deregulating barn raising fixes this
disaster recovery is when you need free markets most of all
as we start to think about the prospects for recovery from the LA firestorm, it’s worth remembering some words once spoken by a prescient president about how scary it is to hear that the government is here to help you.
the help is rarely useful, the promises unkept, and worst of all, real help gets crowded out. these people would not know which end of an “actual help” to hold if you handed them one.
FEMA, like most federal agencies has become a politicized clown factory utterly unsuited to task playing at petty partisanism and falling on its face when asked to accomplish tasks that amazon or walmart would consider trivial.
they have made 12 kinds of mess out of the response to hurricane helene and while many keep howling about “why is money going to ukraine when THIS is happening at home!?!” (and there is certainly a point to be made there) if i may for a moment play at puissant pussycat and make a bold prediction:
giving more money to FEMA won’t fix this.
you could give them $5bn or $50bn or $500bn, they’d just waste, squander, and steal that too.
did you notice the really big lie in the story above? it’s not about the number of homes delivered. it’s the one about “much needed federal aid.”
consider the possibility that it’s mostly in the way.
legalizing barn raising and building fixes these issues. but the powers that be do not seems to want fixes. they want problems. so they plead “safety.”
first off, this is the real america. say what you want. it’s just plain true.
WNC resident (and X user) Margo reported last month that her area had "56 passenger bus load groups of skilled Amish carpenters coming down from Lancaster PA weekly to help build tiny homes for Cabins for Christ." Margo was doing her bit, looking for help finding room to lodge all of the volunteers. "We are bringing our own supplies and would be 100% self-sufficient," she posted, "Just need a place under [a] roof to sleep and house our volunteers from Monday night through Friday night every week."
betcha a dollar you can indeed guess what happened next…
yup.
right ahead of what has proved to be one helluva nasty cold snap, the bureaucraasaurus stomped in roaring “but muh safety” and kicked people out of homes.
because “rules are for following” and we cannot have anyone breaking them whatever the cost in human misery.
after all what to the amish, who build all their own homes which stand for generations know about anything?
however much you disdain these bureaucrats, it’s not enough.
everywhere you look, government is the gravel in the gears of progress and the subsidizer of bad ideas.
LA has half the firefighters it should based on population. it’s about the same as the 1960’s. the fire system was underpowered and antiquated. the building codes sure did not help with “fire retardant.” so where is all this “safety” we’re allegedly paying for?
they cap insurance prices while risk explodes, drive all the insurers out, then on conflagration day, they leave everyone in the lurch and uninsured.
here’s a 250 year old village in japan. they have automated firefighting. it’s not like LA could not afford this, it’s a crazy rich city especially many of these neighborhoods.
nope. instead they got fire hydrants that don’t work.
and once the fires are out, rebuilding will start. it’s going to be 20,000+ custom homes. this takes architects, builders, incredible amounts of material. california adds 80k dwellings a year, most apartments. and extra 20k is an INSANE additional number. at typical CA pace, this will be decades to recover. the permitting alone will take 3-5 years. cali is just about the worst in american on “ease of building.”
enter governor clownworld and mayor muppetshow with “solutions.”
the same people who capped fire insurance rates and caused all the insurers to leave are now going to cap building prices to prevent high prices from attracting more builders.
this will wind up reducing the supply of builders willing to come and work and cause long waits to get one.
it will result in materials shortages.
price fixing never works.
high prices are the signal to add supply and bring prices down.
it's how you get builders to relocate from other places and people to enter the building trades.
they are not going to do it for "mandated normal rates."
free this market or you'll hamstring recovery.
lol. fat chance.
price fixing/rent control is a practice with a historical success rate indistinguishable from zero.
amazing that it's still a go to for politicians.
this speaks poorly of their grasp of history and economics.
at the risk of bastardizing thomas sowell
the first law of economics is resource scarcity. there is never enough stuff to give everyone everything they want.
the first law of politics is "ignore the first law of economics."
price is a means of allocation and a signal to make more of things people suddenly want.
when you break that signal in times of high demand, you get shortages.
this will be no different.
the second law of politics is, of course, “blame the ill effects of any markets you break on capitalism and use them as a pretext to break more markets.”
i really feel for the people of LA
they are about to get a world class tour of asinine rules made by asinine people coming to asinine ends.
the government is not here to help.
from FEMA to TSA to the federal highway administration and every building department everywhere including and especially anything that touches “green,” the primary purpose of these agencies is to fail into larger budgets and perpetuate problems and crises. the human cost is horrific, the wasted time, endangered lives, lost progress, the degraded infrastructure: it’s a universal.
LA is really in for it. the free markets to pull in the huge resources needed for rapid recovery by offering high compensation are unlikely to emerge. every one of these little regulo-fiefdoms will start trying to assert itself again the minute the cameras turn off. ask maui.
i wish i had better news, but this looks like this is going to be a charlie foxtrot for the ages.
at least krugman retired so we do not have to listen to him trying to call this “stimulus”…
I work for a home building company based outside of Buffalo. We travel all over the United States (Florida, Alaska, Montana, etc). putting up homes. We can be competitive because our local salaries & expenses are usually significantly lower than the prevailing norm in the places we build.
California is *the only* state where we can't go, because there is so much red tape. We build very energy efficient, beautiful homes for higher end clients (does that sound like a good fit for the California market or what...) and we can get these homes designed and built relatively quickly. But those damn regulations in California won't let us in. It's a frustrating situation for us, and I would imagine for the people living in California too.
Our company is the main subcontractor for Helene cleanup in 2 NC counties (we live in another county where we get hurricanes all the time). Part of the task in one of the counties is cleaning up a waterway, which looks like the photos you've seen - FULL of trees, houses, boats, cars, bodies... They are still wrangling over it because every single town/city/county/state/fed has their own say over some part. For instance (and this is the God's honest truth), by code there has to be a separate permit for every 100' - FEET - of waterway. It will be over 36k separate permits if they don't waive it. This is ONE county. They are also worried about harming the trout and what we are going to do to mitigate that. What the trout want is for the CARS to be taken out of the waterway! There are no flipping trout swimming around all that debris, oil, gas, decomposing organic matter, etc.
Also, after those Amish built the first 100 house in Nov, more went to Boone around Christmas and built about 3 dozen, all paid for. To give credit where it's due, Watauga County did approve them for people to live in and approve the Amish coming back to do more. (Which they are paying for themselves and donating.) My daughter and son-in-law went to App State in Boone, and it is a VERY liberal town/county (like Asheville where those first 100 were built). But they apparently got the memo after the outcry from the first incident.
FEMA, however, did kick people out of hotels last week when we had a statewide winter storm and frigid temps. While they did give them an extra 24 hours, that didn't extend to the life of the storm and we are still having unusual cold. Our crews almost never see any FEMA people (nor do the Savage Freedom guys up in Swannanoa which is one of the hardest hit areas) and when we do they're in a truck "watching". State agencies and contractors have been AWOL, too, as they waited for the new money the legislature approved to get in the pipeline and for our new Dem gov to bring his cronies in.
Oh, and the contractor that is in charge of measuring the debris the clean up crews bring to the dump sites does this by eyeballing the loads. Yep. The official way of doing it is to look in the truck and assign a percentage. Not weight or anything. They routinely underestimate the yardage, so of course contractors have figured out how to put the stuff in the trucks to look good. (And we know they underestimate by about 30% because when we take it to burn or gring instead, we know exactly how much that is.) And the people measuring can't be the people monitoring, don't you know...
It is the biggest mess you can imagine thanks to the government. And we're a red state! So I can't even imagine what will happen (or not) in California.