Why American construction costs are so high (2019)
The article lacks precision in the fact that it&#x27;s not necessarily &quot;American&quot; construction costs, so much as &quot;why are construction costs in large American cities so costly&quot;.  DC, NYC, LA, SF are not representative of how infrastructure projects are pursued in the rest of the country.<p>We know very well that there are orders of magnitude more bureaucratic obstacles, as well as dramatically higher labor costs, when comparing any building project conducted in Texas vs. California.  New York City&#x27;s municipal projects are widely-known to have dramatically inflated labor costs due to various factors, not limited to rampant corruption within unionized labor.  I&#x27;m a supporter of labor unions, but a minority of unions give the majority a bad name by allowing themselves to be used as tools to enrich corrupt officials.  European unions seem to be far, far less susceptible to these kinds of grifters.<p>There are certainly issues at the federal level as well with metrics for funding allocation, but let&#x27;s not pretend that building large infrastructure in states with lower regulations is remotely as expensive as in places like California which have ridiculous levels of red tape and NIMBY empowerment.  (Understood that construction in California has to take into account earthquake mitigation, but it isn&#x27;t remotely enough to explain the cost deltas.)