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Comment by warning26 | Hacker News Reader

Fact is, if you want to build a megaproject (highway, HSR, whatever), you have to step on someone's toes. In the past, America did this by stepping on the toes of people with no political power, resulting in the excesses of 1960s destroying of historic areas in favor of unfortunate highway interchanges.

Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction -- no project can be built because no one is willing to step on anyone's toes.

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> Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction -- no project can be built because no one is willing to step on anyone's toes.

I don't see this as a bad thing at all. We could do with fewer "megaprojects" unapologetically stepping on people's toes. Frankly, if the project isn't economical after accounting for what it would cost to buy up the necessary property at market rates--which is to say, rates the actual owners will voluntarily accept without any threat of coercion or eminent domain--then it simply isn't worth doing.

You don't need to do anything of the sort. Housing is one of the most tightly regulated form of capital expenditure in the US.

Most of the US is zoned to SFH-only zoning. What this means is that real-estate developers and property owners are not allowed by law to build anything other than a single-family home. This is accompanied by mandates to achieve certain minimum lot sizes (lots have to be at least a certain size), maximum FAR (Floor-Area Ratio), and minimum setbacks (a residence has to be set back from the street by a minimum number of feet). You cannot build low-impact businesses in these areas like corner stores or barber shops/salons. These rules result in the suburban American homogeneity that you see throughout many neighborhoods in America. This doesn't even cover the role of HOAs which are additional local bureaucracy which control what residents are or are-not allowed to build when and where on their property.

Relax (but don't get rid of) zoning and other mandates around US building and empower property owners to make the changes themselves. If they don't want to, they don't have to either. But give them the choice.

> if the project isn't economical after accounting for what it would cost to buy up the necessary property at market rates--which is to say, rates the actual owners will voluntarily accept without any threat of coercion or eminent domain--then it simply isn't worth doing

This sounds great on paper, but in practice it tends to break down. Consider, for example, building a highway. The road is gonna have to go in roughly a line between point A and point B. How much is that land worth? Since there's not a lot of flexibility as to where the road can go, there's no competition, and the owner can basically charge anything imaginable; there's no notion of a "market rate".

While my example was a highway, this applies to pretty much any transport infrastructure, and this exact scenario has actually happened in the case of both the Texas and California HSR projects.

If you have no flexibility as to location then you have no bargaining power; of course the prices will be sky-high. So you plan multiple potential routes (the road or rail doesn't need to go in a perfectly straight line) and make the purchases through intermediaries, just as with any large-scale commercial project.

The problem is that basic infrastructure is never economical. Say you live in the midwest and your house is only worth $40k. If we looked at everything from a neoliberal market theory angle, the city would never ever rebuild the roads or sewers in this neighborhood, because that would cost millions of dollars to serve a couple hundred thousand dollars of property value for individuals who aren't making more than a couple tens of thousands a year, and they might as well live in mud brick huts because that's about the only way you can turn a profit while building infrastructure with these paltry tax revenues you can collect. This is why we have public services versus anarchy and privatization (the neoliberal paradise), because necessary things for everyone are not always going to turn a profit.

>what it would cost to buy up the necessary property at market rates--which is to say, rates the actual owners will voluntarily accept without any threat of coercion or eminent domain-

They're not even willing to do that any more.

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