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Who gets to decide what stuff we build?

Matt Yglesias is reading Middlemarch, and it turns out that a minor plot point in the novel is about the construction of a London-Birmingham railroad that will go through Middlemarch. Not everyone is happy about this, but as one of the book's characters explains, there's no use fighting because the law is on the railroad's side. Matt strongly supports this anti-NIMBY attitude of yore:

That’s how you get things done.... A company willing to invest private capital in the construction of such a railroad was given the right to survey the route and to take whatever land they wanted via the British version of eminent domain. British law is more generous to the landowner than American law in this regard and requires that the company pay the market value plus ten percent to the landowner. But (at the time) there were no procedural tools of delay. The railroad had to pay for what they wanted, but they otherwise operated under very few constraints.

This attitude is one of the things that most bothers me about liberal YIMBYs. You can make a case that modern America puts too much red tape in the way of building new stuff, but the answer is surely not to extol 19th century robber baron practices. That's what was responsible for all the red tape in the first place: during and after the '60s, people got sick and tired of rich corporations having carte blanche to do anything they wanted, wherever they wanted, with no concern for either the environment or the opinions of the people whose lives they were wrecking.

They wanted a say, and that's what gave us laws like NEPA at the federal level (signed by Richard Nixon) and CEQA in California (signed by Ronald Reagan). Have those laws gotten out of hand? Maybe. We're a litigious society, and lots of things get out of hand. But surely the people most affected by development deserve a voice in that development?

Later on Matt glosses the railroad building boom like this:

The railroads got built because the national government decided it wanted a national railroad network to get built, so that the aggregate benefits would exceed the costs. And then having decided that the aggregate benefits would exceed the costs, it created an institutional framework that facilitated doing the thing and cleared out procedural obstacles to it happening.

This, I think, is an exorbitantly rosy view of things. As in the US, British railroad building was largely a frenzy of projects launched by rich people who won permissions and contracts via political hardball and outright bribery. It was decidedly not the result of a cool cost-benefit analysis followed by technocratic white papers setting out national plans.

As genuine democracy advances, things get messy. It often turns out that when people get enfranchised they aren't happy with the status quo after all. So they fight. That means it's inherently harder to make decisions today, with a huge and diverse electorate, than it was in 1789 when only a relatively small and homogeneous group (white, male, well-to-do) had to agree on things. But that's the price. If you want democracy, you have to accept that everyone gets a say and a lot of extremely stubborn people are going to disagree with you. Fractious, unsatisfactory compromise is unavoidable.

64 thoughts on “Who gets to decide what stuff we build?

  1. golack

    Building out the railroads did bind our country together, but it was done to make money, built by imported labor that were treated poorly and many died, took lands that were not theirs to take, had the strong backing of the Army--it was not pretty.

    Building commuter rails around cities, and subways in them, was not as bad--and gave rise to the first suburbs. Attractions, venues, parks, etc. were also built at the end of some lines to goose ridership on weekends.

    We should look towards other countries to see how they built out high speed rail, and not to our railroading past. The closest project here would be akin to the interstate highway system.

    1. Austin

      Building commuter rail and eventually highways allowed white people to flee living next door to black people. Your politics will decide whether you think this was good or bad - I personally think it sucks - but commuter rail and then highways enabled the whole “I can live a hundred miles away from where I work” and the people most able to take advantage of that were white people, who used it to turn cities into hellholes from approximately 1965-1995, when finally the suburban dispersion got too vast. (Most people won’t agree with “I can live 200 miles away from where I work” if they aren’t also allowed remote working options.)

      1. Atticus

        That's a new one. "Highways are racist". This is yet another example why many otherwise reasonable people could vote for Trump (i.e. not for a liberal).

        1. PaulDavisThe1st

          "X enables racist behavior" does not mean "X is racist"

          That's a simplification used by people who are at best anti-anti-racist, and at worst actually racist.

          1. Atticus

            You think most voters care about that logic? They see a liberal bringing racism into something as mundane as highways. That's all that matters. It's feeding the caricature that lefties invoke racism in every aspect of life.

        2. kkseattle

          If it wouldn’t be completely wasted on you, you might benefit from reading The Power Broker if you think highways can’t be racist.

          The reason a lot of people voted for Trump—like the reason we had slavery, segregation, Japanese internment, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the extermination of our indigenous people—is because a lot of people are racist.

          That’s why they shriek about the Mexican workers who come here but don’t give a crap about the white farmers, construction contractors, meatpackers, and golf course owners who pay them to take away American jobs.

          DUH

          Do you think if a Black man who ran two veterans organizations into the ground and was accused of rape would be confirmed by the Republican Senate for Secretary of Defense?

          In America, white men benefit from the soft bigotry of low expectations. No sane profit-making corporation in America would hire Trump to run its least important division.

          1. Atticus

            Of course. I’d say the vast majority of people are racist to some degree. As long as there are races, people will be racist. Doesn’t mean you have to bring it into every issue.

  2. D_Ohrk_E1

    The homeowner, whose solar access rights are cut off by the 10-story apartment building thereby mooting their solar panels, yelling into the ethernet blackhole.

    And Matt responds, "This is how progress works!"

    1. shapeofsociety

      The value of a 10-story apartment building is several orders of magnitude greater than the value of the electricity produced by the rooftop solar panels of a single house. It does not make sense to forego building the apartment building for the sake of the solar panels.

      Every project has costs. If the benefits clearly outweigh the costs, the project should happen.

      1. Austin

        The value of a slave working the field might outweigh the cost of feeding, clothing, housing and giving basic medical care to the slave, especially if you can also sell off any offspring.

        “If the benefits clearly outweigh the costs, the project of slavery should happen,” says shapeofsociety.

        Those of us with morals though believe that, if the losers lose really badly in an economic transaction, especially if they aren’t even compensated for their loss (as most people aren’t when a neighboring land use destroys the value of their land), the transaction should be prohibited. For the same reason we believe certain labor arrangements - slavery, near slavery (indentured servitude) and child labor should be prohibited too, even if great economic value can be extracted by someone in them.

        There are lots of economic deals that are both profitable and also generate lots of losers who are never compensated for their losses - only a rich person or someone so delusional to believe they will never be the loser would agree to a legal system in which “if it’s profitable, do it and damn everyone else” reigns supreme.

        1. tomtom502

          shapeofsociety did not specify he was referring to economic value.

          The NON-economic value value of a 10-story apartment building is greater than the value of the electricity produced by the rooftop solar panels of a single house. Just as a matter of value to people, as in having a place to live. Those of us with morals realize this.

          Your argument boils down to a near-absolute defense of property rights, not a position with a great history.

        2. shapeofsociety

          This is an insane comparison. The electricity from a set of solar panels has only economic value, it does not have moral value. A human being has moral value, which is why we don't allow slavery anymore.

          It's actually the homeowner upset about losing the power from his solar panels who is the "I only care about myself, and damn everyone else" camp here. The apartment building has large and widespread benefits for lots of people - not only profits to the developer, but income for the workers who build the building, valuable homes for those who buy or rent the apartments, and positive economic spillovers to the entire community from the new residents. Why should one guy's solar panels be allowed to take priority over all that?

          Asking the developer to compensate the homeowner for the fair market value of the lost electricity isn't unreasonable, but letting the homeowner block the building is totally unreasonable.

      2. tomtom502

        Thank you.

        I heard a similar argument gainst looser zoning. What about the old couple whose house is surrounded by apartment buildings?

        To which I said this is Seattle! What about all those people who now have apartments?

        It did not go over well.

        1. Jasper_in_Boston

          What about the old couple whose house is surrounded by apartment buildings?

          The only way to ensure no one, anywhere, ever has their life negatively impacted by changes is a policy of mandatory stasis (large swaths of the country are already governed under rules closely approaching this).

          Unfortunately, mandatory stasis causes huge problems. Far better to live under a rule that goes something like "If you want a functional society with broad-based prosperity and rising living standards, you can't have a guarantee your surroundings will never change. Plan accordingly."

          But we're a ways away from such a vision, because incumbent property owners really value stasis, and they both vote and fund campaigns in greater proportion than non property owners.

          1. PaulDavisThe1st

            Actually, while not 100%, sprall works almost as well as stasis.

            Of course, it has objectively harmful collective side effects, but these are externalities not priced in and thus generally ignored.

            But in the meantime, nobody gets their panels or yard obscured, and new arrivals get their single family with garden.

      3. danove

        Who gets to decide "What is a benefit?" Who gets to place a relative value on the various benefits to various people? And there's more nuance than in your example. Maybe that's not a good spot for the apartment building for other reasons. These questions seem to take us back to where we are: arguing it out. Like in a democracy.

      4. D_Ohrk_E1

        The value of a 10-story apartment building is several orders of magnitude greater than the value of the electricity produced by the rooftop solar panels of a single house.

        Whose value is served? The homeowner's is certainly not. Their investment of $50K is down the drain. The neighborhood's? More traffic and noise might not be the positive outcome they were looking for. The city's? Certainly they want to pack as many people in, people who will be paying property taxes and consuming goods and services locally.

        It does not make sense to forego building the apartment building for the sake of the solar panels.

        I never said it was a binary choice. The city can require solar setbacks and cap heights at 5 stories.

        1. shapeofsociety

          Whose value is served? The entire community.

          The reason cities exist is because there are positive economic spillovers from having lots of people live and work close together. When a new apartment building is built, the benefits include profit to the developer, income for the workers who build the building, valuable homes for those who buy or rent the apartments, and the positive economic spillovers of new residents for the whole community.

          When considering whether to permit the building, the city should weigh the costs and benefits; the lost electricity from the solar panels on the house to the north of the building certainly belongs on the "cost" side of the ledger. But the cost should have a number assigned to it, and the correct number is the fair market value of the electricity produced by the panels, not a blithe, no-number assumption that it is somehow worth more than a whole bunch of new apartments.

          Capping heights at 5 stories or requiring solar setbacks doesn't pass a cost-benefit analysis once you do the math and value the solar panels at what they are actually worth. The additional apartments that can be built without those rules are worth more than the electricity from the panels, and obviously so. This is also true if you are considering climate; the climate benefits of denser development and shorter commutes outweigh the climate benefits of a few rooftop solar panels.

      5. SnowballsChanceinHell

        Okay. Does this mean that if suburbanites want to bulldoze an eight-lane highway through a streetcar suburb into the city center, then that is okay? The number of people using the eight-lane highway is likely an order of magnitude greater than the number of people displaced.

        For example, assume a streetcar suburb has 20,000 people per square mile. At the margin, each additional highway lane requires an additional 12 ft of width. Assuming the lane winds 10 miles through the streetcar suburb, that additional lane will take up about 0.03 square miles and displace about 600 people.

        That lane has a capacity of 2000 people per hour. It will likely be full 3 hours a day. So 6000 people will benefit and 600 will be displaced. And those 6000 people will be able to live further out from the city center, in larger, more affordable housing.

        So clearly this is just as acceptable as building the 10-story building in the single-family home neighborhood? Right?

        1. shapeofsociety

          Your example isn't actually realistic. People are turning against urban highways and more cities are removing them these days, because they are bad for the environment and bad for urban spaces, car dependency is geometrically unfeasible in a dense city, and their benefits to suburban commuters don't actually outweigh the costs to the city core.

          If the actual cost-benefit analysis were as you laid it out, which to be fair is what a lot of people thought it was in the 1950s, urban highways would make sense. But when you add other factors that people have become aware of since, it doesn't pencil, so urban highways are getting ripped out and replaced with regular roads. As our understanding improves, we make better choices.

          And one of those better choices is building more and taller apartment buildings, so that more people can enjoy the benefits of city life, which are a direct product of bringing lots of people close together. A neighborhood of single-unit houses doesn't have a god-given right to stay that way forever. If there is high demand for housing in the area, either the neighborhood will be converted to apartments or the houses will become insanely expensive. The community is better off allowing the neighborhood to change to meet housing demand.

          1. SnowballsChanceinHell

            See, this is the problem.

            To slay the YIMBYs, your faction developed an all-purpose, universally-applicable, Econ 101-type argument. And you applied this argument to further the type of development that you favor.

            But your argument sweeps far, far, far broader. And when I point that out, you pull this "character of the neighborhood" crap, just like the YIMBYs you deplore.

          2. SnowballsChanceinHell

            Lower down, you said that you want to buy a house before you are 50.

            But that is not what you want. You could easily buy a house now, in a less expensive part of the country or further from the city center in a more expensive part of the country.

            What you want is to buy a lifestyle. An affluent urban lifestyle. And you can't afford it.

    2. lawnorder

      A landowner doesn't have solar access rights. Landowners have air rights in the column directly above their property but not off to the sides.

  3. realrobmac

    Matt should really read the Power Broker. Most of the time it was the government itself busting up towns, neighborhoods, and cities to build infrastructure, with no regard to the people most directly impacted. And in practice that often meant a few very powerful people controlled everything. In New York that meant one very powerful person.

    For a smart and well read guy it is amazing how dumb he so often is. I used to love his old blog because all of us commenters would just jump on everything he said and disagree with him. It was kind of a fun community.

      1. Jasper_in_Boston

        The groundless dissing of Yglesias (often by people who admittedly seldom read him) cannot fail. It can only be failed.

      2. SnowballsChanceinHell

        If the above quotes are any indication, Yiggs problem with Robert Moses is merely that Robert Moses wasn't Yiggs.

        1. shapeofsociety

          You could say the same thing about anyone who has a problem with anyone.

          Moses' policies had bad results, and those bad results were in many ways a direct product of Moses not understanding basic economics. Jane Jacobs' reaction to Robert Moses had a different set of bad results, and those bad results were also a product of not understanding basic economics. It's possible that the YIMBY movement will end up getting bad results - the full results of any policy change are never knowable in advance - but they do know their basic economics. The status quo is failing America's cities and I think YIMBY is much more likely to get good results than the status quo, and that's why I support it.

          I'm also self-interested - I want to buy a home, preferably before I turn 50.

    1. tomtom502

      Sometimes the problem is government pushing people out of the way, sometimes the problem is interest groups blocking projests of great social value.

      Nowadays the probolem is the latter. We could correct without going back to Robert Moses.

      The fantastic cost of building light rail in the US is a problem.
      Homeless people on the streets largely because rents are super-high is a problem.
      Middle class people depressed because no way can they buy a house is a problem.

      BTW I live in Seattle. Obstacles to development are real. So is the pain of the homeless I encounter daily.

      Just today I talked with a co-worker. He doesn't want to move to Texas. But he could afford a house in Texas.

    2. Batchman

      I used to love [Matt Yglesias'] old blog because all of us commenters would just jump on everything he said and disagree with him. It was kind of a fun community.

      That's my impression of Kevin Drum's blog now and why I make it a point to read all the comments.

    1. shapeofsociety

      Yes. He supports the Democratic Party, cares about climate change, cares about inequality. Where he differs from those farther to his left, it's because he cares about winning elections and governing effectively and believes that those should be much higher priorities than ideological purity. He's also against efforts to deny reality, which guarantees he'll never be a Republican.

      1. somebody123

        none of that makes him a liberal. it makes him to the left of the Republican Party, but at this point they think Hitler was a squish. If Matty were a Brit he’d be a tory.

        1. Joel

          Yep. The problem here is the word "liberal," which is used by the extreme right as an epithet to refer to what used to be conservative values. Folks like Yglesias used to be called "Rockefeller Republicans."

    2. tomtom502

      These purity tests are part of why Democrats lose.

      I'm Bernie Sanders / AOC left and I'm happy to be in the same party as Joe Manchin.

      1. Jasper_in_Boston

        I'm Bernie Sanders / AOC left and I'm happy to be in the same party as Joe Manchin.

        I'm more of an Obama-Pelosi-Buttigieg liberal, and I, too, am happy to be in the same party as Joe Manchin (he was vastly preferable to any alternative we're possibly going to get from West Virginia voters, something the next Congress is going to drive home).

  4. shapeofsociety

    "Give people a say" sounded like a nice idea at the time, but it has turned out that the only people who bother to speak up are those who want to block absolutely everything because they don't want anything to change at all, and they don't care about the benefits that society loses from freezing our built environment in amber. They don't care about lost progress and economic stagnation, they don't care about young people crushed by soaring housing costs, they don't care about continuing carbon emissions because clean energy isn't getting built nearly fast enough. They only care about their own personal aversion to change.

    People get a say in politics through their choice of elected officials. Allowing small local interests to block the will of elected officials is not democracy, it's the opposite of democracy. "Give people a say" via blocking procedures rather than elections is a failed experiment and it's time to end it.

    I do think the process for reviewing projects should be more involved than it was in the 1950s, because a lot of bad choices did get made back then. But NEPA is hideously inefficient and desperately needs to be replaced with a new environmental regulation law that protects the environment at reasonable cost. At minimum, the bar for a NEPA lawsuit needs to be way higher than it is now.

    1. Batchman

      This is the mentality I see in my corner of Southern California. People complain about the homeless folks on the street and blame whoever happens to be in power at the time, but when presented with the building of new housing they object strenuously to the notion of bringing "traffic, noise and crime" to their formerly pristine communities.

  5. Art Eclectic

    Pfft. He should read Cadillac Desert and take a look at the massive schemes and fraud around water rights and the build out of the west. Sorry, we will need your farm for this here project, no we aren't paying you for it. We'll destroy it so you have to sell for pennies.

    Rich people are awful in every country, in every century.

    1. shapeofsociety

      I did read Cadillac Desert, in a college class two decades ago, and I don't remember that part. What I remember is that the government developed a habit of building water projects and dams, and just kept building them long after all the good and sensible projects had already been built and the only possible dam sites remaining were stupid ideas that shouldn't have been built. It took a while to break this mindless momentum, because people who were accustomed to benefiting from water projects resisted efforts to point out how stupid they had gotten, but it did get broken and it's been a long time since the US government built a dam. They're actually taking dams down now.

      1. aldoushickman

        The schemes and fraud were a big part of the story, and a big part of Cadillac Desert. Hell, one of the famous quotes from the book is "water flows uphill towards money." It definintely was not simply about government inertia in dambuilding.

        Not taking shots at you--two decades is a long time--but it sounds like you could use a bit of a reread.

  6. Joseph Harbin

    Hear, hear.

    One thing that wasn't as much of an obstacle in the old days was worker safety. Those pesky regulations that add delays and costs to construction projects also save lives.

    Generally, as we progress we learn to build things with many fewer deaths in the process. The deaths incurred in some projects of the past are simply not tolerable today. No reason to go back to the old days.

    Deaths during construction (approx. chronological order)

    *Great Wall of China: 400,000 to 1,000,000 (?)
    US Capitol: 6
    Erie Canal: ~1,000
    *Suez Canal: 120,000
    Transcontinental Railroad: ~1200
    Brooklyn Bridge: 27+
    *Eiffel Tower: 1
    NYC Subway (first line): 16
    Los Angeles Aqueduct: 43
    *Panama Canal: 22,000 to 30,000
    *Titanic: 8
    Empire State Building: 5
    Hoover Dam: 96 to 116
    Golden Gate Bridge: 11
    Mount Rushmore: 0
    Astrodome: 3
    Gateway Arch: 0
    World Trade Center (Twin Towers): 60 (ouch)
    Sears Tower (Willis Tower): 5
    Big Dig: 4
    World Trade Center (Freedom Tower): 0
    Burj Khalifa: 1
    Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) plant, Phoenix: 1

    * Non-US

  7. antiscience

    A big problem with these big projects, is that sometimes the spillover damages are hard to forecast. So when a company builds a refinery, people for miles around are affected. It's not enough to just make the company buy the land they're gonna use at market rate (plus some percentage), if people for miles around are going to see their quality of life and property values degraded.

    Maybe a solution is that when a company builds some big facility, for some radius the company must be willing to purchase anybody's property for market value (plus that percentage) from the time when they were doing it for the start of the project .... for some period of time, say 20yr. That should guarantee that if there is significant spillover harm, then the company will have to pay for at least some of it.

    Just a thought: I'm not a public policy expert/lawyer/economist or anything. Just a thought.

  8. pjcamp1905

    Never fear! Musk is intent on bringing us the New Gilded Age. I mean, how bad can oligarchy be? The Union Pacific Railroad lasted almost 20 years before it was bankrupt.

  9. MF

    "surely the people most affected by development deserve a voice in that development”

    Makes sense. Of course same should apply to other things too, right? For example, I pay a lot of capital gains taxed. Surely as one of the people most affected by these taxes I deserve a voice in setting those taxes? At least in setting the rate for me?

    The short answer is that we recognize as a society that many things like free trade, taxes, development etc. benefit society as a whole and should be promoted even if some individuals are impacted negatively.

    Allowing imported toys hurts workers in toy factories but benefits everyone else. Preventing barbers from establishing and enforcing a cartel hurts existing barbers but benefits everyone else. Allowing the railroad to exercise eminent domain and build a new line is a minor pain for some people who are displaced (remember they sell their property at 10% above market) but benefits everyone else.

    Overall if we enforce YIMBY the net benefit to almost everyone is positive.

      1. MF

        So then you are incredibly wealthy since your home is worth billions of dollars to you?

        Should this be reflected in your property taxes?

        How about a new rule: Everyone self asseses home value for property taxes, anyone can do a forced purchase of your home for assessed value plus 10%.

        Fair deal?

  10. cld

    America's great joke president continues cranking 'em out,

    Trump Names Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight as ‘Special Ambassadors’ to ‘Troubled’ Hollywood: They’ll Bring ‘Lost Business’ Back,

    https://variety.com/2025/film/news/trump-sylvester-stallone-mel-gibson-jon-voight-ambassadors-hollywood-1236276088/

    President-elect Donald Trump is hoping to make Hollywood “stronger than ever before” by naming Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight as “special ambassadors,” whose goal will be to bring back business lost to “foreign countries.”

    “It is my honor to announce Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone, to be Special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday. “They will serve as Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE! These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest. It will again be, like The United States of America itself, The Golden Age of Hollywood!”

    It appears that the newly appointed ambassadors had little advance notice on the news, as Gibson said he found out at the same time at Trump’s social media followers.
    . . . .

    1. wvmcl2

      He had to come up with something to grab the headlines away from Biden's farewell speech and its warning about oligarchs and lies.

  11. cheweydelt

    I like Matt a lot, but he’s so contradictory sometimes. I’m a huge YIMBY and agree with the notion that you should be able to do with your parcel of land what you want (build as high as you want, sell the land as you want, etc.). And that’s usually What Matt extolls. But then he seemingly gives up his actual truth by extolling the virtue of people being forced out of their property, thus not being able to do with their property what they want.

    I find myself less able to trust his word if this is his interpretation.

      1. SnowballsChanceinHell

        Of course it's a provocation. Yiggs provokes people and nutpicks egregious responses to highlight. That allows his readership to feel smugly superior. A feeling of smug superiority is what he is selling.

        He plays this game with economic issues, not social issues, to reduce his risk getting cancelled.

    1. SnowballsChanceinHell

      holy heck, dipshit. I have to drop off three different children in three different locations, each location about a mile from the others and a mile from work, between 8AM and 9AM every morning. And then pick them up again every evening between 5 PM and 6PM. If I didn't have a car, I couldn't live in the city.

  12. cephalopod

    If Yglesias wants to read about 19th century railroads in a novel, Trollope is a better choice. Then you'd really get an idea of why things changed!

  13. MindGame

    The extremeness of his takes and apparent intention to be provocative ultimately weakens much of Matt's arguments. Clearly, a lot of NIMBYism goes way beyond simple protection against unrestrained private or public interests and results in blocking even changes to the built environment which would not only provide benefits to the general public but also help keep overall housing costs in an affordable range. Surely, there's somewhere in the middle where some control of development and adherence to good environmental and safety practices are achievable without getting bogged down in bureaucracy?

  14. SnowballsChanceinHell

    You are completely correct. But actual moderation is boring. And Yiggs is selling a particularly niche form of entertainment.

  15. Gilgit

    I don't think I've ever seen "glosses" used like that. It took me a couple of minutes before I finally accepted that it is used correctly.

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