Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…That's a really interesting question. In general, the strongest construction lobbying group I'm aware of is probably the National Association of Home Builders which exerts quite a bit of influence to try to keep the cost of building single-family homes low, I'm not aware of any anything that exists for large commercial buildings or something like that. Maybe the Association of General Contractors or something. I guess my my initial guess would be that something to the effect of the natural constituencies for opposing a big project like this are always going to be quite a bit great and at least as big (if not bigger) than the constituencies that would able would be able to act for it. So like any big giant construction project, even if it had like a lot of developers mobilized to try to support that kind of thing also would have a have a large constituency that would exist to oppose basically basically anyone who lives in the area. They don’t want this giant shadow of a building or they’re worried about the congestion that it would cause, etc. A paradox with this situation is that the places that need it the most because their rents are so high the people that are living there are gonna be financially well equipped to oppose it and in a certain sense they're losing the most out of it, right? If you if you're making $50,000 a year you might value the view out of your apartment at like $500 but if you're making five million dollars a year, you might value that view proportionately more and be willing to expend a lot more to prevent it from from being obstructed. So I feel like this sort of mechanism by where places get wealthier and need more housing kind of also creates its own opposition to some extent. I think a co-sign solution to this kind of thing would be optimal where if the view is worth more to you than the apartment is worth to somebody else, then you can just pay them to not build there. The view is not worth more than an apartment is probably worth to somebody right? So then you have an optimal allocation of resources based on who has political influence. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm not super confident and I should look into it. Why developers don’t have better lobbying efforts does seem like an unanswered question.…

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