Why don’t we build things?
Yale Law School professor David Schleicher, who studies local government and land use, has been trying to answer this question for years. While Schleicher typically writes about housing, his latest work — an essay literally called “Why Can’t We Build?” for the New York University Journal of Law and Liberty — is useful for thinking about why we don't have as much green energy infrastructure as we need. “Despite a generation of low interest rates and innovation in many non-physical realms,” he writes, “there are few physical monuments that we will pass to future generations — where are today’s Brooklyn Bridges or Hoover Dams?”
There are certainly explanations for this lack of infrastructural boldness. But more importantly, what are the reasons for it?
The explanations are often local restrictions on growth. When it comes to housing, that might mean zoning regulations that limit what kind of structures can be built where or fees that are sometimes charged to multifamily units. For renewable energy, developers of wind and solar might find themselves coming up against noise restrictions, rules that essentially require minimum amounts of land for installations, or even outright bans on certain types of generation.
But that doesn’t explain why these rules exist — the reasons why infrastructure doesn’t get built. As for these, he told me, most of them come down to the structural factors of local politics. “Statewide majorities have policy preferences” that often support development, Schleicher said. But local a body of government institutions that have been built up since the 1970s “have limited the capacity of those stated statewide preferences to be reflected in policy in many places.”
When it comes to zoning, Schleicher told me, proponents of reform “make arguments at the local level, but they’re very simply turning to the state level because the issue is larger than any individual jurisdiction.” The same goes for renewable energy.
If you ask people across an entire state if they want more housing or renewable energy, they will likely say yes. But local elections — which typically have comparatively low participation and are more likely to be decided on national party lines than on local policy issues — rarely reflect this political reality. With a lack of direct checks from the electorate, interest and advocacy groups have outsize weight on local policymaking.
Local governments have a variety of structures meant to discourage growth and systematically prioritize the views of those with the time and inclination to show up to local meetings — not just those who show up to vote every two or four years. Decisionmaking on individual projects may be dominated by homeowners or local environmental groups that don’t want to see any building or change in the built environment.
Statewide policymaking, on the other hand, “can bring different interest groups to the fore,” Schleicher told me, including labor and large employers. When Michigan, for instance, passed a suite of clean energy bills in 2023 with support from labor, it allowed the state to take over permitting for large clean energy projects if the applicable local rules are too restrictive.
California, too, has passed a series of laws centralizing renewable energy permitting and limiting the appeals that advocacy groups can make to block projects, which Governor Gavin Newsom has already put to work. Earlier this year, he essentially fast-tracked a 400 megawatt solar project in Riverside County by giving opponents just nine months to petition against its approval.
In all likelihood, however, Michigan will have to pass more new laws and regulations to speed up renewable development in any meaningful way. “Realistically, one of the other things that the zoning story has taught us that may be relevant for clean energy is that it's almost never does one law do the trick,” Schleicher told me. When states have tried to boost housing production, he pointed out, it has often required several rounds of legislation to get a meaningful boost in production as local opponents of new housing adapt to new laws.
California, again, provides a helpful example. The state is in the midst of a massive building boom in so-called accessory dwelling units, a.k.a. “granny flats” or ADUs. Housing advocates in the state credit this not just to a set of bills passed in 2016 preempting certain local regulations including setbacks, some parking requirements, and fees for utility connections that discouraged their construction, but also to 11 more bills passed by 2022, methodically clearing out local restrictions on building, renting, and selling ADUs.
And this was just the latest chapter in the effort to encourage the building of ADUs — the first bill trying to get around local bans in California passed in 1982. Forty years later, however, there were still only 1,000 permitted ADUs in the whole state. As of 2022, the state had registered 82,000 ADUs, a fifth of all housing produced in the state that year, according to CA YIMBY, a housing advocacy group.
"The first couple times statewide ADU bills were passed, local governments would come up with other ways to stop things," Schleicher said.
Something similar has and likely will continue to happen as states try to wrest siting for renewables projects from local governments. In New York, a 1972 law the governing the siting of power plants has gone through many different iterations. This law, known as Article 10, was changed in 2010 to apply to smaller generators and therefore include renewables projects. Article 10 created a “siting board” that could permit renewables projects under a fast-track process that exempted them from environmental impact statements required by the State Environmental Quality Review Act. The Board would even be allowed to waive “unreasonably burdensome” local laws restricting renewables development.
But the new process did little to speed permitting. What was intended to be a one- to two-year process instead turned “more lengthy and challenging than originally anticipated,” according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Lawrence Susskind and Anushree Chaudari. By 2018, Columbia University professor Michael Gerrard and then Arnold & Porter partner Edward McTiernan wrote, a single project had been approved under the new system.
New York passed a new law in 2020, which included fixed timelines for review. The new process, while relatively new, has managed to get some local rules on renewable siting thrown out as “unreasonably burdensome,” and opponents to wind and solar projects have lost out in front of the new siting board.
As New York state struggles to meet its ambitious goals for decarbonization, it will likely need to reform land use and permitting regulations again, and again, and again, along with every other state.
“Remember that you’re in a long fight instead of a short one,” Schleicher told me. “One of the most important things is to be able to pass successive bills because local opponents to statewide efforts are going to adapt and change and respond.”
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