What Makes Cities Go BANANA?

The Holland Tunnel under construction (1923) | New York Public Library Digital Collections

The nearly hundred-year-old Holland Tunnel, the first mechanically ventilated underwater vehicular tunnel, opened in 1927 after just seven years of work. By contrast, the humble subway station elevators unveiled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2020 took three years and approximately $80 million to realize. (The MTA, sensing commuter suspicion, even made a video to explain why elevators are so complicated to build in NYC.) The disparity between the two pieces of infrastructural achievement seems as ludicrous as the exorbitant rent I pay to live in proximity to a Superfund site. Has the United States lost the art of building? 

According to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, authors of this year’s hyped and reviled Abundance (Avid Reader Press, 2025), the answer is a resounding yes. “Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions,” they write, “have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially.” For instance, the New York City Citizens Budget Commission found that lengthy zoning and environmental review processes raise the cost of housing by $50,000 to $70,000 per unit. In detailing myriad similar examples, failed projects, and missed opportunities—mainly, but not only, in blue states—Klein and Thompson argue that the inability to develop new housing and transportation, or foster innovation in health, energy, and education, has become a distinct trait of the dysfunction of liberal democracies. It has supercharged skepticism about the effectiveness of government, further compromising the government’s ability to get things done. This roadblock results in a mindset of scarcity and a defensive politics of preserving what we already have rather than dreaming of what more we could make. 

The average liberal reader—the book’s primary audience—is well acquainted with the way scarcity has fueled the housing crisis. The most productive coastal cities in the United States are currently unable to sufficiently grow their housing stock, to the detriment of other forms of growth. As a result, labor is driven away from high-productivity metropolitan areas and city dwellers suffer diminished opportunities for social mobility. Longtime residents are pushed out, and prospective newcomers are turned away at the door. Americans, who were previously very mobile, have become stuck in place, unable to move to areas offering better opportunities with more jobs, education, and improved access to health care.

Klein and Thompson point to the main culprit: zoning regulations, which, according to a recent report by two major housing trade groups, account for 40 percent of the cost of multifamily developments. The multiplicity of zoning regulations and the complexity of procedural red tape create an opaque system in which land costs, reviews, and construction time rise significantly. In liberal cities in particular, rules about what can be built where pile up and make building housing expensive. A case in point: 40 percent of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built under current zoning laws. 

Zoning ordinances and land use regulations are often captured by homeowners to protect property values and control development in their surrounding areas. Unlike redlining, which openly discriminated against African Americans, the exclusionary logic of zoning is subtle. Homeowners and the politicians who represent them engage in defensive zoning through the use of labyrinthine technical regulations that determine population density, land use class, building height, plot size, and so on to preserve the status quo, approve what can be built, and ultimately affect who can live in a particular neighborhood. This practice essentially extends an individual’s property rights beyond the boundaries of their land, into the neighborhood. Increasingly, these tools are applied in middle- and lower-income neighborhoods by renters fearing that new development will supercharge neighborhood gentrification and drive up housing costs. Zoning creates barriers to entry and establishes a system that “pits incumbents against newcomers,” Klein and Thompson write. 

However, a mindset of scarcity that prioritizes existing constituents is not limited to policy-happy liberal coastal enclaves, as Klein and Thompson imply. As coastal cities become prohibitively expensive, Sun Belt cities like Atlanta appear poised to follow a similar anti-abundance trajectory. While they are usually praised for their well-regulated housing supply, many of these cities have rules on the books similar to their coastal counterparts. Alex Armlovich, a senior housing policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank, recently told The Atlantic, “When I first opened up the zoning code for Atlanta, I almost spit out my coffee. It’s almost identical to L.A. in the 1990s.” The problem, then, is not the regulation itself but its use and interpretation by local communities. To put it in plannerspeak: Zoning is not the cause but the enabler of NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard) in the face of housing scarcity. In extreme cases, the pressures of scarcity make cities go BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). 

Anxiety over the future of one’s own neighborhood isn’t a new or even surprising attitude. Back in the 1970s, well before Klein and Thompson, sociologist Richard Sennett asked a provocative question: “Why is the local community more appropriate than the city for dealing with urban problems?” Sennett was writing at a time of growing criticism of top-down urban planning and its dire consequences for poor neighborhoods and segregated communities. The figure of the almighty city architect, as typified by Robert Moses, could never orchestrate the improvisational ballet of the streets that Jane Jacobs wrote about in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, critics argued. But what happens when communities themselves decide who should be allowed to join the dance? 

Recent examples of locals resisting new development are abundant: After community mobilization and a series of lawsuits, the Elizabeth Street Garden in the Lower East Side of Manhattan will be preserved at the expense of new affordable housing for seniors (the city will attempt the project elsewhere). In Berkeley, California, it took years to initiate new student housing development due to concerns by the local community about elevated noise levels. Even in Texas, obscure zoning procedures have been used to try to obstruct a hospital expansion, student housing, and Habitat for Humanity houses.  

What’s changed since the days of the Holland Tunnel’s construction isn’t just the escalation of zoning wars and NIMBYism in US cities and suburbs. Nor is it fully explained by the several thousand pages since added to the 12-page 1916 New York zoning code. Rather, it is rooted in the growing inability of the government to negotiate policies for the general good by pursuing a bold vision for the future. The belief that the state can deliver and ensure that growth improves rather than diminishes quality of life has been eroded by years of inertia and folding to private group interests. Communities have become more fervid in their campaign against change. In New York City, they are armed with 3,400 pages of rules to help them exercise their “right to the neighborhood” since they doubt that the government can protect their “right to the city.” 

Lurking behind this tug-of-war over the right to the city are some of the most foundational questions faced in democratic policy-making, the fundamental concern of Klein and Thompson’s book. Who should determine the provision of societal goods? How can deliberative democracy provide the (local) public goods that sometimes are in direct conflict with the private interests of citizens, homeowners, and neighborhoods? Or, as Klein and Thompson ask, “How do we weigh the role that the current inhabitants of a community should have in who enters the community next?” 

Thorny though they are, these questions seem almost quaint at a time when the very raison d’être of liberal democracy is in question. Abundance (written before the 2024 presidential election) presupposes a polis that reaches agreement through democratic deliberation. Such a polis requires institutions that mitigate and resolve collective action problems and combat the widespread assumption of scarcity embedded in capitalism. These institutions hardly existed in the US even during the New Deal, when the government’s focus was effectively on creating conditions for abundance. As a result, many segments of the population were left out of the innovations and opportunities created at that time, prompting concerns about equity that are absent in Klein’s and Thompson analysis. 

Klein and Thompson do offer a compelling vision of an abundance mindset as an openness to new ideas and people—the antithesis of Mayor Adams’s rallying cry that domestic transplants should stop “hijacking” the housing of longtime New Yorkers and “go back to Iowa.” Cities like New York developed through successive waves of migration, and the city’s history of accommodating new arrivals is its strength. 

Is there hope at the local level? Just recently, an effort that would allow New York City voters to grant the city more power to expedite construction of affordable housing found strong opposition from the New York City Council, with one council member describing the proposal as an attempt to “strip away the power and voice of New Yorkers in shaping their neighborhoods.” What the council member means, of course, is that giving the city a say about what’s built in her district would be to silence the people who already live there—that is, her constituents. After some wrangling, the proposals made it to the ballot, and New York City voters will make their choice on Election Day.