On the latest episode of “The Ezra Klein Show,” Fordham Law Professor Zephyr Teachout offers her perspective on why America struggles to build housing and green energy infrastructure.
Zephyr, what’s your take on this?
Teachout: Housing is a global crisis right now. It’s not just an American crisis. Especially the cost of housing —
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Zephyr, there was an example you had wanted to bring in.
Teachout: I actually do want to turn to green energy because I think it’s really important. But I do want to pick up on what you’re talking about with the Second Avenue subway. As you point out, Ezra, it’s not because of labor costs, because comparable projects have similar labor costs in Europe.
I don’t think you can look at what has happened in New York public transit, subway and real estate without telling a story of money and politics. One of the big differences between the United States and Europe during the period you’re talking about is that we allowed for unlimited campaign spending. We basically made the job of politicians to be a fund-raising job. And then Citizens United supercharged that by allowing corporate spending.
So in New York, to be particular about housing and the subway, it meant that the Real Estate Board of New York has this outsize power in state politics and gets a lot of giveaways that most people think didn’t make that big of a difference and led to really expensive per square footage housing. So that occupied the space on housing.
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And then it led to New York’s state government, under Andrew Cuomo, starving the subway. So then it had to spend all its money doing fixes that would have been much cheaper to fix earlier.
Something you point out in the book is they also starved state capacity. They really said: Let’s consult everything out and pay big consultants. But that is downstream from the centralized corporate power over politics.
And I think one of the things that’s underappreciated is how enervating big-money politics is — how it drains politicians of dynamism. How much big donors actually want government to not act, not just in the lobbying front, which we’ve talked about earlier, but in talking to governors and congressmen. The tendency of big donors is toward no as opposed toward dynamism. And when you actually have a popular politics, people want to exercise that power.
Watch and read the interview, titled “Abundance and the Left,” on The New York Times.