America can build; but America does not want to build, or at least a large portion of America doesn’t. And they try their darnedest to slow everyone else down.

And there may be a good reason for that. Consider this nugget from the article:

> The entire $160 million-per-mile road lane project, and the five years of gridlock it created, were justified by the promise of shaving one minute per mile off commute time for its users. The final indictment of the project was a Metro study that found that Sepulveda had actually made commute times longer.

Many of the things people want to build are pointless! Lanes are added but commute times don’t drop. Roads are added and they are soon choked with traffic. New homes are built but prices go up anyway.

Or worse, they are actively harmful. The “big project” urban highway builds of the late 20th Century ruined waterfronts and neighborhoods and in some cases were weapons wielded at minority communities. It took a horrible earthquake to reclaim San Francisco’s waterfront from the highway. It took a famously difficult “Big Dig” to reclaim downtown Boston.

Or look beyond roads at the huge ecological damage done by the big project dams of the 20th Century. Look at abandoned mines and coal power plants all over the country.

So: it’s hard to build because so many people are against building. And so many people are against building because there is so much evidence that most building projects are pointless or harmful.

The end result is a much higher bar for projects to clear to get started, and a higher bar for them to clear while underway. These may be good things in the long run.