Edward Glaeser: uncertainty

Transcript context

…How dense would it then become? What would it look like? Would it all look like Culver City? This is exactly the same point as Marty Feldstein made, starting in the 1970s, that for many public policy problems, you don’t need to know where you want things to end up because it’ll never end up close to where you want it to end up. All you need to know is the right direction. I feel entirely confident, given how much demand there is for Los Angeles, given how productive Los Angeles is, that we should have more homes in Los Angeles. Whether or not that means ubiquitous skyscrapers everywhere or more duplexes, I don’t know. We’re only likely to get the increase in duplexes. For example, the California law that was put in, I guess, a week and a half ago — I don’t know if Gavin Newsom has signed it yet — that allows much easier permitting for two-unit projects. That’s hailed as a huge triumph because it makes it easier to build projects with exactly two units. This is what we’re actually talking about. I feel confident that I’m in favor of two-unit projects. I think there are lots of core areas in downtown LA that would probably be well served by having some more high-rise condos than they currently have now. As you know, there are quantitative attempts to estimate the cost of NIMBY policies, most notably by Moretti among others, but those attempts don’t typically take into account the fact that the US is uniquely bad at building cheap infrastructure. If we made New York, San Francisco, LA, other cities much larger, we would have to expand infrastructure, but that’s one of the things we’re worst at. To what extent would the potential gains from YIMBY dwindle if we take costly infrastructure into account?…

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