Law & Liberty was kind enough to invite me to participate in their September forum on America’s construction shortage, led off by Michael C. Munger, of Duke University.
You can read my contribution today at L&L. Here are some excerpts to whet your whistle, but, obviously, this is a case where I suggest you read the whole thing:
“Hearts, Minds and Dollar Signs” by James J. Heaney:
Much hinges on the liberty to build. A man who can’t build a factory loses his liberty to run a manufacturing business. A man who can’t find a house in his hometown (because they’ve outlawed building houses) loses his liberty to live, work, and raise his family there. Law and liberty come to a head at the local planning commission.
Nevertheless, every time I write about land use, my family1 asks me, “Why do you always write about boring things?”
I was therefore delighted by Michael Munger’s vivid inaugural essay for this month’s Law & Liberty forum, which cleanly explains our system, its incentives, and their consequences. The stakes, he shows, are high indeed!
Our system requires almost anyone who wants to build almost anything to come before their local planning commission, as supplicants, in a public hearing.
Construction means change: more traffic, fewer trees, lower property values (or, in gentrification, higher values), a marred landscape, and different people. Indeed, in a contented neighborhood, nearly any change poses a threat to someone’s contentment. To a suburb at peace, every new apartment looks like the harbinger of a future slum. Over the past century, enough tony American neighborhoods collapsed into slums that this fear cannot be deemed entirely irrational. Residents’ incentives, then, are to oppose change, so they show up to planning meetings and demand the city use its veto.
City officials, torn between the city’s incentive to grow and their own incentive not to alienate their neighbors/constituents, often compromise by answering, “Yes, but.” The city makes builders jump through hoops, like traffic studies. Individually, these burdens seem light, but, together, they are heavy enough to suffocate many projects, downsize many more, and drive costs for others so high that builders must cater to the wealthy to recoup their investments. Cities that don’t do this expect to become the dumping ground for every other city’s worst projects, so no one can unilaterally disarm.
[…] Most local construction decisions are not controlled by “law” in the usual sense of that word. City officials have planted their zoning codes thick with rules so dense and so minute that it is impossible for most large projects to follow them all. This is the “law”; it is unworkable, everyone knows it, and its unworkability is by design.
Having tied the hands of builders with “law,” city officials make them an offer they can hardly refuse: if you ask real nice, we might grant you an exception to the “law” so you can build. In city government jargon, these exceptions are variously called variances, conditional use permits, and other labels, but they are simply unprincipled exceptions city officials hand out to favored clients. If the local pet store wants to expand, terrific! Variance granted! If the local pro-life center or data center wants to do likewise, God help them, because the city council will not.
Again, you can read the whole thing at Law & Liberty. It’s free, and I appreciate the click-through, because it makes me look good when people read my articles.
I hope you like it! I’m quite pleased, myself—and I will certainly be reading the rest of the forum as it comes out over the course of September, including Munger’s response (if any) in a few weeks’ time. Thanks for reading!
DE CIV NEXT VOYAGE: I’ve had a prolific month here—over 30,000 words, including the L&L essay. Plus, “The Alien Entity,” while short, was extremely difficult to write and took significantly longer than the rest… so I plan to be off next week and possibly the following week, using the time to catch up on my fiction writing.
When I return, I hope to do an installment of Some Constitutional Amendments, in order to answer a question many of you have been asking: “Why propose constitutional amendments at all, since we live at a time when it is impossible to pass a constitutional amendment?” It’s that or St. Alphonsus Liguori’s judgments of oral sex. You just never know what you’re getting with me!
Specifically, my mother and my wife and my children (egged on by my wife).