Housing and the population slowdown

Why costs are up as demand growth has slowed

My main recommendation this week is that you check out Tim Lee’s very detailed look at Waymo’s safety track record. He does what good skeptical journalists do and really kicks the tires on their claims of safety. In the course of doing so, he finds a couple of instances where Waymo has misclassified or mischaracterized safety incidents. It turns out that they are not quite as good as they claim to be.

But, they’re still pretty damn good!

With all errors corrected, “Waymo’s vehicles crash far less often than human drivers on public roads,” and a majority of the serious safety incidents involving Waymo vehicles occurred because of errors made by other human drivers, which is just to say that Waymo isn’t magic. There are drivers out there running red lights and otherwise misbehaving and crashing into other cars, and some of the cars they crash into are Waymo cars. As the number of self-driving cars on the road goes up, the number of self-driving car crashes will also rise, even if self-driving cars are much safer than human-driven cars, because the human-driven cars are out there crashing into the self-driving ones.

I’ve written a few times about self-driving cars recently, and I covered traffic safety even more recently, and also did a piece about why I think the effort to erect a firewall between the Democratic Party and the private sector is a mistake.

But Tim’s piece brought it all together for me. Waymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet, which is one of the biggest companies in the world. Like all giant companies, Alphabet has a lot of regulatory issues and sometimes the company’s position on those regulatory issues is wrong on the merits, and we need politicians and public servants who can stand up to lobbying money and do the right thing. But the populist conceit that you can ascertain who is correct in a given regulatory battle by just assuming that the big rich company is wrong and its “little guy” opponents are right is not accurate. In the case of self-driving car safety, Waymo is correct and its critics are wrong. Thousands of lives are lost each year to unsafe driving, and life expectance is a major domain in which the United States falls short compared to poorer peer countries in Europe. The fact that Alphabet is right about this doesn’t mean that they are right in every other regulatory issue. But it does mean that making policy judgments based on vibes or a hazy desire to “fight big tech” could do enormous harm.

Just as another example, as part of the American Prospect’s ongoing war against Democrats with private sector experience, in advance of the Trump-Harris debate, they complained that Harris’s debate prep was led by Karen Dunn, the successful lawyer hired by Google for their antitrust showdown with the DOJ. Well, guess what? It turns out that Google is a big rich company that is good at spotting talent and pays top dollar. I don’t have any information about the underlying merits of the antitrust suit, but in my opinion, Karen Dunn is an American hero who laid the groundwork for the best anti-Trump debate performance we’ve seen across three presidential campaigns. It’s good if talented people want to work for you, and sometimes the giant the company is correct in a policy dispute!

Other recommendations:

• This Chad Aldeman data feature on which districts are good at teaching kids to read.

• John Ganz on the smearing of Haitian immigrants.

• Rachel Cohen on factory-build ADUs in California.

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This week in good news: Median household income went up a lot in 2023, we could generate tons more electricity out of existing nuclear facilities, transparent mice are cool, this new urban gondola tech is also cool, and a jail in Maine seems to have come up with something constructive on opioids.

Comment of the week from Garrett Cunningham:

It's remarkable how quickly many self-described DC YIMBYs (even ones subscribed to Slow Boring!) retreat when the Height Act is mentioned. "But Paris!" "But the monuments!" "But existing zoning!"

The question is whether being a low-rise city or viewing the monuments (something that can only be done in very specific places anyway) is worth the tradeoffs. How high must our rent prices be so that some rooftops can eke a peek at the Washington Monument? How many tents on the street are worth being low-rise? How high must our taxes be to accommodate a smaller tax base?

Some also point out that DC's Comprehensive Plan doesn't allow for building to the Height Act maximums in many areas, which is true. But locations aren't fungible. The downtown core would be a great place for taller buildings, and other locations are not. These objectors are also often opposed to redeveloping historic neighborhoods (e.g. rowhomes in Logan Circle), though altering the Plan without removing the Height Act would push redevelopment to these historic neighborhoods. You can't have it both ways. Let the market work.

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Our question this week was an interesting (and constructive) one from Freddie deBoer, who asks: Why has slowing population growth not attenuated the housing costs problem? Or has it, and we just can't see it because the underlying zoning and regulatory etc situation is just that bad?