collapse embox

William Gropper, Construction of the Dam, 1938 To many on the left, it's always 1933. Building "roads and bridges" will "create jobs," soaking up the mass army of unemployed desperate for work that they seem to see.  Driving around though, I notice that we build roads with big machines, not lots of people. And construction jobs are high-skill jobs, not people with shovels. "Shovel-ready" itself is a misnomer. Nobody uses shovels on a construction site anymore, they use a backhoe. Neither you, reading this, nor I, nor an unemployed Wal-Mart greeter or bartender could do much of anything useful on a road construction site.  On a lark, I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics to see just how many people are employed on roads and bridge construction.  Latest Feb-Mar change Total nonfarm 144,120.0 916 Construction of buildings 1,689.3 17.8 Heavy and civil engineering construction 1,062.9 27.3 Water and sewer system construction 183.8 Oil and gas pipeline c...

"San Francisco bans affordable housing," is the spot-on conclusion of a lovely post  by Vadim Graboys  (link to twitter).  The post is titled "54% of San Francisco homes are in buildings that would be illegal to build today" with an interactive graph of those homes.  Or, put another way, "To comply with today's [zoning] laws, 130,748 homes would have to be destroyed, evicting around 310,000 people." The latter statistic is fun, but actually severely understates the damage of San Francisco's (and Palo Alto's!) zoning laws. The only reason current homes are illegal is that they were built under slightly less restrictive zoning laws. So that measures how much zoning laws have gotten stricter over time. It does not measure the much larger number of homes and apartments that were never built. Now, how does San Francisco, ground zero of progressive governance, and a city whose politicians can't get out of bed in the morning, or sign permission to...