Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle via AP
An apartment building is seen under construction from the MacArthur BART station in Oakland, California, April 23, 2019.
The ever-perceptive Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar has noted a split among American liberal thinkers between, roughly speaking, those advocating abundance and those championing fairness (or process). The failure of Democratic governments to produce necessities (housing, transport, green energy) in sufficient quantities has been addressed in two new books: Abundance, by the New York Times columnist (and Prospect alum) Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, and Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back, by Marc Dunkelman.
These authors document the choke points holding up prompt production, and find that many of them—environmental impact reports, community input, hiring and zoning stipulations, competitive bidding for contractors—are liberal creations. Noting the many things government built before the forces of good government arrived, Klein and company recommend a governmental recalibration that elevates production over regulation, which sometimes can mean majority need over minority rights; other times, developer desires over community sentiment; and still other times, both.
Critics of these authors note that it’s often not government regulation but the excesses of inadequately regulated markets that have led to these societal shortfalls. As Hannah Story Brown argues in a review of their books in the Prospect, the housing shortage is in large part also the result of the contraction of the homebuilding industry that resulted from the 2008 crash, itself brought about by the widespread peddling of subprime mortgages by deficiently regulated banks. Millions of actual homebuilders—carpenters, electricians, painters, and so on—had to abandon the industry for lack of jobs, and the dearth of such workers is one of many reasons why homebuilding has not bounced back. To this story, I would add that the one truly large-scale public-housing project ever to be floated in Los Angeles (brilliantly designed by architect Richard Neutra) was killed in 1949 by right-wing business interests opposed to both public housing and the city’s liberal mayor.
Brown also notes that these criticisms of excessive regulation are, through no fault of the authors, singularly ill-timed, inasmuch as our new president is busily dismantling the regulatory state, as well as appropriating the power of Congress for himself. Given our nation’s dependence on imports for so much of what we directly or indirectly consume, Trump’s new tariffs aren’t exactly calculated to help the cause of abundance, either—more particularly, affordable abundance. (On the affordability question, Klein and Thompson rightly note the central role that the post-1970 decline in housing construction played, but largely ignore the equally central role that the post-1970 stagnation of working-class incomes also played, as the unionized share of those workers began to plummet.) Should Trump’s tariffs produce a recession, the ensuing decline in purchasing power will almost surely put abundance even more out of reach.
It’s clear that post-Trump, when Democrats return to power, they’re not going to look to the unchecked power of a Robert Moses as a model (much less that of a Donald Trump). But Moses isn’t the only personification of sweeping governmental power in mid-20th-century America. Less problematically for liberals, there’s also Harry Hopkins, whose record on speedy governmental production projects, undertaken chiefly to reduce massive Depression-era unemployment, hunger, and homelessness, is without peer.
Given our nation’s dependence on imports for so much of what we directly or indirectly consume, Trump’s new tariffs aren’t exactly calculated to help the cause of abundance.
In fact, during the only two employment downturns since the 1930s that reached levels serious enough to require major governmental response—following the 2008 crash and during the 2020 pandemic—I wrote Prospect articles urging the Democratic administrations then in power (Obama’s and Biden’s) to sidestep some possible regulatory constraints in order to go Hopkins-esque on recovery programs. Looking back at what I wrote, I find I made some of the arguments you’ll find in Abundance and Why Nothing Works.
In both pieces, I marveled at Hopkins’s responses to the Depression. In the early fall of 1933—with official unemployment at 25 percent, many of the still-employed working half-time at half wages, and unemployment insurance, food stamps, and welfare not yet in existence—Hopkins convinced Franklin Roosevelt to take some funding from the Public Works Administration (PWA), and redirect it to a new project that would create jobs more immediately.
The PWA, I wrote, eventually built some enduring monuments but was slow to get moving, as Roosevelt himself lamented, despairing about “the unavoidable time-consuming process of planning, designing and reviewing projects, clearing up legal matters, advertising for bids and letting contracts.” Hopkins’s idea was the Civil Works Administration (CWA). It began operation on November 9, 1933. As I wrote, “By Nov. 26, he had approved 920 projects for Indiana alone, and 48,500 Indianans were already on the job, on the CWA’s payroll, by that day.”
In its less than half a year in existence, CWA workers managed to pave 255,000 miles of road, build or improve 40,000 schools and 998 airports, and paint the murals inside San Francisco’s Coit Tower, which, the times and the place being what they were, included a scene of a library featuring works by Marx and Lenin. Hopkins had put 4.264 million Americans to work—roughly 3.5 percent of the nation’s population at the time. Had Obama been able to create the equivalent percentage of jobs in 2010, when I was writing, the total would have come to 10.8 million new jobs, almost equal to what was then the 11.1 million jobs lost since the 2008 financial meltdown.
When I tracked the $787 billion stimulus that Obama had managed to get through Congress, I found that the funding that involved cash transfers did impact immediately: offsetting cuts in payroll taxes, making unemployment insurance payments more robust, and enabling states to keep Medicaid patients on the rolls and keep teachers at work in the schools. But some money was devoted to a latter-day version of public works, and that’s where the system ground if not to a halt, at least to tortuous prolongation.
California had been allotted $10.8 billion for infrastructure projects in the 2009 stimulus bill, but by year’s end, only $1.2 billion of that had been spent. The stimulus funding enabled schools to pay for 50,138 teachers during that year, but went to just 1,656 workers in transportation and highway maintenance and construction.
“Big government,” I wrote, “ran into good government—regulation, competitive bidding, environmental safeguards, the works.” California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had hired Laura Chick, a liberal Democrat who’d been Los Angeles’s city controller, to monitor stimulus spending in the state. “To be shovel-ready,” Chick told me, “is much more complicated now than it was in 1933,” due to all of the reviews and mandates that each have their own logic but have changed the way government works. The stimulus funds included no waivers from these rules to accelerate action. “I’m not saying concern for environmental impacts should go away,” Chick concluded, “but it makes it harder to deal with an economic crisis.”
Some of these constraints had been around in Roosevelt’s time, too. The great projects of the PWA proceeded with painstaking deliberation and constant fiscal oversight. To the extent that Obama’s stimulus package followed in Roosevelt’s footsteps, however, it operated under all the constraints of the PWA and then some, while also trying to be the kind of mass job-creating enterprise that was the CWA.
Klein, Thompson, and Dunkelman would say the Obama stimulus didn’t build very much. I would also say—I did also say—it didn’t employ enough people. By contrast, CWA workers were employed directly by the federal government, so it was able to skip the time period devoted to soliciting, assessing, and rewarding bids from private companies. We don’t have that kind of state capacity now, nor would we think to directly hire.
In early 2021, I found myself offering similar counsel to the Biden administration. I noted that in failing to produce timely tangible results from its 2009 stimulus, the Democrats had been wiped out in the 2010 midterm elections, and predicted a similar fate for the Democrats in 2022 unless their own program cocked an ear to “time’s winged chariot hurrying near.”
In this instance, manufacturing construction of new facilities almost immediately went up like a rocket ship after the infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act passed. But delays were more the result of the political and fiscal constraints under which the new administration operated. The IRA enabled Medicare to negotiate down the prices of widely used prescription drugs, but the first batch of new prices does not roll out until 2026. The Build Back Better bill, which failed to pass Congress, would have established subsidies for child care, but those wouldn’t have fully kicked in for six years, nor would have the expansion of Medicare to cover dental care. Medicare itself, I pointed out, was fully up and running within one year of its 1965 enactment, despite being a wholly new program requiring an immense amount of work to establish.
So what are the Democrats to do? The abundance crowd is certainly right that they need to use their power to build things again (first, of course, they need to win back that power), and I’d add to that, to cop a line from Macbeth, “’twere well it were done quickly.”
At the same time, they can’t simply abandon the regulations that protect the public even as the projects they build meet public needs. That’s a balance that requires skilled politicians. If California is to seriously address its housing shortage, however, that would require the state to condition the flow of state funds to localities on those localities making just those kind of zoning reforms. We’ve yet to see a pol able to pull off that kind of move.
However perverse it may sound, public input can often be at odds with policies intended to do the greatest good for the greatest number, particularly when those policies concern building things. Today’s liberal politicos don’t have the option of resurrecting either Robert Moses or Harry Hopkins; they will have to learn how to balance both sides of this equation, or their days with the power to make such decisions will be few and far between.
