[baron816]

Progressives and Democratic Socialists like to pretend that the government can pass a law which would allow it to build lots of social housing/provide health care for everyone/build a lot of green energy/etc and it would just go and do that easy peasy. But building housing and infrastructure is not something you can just snap your fingers and it happens. It’s not something you can just throw tons of money at and pops up over night. Governments have to spend years and decades building systems and institutional knowledge around these things. The reason people can make a lot of money building houses is that it’s really hard and requires a lot of specialized and localized knowledge to figure it out.

This is a lot of what Abundance is actually about. Part of it is saying “yeah, let’s take the time and build state capacity to be able to do some of these things”. Vienna is able to build social housing because it’s been doing it consistently for decades and has all the right systems in place to do it. It’s not a libertarian book that just says “get rid of the rules and let capitalism sort everything out”. It’s about figuring out the right set of rules and incentives that allow governments to sustainably build things, or else facilitate the market to build them.

[anthonypasq]

Yet we somehow managed to build the interstate highway system?

This is just so defeatist and annoying. Building houses isnt inherently hard. we've intentionally made it hard for no good reason.

[tptacek]

Yes, with exclusive zoning and permitting rules. That's the entire point of Abundance.

The housing market dwarfs the Interstate Highway System, by the way. It's like comparing Europa to Jupiter. But the defeatism thing you're saying here: that too is an Abundance argument. It's a thing we're pissed about: that the government can't just go build things anymore.

It sounds like you're already one of us. Come on in! We have a conference and everything.

[baron816]

I don’t think you finished reading my comment. If you want the government to build lots of housing, fine. But you just have to really commit to doing so and expect it to be a perpetual project. Building out the highway system worked because we never stopped building it. China was able to build out its high speed rail system because it planned on connecting the whole country (and it’s still building, to its own detriment).

If you’re going to build three new subway stops, or a single housing complex, you’re not going to keep any of that expertise. You hire some consultants and contractors and then they move on to something completely different at the end of the project.

[anthonypasq]

> The reason people can make a lot of money building houses is that it’s really hard and requires a lot of specialized and localized knowledge to figure it out.

I fundamentally don't believe this is true. This shit isnt hard at all. its a fucking building. Creating EUV lithography machines is hard, creating cutting edge vaccines is hard. Building a building is not hard.

[ux266478]

> The reason people can make a lot of money building houses is that it’s really hard and requires a lot of specialized and localized knowledge to figure it out.

That's true if we're talking residential structures using load bearing masonry in America. Modern timber-framed houses? Nope.

> It’s not something you can just throw tons of money at and pops up over night.

If this is true for your locale, the reasoning always boils down to the slow pace of bureaucracy. Needing this permit cleared, then this one, need this plan signed off on, need this approved, etc. Of course, you can absolutely expedite the process by throwing money at the problem. The wealthy do that in LA all the time, to shorten a 5-year bureaucratic lead time into a matter of months. Sometimes it's to build where local regulation would outright forbid it, rather than expedite the process.

The thing is that this bureaucratic lead-time is entirely manufactured. It's not actually a natural law. The state can bypass it anytime it pleases and and pass the buck to pick up the mess. The obvious contemporary example is just how quickly data centers have been built, but it's a truism in general. Never underestimate the power of the state deciding to ignore its own laws, and its natural god-given right to do so at any time.

[lux-lux-lux]

It’s always fascinating to see when “this is hard and expensive to do, so we shouldn’t even try” is considered a compelling argument (housing, health care) vs. when it isn’t (defense, policing, the modern panopticon).

[tptacek]

We spend way less on policing than people think we do. A generation of progressives got turned around on this because people don't understand how overlapping taxing bodies work.