Abundance

Tahanan is a public housing residential building in the Soma neighborhood of San Francisco that was built within three years for under $400,000 per unit. This is an unheard level of efficiency for the construction of public housing buildings. The reason that Tahanan was built so quickly and inexpensively was that it was constructed with private money and not government grants. Government grants come with countless stipulations, laws, and procedures. Private money does not.

A False Divide

While the traditional thinking is that liberals support a big government and conservatives support a small government, the truth is more complicated. In practice, liberals pass policy that limits what the government can do, while conservatives support the creation of an increasingly terrifying surveillance state. The big versus small government debate is a false divide, Klein and Thompson assert, as neither side focuses on “state capacity,” which is “the ability of the state to achieve its goals” (105).

When it comes to the housing crisis, some think that the elimination of zoning laws is not what would solve the lack of affordable housing. However, Houston, Texas, has no zoning laws, just land use laws, and it has far cheaper and more available housing than San Francisco or Los Angeles, in addition to a less drastic homelessness problem. Liberals in California want more affordable housing and are upset developers don’t want to build it, but the laws and regulations of liberal jurisdictions make building a slow and expensive process, limiting developers’ ability to construct affordable housing units.

Liberals claim to support affordable housing built by non-profit developers with the backing of voters and local government. However, using public funds is no easy task. In 2016, Los Angeles passed Proposition HHH, which raised $1.2 billion for the construction of 10,000 apartments for the homeless. By 2024, the city had built 4,344 units for an average of over $600,000 per unit. However, each unit only utilized $134,000 of HHH funds on average, meaning many units utilized outside funding in addition to HHH funds. This sounds good in theory, but in reality, this means affordable housing projects often must find funding from five or six sources, bringing together tax credits, donations, and government incentives. Different financing sources come with different demands, which make affordable housing projects even more complex.

The government funding begins to essentially only cover the costs of meeting the regulations and requirements. The building and environmental standards of California are higher than anywhere else in the country, and meeting those standards adds costs that discourage developers. Local opposition also discourages developers, as people fight against having affordable housing built in their communities. To survive local opposition often requires acquiescence to expensive demands, and if the development survives, the cost per unit rises. Federal funding comes with perhaps the most strings, including close auditing of each dollar spent. Heidi Marston led the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority from 2019-2022, and she had a budget of $1 billion. However, the federal funding came with such specific requirements that it was nearly impossible to spend. The lead agency working on the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles was forced to audit every dollar spent, leading to a sluggish and ineffective response.

The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism

An issue liberals are encountering at every level of governance is the tendency to attempt too many goals in a single project. A government that attempts too much at once accomplishes nothing. Klein and Thompson call this “everything-bagel liberalism.” The everything bagel is great because it puts enough on the bagel, but it does not actually pile “everything” on the bagel. Klein and Thompson connect this to the government. When the government does just enough, it can accomplish its goals. When it tries to pile on “everything,” it can “collapse under its own weight” (113).

In 2022 and 2023, the Biden administration passed legislation intending to bring semiconductor production back to the US with the belief that semiconductors would be the oil of the 21st century. It is cheaper to craft semiconductors in Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. Despite this cheaper cost, the legislation sought to bring semiconductor production back to the US while also tackling issues related to gender equality in the workforce, the diversification of supply chains, and more. The legislation attempted to tackle too many issues, adding consistently and deleting infrequently. The federal government frequently crafts legislation in this way, like the high-speed rail system in California, which required the building of railway systems in rural areas with higher air pollution instead of populated cities.

It Should Not Be This Hard to Serve the Public

Since 1960, federal government spending has increased fivefold, while the number of federal employees has stayed mostly the same. Republicans act as if the government is bloated and treat government employees with disdain, believing the public sector is more efficient. Democrats claim to disagree with the Republicans, but they do not act accordingly. In 2008, the high-speed rail system project in California had only 10 workers. Quickly, the work was turned over to and made reliant on expensive consultancy firms. An alternative example was when the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) department signed a contract with a French manufacturer in 2012 for 775 rail cars for $2.5 billion. By 2023, the cars were coming cheaper and faster, as BART had its engineers doing more work in-house. Increasing employment in state departments of transportation can reduce costs. The government cannot do everything, but it needs enough know-how to oversee its projects.

Jen Pahlka, co-founder of nonprofit Code For America, encountered the problem of a lack of project knowledge on government digitization. After working for the Obama administration, Pahlka stepped away in 2020, but the crisis of the pandemic brought her back to government work. The California government sought her help with the Employment Development Department (EDD), as the online unemployment portal fell into chaos. Technologically, nothing was crucially wrong with the system. However, government technology tends to have issues like layers of sediment, piling atop each other. At EDD, the single client database ran on a mainframe from the 1980s and a programming language invented in 1959. In 2002, Deloitte brought EDD online and built system access in different places with their subsystems, leading applications to pool and get trapped in different places. Manual verification also complicated the system. When Pahlka worked on the system, the backlog was over a million applications.

The layers of technological sentiment were challenging to clear, and these challenges were compounded by rules and regulations from the California unemployment insurance system that kept growing. The code became harder to update, and employees became harder to hire and train, with backlogs taking even longer to clear. For the government to do more, Klein and Thompson state, sometimes it needs permission to do less.

A Government That Chooses Is a Government That Works

In June 2023, a tanker truck full of gasoline flipped on the I-95 bridge in Philadelphia, killing the driver, melting the steel girders, and collapsing the bridge. Governor Josh Shapiro warned that rebuilding could take months, and it would have if they followed the typical rules and regulations process. Instead, Shapiro declared a state of emergency and went around the environmental impact statements, bidding processes, and governmental rules. Using union labor, the bridge was worked on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with a livestream to show the community the bridge process. Shapiro gained political clout due to his illustration that the government can build things fast and use union labor. The bridge was rebuilt in just 12 days.

Shapiro and the I-95 bridge illustrate what can be accomplished when the government feels empowered to act without getting bogged down in the minutiae of bureaucracy and its rules and regulations. Liberals have chosen to trust the government and elected officials less and instead trust regulatory and judicial procedures to ensure the government delivers results. This may have worked in a past era, but now the government must justify itself not through rules but through outcomes.