Abundance

by Ezra Klein

“There are a million veto points,” he said. “There are a lot of mouths at the trough that need to be fed to get anything started or done. So many people can gum up the works.”62 That’s particularly true in richer areas. There’s a reason so much of the housing construction in Washington, DC, since 2000 has happened in the city’s Southwest, rather than in Georgetown. When richer residents want something stopped, they know how to organize—and they often already have the organizations, to say nothing of the lobbyists and access, needed to stop it. These dynamics help explain the curious finding that ends Syverson and Goolsbee’s paper. After looking at the states with the highest construction productivity, they note that the more productive states don’t seem to gain market share in the construction industry. That doesn’t make much sense if you assume that the difficulties of construction are primarily the organization of manpower and materials. It makes more sense if you assume that the frictions are in navigating local regulations, community considerations, neighbors’ qualms, and politicians’ interests. Developers are often fixtures in the local political scene. They have to be.