Having lived in Shanghai during 2005-2012 and seeing the construction boom there, I noticed some differences immediately after arriving in the US. It's common to hear about transportation projects taking decades to expand a few stations here. Mean while, since the time I left the Shanghai subway station has opened 21 new lines composed of 516 stations.
Certainly, the air/water was worse in China but workers also had to work much harder (later nights, weekends, etc). But perhaps most importantly, the government would waste no time in getting land that it needed, and it certainly wouldn't ask for your consideration if it needs to do construction on a Saturday morning.
While I appreciate that there is an inherent trade off between environmental consideration and speed, I think the author makes it clear that it's reached comic proportions in the US. The article is short, but I think the main premise is overwhelmingly accurate: The system exists to protect the status quo.
I live in China, I think the best way to summarise everything we do at all level is: the end justifies the means.
Need to seize power ? Murder all members of the former power. Need to make poor peasants rich middle class ? Build entire cities, put them there, and done. Need to build a metro station ? Take the land, build it. Need to make Hong Kong a more physically integrated part of the country ? Build a gigantic bridge to Zuhai even if nobody actually need to use it.
The problem ofc is that sometimes the means is more costly than the benefit of the end result, and also that the goal of the end result is never debated, but I suppose that will change eventually, once we've incurred too high a cost for too little a benefit overall.
Yeah, this framing was taken in a piece a few years ago about the failure to revitalize a rail project [1] in New York, which ultimately pinned the blame on tipping the balance too far in favor of private property rights. A single person/holdout can grind a project valuable to millions to a halt. It's the most compelling explanation I've read.
In short, if private property has absolute veto power, you can never get big public projects done. (This is why eminent domain exists) There's a balance between private property rights & public good; in the times of great public works, the public good was given more sway, while recently private property rights have been given more (and stifled public works).
Your comment about the Shanghai subway sparked my curiosity. Wikipedia says the Shanghai metro consists of 396 stations across 19 lines, and has been operating since 1993. How does that square with "since [2012] the Shanghai subway station has opened 21 new lines composed of 516 stations"? Especially when Wikipedia also says "During Expo 2010 the metro system consisted of 11 lines, 407 km, and 277 stations." Seems like they opened 119 stations and added 8 new lines since 2012.
I'm sure Japan is not at China's levels but in the time I lived there are I saw several lines get completely, several stations get rebuilt (A good example would be Shinagawa Station) and an 11km underground highway built. Meanwhile it's taken SF 10 plus years for SF to build a tiny 4 station line (the Central Line) and it's not done.
The thing is, Europe, where the environment is a significant consideration, also builds subways (and other things) at significantly faster speeds and lower cost than the US.
If you look in any detail, it's not a matter of some magic the Chinese or whoever have, it's matter of the corrupt nexus of interests that have come to soak up any transit spending in the US, in particular.
"an inherent trade off between environmental consideration and speed"
It's not just environmental consideration. Speed also incentivizes corner cutting, nepotism, and all sorts of corrupt behavior. Evergrande is a great example of speed. Banks in China made the same mistakes that banks in US made in 2008. If banks in China had tight regulations for the last 20 years, real estate growth would be significantly hampered.
China should be given credit in that their leaders learned from other countries and leveraged their population size to grow with incredible speed. However, I would argue that China's rise to power has less to do with their efficiency and more to do with laws of growth. If we exclude Covid, I am willing to bet that China will not be able to sustain double digit growth ever again. In fact, I am willing to bet my house that when China achieves US's per capita GDP levels, China will never achieve double digit growth ever again.
While acquiring the property takes more time in America, I can't help but notice once construction starts it also takes a ridiculously long time too. It really seems like the interests of the power brokers in various areas are far outstripping the interests of the utility to society in multiple areas in America.
The problem is the massive bureaucracy / government we have today. Massive swaths of government workers literally being payed to sit all day in zoom calls on "meetings" talking about approving projects and budgets, from local infrastructure to schools, to medical, etc.
Source: Live with someone with said job. See them in meetings all day long, accomplishing nothing other than getting their paycheck.
"While I appreciate that there is an inherent trade off between environmental consideration and speed, I think the author makes it clear that it's reached comic proportions in the US."
The quote I think that encapsulated it best was:
"And this is where I feel that lawmakers of the 1970s made a huge mistake. Rather than accept the need for general rules, or choices by accountable elected officials, the lawmakers built a dispersed power structure filled with veto points that lends itself to analysis paralysis"
Given how trash the environment is becoming due to various forms of intransigence, there is an interesting trade off to be made in more ambitious projects that actually move the dial, which ironically might require tinkering with same said systems that currently are at the root of (a phrase change I would make) "decision paralysis".
I’m trying to build a house on empty land in Los Angeles. It’s about 15mins from downtown in Mt Washington. We bought the land in April of 2019 and started on the design and permitting process immediately. Despite it being in populated Los Angeles, we need a septic system, to widen the road and add curbs, move a power pole, relocate 3 trees, and extend a water line. We won’t have gas as we want to go all solar. All of this the city is making us pay for.
Our permit for a small septic system took 14 months to approve.
The power department has told us it will likely take 12 months for them to approve the pole movement (the city is making us move it as part of the road widening).
The water main needs to be extended 12 feet, and it’s mandated that the utility company must do that work and it will cost us $75k.
The tree permit took us 12 months to get and requires us to get a bond too.
We still haven’t got approval for the road widening, it’s been almost 18 months. Keep in mind this is just the road in front of our house in a residential area of Los Angeles. There are lots of homes on our street already.
I’m originally from Australia. The American bureaucracy is insane. The agencies don’t talk to each other. Often times we have been acting as the go between for different departments that worked in the same building!
Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage. If my experience is anything to go by, it’s because the bureaucracy is so dense it takes years to just get the permits in place. It would be cheaper and better if I could just pay a bribe and get it done quickly.
Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it. Like you all know the DMV sucks and the USPS sucks, but everyone has just accepted that’s it’s just the way it is and decided to live with it. Why?! Hold your officials accountable to actually run government effectively.
You're in one of the worst ran cities in all of America.
I rant here often about how horrible LA is, wonder why they're so few new homes getting built in LA. Well now you know.
The cost to build anything is so astronomical. The only thing that gets builts are luxury apartments/condos are multi-million dollar McMansions.
To see an extreme example of this, just look at how much money was spent per each homeless shelter unit. Each of these units can only house one family or so, the city somehow spent $600,000 to $700,000 on each one. This source article uses a high estimate, some of these units are costing 800k.
I wish you the best of luck with finally getting your house built, but just factor in you're going to have to deal with these problems in every single aspect of living in Los Angeles.
I decided to leave, and in every aspect of my life I'm doing much better. I make more, my housing is cheaper, I don't need a car, and frankly everyone's nicer.
PS: If you want know WHY things are this bad, look at Prop 13. This allowed home owners to lock their taxes to when they purchased their homes. So say you currently own a house worth $800,000, you bought it 15 years ago when it was worth 200,000. You have no motivation to ever move, even if it would be better for you aside from the taxes.
So You end up with a very large contingent of homeowners who are going to be in their properties for their entire lives, and are extremely resistant to any change. NMBY level Max. Many people in LA don't want you to be able to build your house in any efficient manner, the easier it is to build a house. The cheaper houses are. If I'm a home owner, I don't want competition.
No it does not. The USPS freaking rocks and comparatively trounces the competition. It delivers better and more reliably on time than any other carrier in the nation. The drivers are friendlier and more accommodating. They also deliver at sane hours and no matter the weather.
Amazon? Absolutely hands down the worst delivery retail experience. I've almost been run over by more than one amazon driver.
FedEx? Don't honor delivery instructions, regularly mark things delivered without delivery, leave ridiculous 'missed you' notes for signed packages, inconsistent service across the nation.
UPS Probably the better privately run one, but way more expensive than USPS and the drivers aren't nearly as friendly as postal delivery people.
This sounds fast for California. It's taken me about two years to get a site development permit to edit my roofline a bit to make it better at shedding water. I don't have a building permit yet. I desperately want to move out of this state, but my wife (who isn't handling any part of the project or our costs of living) likes the weather and so we're stuck here.
I think we could fix the housing shortage turbo-quick if we passed a constitutional amendment that offered property rights to landowners. But owning land right now is almost meaningless. It's the right to ask for permission to do something on that land, and local governments exist seemingly for the sole purpose of preventing any change whatsoever.
It's probably one of only a handful of root causes of American ossification and cost disease.
Sounds bad but objectively Los Angeles has the fastest permitting process and the lowest fees of major California cities according to data compiled by the UCLA Lewis Center. Not to say you are lucky, only that this problem is actually much worse than you've described.
The median time to get planning approval for residential construction in San Francisco is 47 months!
I had a similar experience. After 20 years off the power grid, we wanted to connect to the grid and the nearest line was about 1/4 mile away. The state and PG&E wanted ~500k and several years to extend the power to the home.
Ended up finding a private company to put in the poles, line and transformer for <50K, and they could start within a month. It was still hell to connect it to the grid, but vastly faster and cheaper than the alternative.
"Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it. Like you all know the DMV sucks and the USPS sucks, but everyone has just accepted that’s it’s just the way it is and decided to live with it. Why?!"
They do not want new construction in LA. You're lucky so far you only have red tape to deal with, when the neighbors know you're building on that plot you will have much more to deal with.
By building a new house in that area, you're taking away everyone's "forced" savings account or asset that has accumulated so much wealth that can makes everyone a millionaire due to forced scarcity. The red tape you're experiencing is why there is that scarcity.
You're also in California. It is not the same in the majority of other states, or major urban cities from personal experience, it is much less than two weeks or a week for all the pain points you stated.
Real change is not meant to happen in the US system, unless it is pushed forward by the handful of very powerful special interests that hold the reigns, and that is by design.
Switch from FPTP to RCV or any other and the system will fix itself.
I wonder what the cost of the fines would be if you built anyway. If they didn't make you tear it down and the fine was less than the difference in costs, it might be optimal to skip.
My girlfriend's parents have been trying to build a house on undeveloped land in LA county for over five years now. It wasn't until one of their kids got a job that made them connection in county government that they started getting things approved. It is absolutely ridiculous here.
>Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage. If my experience is anything to go by, it’s because the bureaucracy is so dense it takes years to just get the permits in place. It would be cheaper and better if I could just pay a bribe and get it done quickly.
No. Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage because most local voters and active participants in local politics are homeowners. They want a housing shortage, so they get a housing shortage.
The problem is that there is no incentive for a government service to perform as its existence is not at risk.
There is no competition to the DMV, so there is no incentive to run it well.
The USPS will always exist due to being a federally funded service, so there isn't a massive incentive to compete with FedEx, UPS, etc.
Since these organizations do not live in competitive environments there is no drive for them to ever improve.
They cannot be improved with elections because the political state of America is so polarized that it is broken. Elections are decided on one thing alone - whether you run as red or blue. Platform objectives (eg "fix the DMV") are irrelevant because they no longer sway voters. All that matters in an election at this point is whether you are Republican or Democrat.
"Residential Construction Permits require an average of 5 to 7 working days for approval or response. Commercial Construction Permits require an average of 14 to 21 working days for approval."
First I am sorry to hear this. In Florida you could be plowing over a wetland in 5-7 days. Take your cash and walk to a better run state.
One of the primary goals of homeowners (one of the largest voting blocs) is to prevent the decrease in the value of their homes. In this way, government is fulfilling its purpose beautifully.
I’m curious why you are putting yourself through this? Given this is a multi million dollar project, why not purchase an existing home? I know inventory is tight, but you’d close on a place within 6 months.
For public transit in particular, the US has billionaires and politicans who actively campaign against such projects [1]. The effect of this cannot be overstated. People buy into the propaganda that their taxes will go up and/or it will bring crime to their idyllic locales (where otherwise property prices keep the riffraff out).
Landowners in the US have very successfullly voted in measures that limit further construction (including higher density housing and public transit systems) and increase the value of their holdings.
I've mentioned housing here because it directly impacts a lot of potential construction, particularly public transport. You cannot build anything other than single-family homes in much of the US. This lowers population density and makes public transport less viable. It also diverts tax revenue to build infrastructure for the required cars: highways, parking lots, etc.
There are a lot of local problems here too eg NYC's scaffolding laws [2], corruption in NYC construction projects [3] and CEQA in California [4].
I never thought about the length in time it takes to build things in the US today when compared to previous time periods in the US.
I had to double-check this but it did really take 4 years to complete initial construction of the NYC subway system; however, what's failed to mention in the article is that a plan was approved to build the NYC system 6 years prior. In total, it took 10 years of planning and construction to actually have an initial system in place.
Even though the author failed to mentioned the planning period in that instance, it doesn't take away from his argument that things are slower today in getting large projects built or renovated due to legal and political structures that stop each of these from happening through procedural delays.
I have a great local example of this. My interstate bridge has been in need of repair for the last 30 years, but nothing has been done of it due to so many groups getting in the way. It's been a nightmare and that bridge is very much needed for the local community to stay as strong as it is. I believe the political will to do anything has vanished out of frustration.
An absolutely enormous number of people in our western societies are employed in making reports. They don't do technical things, like engineers. They don't decide things, like management or politicians. They make a living by "contributing" to reports that actually do need to be written, essentially by ballooning the size and time taken to make the report. There are legitimate reasons why doers (engineers) and deciders (mgt, govt) need reports, but like advertising there's too much of it and we don't know what to cut once it's there.
The reason there's these 575 page reports as mentioned in the article is that it's never enough just to say "the bird sanctuary will be harmed by this windfarm, let's think about that". You need a sweeping survey of how many birds there are, how many people visit the sanctuary, how much they spend at the shop, and so on. If you try to head this off by saying you want to just summarize it, you are the bad guy who wants to trample the rights of the kids who enjoy counting the birds.
As mentioned, for large projects this naturally ends up in court as well, and that of course takes a long time.
We also live in the age of PR, so it's not really in anyone's political interest to make a bunch of enemies. Even if those enemies have a relatively small claim to veto a project, it will inevitably loom large in the public debate about it. If TV news manages to find that a kid who likes the birds, they will put him on TV and you will have to find an appropriate face for the interview.
- Wages are high, so labor for construction is very expensive (not unique to the US)
- It's difficult to acquire property to build new stuff in existing cities compared to building in new places.
- It is also incredibly slow/expensive to build subways if you try to prioritize minimizing inconvenience to nearby residents above all else (cut-and-cover is MUCH faster/cheaper than tunneling).
- The US is also not very interested in trying to learn from what construction techniques, etc. have worked for public transit in other countries
Aside from the first point, a lot of this comes down to the fact that even in places in the US that have decent public transit, transit is treated more as a toy that is nice to have than a serious priority by the government, and it is only built when it doesn't cause any inconvenience to residents/drivers/etc.
The US has historically been willing to demolish low income areas and force people to move in order to build highways, however.
I wrote software for an environmental consulting firm. It is the dark side of construction and permitting in the US. Basically, people that worked in government permitting would leave their job after 10 years in the public service then work for us in the private sector. Let's say you wanted to build a mall. You would need us to come in analyze the land check for vernal pools, cultural artifacts, rare species of salamanders... the list is 20 pages long. We would then run software (me!) to find places which you could pay to protect (the pay off)- in order to get a permit for plowing over that area. Our firm would spend months analyzing a rock to ensure it wasn't an arrow head or watch if bats would bread in your area. "Why can’t America build quickly anymore?" I would say permitting is a large portion of the answer. If you wanted to build without knowing this system or you fought it - your application would sit in some bureaucratic office for years.
I think the author is fundamentally correct on the main point: the interface for environmental review needs to change. The current interface is that you generate a report and anyone can sue to require that report to have additional details provided a court agrees those details are unaddressed environmental impacts. This leads to 4.5 years for just the environmental assessment and 575 page environmental impact reports. It allows for excessive detail and thoroughness at the expense of time and cost. I’m not sure what the better interface is but it’s quite clear we as a society need to figure it out and halt the current trend of building less and less for more and more cost. Other issues people raise are parts of the problem but it’s clear that 4.5 years on one aspect of planning for a single project is not reasonable.
the biggest reason is simply financialization, which infiltrates every nook and cranny of our socioeconomic perceptions.
it creates the perception that everyone else is getting ahead of you by hook or by crook (which is true in the minority but not the majority), rather than building stuff for the pride of having done it. that distorts all of our incentive structures for the worse, which is just one of the many adverse effects of financialization (which i define as economic activity focused solely on money itself, which includes most of real estate these days).
A problem with analysis like this is that these problems are in no way limited to the US or the public sector. All Western countries have these problems to different degrees and it also exists within private enterprise which do not face the same problems outlined here.
Boeing e.g. had been terrible at making pretty much anything from planes to space rockets. Everything is delayed.
I suspect there are deeper more fundamental problems. E.g. how companies are managed and organized. Companies used to be far more engineering oriented. Today they are very sales and MBA oriented. There is also way more outsourcing and fragmentation of business. Business used to be far more integrated.
One thing that's pretty easy to understand is the network effect of complexity.
You don't have to check many things if you have few things in place. Each item creates an exponential increase in complexity for the next one. Another reason why things slow down is that as you add things to a system, they have a maintenance cost, the more you add the more you approach an equilibrium of costs == capacity.
This is, in part, explains why it becomes inevitably hard to add to a very large codebase -- you might have many many scrum teams simply maintaining what is, and each Nth new item has to do N-1 compatibility checks.
What about Oroville dam repairs? It was a pretty successful and fast engineering project. I think that America can still build quickly if she wants to. But most of the projects are not that important.
The pattern looks a lot like changing existing code vs writing code from scratch. We have accumulated vast number of laws where making any change in the world is uphill battle. The advantage of places like China is that they we’re able to throw away existing code quickly.
> The bigger problem is that urgency just isn’t there
Pretty much says it all. Unless it's something like replacing a critical bridge that collapsed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge... ), there just ain't much of a constituency for quick, affordable, and competent construction of anything.
-People spend more time thinking about what they might lose instead of what they might gain by doing something. Partially, this is because wealth and prosperity are generally higher.
-People were more likely to ignore things they didn't like, and so building consensus was faster when dissenting people simply weren't talking. It's more common now to encounter people who feel it's their civic duty to search for things they feel are undesirable.
The eastside freeway in Atlanta doesn't exist because NIMBYs opposed it for years and the final stake through the heart of the project was when Jimmy Carter selected a site for his presidential library right in the middle of path the freeway was to take. Instead Atlanta got Freedom Parkway (most famous as the cover image for 'The Walking Dead'), a much lower capacity, much less useful road but also one that didn't destroy the surrounding neighborhoods like the Downtown Connector did with African-American neighborhoods such as Buttermilk Bottom.
NIMBYism stops many useful projects but it also protects a lot worth saving.
The problem is that any publicly funded initiative is immediately treated as a cash cow that has to be milked to death. Industry, lobbies, special interest groups, insider deals, etc. etc. Everyone has to get a piece of sweet sweet cake. The longer this takes the more money is needed and the more cake there is. This is true regardless of whether its for infrastructure, schools, or defense acquisitions. Its functional systemic corruption, even if no laws are broken (because those who make the laws are part of the system).
If America cannot continue to evolve, improve, and adapt, then its prosperity and leadership role will fade away. It doesn't matter how great our ideology or political systems are (or we think they are). It doesn't even really matter how many advanced weapons we have. You can't fight the whole world forever.
I guess people would literally rather take the chance of America falling apart or the earth melting than let someone build a subway or new building near them.
[+] [-] robinjhuang|4 years ago|reply
Certainly, the air/water was worse in China but workers also had to work much harder (later nights, weekends, etc). But perhaps most importantly, the government would waste no time in getting land that it needed, and it certainly wouldn't ask for your consideration if it needs to do construction on a Saturday morning.
While I appreciate that there is an inherent trade off between environmental consideration and speed, I think the author makes it clear that it's reached comic proportions in the US. The article is short, but I think the main premise is overwhelmingly accurate: The system exists to protect the status quo.
There's also the reliance of transportation agencies on consultants: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/21/mbta-o21.html
[+] [-] secondaryacct|4 years ago|reply
Need to seize power ? Murder all members of the former power. Need to make poor peasants rich middle class ? Build entire cities, put them there, and done. Need to build a metro station ? Take the land, build it. Need to make Hong Kong a more physically integrated part of the country ? Build a gigantic bridge to Zuhai even if nobody actually need to use it.
The problem ofc is that sometimes the means is more costly than the benefit of the end result, and also that the goal of the end result is never debated, but I suppose that will change eventually, once we've incurred too high a cost for too little a benefit overall.
[+] [-] ip26|4 years ago|reply
In short, if private property has absolute veto power, you can never get big public projects done. (This is why eminent domain exists) There's a balance between private property rights & public good; in the times of great public works, the public good was given more sway, while recently private property rights have been given more (and stifled public works).
[1]: I think it was https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
[+] [-] patentatt|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Metro
[+] [-] gernb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|4 years ago|reply
If you look in any detail, it's not a matter of some magic the Chinese or whoever have, it's matter of the corrupt nexus of interests that have come to soak up any transit spending in the US, in particular.
[+] [-] nouveaux|4 years ago|reply
It's not just environmental consideration. Speed also incentivizes corner cutting, nepotism, and all sorts of corrupt behavior. Evergrande is a great example of speed. Banks in China made the same mistakes that banks in US made in 2008. If banks in China had tight regulations for the last 20 years, real estate growth would be significantly hampered.
China should be given credit in that their leaders learned from other countries and leveraged their population size to grow with incredible speed. However, I would argue that China's rise to power has less to do with their efficiency and more to do with laws of growth. If we exclude Covid, I am willing to bet that China will not be able to sustain double digit growth ever again. In fact, I am willing to bet my house that when China achieves US's per capita GDP levels, China will never achieve double digit growth ever again.
[+] [-] dv_dt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubicon33|4 years ago|reply
Source: Live with someone with said job. See them in meetings all day long, accomplishing nothing other than getting their paycheck.
[+] [-] dixie_land|4 years ago|reply
by blackmailing, intimidation, and literally murder by bulldozing houses with people in them when they refuse to leave
[+] [-] zeruch|4 years ago|reply
The quote I think that encapsulated it best was:
"And this is where I feel that lawmakers of the 1970s made a huge mistake. Rather than accept the need for general rules, or choices by accountable elected officials, the lawmakers built a dispersed power structure filled with veto points that lends itself to analysis paralysis"
Given how trash the environment is becoming due to various forms of intransigence, there is an interesting trade off to be made in more ambitious projects that actually move the dial, which ironically might require tinkering with same said systems that currently are at the root of (a phrase change I would make) "decision paralysis".
[+] [-] drewrbaker|4 years ago|reply
Our permit for a small septic system took 14 months to approve.
The power department has told us it will likely take 12 months for them to approve the pole movement (the city is making us move it as part of the road widening).
The water main needs to be extended 12 feet, and it’s mandated that the utility company must do that work and it will cost us $75k.
The tree permit took us 12 months to get and requires us to get a bond too.
We still haven’t got approval for the road widening, it’s been almost 18 months. Keep in mind this is just the road in front of our house in a residential area of Los Angeles. There are lots of homes on our street already.
I’m originally from Australia. The American bureaucracy is insane. The agencies don’t talk to each other. Often times we have been acting as the go between for different departments that worked in the same building!
Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage. If my experience is anything to go by, it’s because the bureaucracy is so dense it takes years to just get the permits in place. It would be cheaper and better if I could just pay a bribe and get it done quickly.
Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it. Like you all know the DMV sucks and the USPS sucks, but everyone has just accepted that’s it’s just the way it is and decided to live with it. Why?! Hold your officials accountable to actually run government effectively.
[+] [-] 999900000999|4 years ago|reply
I rant here often about how horrible LA is, wonder why they're so few new homes getting built in LA. Well now you know.
The cost to build anything is so astronomical. The only thing that gets builts are luxury apartments/condos are multi-million dollar McMansions.
To see an extreme example of this, just look at how much money was spent per each homeless shelter unit. Each of these units can only house one family or so, the city somehow spent $600,000 to $700,000 on each one. This source article uses a high estimate, some of these units are costing 800k.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/la-spending-837000...
I wish you the best of luck with finally getting your house built, but just factor in you're going to have to deal with these problems in every single aspect of living in Los Angeles.
I decided to leave, and in every aspect of my life I'm doing much better. I make more, my housing is cheaper, I don't need a car, and frankly everyone's nicer.
PS: If you want know WHY things are this bad, look at Prop 13. This allowed home owners to lock their taxes to when they purchased their homes. So say you currently own a house worth $800,000, you bought it 15 years ago when it was worth 200,000. You have no motivation to ever move, even if it would be better for you aside from the taxes.
So You end up with a very large contingent of homeowners who are going to be in their properties for their entire lives, and are extremely resistant to any change. NMBY level Max. Many people in LA don't want you to be able to build your house in any efficient manner, the easier it is to build a house. The cheaper houses are. If I'm a home owner, I don't want competition.
[+] [-] always2slow|4 years ago|reply
No it does not. The USPS freaking rocks and comparatively trounces the competition. It delivers better and more reliably on time than any other carrier in the nation. The drivers are friendlier and more accommodating. They also deliver at sane hours and no matter the weather.
Amazon? Absolutely hands down the worst delivery retail experience. I've almost been run over by more than one amazon driver.
FedEx? Don't honor delivery instructions, regularly mark things delivered without delivery, leave ridiculous 'missed you' notes for signed packages, inconsistent service across the nation.
UPS Probably the better privately run one, but way more expensive than USPS and the drivers aren't nearly as friendly as postal delivery people.
[+] [-] zbrozek|4 years ago|reply
I think we could fix the housing shortage turbo-quick if we passed a constitutional amendment that offered property rights to landowners. But owning land right now is almost meaningless. It's the right to ask for permission to do something on that land, and local governments exist seemingly for the sole purpose of preventing any change whatsoever.
It's probably one of only a handful of root causes of American ossification and cost disease.
[+] [-] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply
The median time to get planning approval for residential construction in San Francisco is 47 months!
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|4 years ago|reply
Ended up finding a private company to put in the poles, line and transformer for <50K, and they could start within a month. It was still hell to connect it to the grid, but vastly faster and cheaper than the alternative.
[+] [-] nostromo|4 years ago|reply
This is an California issue, not an American one.
> Americans seem to know what the problem is, but just accept that nothing can be done about it.
Again, this is a California issue. We know the bureaucracy is broken, but we vote for the same incompetent people over and over again.
[+] [-] rootsudo|4 years ago|reply
They do not want new construction in LA. You're lucky so far you only have red tape to deal with, when the neighbors know you're building on that plot you will have much more to deal with.
By building a new house in that area, you're taking away everyone's "forced" savings account or asset that has accumulated so much wealth that can makes everyone a millionaire due to forced scarcity. The red tape you're experiencing is why there is that scarcity.
You're also in California. It is not the same in the majority of other states, or major urban cities from personal experience, it is much less than two weeks or a week for all the pain points you stated.
[+] [-] x3iv130f|4 years ago|reply
Real change is not meant to happen in the US system, unless it is pushed forward by the handful of very powerful special interests that hold the reigns, and that is by design.
Switch from FPTP to RCV or any other and the system will fix itself.
[+] [-] unnamed76ri|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] umvi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eximius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway48375|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|4 years ago|reply
No. Los Angeles has a huge housing shortage because most local voters and active participants in local politics are homeowners. They want a housing shortage, so they get a housing shortage.
[+] [-] xvector|4 years ago|reply
There is no competition to the DMV, so there is no incentive to run it well.
The USPS will always exist due to being a federally funded service, so there isn't a massive incentive to compete with FedEx, UPS, etc.
Since these organizations do not live in competitive environments there is no drive for them to ever improve.
They cannot be improved with elections because the political state of America is so polarized that it is broken. Elections are decided on one thing alone - whether you run as red or blue. Platform objectives (eg "fix the DMV") are irrelevant because they no longer sway voters. All that matters in an election at this point is whether you are Republican or Democrat.
[+] [-] ransom1538|4 years ago|reply
First I am sorry to hear this. In Florida you could be plowing over a wetland in 5-7 days. Take your cash and walk to a better run state.
[+] [-] xnx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theNJR|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|4 years ago|reply
Corruption isn't the answer to these problems.
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmaswell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmyeet|4 years ago|reply
Landowners in the US have very successfullly voted in measures that limit further construction (including higher density housing and public transit systems) and increase the value of their holdings.
I've mentioned housing here because it directly impacts a lot of potential construction, particularly public transport. You cannot build anything other than single-family homes in much of the US. This lowers population density and makes public transport less viable. It also diverts tax revenue to build infrastructure for the required cars: highways, parking lots, etc.
There are a lot of local problems here too eg NYC's scaffolding laws [2], corruption in NYC construction projects [3] and CEQA in California [4].
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...
[2]: https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/east/2020/10/08/585902...
[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
[4]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/signature-...
[+] [-] yosefjaved1|4 years ago|reply
I had to double-check this but it did really take 4 years to complete initial construction of the NYC subway system; however, what's failed to mention in the article is that a plan was approved to build the NYC system 6 years prior. In total, it took 10 years of planning and construction to actually have an initial system in place.
Even though the author failed to mentioned the planning period in that instance, it doesn't take away from his argument that things are slower today in getting large projects built or renovated due to legal and political structures that stop each of these from happening through procedural delays.
I have a great local example of this. My interstate bridge has been in need of repair for the last 30 years, but nothing has been done of it due to so many groups getting in the way. It's been a nightmare and that bridge is very much needed for the local community to stay as strong as it is. I believe the political will to do anything has vanished out of frustration.
[+] [-] lordnacho|4 years ago|reply
The reason there's these 575 page reports as mentioned in the article is that it's never enough just to say "the bird sanctuary will be harmed by this windfarm, let's think about that". You need a sweeping survey of how many birds there are, how many people visit the sanctuary, how much they spend at the shop, and so on. If you try to head this off by saying you want to just summarize it, you are the bad guy who wants to trample the rights of the kids who enjoy counting the birds.
As mentioned, for large projects this naturally ends up in court as well, and that of course takes a long time.
We also live in the age of PR, so it's not really in anyone's political interest to make a bunch of enemies. Even if those enemies have a relatively small claim to veto a project, it will inevitably loom large in the public debate about it. If TV news manages to find that a kid who likes the birds, they will put him on TV and you will have to find an appropriate face for the interview.
[+] [-] resoluteteeth|4 years ago|reply
- Wages are high, so labor for construction is very expensive (not unique to the US)
- It's difficult to acquire property to build new stuff in existing cities compared to building in new places.
- It is also incredibly slow/expensive to build subways if you try to prioritize minimizing inconvenience to nearby residents above all else (cut-and-cover is MUCH faster/cheaper than tunneling).
- The US is also not very interested in trying to learn from what construction techniques, etc. have worked for public transit in other countries
Aside from the first point, a lot of this comes down to the fact that even in places in the US that have decent public transit, transit is treated more as a toy that is nice to have than a serious priority by the government, and it is only built when it doesn't cause any inconvenience to residents/drivers/etc.
The US has historically been willing to demolish low income areas and force people to move in order to build highways, however.
[+] [-] ransom1538|4 years ago|reply
Somewhat off topic: https://twitter.com/billmaher/status/1376644161172987905?lan... bill maher wanting to build a shed in CA. Hilarious.
[+] [-] TimPC|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clairity|4 years ago|reply
it creates the perception that everyone else is getting ahead of you by hook or by crook (which is true in the minority but not the majority), rather than building stuff for the pride of having done it. that distorts all of our incentive structures for the worse, which is just one of the many adverse effects of financialization (which i define as economic activity focused solely on money itself, which includes most of real estate these days).
[+] [-] socialdemocrat|4 years ago|reply
Boeing e.g. had been terrible at making pretty much anything from planes to space rockets. Everything is delayed.
I suspect there are deeper more fundamental problems. E.g. how companies are managed and organized. Companies used to be far more engineering oriented. Today they are very sales and MBA oriented. There is also way more outsourcing and fragmentation of business. Business used to be far more integrated.
[+] [-] maerF0x0|4 years ago|reply
You don't have to check many things if you have few things in place. Each item creates an exponential increase in complexity for the next one. Another reason why things slow down is that as you add things to a system, they have a maintenance cost, the more you add the more you approach an equilibrium of costs == capacity.
This is, in part, explains why it becomes inevitably hard to add to a very large codebase -- you might have many many scrum teams simply maintaining what is, and each Nth new item has to do N-1 compatibility checks.
[+] [-] matusp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yobbo|4 years ago|reply
Mary Poppendieck discusses this from the perspective of project management: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/
I think nowadays the projects are simply more profitable if they are long and slow.
[+] [-] sytelus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bell-cot|4 years ago|reply
Pretty much says it all. Unless it's something like replacing a critical bridge that collapsed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge... ), there just ain't much of a constituency for quick, affordable, and competent construction of anything.
[+] [-] bkraz|4 years ago|reply
-People were more likely to ignore things they didn't like, and so building consensus was faster when dissenting people simply weren't talking. It's more common now to encounter people who feel it's their civic duty to search for things they feel are undesirable.
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|4 years ago|reply
NIMBYism stops many useful projects but it also protects a lot worth saving.
[+] [-] Eddy_Viscosity2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|4 years ago|reply
I guess people would literally rather take the chance of America falling apart or the earth melting than let someone build a subway or new building near them.
[+] [-] fasteddie31003|4 years ago|reply