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Comment by redacted_ib | Hacker News Reader

The USA needs to shift its mentality towards this if we ever hope to get high speed rail that's up to par with other developed countries

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There is a reason for all the restrictions. Some of it is bad reason, but we have done some really stupid things as well. Anyone who wants to be YIMBY (which includes me) needs to come up with ways to figure out how not to do the bad as well.

> how not to do the bad as well

What is the bad that rivals our current housing crisis and infrastructure depletion?

Urban renewal, massive concentrated public housing, and highway construction through cities burned a lot of goodwill towards building. I'm very pro-building, but there's a lot of scar tissue (physical and mental) from last century.

> Urban renewal, massive concentrated public housing, and highway construction through cities burned a lot of goodwill towards building

The common thread is these were done by the federal government.

Not always. Robert Moses is most well known for the evils we are talking about and he was strictly New York (though he was able to get federal money in latter years)

Funded and enabled by the federal government, but routes and locations were largely chosen by local political leaders.

Yglesias's position, which he's articulated in a number of posts over the years, is that procedural barriers are a poor and ineffective way of preventing this failure mode, because they don't differentially retard bad projects compared to good projects; they just slow down everything, and impose other costs besides. You might like this if it's your considered opinion that change is in general bad, but I think most sane people recognize that that's not the case.

According to this position, the thing to do is to reduce the influence of bureaucrats and courts over what kind of building is allowed, and instead concentrate authority in a small number of elected officials who are empowered to do whatever they judge best—while making very clear to voters that those elected officials are responsible for whatever outcomes come of this, so that if those outcomes are bad (as judged by voters), the officials won't be reelected. In short, let democracy do its job.

He shares this position with Ezra Klein, who has articulated it at some length in his new book "Abundance" (written with Derek Thompson of the Atlantic).

The thing to do is make things allowed by right. Nobody should be approving things, they should just verify that if follows fire code.

That could be a good policy insofar as residential zoning goes, but you probably don't want to abolish all rules about things like environmental impact for large-scale construction projects; you just don't want to let arbitrary people who dislike a project for arbitrary reasons block it on pretextual environmental grounds.

The issue with this is that perception of outcomes is subjective, and if you sell yourself well (and bribe elderly voters), you will get away. The most indebted city in my country is led by a clan who managed to now own via trust multiple villa, gold ingot from nowhere, and whose 'leader' was arrested and convicted for corruption. They enriched themselves way more than a public servant salary could do (especially with their living standards) and repeat that their wealth is from an hidden inheritance. People from that city still vote for them.

I've been a temp at the equivalent of the IRS in my country. We had unbelievably inefficient processes. Some of it was because of very old software, but most of it was simply procedures, my main example is that the person approving a rebate/delay can't know or guess who's asked for it. I had to check if they were eligible, then anonymize them, then send the data to someone I don't know (to be exact, if it was the first year you asked for a delay i could automatically approve it without a seal of approval). Hopefully nowadays they have better software that helps them do that (explaining he situation without letting too much details slip was hard, but a good use of LLMs I would guess?)

If you went looking in China, you'd find plenty of really stupid or bad things that happened as a result of the government's ability to easily requisition land for public use. Ruined ecosystems, displaced families, corruption, the works.

Just this wikipedia page will give you a sense of the scale of just one of those issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_evictions_in_China

But it's quite obvious that any large-scale building would result in at least some of that. There is no way to "figure out" how to avoid all harms or how to avoid at least some broken eggs in the basket. Personally I'm all for North Americans figuring out what a "greater good" is, but the idea that it'll actually happen is laughable; we can't, we won't, we'll simply fester in what we have.

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