The Construction Lending Podcast
Manufactured Scarcity: How America got great at blocking construction
America has more land than almost any country on earth and a long history of building fast and cheap, so why can't we produce enough housing? This week, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City and Survival of the City , joins us to argue that the affordability crisis is fundamentally a construction problem, and one we've inflicted on ourselves. We trace how decades of hyperlocal land-use regulation quietly turned America from a country built for outsiders into one that protects insiders, why an industry that once mass-produced entire neighborhoods now builds one unit at a time, and what the crisis is really costing us in productivity, in upward mobility, and in a generation locked out of homeownership. Glaeser also lays out where he sees room for hope, from accessory dwelling units and prefab housing to smarter ways of tying federal dollars to construction. It's a wide-ranging, clear-eyed conversation about how we manufactured our own scarcity and what it would take to build our way out.
