I caught some of Bill Maher's show last night, and midway through he began a rant about bureaucrats making it harder and harder to build anything. These "petty tyrants," he said, are constantly coming up with new rules that force you to jump through ever more hoops to get anything done.
Maher is wrong to assign blame where he does. There are good and bad bureaucrats, just like everything else, but for the most part all the new rules come from elected legislators: city councils, county commissioners, state legislatures, Congress, water boards, school boards, and so forth. The reason there are so many hoops to jump through is largely because (a) we elect people who put them in place and (b) construction opponents tie things up in court endlessly.
But aside from assigning blame, this got me curious: Is it really impossible to build stuff anymore? If it is, we should be building less stuff as time goes by. Are we?
Looking at the value of construction does no good. The cost of construction can change for lots of reasons. What we need is the raw quantity of construction, and that's not easy to come by. But it isn't impossible. For example, here's the number of miles of public roads built each year over the past half century:
There's a lot of noise here but no trend. The average today is the same as it was 50 years ago. Here's housing:
The raw amount of housing has gone up, but that's not a fair comparison since population has also gone up. What I've done here is adjust new housing for annual population growth. That is, the number of houses built each year divided by the increase in population for that year. It's not perfect, and perhaps it should be based on lagged population growth since it's adults who buy houses, but it gives a good sense of things. Again, there are ups and downs, but it's stable overall with a noticeable rise over the past few years.
Now here's commercial development:
Once again, this is amount of construction per year adjusted for population growth in that year. Commercial construction has been down over the past decade, but the trend is generally upward in the postwar era.
This is hardly definitive, but generally speaking it looks as if we're building about as much stuff as ever, even when you account for population growth. It might take longer and it might be more expensive—I can't tell on either count—but one way or another all the new rules don't seem to be stopping anything.
POSTSCRIPT: For what it's worth, the reason these statistics might be surprising is that a lot of people cherry pick to make them look worse than they are. In particular, California is famously resistant to new housing, and our CEPA law is infamously abused to slow down construction. New York City is also an outlier, where construction is difficult and expensive and time consuming. If you focus on California and New York City, it's easy to make things look bad. If you include the rest of the country things aren't so bad after all.
So: during ten out of the past forty-four years, public roads were destroyed or taken private? In substantial quantity in at least five of those years, and in 1980 alone, roughly 60,000 miles thereof? What the Hell happened?
There are places where paved roads are being converted to gavel and are no longer plowed, so costs are lower. And some places have "sold" their public roads and they are now tollways.
The way it is worded, I thought Kevin was looking at road construction information, not total miles--but it's total miles.
Isn't the real complaint that we're not building big dramatic things like dams and the interstate highway system and the Golden Gate bridge that everyone can drive by and gawk at?
And most construction related activity is maintenance of what we now have and things like NASA that take place far, far away.
And the big dramatic things we do build, like power generating windmills, make half the population mental just knowing about them, making it impossible to build other large scale things we should be building like nuclear power plants.
One issue here is careless and/or ignorant use of the word "bureaucrat" A lot of people think it means *all* government officials including elected ones. I've actually heard people complain about "our elected bureaucrats" though there is no such thing.
Kevin, didn't you post something a year or two ago about the cost of building subway stations or something like that?
Was that the discussion about how public construction goes in fits and starts, so expertise is loss between projects and we're always reinventing the wheel? Even excluding the costs of lawsuits, the cost of building is far higher here than elsewhere, e.g. Europe.
I do believe it is CEQA.
https://opr.ca.gov/ceqa/
It does cost more to build things which are better than what we used to build. I call this the escalating price of civilization.
Maher might say that is was better to live without all these new rules, but I don't see him living in a cardboard box and peeing on the library steps. No unnecessary regulations for those guys.
Someday, the incremental costs of making the world a better place will exceed the incremental benefits of making the world a better place, and we will have to "simplify" (https://risk.princeton.edu/img/Historical_Collapse_Resources/Tainter_The_Collapse_of_Complex_Societies_ch_1_2_5_6.pdf), but that day is not today.
Light bulbs cost more!!! What--I don't have to replace them every few months and my electric bill is down.....but Light Bulbs Cost MORE!!!
“If you focus on California and New York City, it's easy to make things look bad. If you include the rest of the country things aren't so bad after all.”
Yes but relatively nobody wants to live in most of the rest of the country outside of the difficult places to build. Like, woo-hoo, I can build a house quickly in Wyoming? And wtf am I going to do for income if I move to Wyoming?
😄😄😄
Whatever else you were doing as work from home?
Middle of Wyoming might not have reliable, high speed intertubes to work from home.
If all you need is the speed, ViaSat would suffice. Otherwise there’s Starlink.
Can’t say anything about Cali but NYC? Construction is constant and endless. Tell all the zillionaire developers how hard it is to build. I am sure they will agree as they laugh heartily, all the way to the bank.
Cali? When did a city in Colombia become part of this?
The housing construction rate isn't "stable overall" as shown by the very chart that is being claimed to show stability overall. Look at the scale. In the past 30 years, it's gone from ~250 to 800 back to 200 and back up again.
For the record, we probably need a long term housing construction trend of somewhere around 600-800 units per 1000 people (the long term average, pre-1990, appears to be around that). We barely passed that before the financial crisis in 2008, and then it cratered and we've only (in the last 2 years) just barely begun to make up ground on the massive hole we're in since 1990. There's a long, long way to go but the economic powers that be seem intent on annihilating what little progress we've made because of a fundamental misunderstanding (which is perhaps willful) of inflation and the efficacy of the Fed's prime rate.
Going to an all-electric, (mostly) non-fossil fueled civilization is going to take a lot of extra wiring, over 1,000,000 miles of new transmission lines if the estimates are to be believed. How many miles were put up in the years 2010 - 2020? Just 18,000 miles. Unless the government gets a lot more agressive with emininent domain, our zero-emissions future just isn't going to happen.
The housing chart is misleading and everyone should try to forget it.
1) We dont care about population growth, we care about new households. Changes in size of households will have a dramatic effect over the last 60 years.
2) We need to factor in housing demolitions. If demolitions have changed over time, this effect will also be dramatic.
3) Kevin draws a broad and incorrect conclusion based entirely off a sudden decline in population growth that occurred in 2017 to 2020.
4) His misleading chart appears to show that the US was building too few houses for about 24 of the last 27 years until the sudden change around 2017, but he simply shrugs this off.
The road chart may be misleading as well.
Kevin links to data showing a small increase in roads built, but a very dramatic increase in miles driven.
Roads may be being built at the same pace, but it looks like this same pace of building in the face of dramatically higher utilization is a sign of failure, not success.