Best Of: How Blue Cities Became So Outrageously Unaffordable
b'Joe Biden\\u2019s economic agenda is centered on a basic premise: The United States needs to build. To build roads and bridges. To build child care facilities and car-charging stations. To build public transit and affordable housing. And in doing so, to build a better future for everyone.\\n\\nBut there\\u2019s a twist of irony in that vision. Because right now, even in places where Democrats hold control over government, they are consistently failing to build cheaply, quickly and equitably. In recent decades, blue states and cities from Los Angeles to Boston to New York have become known for their outrageously expensive housing, massive homeless populations and infrastructure projects marred by major delays and cost overruns \\u2014 all stemming from this fundamental inability to actually build.\\n\\nJerusalem Demsas is a policy reporter at Vox who covers a range of issues from housing to transportation. And the central question her work asks is this: Why is the party that ostensibly supports big government doing ambitious things constantly failing to do just that, even in the places where it holds the most power?\\n\\nSo this is a conversation about the policy areas where blue city and state governance is failing the most: housing, homelessness, infrastructure. But it is also about the larger problems that those failures reveal: The tension between big-government liberalism and anti-corporatist progressivism; the cognitive dissonance between what city-dwelling, college-educated liberals say they believe and their inequality-amplifying actions; how reforms intended to make government more accountable to the people have been wielded by special interests to stall or kill popular projects; and much more.\\xa0\\n\\nThis conversation originally took place in July 2021, but it has become even more relevant with the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the ongoing negotiations over the Build Back Better Act.\\n\\nMentioned: \\n\\n\\u201cWhy does it cost so much to build things in America?\\u201d by Jerusalem Demsas\\n\\n\\u201cLos Angeles\\u2019s quixotic quest to end homelessness\\u201d by Jerusalem Demsas \\n\\n\\u201cHousing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation\\u201d by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti\\n\\nPublic Citizens by Paul Sabin\\n\\n\\u201cZoom Does Not Reduce Unequal Participation\\u201d by Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick, Luisa Godinez Puig, and Maxwell Palmer\\n\\n\\u201cThe Gavin Newsom Recall Is a Farce\\u201d by Ezra Klein\\n\\n\\u201cCalifornia Is Making Liberals Squirm\\u201d by Ezra Klein\\n\\nBook recommendations: \\n\\nGolden Gates by Conor Dougherty\\n\\nThe Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin\\n\\nStories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang\\n\\nThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.\\n\\nYou can find a transcript of this episode here and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.\\n\\n\\u201cThe Ezra Klein Show\\u201d is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rog\\xe9 Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Alison Bruzek.'