Abundance and Scarcity: Not pie.
China has built tens of thousands of miles of high speed rail in the last two decades. When I traveled in rural Yunnan in 2004 it was an all-day drive from Kunming to Dali and another few hours to Weishan. By 2014 it was a few hours tops by road or rail. High speed rail is so successful that Chinese airlines are complaining that too few people fly from Beijing to Shanghai. Meanwhile, California’s high-speed rail proposal from the 1980s will probably never happen.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have written a book called Abundance that provides a structural reason for our drop from first-world status. They argue that the nation’s institutional architecture prevents things from happening rather than facilitating things. Klein in a podcast said we have prevented good people from achieving things, which makes bad actors who promise to break the rules popular. Hence, the political reason for our drop.
Now, this might seem like the anti-regulatory banner-waving of YIMBYS and neocons, but the Klein argument is – like I said above – about structure, not politics. Not flags but terra firma. Put simply, the regulatory web is not designed to make things happen but to study and litigate them forever. And ever.
When Sara Bronin, in her role as Chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation from 2022-2024, tried to make historic preservation more amenable to achieving things that would help society, like affordable housing and energy efficiency, she stumbled into a few canards. Turns out the preservation infrastructure has been a lot less clogged than environmental and habitiat issues. Even in her area of great expertise – zoning – preservationists have been ahead of the games, arguing for ADUs in SFR districts since the early 1990s.
And many have been there much longer – King William district, San Antonio.
One of the smartest things Klein and Thompson do is ask about where and how things get done. In China, you can relocate a million people to build the Three Gorges Dam because public input is extremely limited. In France and Spain you can build high-speed rail because while there is a public process and bureaucracy, approvals can happen and there is not endless litigation.
They also make use of two economic writers I appreciate – Ed Glaeser and William Fischel, who help explain that strange 1970s transformation when homes became expensive primary assets. We have a housing problem that is intractable because we want two things that are structurally opposite: We want housing to be cheap enough for all, and we want housing to be our primary source of tax-advantaged wealth. Can’t. Have. Both.
Now of course Fischel and Glaeser take their shots at the regulatory world as well, and a few land but most don’t because they aim at the anecdote. Klein and Thompson note the changes we are seeing to traditional single-family zoning and give a couple of good examples where projects got done – one by having a private entity build affordable housing and the other by a governor using emergency powers to rebuild a bridge in record time. These locally rare examples are what the Chinese do daily.
At the end the book was not a deep-diving revelation but a useful provoking of thought. What are our systems designed to do and not do? I myself was hoping for a clearer definition of an abundance Weltanschauung, rather than a staid critique of the regulatory web that doesn’t add much to what Fischel and Glaeser gave us over a decade ago.
Come on guys, tell us it isn’t pie. And why. The Chinese figured that out, clearly.
Owning in an historic district
I own a house in a historic district and last year I blogged about how thankful I was for that fact. Real estate is an asset whose value is largely external – it comes from its location, which is to say, its surrounding buildings and environment. Because my house is in a historic district, its value is assured. Economic studies for over 40 years have confirmed this fact in communities across the United States.
If you look at the history of historic districts – which I did in my dissertation – you find that the first modern historic districts emerged in the 1950s in communities that were concerned about drastic changes to their environment and thus the value of their homes. Urban renewal was one threat, which proposed outright demolition. The other threat was posed by postwar zoning ordinances, which dramatically increased density and thus owners of brownstones or single-family homes faced the prospect of massive highrises next door.