The Path to Abundance, Part III

Abundance reforms will pose difficult tradeoffs, including with environmental goals and public participation

This is the third post in a series of six posts.  The first post is here.  The second post is here.

The reforms that abundance advocates have proposed are varied, in part because they target a wide range of policy areas.  I will begin with housing as an example of the reforms being proposed – both because housing is where abundance reforms have made their greatest progress, and is also the area where reforms have been developed to the greatest extent.

A range of reforms have been proposed, and many have been tried in various states: state level preemption of local land-use decisionmaking; reducing or eliminating local government discretion to reject certain projects; limitations on public hearings and public participation; imposing quotas for housing production for local governments; and limitations on environmental review for housing projects.

But whatever the effectiveness of these various reforms, they all generally come with tradeoffs.  Other policy goals are sacrificed to increase housing.  Most of these reforms require reducing local government autonomy in land-use decisionmaking, a reduction of community input and influence over land-use decisionmaking, or both.  Those trade-offs may well be worth it.  But they are trade-offs.  And they come with political costs.  Local control in government tends to be quite popular in the United States, as is community input into government decisionmaking.  And that popularity remains, despite advocacy by abundance proponents, even in housing, and even across party lines.  It is no accident that some of the most recalcitrant local governments resisting state preemption of housing decisionmaking in California are also among the most conservative coastal cities, such as Huntington Beach.

As another example, consider proposals by abundance advocates to reduce procedural requirements and litigation risks for decisionmaking by federal agencies.  Reforms here generally involve reduction of environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act; more deferential or even reduced judicial review of agency action under the Administrative Procedure Act; reforms to add flexibility to contracting and procurement rules, and more.  Advocates argue that more agency flexibility and discretion would benefit the country, allowing for more responsive decisionmaking and policy experimentation.

There is a lot to the critiques of the “procedure fetish” (as identified by Nicholas Bagley) as constraining government action – and if progressives support more government, why should they not support unleashing it?

But again there are tradeoffs.  Less constraints on contracting increase the risk of corruption.  Reduced judicial review and procedural constraints for agencies will empower agencies to do bigger policy changes – but that can also facilitate wild swings in government policy.  The ping pong government we have seen over the past two decades has had many costs, and one of them is that it undermines the policy stability that is required for private sector investment, investment that itself is essential to any abundance agenda.  And of course, one can excuse many Americans for being skeptical of sweeping and unprecedented executive branch experimentation after the chaos of the first year of the Trump Administration.

There are other tradeoffs as well.  Reducing procedural and substantive protections for environmental impacts from federal government agencies may facilitate more development projects, but at the possible expense of endangered species, clean air and water, and other important environmental goals.  Producing cheaper housing may entail facilitation of sprawl, which can entrench auto-dependent lifestyles that, at least in the medium term, contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.  And so on.

Of course any policy reform effort involves tradeoffs.  Indeed, in many ways politics at heart is about making difficult choices in prioritizing different policy goals when they conflict.  The challenge is that, as I will discuss in the next blog post, the difficult tradeoffs involved in abundance reforms may undermine the movement’s effectiveness, particularly at the federal level.

abundance, administrative law, APA, housing, Litigation, NEPA, permitting reform, renewable energy