Ezra Klein

And this is hard.

The question of who should have the right to say yes and who should have the right to say no.

And I think even within conversations among people on the left, there's like a lot of contrasting intuitions here for good reasons.

How do you think about this?

I will add one thing on that because I think the way to think about why you should worry about this is that it's not like the last year was the first time California or any of these states passed a bunch of new housing bills.

They were bigger and they were cleaner in that way.

But there has been a decade of housing bills being passed in California.

Dozens and dozens of bills, including many that were framed to me as transformative, that just weren't.

And so to what you're saying, and as somebody who's worked in politics, you've seen this, and as somebody who's covered legislation, I've seen it.

I think there is a tendency to assume when a bill has passed, it's done.

If you've been fighting for the bill and finally we got the duplex bill or whatever it is, well, it's passed.

Great news, everybody, we're gonna get our duplexes.

And often it doesn't work that way.

A lot of things don't work in practice the way you think they would.

And that implies to me, particularly on housing, that when you don't have enough consensus on the ground for something, it can be very, very, very hard to implement it because cities and neighborhoods and planning commissions and so on use a lot of different tools

to block the projects in other ways.

So something that I read about in our housing chapter was the...

anger in the 60s and the 70s that america was just getting uglier the term ticky tacky comes from you know the song about the uh housing in daily city like you know not too far south from san francisco little boxes on the hillside little boxes made of ticky tacky little boxes little boxes little boxes all the same

You had the accurate view that a lot of forests and rivers were being despoiled.

And the growth machine, government construction, all of it, the public lost a kind of faith in it.