State capacity and eight parking spaces

I've worked for the US federal government, big tech and another big corp. I would say my experience with the government (and the non tech big corp) was more positive than big tech, as my team was more focused on working/growing together rather than trying to individually outshine everyone else. I feel like we were working towards practical goals that has clear benefits for our customers rather than trying to hit seemingly arbitrary kpi's.

Working for the government I also feel like my work/life balance was most respected as well. YMMV though. Admittedly, N=1 here.

We would never excuse such ignorance of 2nd through Nth order consequences in any other context. Can you imagine "the catholic church wasn't trying to provide cover for abusers, that was just an accidental side effect of protecting their own image"? That'd be laughable.

So why does government get the pass?

This stink of a "Low priority project use as a place-holder, but as soon as even a mouse-sneeze comes up, the resources are put to a better used, and it is kicked down the road"

But (as you say) we are all pre-trained to assume 'red tape / regulations' so we back-fill that explanation, even with no evidence.

*(I Wouldn't mind a second reader, read them fast and searched, may have missed something.)

I agree with the wider point but I think the reality is a bit more complicated than that, policy needs to be written with price signals in mind, or if they are addressing a market failure they satisfy some cost benefit analysis to demonstrate the cure isn't worse than the poision. Regulation can also reduce transaction costs when they address coordination problems where a private solution may be discouraged by a fear of free riders.

Regulations can increase fixed costs or variable costs, but if it leads larger markets for the service or if the reduction in services is seen as a smaller cost than an existing negative externality (like costs required to ensure a private water treatment company isn’t poising a public water way, a cost otherwise handled by the government), despite the regulations these are scenarios where costs pay for themselves.

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HOWEVER, much of town planning and land use policies in English speaking world does none of these things. Maybe with the exception of deciding a street grid which addresses a coordination problem.

What market failure do minimum lot sizes or room size address? There are no positive or negative externalities to smaller rooms or lots, people simply choose not to buy or rent something if it’s too small.

Planners hail mixed use zones as a policy only possible with planning, as if it isn't a solution to a problem of their own creation (mutually exclusive residential & commercial land use zones).

Parking per land use is another awful policy. This is simply something the developers can determine based on their own market research. They are handling the development let them handle the risk.

Free parking is also another poor planing policy, parking is definitely something of value which would be a more productive use willing if it had market pricing.

Floor area caps are just evil, infrastructure charges are a much fairer way of handling increased land usage.

Upper level setbacks are just dumb, as they add so much in terms of costs, often to handle more in terms of support columns, and increase the likelihood of water damage. As a result the top most levels end up costing much more and less for less than they could, which puts development feasibility at risk when building heights are too low (sometimes that is the whole point).

Every kind of regulation can be exploited and is currently being exploited. GDPR led to law firms squeezing money out of neighborhood bars with cease and desists. Government grants spawn companies doing the exact minimum to keep getting grants without building real businesses.

I totally agree that lobbyism is a massive problem (and often the reason we get such complex regulation—they shut out the little players). But any proposed solution will have to be some type of risk.

In truth I think it's a mix of this, and the opposite--where private interests have already captured the public good.

I just flat out don’t buy this. The majority of regulations I see “abundance” type people arguing against were never aimed at curtailing private capture. They are aimed at keeping neihborhoods unchanged for generations, making sure everyone up-and-down society gets veto power over any project regardless of type or upside of it, and making sure arbitrary unrelated “goods” are enforced with as much bureaucracy as possible during development (the best example of this is trying to get solar panels built and having to fight many years of “environmental” review for something so desperately needed for our environment).

EV sales are in the middle of a nationwide decline, especially for one of the major manufacturers. I doubt it has anything to do with the 8-space parking lot in Seattle in particular. Add to this stories about charging station compatibility, and I'm not surprised there isn't a greater sense of urgency from the city.

I have my pet projects I'd like to see finished as well, but I don't blame my municipality for not prioritizing them. They have a lot on their plate. It has nothing to do with capture or overregulation, but priorities with constrained staff, budget, and time. People change their minds and city priorities change with popular sentiment.

In some ways, this is a good example of why some prudence is warranted, and maybe you should get the other side of the story. The essay neglects to mention that four of the eight charging stations would be owned by Tesla for example — something that if you're not opposed to, you might at least admit is reasonable for the city to reevaluate — and there is apparently contaminated soil at least nearby the site.

I'm generally in favor of reregulation or deregulation, but I generally feel like land use, environmental, and public space or resources are something where there should be a lot of scrutiny and layers of approval. Once it's gone, it's hard to reclaim and expensive to clean up. I also feel like many examples of complaints in this area and mention of things like Abundance are just like this — someone complains their personal project of interest isn't done fast enough, criticizing the government for being cumbersome and overwrought, while neglecting to mention all the reasons why people might not prioritize their pet project, or why their pet project might reasonably be seen as requiring safeguards or approval processes. The reason why the government is slow with your pet project is because not everyone agrees with you, and there is a commons issue involved.

Meanwhile, discussion about deregulation of things that actually involve personal choice, with little or no public commons issues involved, like medical care, go by the wayside and are never mentioned, or are even hyperregulated.

As patio11 would say, "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero". Fraud is bad, but if fighting fraud involves so much red tape that it costs more than whatever petty corruption could ever cost, it's bad.

[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

If we want to go back to taking risks and making mistakes, by all means, let's cut red tape and get rid of process. But, we should do it knowing the tradeoff we're making. I think some people here just think "regulation/process = bad" and "getting rid of regulation/process = good" but it's more complex than that.

Nearly any kind of public spending can be exploited, including auctions. There are countless cases where the cheapest vendor that satisfies the written criteria is chosen, only to end up with delays, cost overruns that far outweigh the initial savings, or equipment that malfunctions and breaks.

I know somebody who was in charge of writing these auctions for their government department. They picked a vendor, and then worked backwards to write the requirements so that only that vendor would satisfy them. Not because of corruption, but because they knew that vendor's equipment was quality.

There was another case, in a different department, where this was not done - the auction was written naively (and honestly), and the cheapest vendor chosen. The equipment failed within months, putting people at risk, and a different vendor had to be quickly chosen.

It's better to just put some conflict-of-interest guards in place, and then trust the judgment of whoever needs those goods, than to try to eliminate corruption through bureaucratic procedures. Because it can't be eliminated with bureaucracy - but efficiency can, and will be.

1) Somehow he decided euclidean zoning was a leftist project. Most leftists and environmentalists I've ever known hate euclidean zoning and this includes many urban planners. Euclidean zoning exists pretty much because property owners want to be able to exclude nearby land uses. It's fundamentally conservative, especially when the goal is to enforce limited housing density.

2) Setting up euclidean zoning as the main whipping boy and then saying "and also air quality regulations are basically the same thing" is a form of straw-manning the stuff he's arguing against.

3) He sets up a dichotomy between California and Texas ignoring that a lot of California's problems are conservative (downzoning, prop 13) and also ignoring the weaknesses in the Texas model including corporations running roughshod over locals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7_WDzPyoqU) a fragile power grid, huge flooding problems etc. It's possible to look at quality of life metrics and see that Texas is doing quite badly. Also, you had the whole tech moving to Austin thing that already fizzled out.

4) He set up developers as the heroes in the story and apparently got a lot of his info from private equity ride-alongs. He ignores that developers are also often land speculators and are in favor of blocking competitors projects and downzoning areas to keep land value high. (https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/abundance-hudson-yards-west?u...)

Basically Abundance is a way for Ezra Klein and his fellow travelers to repackage Clinton-era triangulation and Obama-era neoliberalism as something completely new, so the party can carry on with its pro-donor agenda and ignore why they keep losing. That's also the reason why it was astroturfed into every left media space with a massive marketing budget.

There is a private dental office down the street from me that's has an expansion which somehow took years. Same story. Ton of construction for a month or two, and then nothing happened.

There was a union protest about using non-union labor for a bit. It felt like they were protesting the wrong issue, as no labor was occurring.

That's why part of the argument in Abundance is that current processes give too many people too much veto power. When every issue is someone's pet issue nothing can ever get done.

Like all code, it can be buggy, bloated and slow, or it can be well-written and efficiently achieve ambitious things.

If you have crappy unmaintainable code that doesn't work, then deleting it is an obvious improvement.

Like in programming, it takes a lot of skill to write code that achieves its goals in a way that is as simple as possible, but also isn't oversimplified to the point of failing to handle important cases.

The pro-regulation argument isn't for naively piling up more code and more bloat, but for improving and optimizing it.

And the public should be able to have an expectation that when the government says they'll do something, they're capable of doing so within a reasonable budget and timeframe.

I can always tell who on the left is ideologically poisoned by how vehemently they hate anything related to the idea that current government processes and regulations could improve or that government regulations can go (sometimes very) wrong. As if somehow that admission is the same as wanting anarcho-libertarianism.

In light of that, maybe a better description of the problem is more the absence of responsibility/accountability (for both the proponent and the reviewers, although it's not indicated which is dropping the ball here) rather than the processes/regulations themselves.

Sometimes I think the only real difference is it’s easier to sell stuff to upper management than it is to a congresscritter. Easier for one person to waste a lot of money than it is for a committee to do it.