The nearly hundred-year-old Holland Tunnel, the first mechanically ventilated underwater vehicular tunnel, opened in 1927 after just seven years of work. By contrast, the humble subway station elevators unveiled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2020 took three years and approximately $80 million to realize. (The MTA, sensing commuter suspicion, even made a video to explain why elevators are so complicated to build in NYC.) The disparity between the two pieces of infrastructural achievement seems as ludicrous as the exorbitant rent I pay to live in proximity to a Superfund site. Has the United States lost the art of building?
According to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, authors of this year’s hyped and reviled Abundance (Avid Reader Press, 2025), the answer is a resounding yes. “Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions,” they write, “have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially.” For instance, the New York City Citizens Budget Commission found that lengthy zoning and environmental review processes raise the cost of housing by $50,000 to $70,000 per unit. In detailing myriad similar examples, failed projects, and missed opportunities—mainly, but not only, in blue states—Klein and Thompson argue that the inability to develop new housing and transportation, or foster innovation in health, energy, and education, has become a distinct trait of the dysfunction of liberal democracies. It has supercharged skepticism about the effectiveness of government, further compromising the government’s ability to get things done. This roadblock results in a mindset of scarcity and a defensive politics of preserving what we already have rather than dreaming of what more we could make.
The average liberal reader—the book’s primary audience—is well acquainted with the way scarcity has fueled the housing crisis. The most productive coastal cities in the United States are currently unable to sufficiently grow their housing stock, to the detriment of other forms of growth. As a result, labor is driven away from high-productivity metropolitan areas and city dwellers suffer diminished opportunities for social mobility. Longtime residents are pushed out, and prospective newcomers are turned away at the door. Americans, who were previously very mobile, have become stuck in place, unable to move to areas offering better opportunities with more jobs, education, and improved access to health care.
Klein and Thompson point to the main culprit: zoning regulations, which, according to a recent report by two major housing trade groups, account for 40 percent of the cost of multifamily developments. The multiplicity of zoning regulations and the complexity of procedural red tape create an opaque system in which land costs, reviews, and construction time rise significantly. In liberal cities in particular, rules about what can be built where pile up and make building housing expensive. A case in point: 40 percent of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built under current zoning laws.