The Unbuildable Land

A very interesting point in the midst of Gary Leff's post about air travel delays:

The existing array of airports serving US cities couldn’t possibly be built as-is today. With far greater environmental scrutiny and NIMBY opposition, it’s incredibly difficult to expand airport infrastructure. Similar to the US experience, the London-Heathrow terminal 5 project spent more time in its public comment phase than the entire much-larger Beijing terminal 3 took to go from proposal to completion. I’m not saying I prefer the Chinese model, but the difference illustrates how cumbersome infrastructure issues are in the modern Western political context.

Of course, this goes far beyond airports (imagine if the rights-of-way that constitute Amtrak's northeast corridor didn't already exist and you tried to put that rail corridor together, or if you proposed something like the subway tunnels beneath Manhattan) and, indeed, beyond infrastructure. Many of DC's historic neighborhoods, like Georgetown, couldn't pass muster under current parking and lot-size regulations and much the same is true of neighborhoods in cities and close-in "streetcar suburbs" all across the country. And yet nobody regrets that we have this infrastructure or these neighborhoods -- indeed, they're often the very most expensive places to live in the country because they're (a) nice and (b) the supply is artificially constrained by regulations and NIMBYism.

It really wouldn't be better to become a technocratic oligarchy like China, but liberal democracy is compatible with any number of institutional schemes. Putting a lot of power over land-use decisions in the hands of bite-sized units (each ANC commissioner in DC represents just a handful of blocks in my neighborhood) makes it impossible for the political process to reflect anything but the most narrow and parochial of interests.