Public pools need an abundance agenda. By Matthew Yglesias

Read time: 8 minutes

Public pools need an abundance agenda

And by all means, frame it as hostility to "neoliberalism" if you want

I read Kate Aronoff’s case for pool party progressivism with interest because although it’s positioned as a riposte to my side of the ongoing supply-side liberalism debate, I am personally a big fan of D.C.’s public swimming pool system. The article turned out to contain surprisingly little content that I disagree with, but I think it reflected an ongoing tendency of those on the Everything Bagel side of the debate to not really engage with what specifically is at issue — including pretending that the reference is to foodstuff rather than to the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once.

By contrast, back in late July, my former boss Robert Kuttner made an admirably specific claim about a side point in this argument. I thought this was useful because his claim is wrong:

A favorite Klein example is the case of affordable housing. For Klein, the main problem is zoning and other regulatory barriers that make it more costly to build housing and raise costs. But as Dayen correctly points out, we have a very modest social-housing sector in the U.S. and limited funds for housing subsidies. We are largely at the mercy of developers. We could eliminate zoning restrictions and make it easier to build multifamily housing, and that would solve only a small portion of the affordable-housing shortage.

There’s a lot that one can say about social housing in the United States and the case for more investment in it, but Kuttner here really captures what makes me suspicious about this discourse — it seems like an evasive move designed to avoid a clear discussion of zoning.

After all, look at the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s affordability map and ask yourself if you believe that Massachusetts (#3 in housing wage) is so much less affordable than North Carolina (#29 in housing wage) because North Carolina has a dramatically more robust commitment to social housing.

I don’t think anybody believes that, including Kuttner if he thought about it for five minutes.

Why Massachusetts is unaffordable

Note the answer isn’t really that North Carolina’s zoning is “better” either. Towns like Cambridge and Somerville have levels of density that are illegal all across the Sunbelt.

But relative to the pattern of demand, North Carolina has a fairly elastic supply of housing, while Massachusetts has very effectively curbed sprawl while also allowing very little infill. So at the margin, instead of replacing existing parcels in greater Boston with new taller buildings or sprawling the development footprint of greater Boston further into the countryside, people move to North Carolina. Massachusetts could improve on this situation through zoning reform. Small zoning changes would only have a small impact, but large changes could have a large impact.

I would note that it is in some respects good that the price of housing is so high in Massachusetts.

Unlike the number one and two states (Hawaii and California), the Bay State does not have good weather. The very high level of demand for living in Massachusetts reflects, to a large extent, a public policy success story. Greater Boston has a thriving economy, Massachusetts has good public schools, and Boston is very low-crime by American city standards. An unfortunate macro-politics consequence of inelastic housing supply, though, is that population growth in Massachusetts and other high-priced coastal states is quite low compared to the Sunbelt. That allows the Greg Abbotts of the world to claim that people are voting with their feet for conservatism. Smart observers say that prices and quantities both count and demand for Massachusetts is, in fact, high. Still, it is true that land use regulations are preventing that demand from being met, which is bad.

Massachusetts absolutely could address this supply/demand mismatch with more investment in public housing.

But note that this is a false dichotomy. Zoning reform costs $0, and nonprofit affordable housing builders need to follow the same zoning rules and deal with the same NIMBY litigation as market-rate builders. By contrast, public housing features a genuine zero-sum tradeoff with things like spending on schools or parks or public pools. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t do it. It’s just to observe that zoning reform + social housing is a balanced mix of toppings, like an everything bagel, whereas “just spend more money on every conceivable thing” is closer to the nihilistic black hole from the movie.

I would note that over the years, many American Prospect articles (some written by me but lost to the vagaries of link rot) have acknowledged the critical role of zoning reform in promoting housing affordability. Here’s a good one from during the last Democratic Party presidential primary, when I was happy to see this was something everyone broadly agreed on.

Making it easier to build pools

One point about this that I think both sides actually agree on is that America needs more “state capacity.”

David Dayen recently wrote up a good research paper by Zachary Liscow, William Nober, and Cailin Slattery that focuses on a very narrow set of public sector construction projects in order to precisely identify the source of costs. They “find that two important inputs in the procurement process appear to particularly drive costs: (1) the capacity of the DOT procuring the project and (2) the lack of competition in the market for government construction contracts.”

So this is where we agree: To build public pools, you need a bureaucracy that possesses the technical competency to do in-house design work on public pool projects. For a large city or county, that competency could be located inside a Department of Public Works or a Department of Parks and Recreation. In many cases it might have to be a state or even federal function, operating as a kind of public sector consultant to municipalities. You’d need to be able to do competent design work and make credible cost estimates so that you could say to elected officials “hey, we could build a pool here for such-and-such money” and maybe even offer a few versions at different cost points.

The disagreement is about what happens next. I think that what happens next should be that elected officials look at the proposal made by the technically qualified bureaucrats and say either “let’s do it!” or else “thanks for the hard work, but it’s not worth it.” And if they say “let’s do it,” it should be done.

That’s exactly the view Dayen disagreed with when I wrote “Community Meetings Aren’t Democracy.” He’s of the school of thought that all these complaints about permitting, litigation, and community consultation are misguided. In the new piece, Dayen writes “It’s important to emphasize what it does not say. It makes no claims about environmental reviews or citizen participation in infrastructure projects.” That’s true! But the reason the study doesn’t make any claims about environmental reviews or citizen participation is that it’s a study of highway resurfacing projects. If you look at a different paper from Liscow, Dayen’s main source for the article, about the cost of building new highways, he found that increased attention to citizen voices has dramatically increased costs.

As it happens, I am not a big proponent of building new highways, so I don’t really mind that increased citizen voice has driven up the per-mile cost of highway building.

But that’s the point. If you do want to see more of something built, you need to worry about all the sources of higher costs and more delays. Over-reliance on outsourcing of core public sector capacities absolutely belongs on the list. But so does excessive informal citizen input and post hoc litigation. The route to a public pool boom is twofold:

Empower democratically elected officials to build pools

Convince voters that building pools is a good idea

The state capacity piece of this includes having the in-house competencies and also literally having the legal authority to make the decision.

Deregulate the state

The Dayen piece runs off the rails, I think, when he pivots away from discussing the specifics of Liscow’s research to an attack on “neoliberalism.”

And that’s the point here. Back on August 10, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a video about the superiority of foreign sunscreens and the FDA’s stubborn refusal to allow them in the United States. It was a great example of AOC being a highly effective politician — she’s a compelling communicator, she found a small-but-important cause that impacts people’s lives in a concrete way, and she’s talking about it.

Nonetheless, she got some backlash. Not really from anyone who took issue with the specific things she said about sunscreen, but from people angry that she was arguing for “deregulation.” Because in a certain frame of mind, the most important thing is to win some kind of ideological meta-argument. I suspect this is what’s driving a lot of ideological anti-YIMBYism. Going back to Kuttner, it’s not particularly that he objects to the idea of zoning reform. But since housing is such a large piece of the economy — much larger than sunscreen — admitting that overregulation is a problem here means that “neoliberalism” (defined as too little regulation!) can’t be the great social ill of our time. And especially to people who’ve been fighting the good fight since the Reagan years, that’s a hard pill to swallow.

One recommendation I have is just to reframe. If you think of “neoliberalism” as instead meaning “economic policy trends that started with Ronald Reagan,” then the reality is that land use regulation got much stricter during the “neoliberal” era. So if you want to be against neoliberalism but also acknowledge the reality of land use, just tell yourself we are returning to (much less stringent) New Deal Zoning.

But in terms of environmental review and community meetings, I don’t even think you need to get that cute. Because what’s at issue here is specifically the post-1970 trend of putting regulatory shackles on the state itself. That was very clearly part of the neoliberal turn — completely aligned with the hollowing-out of state capacity that Dayen deplores. It’s all grounded in a distrust of politics and the public sector and we should set it aside. The Works Progress Administration built a ton of swimming pools in the 1930s and they did it quickly, because back then public works were done on the basis of democratic politics. The people in charge made decisions and did things fast, and if the citizens didn’t like it they would vote them out. That’s how it should be.