99% Invisible
Hosted by Roman Mars
Why is it so hard to build anything in America?
8,930 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
Some of the most important design choices are the ones that go unnoticed. The details that together make an experience feel intuitive, comfortable, and above all, exhilarating. At Acura, that means looking closely at how every detail can make your experience behind the wheel more rewarding. Every lesson learned and every idea refined becomes part of what comes next, and it lives inside every MDX, ADX, and Integra. That's precision crafted performance. That's Acura.
If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job, the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
In 2022, a group of developers in San Francisco proposed turning a Nordstrom parking lot into housing. They wanted to build nearly 500 apartments, many of them affordable, right near public transit. But before they could even start the formal approval process, they had to go through what's called a preliminary review. That's when city planners take a first look and tell you what studies, hearings, and permits your project will need. It's not a green light to build. It's not even a red light. It's just a list of what paperwork you'll need to file. And that step alone took over 500 days. That kind of delay isn't rare. All over the country, efforts to build housing, transit, and clean energy
get tangled up in procedures that are supposed to help, but often just stall everything.
Ezra Klein has been thinking about this a lot. His new book that he co-authored with Derek Thompson is called Abundance. And at its core, it's about infrastructure, not just roads and bridges, but the systems that make it possible or impossible to build anything at all. He argues that the biggest obstacles to building the stuff we need aren't technological or financial, they're legal and procedural, and they're largely self-imposed. His book, which came out a couple of months ago, has been making waves and causing arguments. And so we wanted to have him on the show to talk about it.
So for people who are not familiar with the book, tell us about the idea of abundance. What does it look like?
So the idea of abundance is there is a pretty simple question that would be good to put back at the center of politics, which is what do we need more of and how do we get it? And that emerges from looking around, looking around California, looking around the federal government, looking around America itself, and seeing that a lot of our problems are problems of scarcity, problems of being unable to build enough of the things we need. Housing, clean energy, infrastructure. And you would think this is pretty straightforward. I mean, what is politics about if not getting enough of what we need? But actually, you dig into it and you dig into how we run our governments and make our laws and build our processes.
And you often find that we are the reason we are not building enough houses. We are the reason we are not building enough clean energy or transmission lines. And so it's an effort to focus people on that set of questions, to try to like pump out some more utopian thinking about what world do we want to inhabit? And then work backwards of what is plentiful there that is scarce here? And how do we bridge the gap?
So what is stopping us from this vision of abundance? What stands in the way?
It depends on the issue. So not every, you know, not every domain is the same. Not every place is the same.
Sure.
But you don't have enough apartments in San Francisco because we've made it functionally illegal to build apartments in San Francisco. Right? It's not like San Francisco has lost the knowledge that Houston still has about how to build an apartment building. It's not like we don't have any cranes. We just don't make it possible. And there's a million different reasons why. But fundamentally, we have constructed a set of processes to make it impossible. Why did we not get rural broadband done under Joe Biden or the electric vehicle chargers? It's a different set of problems, but we've made the process much too heavy. We've made it too expensive. We've made it too cumbersome. We've created too many veto points. And every one of these things has its own little history. They're, you know, as I say about the families, right? They're unhappy in their own ways.
But they reflect a generalized embrace of the virtues of delay. And the virtues of delay, depending on what process you're looking for, tend to be about amassing more information so that some group, some constituencies, some problem is not missed. The issue is that when you do that, you create a leverage point for anybody who wants to stop what is actually going on. Right? So, you know, what in theory you're doing is checking to see if there's going to be negative environmental consequences from project. But what then people are doing is using that process and using the lawsuits that process makes possible to make the project not happen at all. They're not worried about protecting the snail.
They're worried about the fact that they just don't want this built in the first place. And this gives them a way to slow the project down so much that it becomes too costly to ever create in the first place. So at some point, you have to look and realize that a policy architecture that got built for many different reasons in the 70s and 80s, you know, 90s, has just kind of become overgrown, that the problems we were trying to solve through that architecture have now created new problems. And now we have to do a new era of institutional renewal that is alive to the issues of our age, not captured by the debates of a prior age.
Right. So I get that the, you know, the process of slowing things down is sort of very specific to whatever it is you're trying to slow down. And all those sort of get kludged up in their very specific ways. If we were to pick one, I was thinking of picking high-speed rail because it's sort of a centerpiece of the beginning of your book. What is the project there and how was it getting stopped?
So, high-speed rail. High-speed rail is a good one because I think it sounds a little bit futuristic to people.
Yeah.
But other countries have built high-speed rail. You can ride high-speed rail all around Europe, can ride it around Japan, can ride it in China. China in recent decades has built 23,000 miles of high-speed rail. California begins studying high-speed rail in the 80s. It passes in 2008. I think it's fair to mark this as like the real beginning. This proposition that sets aside a bunch of money for it. And they say it's going to take them till about, you know, 2020-ish and costs about $33 billion. And here we are in 2025. You can't ride anything. The cost estimate, if you were to finish the whole thing is now $110 billion. And what they're only trying to do is this Merced Bakersfield line, which will cost,
you know, more than the whole thing was initially believed to cost.
So what happens in the interim? There is no end of problems, but what I would say is that the connective tissue of them is that everything, everything, everything is negotiation and delay. The route, the individual environmental clearances in 2012, they begin trying to do environmental clearance on the route. That isn't done by the end of 2024. In every city, there's sort of, not literally every city, but a lot of the cities, they're making side deals to come in and, you know, rebuild a playground or do this so that, you know, the, the council and so on will not fight them too much. In places where they need to go through land, the eminent domain process is actually extremely cumbersome. What you begin to see with high-speed rail, because I mean, we could sit here and talk
about it for hours, but what you begin to see is almost no matter which part of the kaleidoscope you look at it through, there is not a process that allows the government to build things and it is decided are priorities. The government does not have the power to say, we are going to build high-speed rail. This is going to create inconveniences. It is important to us, so we are going to move fast and organize resources in a rapid way to get it done. Instead, they're negotiating with other parts of government. They're in endless lawsuits. They are sort of redoing the route relentlessly because like this or that group doesn't like it, or this or that legislator doesn't like it. And what you have here, you have it in other states too, in different ways, but you begin to see, oh, we can't do it.
There are a million things that I disagree with Elon Musk on, and he's become a very poisonous political figure, but he does give this interview, you know, a bit back where he says about high-speed rail in California that We have functionally made it illegal to build high-speed rail in California. And that's accurate. That's the right way to think about it. We've created a process by which it would not be legal to do the things you need to do to build high-speed rail. So then you want to ask this question, right? Do you think that it is an abuse of democracy, the way Spain, or France, or Japan does rail construction? Or do you think it is an abuse of democracy to make things that the public wants so unbelievably subject to veto and delay that they never happen?
That's really the choice, I think, that emerges through studying this particular project closely.
Yeah. Are people obstructing just to obstruct? What is the nature of the obstruction?
It depends. I mean, the problem is they have a million different reasons. Sometimes they are using the process exactly as intended. They are genuinely concerned that this or that project, or this or that part of high-speed rail, will be devastating to the environment in some way or another. And so they're using environmental laws to try to change that, or at least make the government think about the consequences of the action and ameliorate it. Elsewhere, it's not that at all. So the California Environmental Quality Act, which is a sort of statewide version of a national policy. One of the reasons that act, which is widely agreed in California to be kind of a disaster, is very, very hard to change, is that California's unions defend it relentlessly. Now, why do they defend it?
Because, I mean, they're not primarily motivated by environmental concerns. They defend it because they use CEQA to basically threaten delay in lawsuit if developers for all kinds of different projects don't make sufficient concessions to the union, or don't unionize a project, or whatever. And so they've become a huge defender of this, not because of its environmental quality dimensions, but because it is a point of leverage they can use for labor standards. Now, I'm broadly speaking pro-union.
But I would like to use like direct worker law to effectuate that, not have these sort of backdoor approaches, because it makes everything else very inefficient. You know, a lot of people don't want rail going by them. That makes complete sense, right? The problem is you have this, you know, continuous tension between the needs of the individual and the needs of the, the, the, the community or the, the polity. If you're a mini storage site, which is one of the, the situations where this happened, and the high-speed rail needs to move past you. And so the idea is like, can you move backwards a bit? Or can the government come and use eminent domain to take your land and compensate you? Of course, you don't want to be inconvenienced in that way. But on the other hand, if we can't do that, then we can't build things that go through
populous areas. Other countries just deal with these questions differently. I mean, China deals with them very imperiously, but I don't think people go to Europe and think, whoa, total tyranny with no respect for individual rights. We deal with them through lawsuit and courts take very long periods of time. It's a very slow way to resolve issues. So then delay becomes like the fundamental nature of the project.
I mean, we don't usually have the burden of having to believe in the law that we're sort of using on our side to make an argument. Like we, we, we, we do this sort of end run all the time, like using one piece of law to stop something. Isn't the point that we want to save the snail darter? We just really don't want TVA's dams or whatever it is. You know what I mean? Is that a requirement? Like, how would you police that or tell, you know, like?
I, I think in the era where we built a lot of these laws, what we did, which is kind of the seventies, what we did was we created structures that do not internally make judgments. So something like the National Environmental Policy Act, the California Environmental Quality Act, to use these as examples, but there are many, many, many others. What they demand is not that the thing you are doing is good for the environment. That's not the question the law is asking. They are asking a question about how thoroughly you have researched and considered every possible impact that a court has ever defined as plausibly environmental. So there was a famous case a couple of years ago in Berkeley where a guy sued under the California Environmental Quality Act to stop Berkeley from expanding its dormitories.
You see Berkeley. Under the basic argument that adding more students to Berkeley was an environmental harm. They create trash, they create noise. What I would like to see is not the absence of environmental laws. I would like environmental laws where there is a judgment we are capable of making in a pretty compressed time period of whether or not a project is on net, good or bad for the environment, and whether it is kind of in a reasonable way thought through that question. And if it's good, then it gets sped up. And if it's bad, maybe then it requires more study. But I think the law should treat laying down an array of solar panels differently than building an oil refinery or a coal plant. And the law doesn't treat
it very differently. That's a huge mistake.
I mean, this does seem like a huge cultural thing related to the United States as a very particular and unique object. The closest analog that I see from history in terms of a time of abundance and state capacity is the New Deal, the WPA, TVA, PWA. How much does that historical antecedent conform to your vision of abundance?
I think there's a lot of similarities. Now, the sort of tension we're laying out in the book is a tension between that New Deal era of liberalism and a form of liberalism that arises in reaction to it, that we often think of as the new left. And the left has a much more troubled relationship with government than it lets on. There's New Deal liberalism, the liberalism of FDR, and it's a liberalism of connections between the state and the unions and the corporations. And in that post-war period, it really builds at a torrid pace. In the 50s, in about 10 years, we increased America's housing stock by, if I'm remembering the number right, about a quarter. Just shocking. But we do a lot of damage. We despoil the environment.
We, you know, build a lot of really ugly things. The term tiki-taki comes from these same same developments, a song about these same same developments in Daly City, you know, just south of San Francisco.
Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of tiki-taki, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same, there's a pink.
You really look in this period and there is this growing concern about a soullessness in the American growth machine. Lyndon Johnson gives a speech about how we used to worry about the ugly American, but now we worry about the ugly America.
Today, we must act to prevent an ugly America. For once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured.
John Kenneth Galbraith, you know, a legendary liberal economist of that era, writes his famous book called The Affluent Society and talks about, you know, these people camping and eating their food out of plastic containers amidst all this trash and is this really what this was all buying us? And you have this rise of liberal critics of the government. And so this new left emerges, Ralph Nader on consumer safety and who helps build this huge network of organizations that what they do is sue the government. When Nader runs in 2000, he's asked, what qualifies you to be president? And he says, I don't think any human being alive has sued more government agencies than I have. Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, that's very much about how the government is mismanaging ecology.
And so we then spend decades passing legislation that reflects this. And much of that legislation is amazing. I mean, this is all in an era where we are thinking about civil rights, where we are afraid of the totalitarian example of Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union. And so there is a real rise in individualism, which I think we think of as economic, but it was more than that. It was moral and spiritual. And it's very much reflected, legislation is downstream of culture. You can listen to Jimmy Carter, you can listen to his State of the Union, and he's searing on all that the government cannot and should not do.
Government cannot solve our problems. It can't set our goals. It cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty, or provide a bountiful economy, or reduce inflation, or save our cities, or cure illiteracy, or provide energy.
And liberals begin to try to restrain the growth machine they have built, to make sure it is more respectful of older ways of living. And all that is important and is needed and it's beautiful. But it just gets overgrown over time. It solves the problems of its time. I mean, we really did have these fluorescent rivers. And I grew up outside LA when the smog would choke you. We solved these problems. And then the processes we used to solve them over decades got captured by other special interests and other corporations and other groups. And now we have new problems and we need new processes. But it's just so important to understand, a lot of these problems are worse in blue states. Because it is in blue states,
it's in liberal states where the new left was most powerful and was able to build the architecture of government that we now live under. And that solved many problems and it's now created others. I mean, institutional renewal. It faces every generation anew.
So on the show last year as a project, we read The Power Broker over a year. That is a person in Robert Moses, who both built things and bragged about them quite a lot. An incredible builder. But he also bulldozed neighborhoods, especially poor and vulnerable neighborhoods. So how do you cut red tape so that those things can be built without an authoritarian in the style of Robert Moses, who can sort of run unchecked for 44 years?
I think that the left has overlearned the lesson of Robert Moses. Robert Moses was part of an era in American government, the New Deal era. And we grew a lot, and sometimes wisely, sometimes very unwisely. And Moses, if he was born today, couldn't get much done at all. Right. The Robert Moses in this institutional architecture would have a lot of trouble building, you know, a fraction of what he was able to build. If what you have done is build your system to try to make it impossible for bad people to act, then you've also built a system which is going to very likely be very hard for good people to act. Now, I think you can have discernment about things.
I don't think we should treat all building, all construction completely equally. But I do believe in the government's ability to act. I am a liberal and I think that requires electing good people. I don't think that there, and we're seeing this right now. I don't think that there is a substitute for electing people who can be trusted with public power. But I think if you make it so even the good people cannot effectively use public power in the public's interest, then eventually they're going to turn to bad people who say, as the strong man does, I alone can fix it. I'm going to ignore these laws, ignore these rules, ignore this tape.
So, yeah, I, I think there's something slightly crazy about being so afraid of a bad person acting consequentially, that even in very blue states where we've learned a lot in the past, you know, however many decades, we've made it so difficult for good people to act consequentially.
In the 20th century, sort of growth and abundance of building things, one of the things that happened was we often asked the same people to bear the cost of our collective desires. People who lived in poorer communities, were bulldozed. How do you stop that from happening of having the same people always bear the cost of what we want to do collectively?
So I want to note two things here, because I do think it's really important to say, those people also bear the cost of things not getting built. If we do not transition away from fossil fuel energy, it is going to be worst on the poor, not the rich. When we didn't build California High Speed Rail, That was worse for the poor than the rich, right? That the consequences of not delivering, it falls heavily on those communities too. I just always think it's a very, very important point because we often recognize the costs of action, but not the costs of inaction.
Agree.
But then I think there's actually a lot of ways you could approach this if you wanted to. So you could, um, let's take housing as an example. The reality is that rich communities have political power and use procedural mechanisms, and they make it very hard to upzone in those communities. And so big apartment buildings and density happens where people are poor.
In some like conceptual way, if you removed a lot of zoning laws and rules, of course developers would want to build in rich areas. And so having created all these procedural veto points, you've given every rich community of the country who's got the money to hire lawyers and lobbyists, a lot of ways to stop things from being built. And asymmetrically, poor communities don't have all that. Recognizing the process is often a tool that is of differential use, depending on the resources you have to activate that tool, is I think a very, very important part of like taking, you know, the, the costs of, of overregulating the government seriously. And then yet you have to elect people, I, I, there's no way to get away from this.
You have to elect people with a just vision of the future.
Mm hmm.
Um, if you don't, it's gonna go badly. It's gonna go badly through inaction, through action, but you have to, you, you actually have to elect people who take seriously that we don't want to, you know, as, as, you know, was said by George W. Bush, balance a budget on the backs of the poor. You want to elect people who take distribution seriously and then can do something to effectuate that.
It really is about judgment over process. I mean, cause that's one of the reasons why it's, it's so difficult to talk about this in the broad sense is that the case by case of what is a good product versus what is a bad product is very specific, you know?
And so it really requires individual judgment and we seem to have legislated our way out of individual judgment.
I have to say that what I want to do is make it possible for the government to act with some level of trust.
And the way we do it now, we, you know, this is a very American thing. We just don't trust the government. And look, I don't trust the Trump administration. But also, I think the Trump administration is partially a response to government that's become unbelievably sclerotic and unresponsive over time. Because again, we don't imbue it with any trust. So we make it, you know, again, in normal times, before Doze started breaking the law left and right, we get very hard to hire and fire civil servants. It make it very hard for the same civil servants to manage and to act. They are enwrapped in unbelievably complex levels of process and auditing and oversight to make sure they never, you know, quote unquote, waste any money. Meanwhile, all this auditing and oversight is itself wasting huge amounts of money.
And I mean, the difference between how we run government and how Europe often runs government is not that we have a liberal democracy and they don't. It's that in Europe, you know, not 100%, but much more so than here, the judgments are made by the civil servants and they have a baseline level of trust and quality of bureaucracy. And here, because we don't, we do it by lawsuit. And it's not 100% clear to me why we would think that a judge is better at adjudicating an environmental dispute than the Environmental Protection Agency and its actual environmental experts would be. But that's how we do it. And having removed all this discretion from the political system, we've instead imbued it in process.
And what the political system has to prove over and over and over again to the courts is that they have followed the process to the letter, to the T. And, you know, over time, that process becomes more and more complex. I mean, very famously, environmental reviews used to be like, you know, seven pages, a dozen pages, and now there are thousands of pages and take three and a half or four and a half years. But that unwillingness to trust the people we elect is very profound.
When we come back, Ezra Klein says we need new processes to solve new problems. That's a hit.
This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every design thing began as something someone imagined. A chair, a sign, whatever device you're listening to this on. Design is imagination with a plan. Claude is an AI built to help you with both. Start with your rough idea, then work with Claude to sketch it, shape it, test it, and build it. Anthropic built Claude to help you discover more. Learn more at claude.ai/99invisible. Sonos is a sound system engineered to make you feel. Sound is part of the design of a home, right alongside the furniture and the lighting and the art. Sonos can give ordinary rituals a little more personality.
Making coffee can feel like opening credits. Dinner prep can feel like a cooking show. Or for me, I like to make it sound like a mosh pit. And tidying up can at least have a better soundtrack. Because Sonos works as a system, the mood can move with you from the kitchen to the living room to wherever the day happens next. It's not about making every moment louder. It's about making more moments feel like yours. Whatever you want to feel, Sonos can help set the scene. Every night, I play the ambient sleep music channel on the Sonos in my bedroom, and it helps me relax, it helps me sleep better. The Sonos is on almost 24 hours a day when I'm not recording. Love the sound, feel the system. Visit sonos.com to build your system.
Ready to give your home a style refresh? Article makes it easy to create a stylish, long-lasting home at an unbeatable price. They offer a curated selection of mid-century modern coastal and Scandi-inspired pieces that will make a perfect addition to your home. All Article collections are carefully curated, focusing solely on high-quality, meaningful pieces that will stand the test of time. And with Article's 30-day satisfaction guarantee, you can shop with confidence. I'm trying to think of any of the Article furniture I haven't talked about at this point. I have couches, I have dining room sets, I have... Sideboards. I have, what do you call it, a media center thing that you put a TV on, side tables, end tables, chairs. All of them are still in heavy use in my house and all
of them have held up great. Article is offering our listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com/99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com/99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. The best pieces in your closet are the ones you can count on, whether you're heading to work, going out, or keeping things casual. And this time of year, Quince makes finding something great for everyone else just as easy. Quince focuses on high-quality staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14-karat gold, and Italian leather. All timeless, versatile pieces that feel special to unwrap and become everyday favorites
long after the holidays. I'm a huge fan of the whole line of Quince sweaters. I have button-up ones, zip-up ones, black, gray, brown. I use them when I just go upstairs, when I get on a call, when I take the dog for a walk. These are favorites that everyone would love. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know that it was 99% invisible. It's the best way to support the show.
We are back with Ezra Klein, co-author of Abundance. The book has been getting a lot of attention in urbanism and policy circles, and some people have been critical, saying that it seems like abundance is arguing for massive deregulation. But we, as a society, have benefited a lot from different regulations. Like in LA, near where Ezra grew up, smog used to be a huge issue, but we solved it with regulation. I asked Ezra if he worried that issues that we solved, like smog, could be unsolved.
No, I don't, actually, on that specific one. What I really worry is that LA is going to be cooked if we don't build enough green energy. Again, you have to align your processes to your problems. We are not in Los Angeles, in Phoenix, facing the major problem of smog. We are facing the major problem of climate change. And if the answer to climate change was make it hard to build stuff, well, great, then we have the answer. But the answer to climate change, at least the one we've chosen as a society, is you gotta build a huge amount of wind turbines and solar panels and transmission lines and electric vehicle chargers. And if we don't do that, we're going to have all the problems that we know are coming. I mean, in LA, like, the reason you can't
breathe in LA for much of the year is wildfires that are made worse by extreme weather conditions that now occur year after year after year. Phoenix gets to temperatures that are inhuman.
So, we know what our problems are. Yes, if we solve those problems, we might have built processes that in another 30 or 40 years, become somebody else's problem. Good. Like, that's, that's the cycle here. There's no-
It means we're alive in 30 years.
There's no endpoint of history, right? May we be so successful that someone else has to unwind what we've done, as opposed to they look back and think, oh my God, if only they'd done something.
I'm, I'm really intrigued by this in, in the context of climate change, because it requires a lot of building, a lot of rethinking things. And that is exactly what we are not poised to do right now, especially with the headwinds of a lot of people not thinking that that's a problem at all, to be fixed. How do you navigate that?
I think that you have to split the problem of opposition to what you want to do, from inability to do what in theory you have the power to do. So yes, if you lose the election to Donald Trump, the reason your climate change agenda is not going to move forward is that you lost the election to Donald Trump. But if you're Joe Biden, and you have a Democratic Congress, that's not the problem for you, actually. The problem for you is that you didn't do permitting reform. And so you can't build as much as you need to build. Now, they, they have done a lot of building of, you know, solar panel, right? I don't want to take- the, the Inflation Reduction Act is a very, very important piece of legislation, but everybody involved in it knew that to achieve what it needed to achieve, we needed to make
it possible to build things that we cannot build at speed right now. Transmission lines being, again, a very good example. And so I, one reason I wrote a book that's very focused on the pathologies of democratic governance, is that I actually think oftentimes, if you're a liberal, and I'm a liberal, the problems of the Republican Party, the, the challenges it poses, the things it believes, they're such an obvious problem for you, that they're a way of not, like, looking at what you're doing or not doing. But I don't have an answer for how you make the Republican Party believe in climate change. I don't think any liberal does. What I have an answer for is how when Democrats win power, they can actually deliver. And by the way, I think if they actually did deliver, it is less likely Republicans would win so much power. If Kamala Harris
could have run around the country saying, "Look, look at this gleaming nationwide network of electric vehicle chargers that anybody can use now for free. Look at how we expanded rural broadband to 40 million people who needed it. Look at all of these roads we built you. Look at how the bridge near you has been repaired." Right? "We said we were gonna build. Look around. Look how much we built." But she couldn't. And like, I've done a lot of interviews with Biden people. I mean, they say it's like, it's a problem that what they had to brag about were passage of bills, not things in the real world that people could look at and feel. It's very, very hard to tell a story
about legislation as opposed to a story about the way your life is actively different right now. I'm not saying that delivering through policy is enough to win every election. I don't believe that it is. But it helps. It's better than not delivering the policy you promised.
I think one of the problems we have is that we've reduced the government's sort of direct interaction with people to these small and painful moments like taxes and parking meters. And I think people feel the inconvenience of construction more than they really internally feel the pleasure and freedom of driving over a bridge. I happen to get a lot of pleasure from driving over a bridge, but like-
I imagine you're a mindful bridge driver.
But, but you know what I'm saying? Like, we've reduced ourselves to such an extent that, you know, like, you know, it could, it could be through just like, there just was like, this, this thing took over. I think, I think I blame Reagan. And then, and then the follow-on Democrats following Reagan sort of took this as just like, we want government to be- So small and obtrusive and that just it made it so that we reduced our interaction with government to these little painful moments that are not very good for the PR of the government.
I think you're right to bring up Reagan here because let's say a couple of things about that. One is it, I don't think it's true exactly that people only interface with government in those moments. I mean, they get Medicare, they get social security, they get Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act. There is a lot that happens that is government, you know, as you mentioned, roads and bridges. But the rhetorical attack on government was so successful.
That it's first a very hard narrative to dislodge. Elon Musk was retweeting something I was saying to Jon Stewart. He's like, see, they're going to make everything in the government like the DMV, you know, Democrats make everything in the government like the DMV. I would say that my last set of experiences at the DMV have been pretty good, actually. Now, maybe that's not true for everybody, but my understanding is actually true for a lot of people.
And but it's so counter narrative that it's almost like hard to talk about it. And then the other just reality is we're not running government well. Look, California is a big rich state. It should run the government in a way where people from California, politicians from California should be able to go all around the country and say, look, if you vote for us, we're going to make everything like California. But California is failing in a bunch of different ways. Not every way. I mean, it's the, you know, leads technology in the world and culture creation and it's wealthy, but its homelessness problem is terrible. The difficulty in building there is really profound. And so there's been a right wing attack on government, a slandering of government,
and then a kind of liberal hobbling of government. What there's not been is a both aggressive effort to expand state capacity, to make the government really work, and then to sell that expansion of state capacity, look, we did this and you get this now. This is, I would say broadly speaking, another problem Democrats have is that they just don't. You know, there's a kind of genius to Donald Trump, minutes after he was sworn in, really, going and signing executive orders in public, like he was going to pull out a T-shirt cannon, you know, and fire MAGA T-shirts.
Into the crowd. Democrats, they do everything through process, they do it very carefully, like. Build some things that are monuments to government efficiency. Choose some projects that are headline projects for you. And then build the rules around them. So you get them done and you get them done fast. And then brag about them.
Brag about them everywhere.
Like make them into an advertisement for what it is you're doing. You know, Joe Biden has said that one of his big regrets is that unlike Donald Trump, when he was sending out early stimulus checks, he didn't put his face and name and, you know, he wouldn't make them advertisements for himself. He, you know, he was being, what's even the word prudent? That's not quite the right word. He was
Humble?
He thought it was uncouth.
I would like to see some people who are a little bit uncouth about government in a positive way, not a negative way, right? Who, who are out there sending the signal that this is so good and so something you can trust. But you got to deliver then. You, you're not going to be able to do that atop the disaster of, of high speed rail or the Boston big dig or the New York second avenue subway.
So in the book, you, you do have a couple of thought exercises of sort of a sci fi world of abundance that, that is, you know, is, is imaginable. And, but I wonder if you could sort of expand on that to envision a world in which things can get built, but voices get hurt. What is the mechanism? If, if this didn't work, if like endless city council meetings and endless lawsuits didn't work, what is the version of this that does work?
I, I mean, on, on any given area we're talking about, I could just point you to a place where it's working fine now. Austin is full of liberals. Is the way housing is done in Austin, is that truly so fascist? Do the people living in Austin, under that regime of being able to build apartments when people move there? Do they truly experience it as such an endless abrogation of their rights?
Is when people go to Spain or France and they ride the trains there, does it really seem so brutal? I mean, what I'm really saying is that there are other places where you've simply struck the balance better. And I think if you go to those places, they're perfectly happy.
And we just build public infrastructure in a costly, ineffective way. And we could learn things from Japan and from much of Europe. And so I, I, I say this because I, I don't, I don't want to make it into sci fi this part. I actually want to say that we are familiar with better examples and we should learn from them.
So you've been out in the country, talking to all kinds of people, big audiences and podcasts and all kinds of things on this book tour. What is the hardest question that you've had to answer for? And if you could like quickly put out the paperback version, not, not that there's something wrong, but more just like, oh, if I just would have put this in, I would have gotten this question less maybe. Like, what is the thing that you would like to present and change that, that, that you think is worth talking about?
It's been, I wonder if satisfying my answer will be here. We should have put more in the book about financing and cost of construction, which is just, it's a big, look, there is, the, the book is operating at different levels and the pushback comes at different levels. And some of the pushback is political, but I think not in a way that I can, you know, drain it. Like, people are just going to want politics to be about different things than I want it to be about, right? I think that's totally reasonable. So that pushback hasn't really bothered me. The pushback that does bother me a bit is when I go places and say, well, look, we actually have come to a regime, you know, permitting regime, more like what you're saying, but actually like none, none of the projects net out. We can't finance them in this interest rate environment. And then you get into very, very difficult things about how we've made it, why we've
made it so expensive to construct in, in blue states. So I would have dug more into the economics of that. And like the literal cost of construction. So that's maybe one answer. Look, I think the question of voice is just a hard question. Nobody knows exactly the right way to balance it out. You do want there to be places in process for people in a community, for affected groups, for, you know, those who are going to bear a heavier burden from any project, to be able to make their voices heard. How do you do that in a way that is constructive? How do you do that in a way where it doesn't lend itself to endless delay, but it also doesn't lend itself to being completely ignored?
That's a very, very, very hard design issue. And it'll be different in, you know, I mean, what you need to think about for the lying down of interstate transmission lines is different than what you need to think about for, you know, building an apartment building in Minneapolis. But you do, like, voice is an important part of democratic politics. I think we've confused it with delay and veto.
But healthy levels of voice are, you know, that's something that I thought a lot about in the book, and I just don't have a, the problem is I just don't have one answer for it. It's a, it's one of many things we'll have to be balanced.
I think that's right. I mean, these are so specific. I mean, zoning isn't a federal issue. These are all cities who do zoning laws.
And they do them differently.
And they do them very differently in very different places. I mean, and, you know, you mentioned the fact that, you know, Texas can build a lot of solar panel and wind farms, but they also decided to cut themselves off from the national grid, and that caused the death of a bunch of people freezing in the wintertime when it didn't work anymore. The details are what matters almost, you know?
I often joke, one of the terms for this politics it caught on was a liberalism that builds, but I often say it's really a liberalism of the details.
It's about the details of what happens after you pass a bill. What happens when you're trying to turn that aspiration into a lived reality?
And I think people tend to check out during that part. We pass the Affordable Care Act. It's done. We did it. We pass the Inflation Reduction Act. Now climate change is going to be solved. Somehow works. What happens after then is really, really important, and it's often much worse than you would think. Because it happens in more in the shadows. It happens with processes that as well intentioned as they may have been are easy for corporations to capture, easy for special interests to capture, easy for incumbent homeowners to capture. They're easy for the people who know them and have the money to participate in them to capture. And so, you know, being very attentive to, did the thing you passed work out the way you wanted it to? And then going back and revisiting it if it didn't. You know, I would, you know, one thing liberalism should be is self correcting, and it often isn't.
So to get back to the high speed rail project in California, which we talked about earlier, what changes to policy do you think would have made that project possible? What would have allowed us to build it much faster?
There are some things here that are really straightforward. They should have exempted the high speed rail from the California Environmental Quality Act, or at least set limits on how difficult it would be to do that. How often it could be slowed down. But the problem is you're really dealing with something that implicates the system itself. It's not any one bill. It's a whole way of doing things that we just got used to. And so it would have been a good idea to go to the French and say, how do you do this? And how might we follow along here? One of the things that has been very interesting to me in the past couple of years is that there are a bunch of places where something has gone wrong very fast, like the I-95 bridge collapse in Pennsylvania.
And in Pennsylvania, there was a version of this in Maryland. There have been versions in California. The governors have used emergency declarations and been able to rebuild very, very fast. The I-95 story, which I tell in the book, they rebuilt that in 12 days when they thought it would take more than a year. And I think there is something interesting here to ask, which is that if all these governors, and Newsom has told me about his pride in emergency reconstruction, if all these governors are so proud of how much they can get done and how fast they get it done using emergency powers, well, then what does that say about your normal process? What would it mean to align not everything to what you can do in an emergency, but more
that is a major priority to the discretion you give yourself during an emergency? Because is climate change really not urgent? It's only urgent if it happens fast? Is the housing crisis really not urgent? It's only urgent if the housing burns down? So we've ended up in this system where we know the government can work fast because we see it do so when it declares an emergency. But otherwise, it is completely wrapped itself in red tape. So I think that the answer I'd give, because there's no just one answer, but look at the places or the processes where you think you are building well. Go look at other countries. Go look at other cities. Go look at yourself. When you've had these moments where you can wipe away some of this accumulated crust
and make decisions about, with discretion, which processes to keep and which to jettison. And then build something new off of that. Use that not as something you only use in the breach, but use it as a basis for a new model.
Ezra, it's been a pleasure to talk with you. The book is called Abundance. I really appreciate your time.
Thank you so much, Roman. Always, always great to hear from you.
99% Invisible was produced this week by Delaney Hall and edited by Committee, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Rial. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeón, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Laish Madon, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Sirius XM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California.
You can find us on Blue Sky as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.
Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.
Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. When you use Angie for your home projects, you know all your jobs will be done well. Roof repair, done well. Kitchen sink install, done well. Deck upgrades, done well. Electrical upgrades, done well. Angie's been connecting homeowners with skilled pros for nearly 30 years. So we know the difference between done and done well. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project at angie.com.
Talk about regrets. We all know someone who's been in a car accident and said, "I don't need to call a lawyer," only to regret it after their pain and damages were worse than expected. When someone hurts you, you deserve to be compensated fairly. Morgan & Morgan is America's largest injury law firm, fighting for the people for over 35 years. Injured? Visit forthepeople.com/podcast. That's forthepeople.com/podcast. Their fee is free unless they win.
Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
