By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, April 09, 2019
Imagine that you are the czar of all building in San
Francisco, and that you have been asked for your thoughts on the design of a
new apartment building that is under consideration. What is your top concern?
If you are a halfway competent and benevolent dictator —
and, goodness knows, history has shown us few enough of those! — then you’d
probably put “affordability” at the top of your list. The people of San
Francisco and the surrounding areas are very much in need of new affordable
housing: In the city itself, the median price of a house is now just over $1.6
million, more than 16 times the median household income. Affordable housing is
a big issue not only for regular middle-class people but for the high-tech
titans of Silicon Valley, who worry that some highly productive potential
employees are looking elsewhere for their futures, not to mention that the
housing market forces them to pay more for all their workers. There are other
places that have faced such problems, notably resort communities such as Aspen,
Colo., but it is unusual for a major city to become so comprehensively
unaffordable. Even famously expensive New York City has its more affordable
enclaves, without which many industries — from food-service to publishing —
would have enormous human-capital problems.
But if the czar of building in San Francisco were
presented with a design for the most affordable apartment building that
possibly could be built (for the
purpose of our thought experiment, there is no building code), he almost
certainly would reject it, because it would lack certain health and safety
features that most of us regard as essential. It probably would not be very
attractive or very energy-efficient. It probably would not be very comfortable
to live in, either.
A different building czar might believe instead that
energy efficiency is the most important concern. But if he were presented with
a design for the most energy-efficient building that possibly could be built,
he almost certainly would reject it, because it would lack things that most of
us regard as essential, like windows.
What if we put safety and health first? We might say we
want the maximum affordability consistent with safety and health. But even
seemingly obvious concerns such as safety eventually put us in a bind: At some
point, we will encounter a marginal improvement to safety that forces us to
accept compromises in affordability, energy efficiency, or some other criterion
that seems to us excessive or unreasonable.
In fact, the building czar making up a list of things
that are legitimately important in the design of such a project might, off the
top of his head, jot down: affordability, health and safety (which might very
well include concerns ranging from fire and earthquakes to crime and
terrorism), energy efficiency, accessibility for disabled people, comfort,
aesthetics, externalities such as traffic and parking, any likely effects on
neighboring residents and businesses, utility loads (a big concern for New York,
lately), and a few other things. Some of these concerns are complementary: A
building that is more energy efficient will demand less of its utility
providers; a building that is well integrated into the mass-transit network
will need less parking and contribute less to traffic, etc. But other concerns
will clash: Many beautiful buildings sacrifice energy efficiency to aesthetics;
some safety and accessibility features consume both energy and money; the cost
difference between making a building very durable in an earthquake and making
it very, very durable in an earthquake may be very high.
All of those tradeoffs will impose costs, some of which
might not be obvious until you are faced with an unusual or extreme
circumstance. There wasn’t anything defective
about the design of the World Trade Center towers, which very likely would have
stood up just fine in the event of an ordinary fire or many kinds of possible
terrorist attack. But they were not designed to stand up to having jetliners
flown into them, even though the question had, oddly enough, come up when the
project was being conceived in the 1960s.
So, you want your apartment building to be affordable,
but you also want it to be safe — from what? Ordinary building fires? Terrorist
attacks? Meteors? Earthquakes? Okay: How big an earthquake? You want it to be
green, but you also want it to be attractive and comfortable. You want it to
have few enough entrances to be secure but enough exits for people to get out
quickly during a fire.
That’s one building, and one building gets pretty
complicated all by itself. When you move into the larger realm of the entire
housing stock of a city such as San Francisco, the problem gets exponentially
more complex. As the locals sometimes like to remind us, the Bay Area is home
to an enormous concentration of intelligence, engineering expertise, human
capital, and ordinary capital, too. But for all those resources, it has made
zero progress toward its goal of making housing more affordable. And there
isn’t anything nefarious behind that: It is a complex problem and would be even
if everybody had exactly the same preferences and priorities — which, as it
turns out, they don’t.
Which is to say: The things that make people want to put
czars in charge of complicated and intractable problems are also the things
that make it a terrible idea to put czars in charge of complicated and
intractable problems.
If designing an apartment building is complex, then how
much more complex is designing, say, a national system of regulating and
subsidizing health-insurance companies, medical providers, employers, state
governments, and — oh! — just about every one of the 327.2 million residents of
this country from sea to shining sea, in a way that optimizes at least a few
hundred major criteria that are in many cases either rivalrous or incompatible?
How much more complicated than that is reorganizing more or less the entirety
of human economic activity in simultaneous pursuit of environmental and
social-justice goals involving competing factors so complex that the
relationships among them are literally incomprehensible?
The same bureaucracies and politician-dominated processes
we expect to ensure substantial justice for the entirety of the human race
while optimizing the sum of human material life in accord with certain slippery
and vaguely defined environmental goals cannot figure out how to raise an
apartment building in San Francisco — which in reality entails not figuring out
how to develop the needed housing but how to let other people who want to use
their own money and energy to develop that housing do so — or how to run a high
school in Milwaukee, or how to ensure that all of the people on Death Row
actually belong there. The federal government cannot even say with any
confidence how many programs it currently administers. Don’t ask its auditors where
the money went.
All of the Instagram-ready chin-up posturing and
declarations of moral urgency in the world will not change the facts of
problems before us or render inoperative Immanuel Kant’s maxim that “ought implies can.” The adjectives “ambitious,” “inspiring,” “audacious,” and
“sweeping” should be met with dread by those who value boring things like
reason, responsibility — and reality.
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