increasingly likely.
This is a lame excuse, look at the Moscow Metro, it's old yet clean, maintained, safe and constantly expanding. As are many European metros - while dated, they are fine (despite the grumblings of Londoners and Parisians). This is a political will issue, not an infrastructure one.
Does Russia have a comparably large automotive manufacturing industry & related industry in comparison to the U.S.?
I fail to see how public transit to shopping center in Russia is counter to my point that America likes to consume cars and that better public transit in the U.S. would hurt the selling (i.e consumption) of cars.
Also, again:
> Additionally there is a lack of infrastructure and culture to keep public transit clean.
Ah, you specifically meant consuming cars. I totally misread that as general consumption. Yeah, I'm with you on that. American car culture is very strange, the brodozers as status symbol and mentality behind them is a pox. The culture of "you ain't no real mayun if you ain't got da big truck" is something that I think only $10+ a gallon gas can solve...
You're saying that China's ability to build rail for the last 20 years while America struggled to build rail has something to do with "several lost decades" that you're anticipating?
Could you expand on why you think China will have lost decades?
I can assure you, 90% of Seattle just looks like it's been taken over by SFH zoning NIMBYs (because it has), with no drug addicts or homeless in sight.
Comparing homeless people and drug addicts to zombies is not helpful.
Instead we could talk about returning to the horrors of the involuntary hospitalization era pre-Reagan, or we could talk about the current push to incarcerate the entire class in order to use them for forced labor (Grants Pass v. Johnson, 2024).
The most humane solution would be to house them and give them a robust social assistance network, of course, but that’s obviously so far off the table that it fell out the Overton Window.
The main reason they can't get housing though is that the government of California, which is dominated by Democrats, refuses to allow sufficient housing construction to make housing affordable.
I’d be interested to see how the Republican approach to the problem of homelessness works at scale, but they control few local governments the size of SF or Seattle.
Full disclosure: I don’t know much about them, and I doubt anyone in this thread cares enough to merit a deep dive. A little light googling suggests both struggle with homelessness (not surprising: both tend to have mild winters). DFW seems to take in essence the liberal approach: social services support with some encampment clearing and forced transport away from the city; OKC seems to be working on a rehousing program (how progressive of them) combined with faith-based charities and private/public partnerships.
I think that a significant cause of homelessness is unaffordable housing. In 2025 housing affordability is better in Republican-run states like Texas because the state governments allow more housing to be constructed. Because housing is more abundant and cheaper, the population is growing faster. (This is why the Electoral College is on track to become more biased in favor of Republicans after the 2030 Census: the US population is disproportionately growing in Republican states.)
For context I'm a center-left person, but at this point I'm pretty fed up with the standard California Democrat stance of simultaneously saying that housing affordability is really important but also using many tools of government to actually block housing construction.
What does partisanship have to do with it, voters in CA are SFH owners and thus push for things that preserve the status quo. The state gov even passed a bunch of stuff in 2024 to defang a lot of NIMBYism but it takes time to see the effects.
I disagree. Zombie-town is a valid insult for the state of certain SF neighborhoods.
Yes, opponents love exaggerating the geographical extent of this crisis. But, it is that dire in the worst hotspots. Unfortunately, these hotspots also happen to be high-foot-traffic commuter hubs and downtown locations. Compassionate methods should be the carrot to a much needed stick. The stick being - Punishment for crimes and involuntary hospitalization of those too far gone.
I would like to talk about the horrors of involuntary hospitalization. Which issues do you think will return ? What's worse than a life that's indistinguishable from zombie-hood on the streets of SF ?
"Affordable housing" (sub-market rate lotteries subsidized by increasing the cost of market rate housing) is IMO more of a NIMBY policy than a YIMBY one. The net effect is market rate housing gets more expensive, which hurts everyone except the lucky lottery winners.
Here's the thing, cities do not get cheaper when density increases. The reasons are complicated, but the end result is that not a single large city in Europe, US, or Japan decreased the housing costs by "just building more".
If you want to decrease costs, you have exactly two options:
This. Demanding new developments all be affordable housing is a strategy NIMBYs use to prevent new construction, since most builders will just go elsewhere.
If a builder does try to comply with the demand, they come up with other reasons to block construction (doesn't match neighborhood's character, not enough parking, demand yet another environmental review, etc.)
No; be as resistant to local environment change as you are to global climate change. If you’re not doing anything about the second then don’t do anything about the first. (If you are doing something about the second, you probably know better than to try and prevent housing being built in a location that is not threatened).
Climate change is going to make large, heavily populated areas somewhere between unattractive and uninhabitable even within the US. Likely outcomes of this are millions of people eventually trying to move from deserts in Texas and California to the PNW or the Midwest. The population of these areas is going to increase, barring the magical peaceful disappearance of half the country, or the unmagical violent disappearance of half the country. If you think you can prevent that climate change, or prevent inland California or Arizona etc from being waterless deserts, or somehow make it safe for everyone to continue living where they are today - go nuts. If you don't think that, start figuring out how your area will absorb more people. It's gonna need a bigger housing supply.
Well then so be it. As you say, I do have great privilege, and I wish to enjoy it. I have high regard for my own life, and that includes protecting tradition
Want to bring manufacturing jobs to the US? You don't need some insane tariff policy, all you need to do is allow people to build housing on land that they own.
Bonus: this will grow GDP by double digit percentage points instead of throwing into another recession https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/opinion/housing-regulatio...
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