How Blue Cities Became So Outrageously Unaffordable

Joe Biden’s economic agenda is centered on a basic premise: The United States needs to build. To build roads and bridges. To build child care facilities and car-charging stations. To build public transit and affordable housing. And in doing so, to build a better future for everyone. But there’s a twist of irony in that vision. Because right now, even in places where Democrats hold control over government, they are consistently failing to build cheaply, quickly and equitably. In recent decades, blue states and cities from Los Angeles to Boston to New York have become known for their outrageously expensive housing, massive homeless populations and infrastructure projects marred by major delays and cost overruns — all stemming from this fundamental inability to actually build. Jerusalem Demsas is a policy reporter at Vox who covers a range of issues from housing to transportation. And the central question her work asks is this: Why is the party that ostensibly supports big government doing ambitious things constantly failing to do just that, even in the places where it holds the most power? So this is a conversation about the policy areas where blue city and state governance is failing the most: housing, homelessness, infrastructure. But it is also about the larger problems that those failures reveal: The tension between big-government liberalism and anti-corporatist progressivism; the cognitive dissonance between what city-dwelling, college-educated liberals say they believe and their inequality-amplifying actions; how reforms intended to make government more accountable to the people have been wielded by special interests to stall or kill popular projects; and much more. Mentioned: “Why does it cost so much to build things in America?” by Jerusalem Demsas “Los Angeles’s quixotic quest to end homelessness” by Jerusalem Demsas “Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation” by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti Public Citizens by Paul Sabin “Zoom Does Not Reduce Unequal Participation” by Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick, Luisa Godinez Puig, and Maxwell Palmer “The Gavin Newsom Recall Is a Farce” by Ezra Klein “California Is Making Liberals Squirm” by Ezra Klein Book recommendations: Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:21Ezra Klein?

  I am a Californian. I was born and raised in Southern California. I was educated in the state's public schools and I graduated from the University of California system. I moved back a couple of years ago after a long time on the East Coast because I love California. I'm a California partisan, kind of wherever I am. But I'm also worried about the state I love. The median price for a home in the Golden State is more than $700,000. It is home to four of the nation's five most expensive housing markets, a quarter of the nation's homeless residents. And as a result, California has the highest poverty rate in the nation when you factor in housing costs. That is not because of the current set of politicians.

• 1:03Ezra Klein?

  The reason is deeper. It is very, very, very hard to build things in California, particularly homes. But it's also just hard to build anything. After years of delays and cost overruns, California's long anticipated high-speed rail system, the one that was partially funded by 2009 stimulus dollars, the one that was supposed to go between Los Angeles and San Francisco, it's been shrunk to a line connecting the mid-sized cities of Bakersfield and Merced. And it is still tens of billions over budget and years behind schedule.

• 1:34Ezra Klein?

  I care about what's happening in California a lot because I'm from here, but it's not just a problem here. This is a New York problem. Look at the difficulty, both with housing affordability, but also, my God, how long it has taken to upgrade Penn Station over there. It is a Seattle problem. It is a Washington DC problem. And it's an American problem. And now President Biden is building much of his agenda, much of his theory of the policy case around building infrastructure. But it costs more to build things in America than in peer nations. It happens more slowly and a lot of projects simply die in red tape and lawsuits. On so many policy issues, the Democratic Party's pitch is simple. Elect Democrats and they will use government to do big things, to build big things, to solve big

• 2:17Ezra Klein?

  problems. The weakness in that pitch is that in the places where Democrats hold the most power, building is often really, really hard. And so accomplishing the Democrats' policy goals is really hard. And I think this is a problem within Democratic governance that liberals need to confront more squarely and try to be more curious about its causes. Jerusalem Dempsey is a policy reporter at Vox who covers a range of issues from housing and homelessness to infrastructure and transportation. She's been doing great reporting on on these topics with exactly this frame in mind. So on one level, the conversation we have here is a policy conversation about why it costs so much to build in America and then in particular states and why it's so hard. But on another level, it is about something more central to the Democratic or even

• 3:02Ezra Klein?

  liberal project. Why does a party that wants the government to do big things have so much trouble building things when they're in charge? And why do the problems often seem worst where they have the most power? As always, my email for guest suggestions, reading suggestions, feedback, whatever, as your client show at nytimes.com.

• 3:25Ezra Klein?

  Jerusalem Dempsey, welcome to the show.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:28Ezra Klein?

  So there's a big infrastructure bill moving through Congress right now. Spending money on on roads and bridges is basically the only thing Democrats and Republicans can agree on. But America is really bad at building this stuff. We spend more, we're slower, a lot of the projects end up dying because of those factors. You've done great work on this. Why are we so bad at building infrastructure in this country?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really complicated. I think first thing, just to define the problem here, the US is basically the sixth most expensive place to build rapid rail transit. So that's things like the New York subway, the Washington Metro, the Chicago L. New York City is a big part of that, but even without New York City, we are basically paying a 50% premium on a per mile basis to build transit. So this is a really big problem. This is billions of dollars. This is a lot of money being lost and a lot of money not being spent as efficiently as possible. And it's also kind of reducing the impetus for people to even want to engage in ambitious projects. We're the sixth most expensive place to build, even though our projects are only 37% tunneled. And the five countries that are ahead of us, they're building projects that are more than 80% tunneled. So essentially, if we were trying

• 4:37Speaker 01

  to be ambitious, we would likely be the most expensive place in the world to build. There are a lot of reasons. A big reason is that culturally, American government is really deferential to the interests of upper-middle-class engaged voters. And when you are trying to build transit, you're usually trying to do it in places where I would service as many people as possible. And that means there's going to be disruption. There's going to be disruption in the construction process. There's going to be disruption as people are planning out and closing streets and bridges and things like that. And it's not that Americans are more angry about disruption than places outside of the United States, but the legal framework that we've set up in this country is one that essentially ensures

• 5:19Speaker 01

  that if you are upset about construction, that your voice will be heard above that of the interests of the majority of the population. So there are several examples where you have people using environmental protection legislation to ensure that, you know, you can't build transit. You can't build even solar projects. You can't build things that are clearly good for the environment. And it essentially is weaponizing pieces of legislation that are supposed to give a voice to people who might be harmed by a process, and they're creating massive delays. And that's what's running up the costs.

• 5:50Ezra Klein?

  You mentioned tunneled versus non-tunneled. And the issue there, as I understand it, is simply that Tunnelled infrastructure is much more expensive. It's also great. I mean, tunnels are amazing, but it's much more expensive. And we do less of it in part because it is so expensive. So when you're trying to compare our infrastructure costs to other places, the fact that we have given up on so much of the tunneling we might otherwise do because of our costs makes us look artificially a little bit cheaper. But actually, it's simply a collapse in our ambitions.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And this is a big problem because one of the ways that transit agencies have responded to this and our government has responded to this massive cost problem is by creating less ambitious projects to begin with. So in not even trying or attempting to do tunneling is one way they've done that. But another way is that instead of trying to build in really dense areas in places that would allow people to reach central business districts and get from work to job to play in the most efficient manner possible, they try to build most transit along freeways where there's already kind of, there's really less disruption because people don't usually live right next to a freeway. Or they'll try to build it in places near freight train lines that exist already. But dense places are not next to these infrastructure projects that already exist.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  So people are getting much worse projects even at the very beginning of the planning process, which stunts us before we even get to the point where we're assessing costs.

• 7:11Ezra Klein?

  This is, I think, such an important point. And I want to hold on it for another second and bring in some numbers here. Because your point about density is key. I think in a lot of people's heads, you know, one easy explanation is, well, America is practically in these cities pretty dense. Some of the infrastructure, buildings, roads, et cetera, is pretty old. Of course, it's really hard to build. But so the, you know, Center for Transportation finds that New York's Second Avenue subway costs $2.6 billion per mile, $2.6 billion per mile. San Francisco, where I live, the Central subway costs $920 million per mile. LA's Purple Line costs $800 million per mile. And then in contrast, Copenhagen built a project that just $323 million per mile.

• 7:53Ezra Klein?

  And Paris and Madrid, which are old and dense, I mean, Paris is very dense. They did their projects in the range of $160 million to $320 million per mile. So these are European cities. They have all dense infrastructure. They tend to have higher union density, union penetration than we do. When Americans think about how work gets done in Europe, they think it's inefficient, that everybody just sits around and takes an espresso breaks, right? It's not like we're talking here just about Shanghai, but it's weird.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of the best places to do this, to build transit in the world, is in Spain, which is not a place, you know, there are tons of jokes that Americans make about siestas and things like that. So you're right, the perception of this is not, is not actually accurate when we look at what's happening with these massive projects. And there are a few things going on here. One of the things going on here is that these countries have invested in public servants in a way that we haven't here in the United States. Public transit agencies in these European countries that are performing a lot better than us on this issue are empowered to complete projects and whatever it takes to do that. So for example, if an agency in the United States, you know, decides they want to build a light rail train, they try and go through a permitting process to close down a street that they need to do for a couple of weeks so that construction workers can work on

• 9:04Speaker 01

  it. Then they have to ask several other agencies often to just do the same exact process over again, do the same kind of thing, we're getting community input, going through all of the regulations and rules, because no one agency is actually empowered to finish a project. So there's this jurisdictional issue as well, where we've basically forced several jurisdictions to have the same sort of authorities that one jurisdiction will have in many European countries. And the second part of the problem is, we've basically terrified a lot of these transit agency workers into not being able to make these specific decisions. So like, you know, there's one anecdote that I heard from an expert in this space where someone was asked, what color should we paint the subway walls? And they had to just kick it up, like 12 different levels to get to the very board of their

• 9:47Speaker 01

  institution in order to get that question answered. And the cost of delaying and having people wait around at these stations because they're waiting for an answer on this costs a lot of money.

• 9:56Ezra Klein?

  I'm just gonna put this as a signpost where this conversation is going, that a lot of what we're gonna end up talking about here is the way Americans, in some cases, dislike and devalue government, not just from the right, but also from the left, that a lot of things are gonna come down to the way America treats its government and constrains it and assumes the challenges to it are correct and should be given quite a bit of precedence. But I want to get to the underlying mystery of this, because it wasn't always this way. It would be one thing if America's an individualistic country. We have a distinctive heritage, a distinctive culture. Maybe we've always been bad at building infrastructure, but we built the interstate highway system just in a matter of decades.

• 10:40Ezra Klein?

  You think we could build something like that that fast today? And something has changed. I mean, you cite research from the economist Lea Brooks, who finds that states spent more than three times as much to build a mile of highway in the 1980s as they did in the early 60s. There was a real explosion in a pretty condensed period of time. So what is the explanation for the change over time here? What happens in this 60s to 80s, 90s period that creates a modern infrastructure tangle we have?

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so her research, Brooks and her co-author Zach Lysko, who's at Yale, they look into this problem of why is it that highways have gotten much more expensive to build? And it's an interesting question, separate from transit, because with transit, we don't do it that often, but we build highways all the time here. We lengthen them, we build interchanges, we keep them up, we maintain them. So we should be very good at it. In a lot of ways, we are. And they're able to rule out a lot of the traditional explanations, things like it's either unions or it's the geography of the places that we're talking about. It's just getting more difficult to build because we're building in harder and harder geographies for whatever reason. And so they rule out these kinds of explanations. And what they're left with is this concept they call citizen voice. And there are regulations that have been put in place that a lot of times come from a good place.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  They're saying that the government should not be able to steamroll over communities, in particular marginalized communities. There are many instances in the 20th century of the government building highways through minority communities and really destroying them and creating a lot of negative impacts. And so one of the big regulations that comes out in 1970 is the National Environmental Protection Act. And this is meant to ensure that the government, if it's either doing a federal project or a project that is receiving federal money, needs to do an environmental impact statement and make sure they're engaging the community properly so that you don't get these massive harms accruing to these local communities because the government's just stomping through them. What ends up happening is what ends up happening a lot of the time when you

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Increased participatory democracy at the local level, which is that it is not used by people who are marginalized. It is often, very few times ever, used by people who are really concerned about the fact the government is not representative of their interests. Who it's used by is, very frequently, individuals who are very wealthy, who are white, who are already privileged in the political system, to stop transportation and to stop public works projects or anything that might be broadly beneficial to the community from being placed in their neighborhoods. And so, of course, there's this concept of "not in my backyard," which really begins to gain steam. And so, people who are broadly supportive of things like public transit become very opposed to the idea that it could ever be properly put inside the community that they reside in.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  And of course, wealthier individuals are concentrated in these places of high opportunity where there are good houses, good schools, good jobs. And a lot of the times, these places do not have access to transit for the very reasons I just described.

• 13:34Ezra Klein?

  I want to go back to that point about the history here, because I think it's so important. It's become much more important in my work, as I've been looking into this more. There is a stereotype of the cleavage in American politics, which is that Democrats want to use the government to do big things, and Republicans don't, and that is the fight. But if you look more deeply, and one reason you see a lot of these pathologies in states with a history and a present of overwhelming democratic governance, you know, a place like California or New York, is that there's a bit of a divided democratic soul here, that there was, as you say, partially in response to these periods in, you know, the 50s and 60s, when you had, you know, Robert Moses cutting up minority communities with

• 14:18Ezra Klein?

  highways in New York. But things like that happened all over. There was a lot of environmental damage. Think of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. And so, you have the rise of a progressive movement, a new left movement, which becomes part of the current Democratic Party, which is very focused on restraining big government, on giving citizens voice in government. Nader's Raiders, Ralph Nader and the Public Interest Movement is part of this. There's a great new book on this called Public Citizens by Paul Sabin. And so... On the one hand, you have this sort of New Deal liberalism that is part of the Democratic Party, you know, where you have government and unions and corporations like coming together to do very big things. And then you have this progressive new left legacy in the Democratic

• 15:00Ezra Klein?

  Party, which is trying to build structures to restrain the government's ability to do those things, at least over the will of communities. But then, as you say, a lot of the processes and pieces of legislation that get built for that end up becoming the tool of organized interests, that they're no longer, you know, for the community, they're just for, you know, whoever might lose from a current project and wants to organize and nobody else shows up because who likes to go to to local planning meetings. When you do your work on this, do you see this as part of a legacy on the left?

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. I think that there's this broader correct diagnosis that progressives have done, that there is massive regulatory capture by billionaires, by big business, by oil companies to stop environmental legislation from passing. But there's very little reckoning of the fact that there are large swaths of the community that makes up progressives that have also engaged in regulatory capture and that, you know, things like homeownership and things like blocking housing and transit and infrastructure in their communities is something that's not being done by developers or some kind of nefarious other force, it's being done by people who make up this coalition. And I think that that kind of cognitive dissonance is something that is not really reckoned with. And I mean, you you mentioned this kind

• 16:16Speaker 01

  of idea of participatory democracy is not actually solve this problem. And I think it's just structural. You have like structural issues with the fact that, you know, people who are willing to engage in these kinds of local politics are systematically older, systematically whiter, and systematically they're likely to be homeowners and have a preference towards stability rather than growth and change. And, you know, we have specific data for this. Katherine Einstein and her co-authors at Boston University looked at in-person meetings pre-COVID to see who attended. And, you know, before COVID, you had 75% of people were over 50, whereas the surrounding population was actually only 52% over 50, and 73.4% were homeowners, while the general population in the area was only 5.6% homeowners. And then they decided to see like, you know,

• 17:02Speaker 01

  what if we made it easier for people to participate? Like during COVID, these became virtual meetings. So the cost to actually accessing these spaces declined significantly. But still, it actually got slightly worse. And I think that unless we we recognize that representative government is the only way to solve collection action problems, we're going to continue having this issue where there's confusion around why is it that participatory democracy isn't getting everyone into the room? It's just never going to happen.

• 17:27Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, there's a fascinating book on this by a guy named Bruce Kane called Democracy More or Less, and and he makes a point very related, which is that a lot of the populist movements in this country have just been built on an empirically wrong view of the population. And this is a real politically hard one for anybody who, like me, believes in democracy. But most people don't want to participate in politics all that much. They will participate some of the time when something they really care about is at stake. And otherwise, like, they want to live their lives and have governance done well by other people. And to even say that makes you sound a little bit elitist. It makes you sound maybe like you're diminishing the capacity of people to participate.

• 18:12Ezra Klein?

  But we see it over and over and over again. Like, the more you ask of people, even on one ballot, the less of it they will fill out. And like, that's normal on some level. I mean, everybody's got, you know, limited time. You're trying to take care of a family. But what it ends up meaning is that there are a lot of processes at basically every level of government that are designed with the idea of a population that wants to participate. But then when that population doesn't participate, to paraphrase Kane here, it leaves a void that organized interests flow into. And so it is then the people who are most organized, who have the money, who can hire lobbyists, who can sign up for everything and and and generate the information, who are well organized, who have something on the line, who show up. That's not always bad.

• 18:57Ezra Klein?

  I mean, sometimes that is a community that has a real need for something. But it is often bad because, you know, as the daddy you're pointing to suggests.

• 19:07Ezra Klein?

  Usually that those are folks who just like own more. And as for the people who are not already in the community, have not benefited yet from the project that has not yet been built, like, of course, you can't organize the future recipients of something that has not yet happened. Like, that's a very tough organizing job.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you're getting at something, I think, that, you know, is really important here is that there's just an asymmetry with these issues in particular, where the harms to progress are concentrated on very few people. Like, let's just take, for example, a train that's being built in a neighborhood. Construction costs, like, it's annoying to have construction. It's annoying if your normal route is blocked. It's annoying if there's dust being kicked up places and there's people around that you don't know in your, in your normally more quiet community. And those are very concentrated harms that people are reacting to and requiring that their government respond to and stop from happening. But the benefits of these kinds of policies are extremely diffuse. No one is the specific recipient of the transit line usually, or if you're just building more houses, you're not really sure, like, who's going to get that.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  That community can't speak up in favor of that because it's not clear who that person is. And that's kind of the structural disadvantage to progress that we're seeing here is that even if in the abstract, which I, I mean, I genuinely believe that the majority of Democrats or, and maybe even the population, is in favor of these kinds of projects in the abstract and would like them to happen if there was, there's no costs, there's not a reckoning with the fact that someone's going to have to bear the cost and we need to stop excessive deference to the very few people who are going to experience some, some harms in the process.

• 20:37Ezra Klein?

  So I want to ground this in a particular example. Tell me the story of Maryland's Purple Line. What is it? What is, what is it trying to do? How long is the project taken? What, what's the cost issue there? Just tell me about that, that tale.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Sure. So I grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is the, one of the Maryland counties that borders Washington DC. And The Purple Line is an above-ground light rail project that has been trying to be built since before I was even born. And for 20 years, from when I moved there to now, the project is still not completed and, you know, costs have risen just astronomically in completing the project. And the ones that are, you know, really causing a lot of the delay are these wealthy homeowners in Chevy Chase, Maryland, which is a very wealthy suburb of the District of Columbia. So you have these folks who essentially have been suing to stop the transit line from coming through. And they've offered a bunch of different justifications for this.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  One was that there is some endangered species that might be harmed by this. It took a lot of litigation and time to discover that they could not find it or any evidence of it at all. And they delayed it for a serious amount of time because of that. And then you had, in addition to that complaint, they offered up a bunch of other ones about how, you know, ridership was going to be low and how people had ridden the bus along the way that the rail line would be built and that there wasn't that much ridership, ignoring the fact that, of course, if you built a rail line, people would be able to use that and be much more efficient than the current, you know, several different buses you'd have to take to get along the exact same route. And so at this point, you know, it's taken over two decades. Like, I thought that I was going to ride the Purple Line when I was in high school, and that never happened. And people are really mad. And there's even people who are, you

• 22:13Speaker 01

  know, infamous at this point in the broader Maryland political community for having been like one of two major proponents of the lawsuit. So you have a situation here where very few people have managed to proffer up a bunch of facially, you know, neutral, race neutral, class neutral explanations for why it's a bad idea to build a public works project. And at the end of the day, the people who have suffered the most are domestic workers who are taking multiple bus lines or having to figure out other ways to get to work every single day. And that's high costs for them. It's high time costs for them. And they're bearing the cost of all of that. And it's a really, it's a really bad situation.

• 22:49Ezra Klein?

  Would you say Chevy Chase has a reputation as a very Republican community?

• 22:55Speaker 01

  No, I would not say that.

• 22:57Ezra Klein?

  This is something I want to note. Like, I lived in DC for almost 15 years. Chevy Chase is overwhelmingly Democratic, overwhelmingly liberal. I am certain if you walk through there, like, you will see Black Lives Matter signs on tons of homes. Like, it is a place that considers itself like committed to racial equality, committed to reducing political and economic inequality. And yet, and this is a, like, a repeated pathology in blue areas of the country right now. When the question is, will you sacrifice something? Inconvenience, building, infrastructure, your view getting blocked, something potentially happening to property values? The answer isn't just no.

• 23:37Ezra Klein?

  The answer is to leverage all kinds of other liberal laws, like the National Environmental Policy Act process, to stop it from happening. I point this out because oftentimes on the show, like, I talk about things that are wrong in the Republican Party, but this is a real problem in liberalism. In particular, it's all the more grotesque because it distorts so many other liberal accomplishments and pieces of legislation to do it. So can you talk a little bit about the actual process here by which you could try to stop something on behalf of an endangered species or environmental concerns? And also the way in which that can be weaponized, even when somebody's concern is not actually environmental, they just don't want to see the project happen? Because that's also a part of this.

• 24:22Ezra Klein?

  I mean, this wasn't an action brought by the Sierra Club, but it is using the National Environmental Policy Act. So what's going on here?

• 24:29Speaker 01

  To be clear, the Sierra Club and lots of places in this country has also fought against public works projects in the name of environmentalism. But I think a large part of this that is very informal is showing up at these meetings and also being very clear at the local level of where the power is. There's a lot of data showing that when you become a homeowner, you begin owning this asset that will be the largest thing that you will ever have in your life. And United States of America has created a society where we do not have a social safety net for medical care, we don't have a social safety net for higher education for people who need it, we don't have a social safety net for retirement, especially as defined benefit plans have just been eradicated, essentially, in society.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  We have a situation where you have to save, you have to have wealth, in order to make sure that you're okay and that your kids are okay. So we have incentivized this behavior at some point, and I'm also struck with the hypocrisy of the idea that you have people saying things like, "Housing is a human right," but blocking housing in their backyard. But- This kind of shock that a lot of people express when we talk about these issues is really just, you know, not really reading the incentives here. We have told people that the government is not going to have your back. You need to save a bunch of money and that any change to your environment could affect the value of the only asset that you essentially have to make sure that you and your family are OK. And, you know, it's exceedingly rational behavior on some level to make sure that that doesn't

• 25:51Speaker 01

  change and to also feel like it's unfair that you might have to bear the burden of someone else getting housing rather than the government or someone else figuring out a way to make sure that all of you can be OK. So I think that a big part of this conversation here, and you know, I think this is true with transit as well. I think a lot of times people are worried about these public works projects affecting the value of their homes, is that you need to actually provide a social safety net as well as removing the power for people to stop these public works projects from going through.

• 26:18Ezra Klein?

  I want to voice skepticism on this point. I think this is a theory you sometimes hear in the kind of context of maybe social democracy can iron out all the contradictions, and I don't think it's true. Look, like in San Francisco, where a lot of this is happening, the people who are organizing to stop this stuff, there is no social safety net you can think of that is going to materially affect their retirement. It's just not the case for them. Like, they're doing great. Like, they work for technology companies, you know, they've made a lot of money over time. It's often times that people who've done the best or the most able to wield the political system, you know, in their favor. I don't want to say it's not rational behavior, because it is. I mean, you can be doing amazingly well and still want your house to go up in value.

• 27:03Ezra Klein?

  You can be doing amazingly well and not want your life to be inconvenienced. I'm not even saying that it is, like, on a local level, cruel behavior. I'm much more sympathetic than some people are in this conversation to the idea that people move into a neighborhood and that neighborhood's character, all the aesthetics of it, the height of it, the trees of it, the fact that it's not that crowded, that's part of why they move there and they care about it. And even if, like, I give you all kinds of economic data showing it'd be better for people if you made it more dense, like, they don't want that to happen. And like, that's actually a legitimate human interest. But I do want to push on this idea that this is all coming out of a mindset of scarcity, because I don't think it's the case that if you made people's pensions better,

• 27:47Ezra Klein?

  you would see a radical change in the in the housing policy they would be willing to absorb. I think if you look at sort of the way the very rich act in these issues, you see that pretty clearly. Like, there are all these very famous cases in California of just, you know, really, really rich folks trying to stop any building around their places, or trying to not let people get to the beach through, you know, the the area they've they've bought up. And you're not going to change that through through better social policy. It's like, it's actually a collision of interests here. And we've just made it so the government has less power than it does in other places to say, yeah, we're choosing the collective interest over the individual interest.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, certainly, it's not the case that all of NIMBYism, or all of opposition to, you know, housing development, or transit development, or helping progressive policy at the local level can be explained by these incentives. But, you know, there's clearly racism and classism. You can hear when you go to public meetings, you can hear the way people talk about it. But I think that we have to be more open sighted to the fact that there are homeowners who are black, homeowners who are Asian American, who are Latino, who are middle class, who are not wealthy, who share a lot of the same views around making sure that the value of their asset does not decline. And all these people can also have classist views, and of course, have xenophobic views, or whatever it is. But it is clearly the case that the tenor of these conversations is so heightened

• 29:07Speaker 01

  because there are real financial stakes for a lot of people. And, you know, it's different for someone who is, you know, a wealthy tech worker in San Francisco who bought a house in 1970 and is locked in a really low property tax rate that's saving them tons of money. But that doesn't explain what's happening at every other level, where homeowners are also opposing these policies despite being essentially identical to the types of people who would benefit from them.

• 29:30Ezra Klein?

  I'm skeptical you could solve it through social insurance, but the point that this is about people trying to protect the value in part of their most valuable asset, I think, is is undeniably true. I do want to go back to the question of environmental policy and and the role it's playing here, though. Because you see this nationally with the National Environmental Policy Act. You see it in in some states. You have a series of laws passed in the, you know, I think it's primarily the 60s, 70s, that come in this moment of conservation, where where the view was that a lot of the problem in the environment is you're having Building and development done heedless of the ecosystem that it is crushing. And now we're in this moment where to a lot of people, having environmental concerns means worrying about climate change. And one of the best things you can do for climate change is density.

• 30:15Ezra Klein?

  You actually want to build more, at least in targeted areas. And so you have bills designed for one area that are now, in many ways, and certainly in the view of many people, have become a problem for pursuing a lot of environmental goals in this era. So can you talk a little bit about how? Like, how do these bills work? Let's use NEPA as the example here. How has the environmental impact assessment process changed? What is actually going on here procedurally that has made it so easy to tie up projects and lawsuits and impact assessments?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  So I think the clearest way to explain this problem and how procedurally we're seeing it play out is through the environmental impact statements that NEPA requires. And we've basically gotten to the point where, and Niskanen, Brink, Lindsay and Sam Hammond are the ones who actually looked into this. But the average economic environmental impact statement runs about 600 pages now, with like 1,000 pages long as the appendix. When they first started, it was like below 50 pages, what we were seeing out of these environmental impact statements. And what that means is that it takes about four and a half years on average for these statements to be completed. And you're getting projects, and they're held up for like 17 years as people attempt to finish these projects. And so what happens is during this process, the NEPA process, you are required to get

• 31:32Speaker 01

  a lot of community input. You have to make sure there's availability for anyone, if they want to, kind of to challenge findings as they're going on through the environmental impact statement process. And there's also like not a firm end. There's not like some sort of like, okay, everyone has to voice their complaints within like a three-year period, and then we can move on. It is someone can voice a complaint, then as that's being resolved, come up with a different idea so that once you've resolved their original problem, they have another problem for you. And another one, there's no requirement that these be dealt with concurrently. And so you have like just these consecutive complaints coming out of the same individuals without any kind of requirement. They provide proof on their own that there is an environmental harm here. And the California version, Sequa, I mean, it's been used to oppose infill

• 32:16Speaker 01

  housing, it's been used to oppose solar farms, it's been used to oppose a great degree of projects that are very clearly meant for the environment, and it's been used to protect parking lots, which are clearly bad for the environment, and car infrastructure is really bad for the environment if we're talking about climate change. And so these processes are put in place to create delays. And that's the really big problem with infrastructure and even housing, when we're talking about why people build more expensive units when they do have the chance to build in these places, is because the delay runs up the costs on the developers and so much, or the governments, and so much, that it no longer makes sense to to build affordable things.

• 32:53Ezra Klein?

  And an interesting counterpoint here is that there are a lot of European countries that have better environmental, certainly better climate track records than the US, and they don't have the same issues, because, and I think this point is really important, they don't enforce environmental legislation through litigation. The enforcement mechanism is not that individual people sue the government. The transportation researcher Alan Levy points out that in many countries, like Italy, planning authorities perform these kinds of reviews in-house. It's not done through lawsuit enforcement. So you can have these reviews. The point is not that you don't want to know the like the effect of a project on the environment, but it is a really important question, whether or not you trust the government to do that and make that decision, or at least to group that all together and do it only once, or you've given any individual who wants to stand in front of the project

• 33:37Ezra Klein?

  for any reason at any time, be that reason environmental or not, the power to use litigation to slow it down, which then, again, sometimes is used for the reason the legislation was intended for, but sometimes that litigation is used as a point of leverage, that we want changes to the project that have nothing to do with, say, you know, whether or not you're going to destroy the habitat for a shrimp or something, and we're going to threaten you with these like endless lawsuits unless you come and bargain with us on other measures.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons why it's so hard to reform NEPA is because it just makes you sound like you're anti the environment when in fact, there are many other models for actual environmental protection that work a lot better and don't require solar farms to go through an onerous process to get built and on the claims that they're bad for the environment. And there's some talk, hopefully, about exempting explicitly environmental projects, things like wind farms and solar farms from this process, but it's politically very dicey.

• 34:32Ezra Klein?

  And we've mentioned CEQA, the California version of this, California Environmental Quality Act. And I get pushed back whenever I talk about CEQA because there have been exemptions built into it. But there's a lot of dispute over how well those exemptions work. And so I just want to note that as a thing I am saying aloud, that I am aware of their exemptions in CEQA, and I am not persuaded that they have that they have solved the problem.

• 35:14Ezra Klein?

  I want to move over to housing here, speaking of California. Let's not start on the current housing market. Let's start before COVID. How would you describe the state of housing affordability in America before COVID?

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Not affordable. You had really high rates of people who cannot afford rent well before COVID began. You had housing undersupply in America's most job-rich communities, places like DC, LA, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, our so-called superstar cities. These places were markedly unaffordable and had really low housing supply even before the crisis hit. And it's not just about buying houses. It's also about rent and rental affordability. And the share of people who have been rent burden, which means that you're paying over 30% of your income on your rent, had been growing significantly. And we were also seeing rise in the homelessness population. I mean, this is something that's become really politically

• 36:07Speaker 01

  salient in California and in Seattle. But, you know, I've just noticed the DC area over the course of my life has seen a lot more of this kind of tent living, which is not something that we we used to have all over the place. And so it has been a serious problem for a long time. COVID clearly exacerbated a lot of these issues and also pushed housing into the forefront of the conversation. But we definitely should not pretend like this was something that was just caused by a pandemic.

• 36:31Ezra Klein?

  So I've often heard this described as two separate housing crises. You have, on the one hand, a crisis of poverty, of the money people have to actually buy homes. So if you're in, say, the bottom 20% to 25% of the income distribution, you're just going to have a hard time affording adequate housing in a lot of different places. That crisis arguably has a straightforward solution, which is you give people money to buy homes, or you give people money to pay their rent. But then there's this other problem of supply, where even many people who aren't suffering from low incomes by traditional measures, where they have incomes that would have easily bought them shelter at other points in American history, in that same city or in that same area,

• 37:14Ezra Klein?

  can't afford shelter, or at least adequate shelter, because there simply isn't enough of it. Like, how do you see those two threads of it?

• 37:23Speaker 01

  So there's obviously this, as you mentioned, there's this demand issue where a lot of people can't afford their rent and you want to give them money, whether it's through vouchers or through another program to ensure they can afford it. But overwhelmingly, we're getting to the point where there's not even enough supply, even if you were to give everyone all the money that they wanted, for people to live in the places where they needed to live, where they need to live for their jobs, for their family, for their friends, for whatever preferences they have about where they want to live in the United States. And it's especially becoming a problem when we're looking at just the housing stock in the United States in general. Because of a lot of these regulations that make it difficult to build housing, and especially affordable housing, you are seeing very few starter homes at all exist or be built as developers are choosing to build their next project. And which means when people do actually get to the point where they've saved enough money,

• 38:08Speaker 01

  there's very few starter homes available for them. And there's a lot more luxury homes, and there are a lot more "luxury apartments" available. And that's a really perverted incentive that we're creating.

• 38:18Ezra Klein?

  When you hear about the supply crisis in housing, I mean, I've heard numbers like California has a 3.5 million gap in the number of houses it needs, or the country has something like 7 million, I think it is. And I always wonder what I'm hearing when I hear that number. Like, for instance, is the issue that we have enough housing supply, but it's not in the right places? Because of course there are places you can go in this country where a house would be really, really cheap. Is it we have it in the right places, but it's not the right kinds? Like, when you look at those numbers, what are you actually seeing?

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Essentially, there are a few different parts to this. One is, housing supply is really low in the places where people want to live. People really want to live in places where there are jobs, where their family is, where there's access to art, culture, all these different things. And usually that means metropolitan areas. And over the last few decades, we've seen really this pull towards these superstar cities on the coast, DC, LA, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC. And, you know, it's for a lot of different reasons. There's increased productivity gains firms get for moving to these places. There's increased productivity gains that workers get, you know, increased wages, all these different sorts of things. And so we've seen a pulling towards these places because there's opportunity and jobs and other things that make life feel good for people.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  And that is the place where there aren't enough housing. And the response to that, obviously, cannot just be like, oh, it's fine. Like, there's a home in rural Missouri for you to go to. Because if you don't have access to job, family, community, or whatever, that's meaningless that there's a structure available to you. And so there's that kind of problem where there's just not enough housing there. But it's compounded by the fact that we're also making it harder to build the types of housing that is the most necessary. Low-income, affordable units are very in short supply, especially after the Great Recession. We saw a lot of these get flipped and turned into higher, servicing higher-income Americans. And so it is a double-edged sword here, where there's just not enough housing at all, whether it's market rate or lower-income housing. And also, there is a problem of misallocation, which, you know, in some places, it's a problem

• 40:20Speaker 01

  that they have a lot of dilapidated housing. Like, of course, Baltimore, I think, is a place where we've seen a bunch of extra housing, and it's causing a lot of problems. It is predominantly an issue of just not enough supply of any kind of housing anywhere.

• 40:30Ezra Klein?

  I remember a conversation you and Matt Iglesias had on The Weeds about how there's also just kinds of housing that have basically disappeared from America. That, you know, you go back however many decades, and you have a lot of boarding homes in this country. If you read anything about 19th-century Americans, people are always, including very important people, ending up in boarding homes, where they're there with six other people and some widow is running the home. It's a constant in the fiction of that period, too. You had a lot more things that were just like tiny, that were dormitory style, which, when you think at least about homelessness for a lot of people, you know, that kind of super-low-cost housing could be really valuable, but people don't want it in their communities, zoning is against it. Can you just talk a little bit about the way the housing stock and the regulations

• 41:15Ezra Klein?

  on what you can build have changed?

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is one of those interesting things where people saw that others are living in suboptimal housing situations where they're living maybe too crowded and too close quarters, things are run down. And instead of finding a way to make all that housing better, they start outlawing the types of housing that they think are undesirable. And so you have a problem where it's harder and harder to build really small units. It becomes illegal to have these kinds of boarding houses in a lot of America. You can't have these units that would once, you know, maybe you have like a bathroom, a shared bathroom, and you have like multiple different tiny bedrooms that people live in a hallway. It becomes illegal to build a lot of these things in different parts of the country. And what ends up happening is not that all of a sudden all of that population now lives

• 42:00Speaker 01

  in giant mansions and wonderful living opportunities. You have a lot of people who become homeless and a lot of people who have to start overcrowding into other scenarios. So you have like people living four or five to a house that's meant to serve two people or a apartment that's meant to serve two people. And so there is this sense that you can solve these problems by outlawing the physical structures without recognizing that low-income housing exists because there have to be affordable housing options for people. And solving that, there definitely should be regulations to ensure places are safe, that places are up to code, and make sure that they are actually providing safe shelter for people. But you cannot solve this problem by outlawing these types of of housing options.

• 42:41Ezra Klein?

  You know, one argument to hear about more housing development is that if you build more, it will just supercharge gentrification. It's just going to be luxury condos. It's going to push people out of the neighborhood. And, you know, it's just something that that rich people want. How do you think about that argument?

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there are two things. One is that the majority of affordable housing in this country is created through this process called filtering. This has always been the case in the United States, is that you have housing built and then it becomes older and becomes less expensive and then someone sells it to someone else. And over the course of time, it becomes less and less costly to buy that property. And then it becomes a starter home for someone eventually, and they're able to save up and purchase newer homes themselves. So the process by which we've built affordable housing in this country has not been that we built new affordable housing. We've always had kind of this filtering mechanism exist, and we've seen that be the case. Another thing I think about this is just that when you tell young urban professionals who are moving into these neighborhoods that you are not going to build any housing for

• 43:41Speaker 01

  them, what you're doing is not telling, making them go away. They're not going to leave. They're not going to like, just say like, okay, I guess I won't take my Facebook job, or I won't like go work for someone on the Hill after I got this strategic opportunity. What they're going to do is they're going to go find whatever housing currently exists and bid up the price of that because they have to and want to live there for their own personal reasons. And so I think a lot of times people talk about gentrification, and it becomes kind of this sort of aesthetic debate about, you know, these new buildings coming up, or a coffee shop, or whatever. But gentrification, the real problem we care about is displacement. And when is it that people are forced to leave a community? And there's ample research showing that it is about whether or not you are building enough for them to be able to stay. So, you know, here in DC, and there's really clear examples here, where I currently live

• 44:25Speaker 01

  in this row house that's been converted into three apartment units. And the DC row house was once like an affordable housing option for families. And what we now have is that the market has responded to the fact that we're not building more homes by converting these once affordable units to service higher income earners and have three different groups of people living within the same property. And it's obviously like a problem for the individuals who prefer to live in, you know, apartment buildings, but it's also mostly a problem for people who get pushed out of these neighborhoods. And there's this false sense that, you know, the fight is between the newcomers and the oldcomers, but the fight is really between the people who are homeowners at that, in that neighborhood, who are refusing to allow for more housing because they know it'll

• 45:08Speaker 01

  hurt their, it might hurt their property values, and existing homeowners who are lower income, who will be priced out if you have these kinds of migration trends without change to housing policy.

• 45:17Ezra Klein?

  You have a line in a piece that I loved, which is that, quote, "Historically, Congress Hasn't been interested in intervening on the supply side." And you're talking here about housing. Why? Because demand-side policies are more fun. So tell me about that.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's nice to give people things. It's nice to give people money. Congress likes to, Democrats particularly, when they want to solve problems, and a lot of problems can be solved this way. They like the idea of giving people money to solve the problem. You know, we're seeing this with the child tax credit. We see that in housing. We see that with voucher programs. And, you know, obviously, there's a lot of opposition to these things. It's not that somehow that this is like easy to get done. But the idea is that the solutions that feel most appealing to Democrats and to progressives is this idea of giving people money and helping them be able to solve the problem that way. But it is really hard to solve supply-side problems. And I think this goes back to the earlier point that I was making about how a lot of the beneficiaries are really diffuse and the people who view themselves as being harmed are really concentrated.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  When Congress, you know, if they got themselves together and were like, we need to figure out the supply problem and we need to build more homes. There's not a specific beneficiary of that. There's no one going, okay, Jerusalem, I am building a home in Washington DC for you and you can thank your government for doing that for you. That's not how any of supply-side interventions in this space would work. But demand-side could be, okay, Jerusalem, you're going to see $1,000 show up in your bank account and you can use that on rent. And that feels a lot better for politicians to do. And of course, within election years, you know, if you increase the supply of housing and you have, you know, that could take five or six or seven years and election cycles don't work that way. You need to show that you've done something within two years or within four years or within six years. And so I think there's a lot of structural problems with trying to get supply-side interventions done.

• 47:22Ezra Klein?

  I want to talk a bit about the connection between the housing affordability crisis and the homelessness crisis. So for a lot of people, they're split. Housing affordability is a problem for people with jobs who want to live in an area. You know, they make a little bit less money than they need to be able to comfortably afford a home. And homelessness is this other thing. It's substance abuse and mental health issues. You've argued That they're basically the same, or at least deeply intertwined. Tell me a bit about that.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so obviously, lowering home populations and homeless populations suffer disproportionately from, you know, health issues, almost tautologically. If you're living outside, it's going to be harder for you to stay healthy. It's going to be harder for you to access services that exist in a location that you might, if you actually had a place to live. And there are a lot of things that are correct, that we need to be providing more than just housing. But there is just a simple fact of that we've had mental illness in this country for centuries. We have had substance abuse problems in this country for centuries. What we have not had is modern homelessness. Modern homelessness as a phenomenon of these kind of tent cities, of these people who are living outside chronically, and having that be a large portion of the housing insecure

• 48:35Speaker 01

  population, is something that we saw during the Great Depression, and then we didn't see it, and then we saw it again in the late 20th century and early into now the aughts and what we're seeing right now as well, in several cities across the country. And so it's hard for me when people say things like, oh, no, we need to solve homelessness through mental health intervention, things like that, to understand like how their story of this actually works out, because a lot of us were alive before this became a problem. So, housing insecurity, and there's been research on this, if you see housing supply drops precipitously, the likelihood of homelessness rising in your community goes up. And it's also just something that we should just think of logically. If you do not provide enough homes for people to live in, there will be people who still want to stay in that area, whether it's because of their jobs, or family, or whatever, and

• 49:20Speaker 01

  they will not have a place to live. And if you make it more and more expensive, people aren't just going to go move to some rural location where there's no jobs, because it's still not affordable for them there. If there's nowhere for them to make money, they're going to remain concentrated in these urban environments.

• 49:34Ezra Klein?

  So there's a national housing affordability problem, but certainly, when I look at it, it seems like it gets worse the bluer you get, that it's really, really bad in blue states. It's really, really, really bad in particularly blue cities. I mean, you're not going to find a much more liberal place in San Francisco, but my God, is it bad here, or in Los Angeles? I mean, if you compare Florida and New York, you're dealing with roughly equal population sizes. It's not like New York is poor and Florida is rich, but Florida has something like 27,500 homeless people, and New York has some 91,000? Is this a blue state governance problem, or is it just an America problem?

• 50:10Speaker 01

  So what I would say to this is, I mean, earlier I talked a lot about agglomeration economies. And you have this concept of, you know, it becomes more productive over the course of the last few decades for firms to move to these superstar coastal cities. And you see a lot of people more concentrating these places. We've also know, there's a ton of research around, these areas tend to be more liberal. If you live in more diverse and dense locations, you either are clustering there because you are already a liberal, or there's something about that that makes people more liberal or progressive. And so I don't think it's likely that if Republicans, for some reason, were the ones that were in charge of these states, that you would see some sort of housing policy or homelessness policy that would be better. I think this is just a governance issue.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  The problems of the 21st century are collective action problems, from housing insecurity to immigration to healthcare to climate change. These types of problems cannot really be solved, in my opinion, just by like local level actions. But that's where all the levers of power are. Because it's not the case that people at the state level are really thinking about and really trying to solve these policies, and especially not at the federal level. It's exceedingly just viewed as a local issue, despite the fact that these have national implications. And people complain a lot about, okay, like, why are we keep talking about this in terms of just these four or five cities? You know, America's really, really big. But the reason is that what happens in New York City, in Boston, in LA, in these handful of cities, is affecting the entire country.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  There's research by Enrico Moretti and Chang Tai She that shows that housing supply constraints have essentially lowered aggregate United States growth. The typical American worker would have earned initial like $3,600 if those were removed, which is, you know, coincidentally roughly the size of the Biden child tax credit, which just started hitting bank accounts this week. So, I mean, it's hard to say that this is about blue state governance when it's really just a massive collective action problem where we've kept the local levers of power in place for a problem that is national, that is regional, that is, at the very least, statewide.

• 52:11Ezra Klein?

  I take your point that this is a collective problem to solve. But state and local policy can make it worse or make it better. And, I mean, it does seem true to me that Texas has had much looser zoning policy than California, that Florida has looser zoning policy than New York. And The point here is not that what I think happened is that blue states or blue cities put into play a bunch of zoning decisions that said, ah, we're gonna like make it really hard to build homes. We have a terrible acute homelessness crisis in our cities. But that there has been a collaboration between the sort of liberal tendency to do

• 52:53Ezra Klein?

  a lot through government and also then some of the progressive tendencies we've talked about to sort of fear government doing too much, just created very restrictive situations in a lot of places that are that are now seen as very liberal. And one reason I bring it up is because I think it's a reckoning that liberals need to have with themselves over why like this political movement that believes in inequality has managed to create such terrible levels of of housing inequality in the places where it has the most control.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  So I think two things here. One is that it's actually not true that all of these blue states and blue cities actually have the worst zoning laws. You actually have, there's been a lot more work and liberalization done in some places in California. It's just more of a problem because there's a massive amount of demand there. Like, no one cares about the zoning laws that are restricting supply in a place where there's not a lot of demand for it. And of course, none of this is to absolve liberals or to absolve progressives who are governing in these places. Clearly, either they are lying to themselves or lying to the public when they say things like either housing is a human right, or they talk about how housing affordability is top of mind for them, or homelessness is a crisis, is something they're trying to solve if they're not doing anything about supply. And so that's

• 54:03Speaker 01

  all true, but I do think that there is potentially within within the pro-housing community an outsized focus on this hypocrisy and less of a just recognition that all collective house action problems like this are not going to be solved at the local level.

• 54:17Ezra Klein?

  Well, when you say it's not going to be solved at the local level, like, what do you actually mean by that? I mean, let's use LA, which you've done a fair amount of writing about, and I'm from outside of LA, as an example here. They've got a pretty big housing crisis, is what you're saying there, that the federal government should somehow make them build double the housing? Are you saying that this is a state of California problem? When you say this can't be solved locally, I mean, it's local ordinances that have control here. So so what's the what's the play then?

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and by locally, I mean like using local levers of power. It's definitely the case that we need to change the local laws here. But one thing that people, I think, often don't realize is that the Constitution grants power to federal government and it grants power to the states. The only power that cities and localities have are the ones that states give them. So everyone keeps talking about this, like, oh, this is a local issue. Like, we can't intervene here. We can't do anything about this because it's a local issue. It's a local issue because states are deciding it's a local issue. So I think we need to have a reframing of this as just states should be engaging in this process to require changes at the local level or to just change it themselves. And we're seeing this movement happening in California where, you know, there's a process going by where the state is requiring different localities to figure out exactly how they're going to meet their their housing budget.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  And you look to Connecticut where we saw recently an effort at the statewide level to legalize accessory dwelling units, which are, you know, English basements, converting your garage to a living unit or creating a mother-in-law suite in your backyard. You know, this is stuff that would never be done if you went town by town and tried to convince every single town selectman or mayor to fix these problems. You have to have statewide action, regional action, federal action to change these things. And I do wish that the federal government would take more of a enhanced role here. States and localities rely on a bunch of federal money, whether it's community development block grants or service transportation block grants that are administered by the federal government or just any kind of funds that states and localities require.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  But there is no reason why people should be receiving money as they continue to block economic growth for the entire country. This is causing widespread economic devastation and continuing to think of it as a local problem is part of why we're not solving it.

• 56:24Ezra Klein?

  So I'm worried this is the same problem almost at every level of it that you go to. So let's take the state-local question and let's keep using LA as an example because it's one I'm more familiar with. So LA, where Eric Garcetti has been the mayor, although he's now off to be ambassador to India, they did some interesting things. I mean, they really have been trying to work on this. They passed a huge measure, which raised a bunch of money, and they were going to build all the shelter. And then it just kind of didn't. I think it's, you know, built less than 10% of the shelters that it promised to do. Because the local communities keep organizing, sometimes through lawsuits, sometimes just through organizing to stop them. Now, at some level, like as you're saying, and your constitutional point is well taken, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, you know, with the consent of the legislature,

• 57:09Ezra Klein?

  could take a bunch of power from LA and just, you know, go over them. But Gavin Newsom can't lose the support of LA either, right? I mean, or he'll lose a recall. And so, one of the issues here to me, when I look at it, and one reason I do focus a little bit more, I think, than than some others do on the liberal hypocrisy thing, is that you really do have a political problem where people who are otherwise good liberals down the line, fight this stuff when it happens. I mean, there's a great piece in the New York Times Magazine about homelessness in Venice. It'll probably be a few weeks ago when this comes out. And they write that, quote, "Residents have lobbied against every proposed form of low-income housing and shelter.

• 57:49Ezra Klein?

  A 140-unit project on the Venice Boulevard median, a 40-unit supportive housing project on Lincoln Boulevard, a 98-unit affordable housing project for low-income senior citizens and families at the city-owned Thatcher Yard, a former maintenance lot." And that the problem often, we're talking about politicians here, but what I see when I look at California at this point, is a lot of politicians who more or less get what the problem is, but they have not figured out a way around the political opposition to solving it.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely agree that the biggest problem here is the political problem of the power that these upper-middle-class homeowners often hold. And you just mentioned the Prop Triple H, which is the Affordable Housing Measure in Los Angeles. I mean, that passed with 77% of voters approving of spending that money on building affordable housing. And as you mentioned, very little of that has actually been built. And you're right that that's true at every single level. And I would say that when we're talking about action being done at state level and at federal level, it is not that this is a politically easy problem for them to fix. It is that the benefits that we're talking about, the economic growth, the labor market implications for all these policies that we're discussing are more...

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Internalized as wins by people who are working in the federal or state government. People don't vote at the local level on whether or not you brought economic growth to their community. They care very specifically about, did you stop this construction? Like, did you fix this highway median? Did you fix these small local issues? And so you're never going to be able to win at that level. It still is hard the further you go up. I think that's definitely the case, and it's definitely true. But it is easier than it is at the very local level where you will just be voted out immediately. Whereas there are other overriding considerations that people make when they're voting for president, when they're voting for senate, when they're voting for congress. And I think one of the things that's really good is that we're having at least a reckoning at the federal level amongst Democrats. And this White House, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Department of Housing and Urban

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Development have been very clear that these types of policies are bad and they are causing a lot of financial harm and economic harm. And that's a really big deal at that level for them to be acknowledging how bad these zoning regulations really are. It's going to take political courage, and I don't, but I don't really see another option other than the state and federal levels taking more of a role.

• 1:00:05Ezra Klein?

  And I do want to give props that there are places that are at least beginning to make interesting moves here. I mean, something that you'll sometimes hear is that, at least in California, there's a lot of, of energy trying to change some of this. Berkeley, which was either the first or a very early adopter of single-family zoning, has gotten rid of it. That's going to be a process to see how that actually plays out. But, but there's some stuff here, and there is some political courage being demonstrated that I think is encouraging. You, you talked a bit about the federal level, so, so let's talk there for a minute. Biden has some good ideas on housing, but when we talk about these levers, like, the idea they have to actually change what is happening on the supply side in, in building local communities is this proposed $5 billion in incentives for, for states to reform zoning laws. And I always wonder about that.

• 1:00:48Ezra Klein?

  Like, on the one hand, money is good, and it's helpful, and it, it gets people to act. And on the other hand, I mean, you've quoted at this point a number of studies, I think, about how much money there would be if you opened up zoning, right? I mean, it would make places much richer. And that, that $5 billion, it's not going to, to individually compensate homeowners who worry that their property values are going to go down. So do you see that pot of money approach as effective here?

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  It's definitely a small, especially relative to the problem. It's very weird to read a report from the federal government talking about how zoning has led to massive economic harms and massive racial justice harms and class implications, then just see that the solution is kind of like a $5 billion pot they're putting out there. But I definitely don't want to just rag on it. I think that the idea that a race to the top program, which is what the Biden administration is proposing, could help identify what are the best levers with which they can convince local governments or incentivize local governments to change their behavior. It has merit to it. I think I would like to see several different kinds of experiments here. Like, there could be different things where you say, okay, you got this $5 billion. If you specifically get rid of parking requirements or this other specific thing that we know

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  is, should have no benefit to any local community. Or the federal government would say, we don't really care how you do it. Until you increase supply to X number, you're not going to get this money anymore. There is some pushback on this idea. Jenny Schutz, who's at the Brookings Institute, has looked into which places really rely on federal funds the most. And the most exclusive communities, of course, like these suburbs that are really wealthy, that can finance a lot of the projects themselves, are not really that dependent on massive grants. But a lot of the big cities, and we're talking about Los Angeles, we're talking about Boston, LA, they do take these pots of money from the government, and they do require a lot of funding to complete the things that they think are important. So, taking this really seriously would mean focusing on the ways in which local governments

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  are dependent on federal governments, or states are dependent on it. Because another option, of course, is also to just say, okay, we're not going to get involved at the local level, but states, you need to figure out a way to make sure that there's enough housing supply, and we're not going to continue funding inefficient transit projects that don't actually make sure that our climate change goals are being met and our labor market goals are being met, until you reform what's going on at the local level, because you control, at the end of the day, what they're doing. So, you know, there's a lot more ambitious things that could be proposed right now. I think it is a sad state of affairs that this is probably the most ambitious the federal government has ever gotten on this issue, despite it being a real problem for several administrations now. But we have to start somewhere.

• 1:03:19Ezra Klein?

  I think it's clear, listening to this conversation, where my politics are on this. But let me try to take the side of the neighborhood defenders here, right, as some academics call them. Do they have a point when they say, I just want my community the way it is? The point of cities is not to become endlessly more powerful engines of economic growth. That if you don't like that there's too much here, well, then, you know, the thing the federal government should do is try to diversify the regional pattern of where the jobs are. And, you know, give people more incentives to move to places that currently have housing stock for them, or want more people to move in. One thing you'll sometimes hear is that this is an overly economics and policy minded

• 1:04:04Ezra Klein?

  way of thinking about what it means to live in a place and what you should be chasing and living in a place. And that there is value in the feel of what it is now. And so the people like you and me, who sit around looking at the data on this and saying this should be better, we're just kind of missing the point. Because like, cities are for the people who currently live in them. And if they don't want this all to change, it shouldn't change.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  So I think a few things with this. One, I think the people who like living in cities, even if they kind of like living in their, you know, single family home in northwest DC and then just going downtown to take advantage of the cultural and vibrant diversity that we see in most cities. The policies that they want to defend here are choking off what makes cities attractive to them. Whether it's you like a diversity of food options, or you like art or culture, all these different kinds of things, the things that make cities dynamic and great places to live and attractive to upper class Americans, requires there to be this kind of demand to live there, that you want a bunch of different kinds of people trying to get there. One example of this is DC has a bunch of really great immigrant food.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  But over the course of my life, I've seen really great immigrant food move further and further out from the city into the suburbs. And that's because, you know, rents have become so unaffordable that they are moving away. And at some point, if you are saying that these cities are just for the people who are there, you are undermining the exact thing that makes those cities amazing, vibrant centers of growth and dynamism. But the second thing is that sometimes you just don't really get everything that you want. You know, there is this paper by Yale Law Professor David Schleicher, and it's called "Stuck." And the idea here is that for a long time, this idea of America was that people, young people could move to new places and get new jobs and, you know, build a new life for themselves and take advantage of economic opportunity in different places.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  And what we've seen is that if you're like a, you know, a service worker, janitor, or something like that, living in a rural area, moving to New York City, moving to DC, moving to Los Angeles and San Francisco, it has become too expensive, to the point where the benefit that you would get of a higher income does not outweigh the increased living costs, and in particular, the housing costs that come with living in these cities. And so you now have a situation where what we're saying is not just, oh, people who live in cities ought to be ashamed of themselves for wanting to have a quiet community. No, what we're saying is, we understand that you like the place that you live in, that you have aesthetic preferences, but we cannot sacrifice the lives, the futures, and the

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  dreams of every other American because you don't want to see an apartment building. And I think that's kind of foundational to this entire conversation here, is how much are you willing to sacrifice really as an individual so that you yourself don't have to see the kinds of people that don't currently live in your neighborhood?

• 1:06:53Ezra Klein?

  I think that is a good place to come to a close. So, always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  So, the first book that I would pick is Golden Gates by Connor Doherty, which is a really great look at the housing crisis in California. And for anyone who's really interested in learning more about this and how it functions and how the politics of this play out, and who the actors are, I would definitely recommend reading that. And then for my other books, I'm going to go into sci-fi, because I think a lot of times, A, a lot of policymakers don't read enough fiction, and no one reads enough science fiction. And I think there's been a lot of failures of imagination recently, and I think that maybe reading more science fiction would help people. So the first one I'm going to recommend is The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. And I love this book for a lot of reasons, but primarily, I would say that science fiction, and her book in particular here, allows you to examine a lot of political debates without feeling so

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  invested in them personally, because it's in a made up world. And then finally, Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang. The first one is called The Tower of Babylon, and, you know, it's about infrastructure, so give it a read.

• 1:07:55Ezra Klein?

  Tower of Babylon, one of my favorite stories ever. People should go back and check out the Ted Chiang episode of this very podcast from a couple of months back. True some emphasis. Thank you. This has been great.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 1:08:15Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roji Karma, and Annie Galvin. It's fact-checked by Michelle Harris and original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld.