Edward Glaeser: belief

Transcript context

…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? I agree with you in terms of the cost of American infrastructure. It’s a shocking thing how expensive it is to build. In some cases, for example, if you expand density in core areas of Manhattan, many of those people can commute to work by walking and the sidewalks are not overburdened. Those are areas which do not require huge amounts of extra infrastructure to build. Often, if you think about the infrastructural requirements in the center and on the edge, it’s not totally obvious that it’s higher in the center than on the edge. In many cases, you can take into account existing economies of scale. In cases like Los Angeles, where the gap between valuation and construction costs are so large, even if you say you’re going to spend on infrastructure twice as much as on physical cost, you’ve still got a lot of social value that you created by opening up a little bit. How much, right now, are we exporting American poverty to American suburbs? And are our suburbs capable of handling that?…

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