Derek Thompson

And that's really put us where we are.

And so I agree.

I think, like you, I'm picking up the criticisms that I heard about financing, about the fact that if you want to build this level of housing, you need to be obsessed with the question of how do we actually finance that construction?

How especially do we make loans to developers at a time of high interest rates possible for them to keep up with the level of housing construction that you want?

Those are really, really strong critiques.

I think they click into the story that we were telling, the 50-year story.

But I do think that it is fair to argue that our book missed that very important ingredient.

I don't know that I buy this idea at all.

At least I think it's incredibly underpowered as an explanation.

So the claim on the table seems to be that Americans in 1950s and 1960s turned against the growth machine as you described it, primarily out of an aversion to the ugliness of the world.

Ugliness is not the word that I would use the word that I would use is environmental degradation I mean the environmentalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s was about the fact that people were dying from the air and dying from the water that's not a question of aesthetics that's a question of health.

If you wanna understand why it's easy to build in Texas, but difficult to build in California, and all you have is the beauty explanation, well, then you're essentially saying that continued building in Texas is made possible because Houston is so damn beautiful.

Houston is not so damn beautiful.

The reason that it's easy to build in Houston, I think, has very little to do

with the aesthetic perfection of downtown Houston, and much more to do with the fact that there's a system of customs and laws and a lack of zoning regulation that simply makes it easier to build up and to build out.

Same goes for Dallas, same goes for Austin, same goes for San Antonio.

I want us to build beautifully.

I want to build things that people love, in part because I want the growth machine of the 21st century to have

democratic approval such that we build houses, people love them, they want us to build more houses, I think that's a flywheel we should hope for.

But if you really want to understand why Petaluma stopped building in the 1970s, why you can't build in San Francisco, why it's so much harder to build in blue cities and blue states than in Texas, I don't think the beauty argument or the beauty paradigm gets you very far.