Feb. 5: Government outsourcing, addressing NIMBY opposition, and the cons of preemption

New Legal Research on Building Abundance

Highlights:

🏛 State Capacity: Why the government is addicted to consultants

⚡️Energy: Addressing NIMBY opposition to geothermal, mining, and more

🏠 Housing: Debates over supply vs. demand, private vs. public

💵 Economic Policy: How government can drive innovation (and shipbuilding!)

🤜 State Preemption: The downsides of constraining local experimentation

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🏛 State Capacity

• Outsourcing to Big Tech is hollowing out federal capacity
  Infrastructural Capture: How Big Tech’s Dependency Loop is Reshaping American Statecraft—Johannes Späth & Giulliano Molinero Junior (Austrian Institute for International Affairs Policy Analysis)

  The US has been outsourcing critical infrastructure to Big Tech, creating a “privatization-dependency loop” that hollows out state capacity. SpaceX and government cloud contracts show how “infrastructural capture” grants private firms veto power, limiting the public sector’s ability to independently direct strategic growth.

• Complex welfare eligibility rules subsidize contractors
  The Means-Testing Industrial Complex—Luke Farrell (Law & Political Economy Blog) @itslukefarrell
  By outsourcing income verification to private monopolies like Equifax, the government transforms the safety net into a venue for rent-seeking, wasting billions on administrative friction that could otherwise be used to expand universal service delivery.

• State capacity enables liberty through cooperation
  Freedom as Social Cooperation: A Theory of Liberal Democracy—Ezequiel Spector (book)
  The state is not a constraint on liberty but a First-Order Cooperator essential to it. “Freedom as Social Cooperation” relies on high state capacity to build the “circulation infrastructure”—law, trust, and public goods—that markets cannot supply alone. By treating governance as a productive input rather than a cost, the state is visible as the ultimate enabler of abundance and large-scale coordination.

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⚡️Energy

• Defang geothermal opposition with early engagement and payoffs
  Tackling the social acceptance in deep geothermal projects: best practices and lessons learned—Dario Bonciani, Amel Barich, Marco Vichi, Loredana Torsello (European Geothermal Energy Conference)

  Social opposition frequently acts as a hard constraint on deep geothermal energy abundance. Analysis of 14 international case studies shows that unlocking capacity requires replacing “decide-announce-defend” tactics with early engagement and direct benefit-sharing to neutralize local veto points.

• NIMBYs of domestic mining for battery minerals.
  Exploring public opinions on mining governance and preferences for interventions to enhance battery mineral access—Mahelet G. Fikru, Sreeja Koppera, Nhien Nguyen (Resource and Energy Economics)
  While 54% of Americans back domestic mining nationally, only 32% accept local projects. This gap stems from specific local risk perceptions rather than ideological opposition, implying that neutralizing local costs is key to unlocking critical mineral abundance.

• Overcome NIMBY objections to renewables projects through partnership and value-sharing
  The Social Acceptance of Renewable Energy Projects—Sébastien Bourdin (editor) (book)
  Technocratic approaches to the energy transition are failing because they treat local opposition as a marketing problem rather than a democratic one. This collection argues that “NIMBYism” is often a rational response to extractive development, suggesting that the only way to accelerate renewable deployment is through “territorial value sharing”—restructuring governance to give host communities actual ownership stakes and decision-making power, thereby turning passive neighbors into active partners in production.

• There should be a legal right to sunlight for residential solar
  Shining Light on Solar Equity: Navigating Legal Barriers to Solar Energy for Low-Income Communities in Washington—Magdalena Larrain (Seattle Journal of Technology, Environmental, & Innovation Law)
  Unclear laws about who owns sunlight and unfair funding are blocking low-income families from using solar power. This study of Washington State shows that the current system treats clean energy as a luxury for the wealthy. To let everyone participate, the state needs to guarantee legal “rights to the sun” and change financial rules so that clean energy is affordable for all neighborhoods.

• Nuclear plant environmental regulations should be streamlined, not reduced
  Streamlining the licensing of nuclear power plants without compromising the core: EU environmental reviews—Bruno Garcia da Silva (Journal of Energy & Natural Resources Law)
  Analysis of the EU, France, and the US finds that while Environmental Impact Assessments for nuclear plants can cause delays, the solution isn’t deregulation that risks environmental harm. Instead, regulators should deploy “procedural efficiency”—streamlining the licensing process by integrating climate, energy, and environmental policies to accelerate construction without compromising the rigor of environmental review.

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🏠 Housing

• Housing privatization harmed renters and owners in the UK
  Housing Provision and Policy in the UK—Alan Murie (book)
  The UK’s reliance on “asset-based welfare”—substituting state provision with home equity—has structurally failed. Privatization yielded not a “property-owning democracy” but a regression to precarious “private landlordism,” demonstrating that dismantling public housing inevitably generates scarcity and generational segregation.

• Residential addiction recovery sites don’t lower nearby property values
  “Not in my backyard”: The impact of recovery residences on property values—Ryan Ramphul, Sheryl A. McCurdy, Jooyeon Lee, Yanchen Liu, Yixiao Chen, Serena A. Rodriguez, Kathryn R. Gallardo, Sreelatha Akkala, Hadiza Theyra-Enias, J. Michael Wilkerson (Drug and Alcohol Dependence Vol. 279)
  Analysis of Texas census tracts finds no link between recovery residences and lower property values. This evidence dismantles a primary NIMBY argument, suggesting that zoning restrictions based on economic fears are unfounded and needlessly constrain essential care capacity.

• Increasing housing supply is an America First policy
  Rebuilding the American Dream: Homeownership for All Americans—Michael Faulkender, Jill Homan, Ethan Antonelli & Kenzo Takeda (America First Policy Institute)
  The housing crisis results from a “regulatory tax” of government fees and permitting delays and immigrant demand. Affordability requires a massive expansion of private supply, enabled by removing bureaucratic barriers, conditioning federal funds on zoning reform, allowing 529 savings to be used for down payments, and cracking down on predatory lending to promote homeownership.

• Inequality, not housing supply, drives the housing crisis.
  Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis—Maximilian Buchholz, Tom Kemeny, Gregory F. Randolph, Michael Storper (London School of Economics Working Paper)
  The deregulationist theory of the housing crisis ignores the structural reality of inequality. By simulating the effects of upzoning, this analysis finds that even massive supply-side reforms would take decades to lower costs because measured demand elasticity is very low. True affordability cannot be achieved through market-rate construction alone but requires correcting the skewed income distribution that drives uneven demand and prices out the working class.

• Judicial standards in North Carolina block housing supply and entrench exclusionary zoning
  The Legal Invincibility of Exclusionary Zoning and the Inevitability of a Housing Shortage in the Old North State—Joel E. Gillison (North Carolina Law Review)
  North Carolina’s housing shortage is a manufactured crisis, entrenched by a legal system that treats exclusionary zoning as “invincible.” By clinging to a deferential standard, state courts have abdicated their duty to check local obstruction, effectively immunizing arbitrary and capricious barriers that block growth. Instead, the judiciary must apply strict scrutiny to zoning restraints, and the legislature must strip local governments of the power to exclude.

• Federal grant conditions can overcome local zoning
  Climbing Mount Laurel: Federal Land Use and Zoning Policy as the Bipartisan Solution to the Affordable Housing Crisis—Nina Stockman (Buffalo Law Review)
  The current housing crisis is not a market failure, but a failure of local governance, where exclusionary zoning has been allowed to fester under the guise of “local control.” This analysis argues that while the federal government lacks the direct police power to override Euclid and zone land itself, it holds a powerful financial lever: the Spending Clause. To “Climb Mount Laurel” on a national scale, Congress must bypass local obstructionists by conditioning federal grants on aggressive zoning reform, effectively purchasing the “fair share” of affordable housing that municipalities refuse to build voluntarily.

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💵 Economic Policy

• Case studies on federal and state governments driving innovation
  States of Innovation: Driving the American Economy in the 21st Century—James D. G. Wood (book)
  Challenging the myth of a purely market-driven U.S. economy, this book introduces the “Polycentric Innovation State” to explain how federal and state governments actively steer growth. Case studies of California, Texas, Michigan, and Maine reveal that regional public investment strategies—not just laissez-faire policies—are the primary drivers of American innovation and industrial renewal.

• Public shipyards to restore American shipbuilding
  Liberty Yards: The Case for Public Shipbuilding—Mary Bridges (Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator White Paper)
  Decades of “market-nudging” subsidies have failed to resuscitate US shipbuilding. Instead, the government should establish “Liberty Yards”—four publicly owned, regionally specialized shipyards—alongside a Maritime Infrastructure Bank to finance fleet modernization and a Maritime Workforce Reserve to guarantee labor supply, effectively treating shipbuilding as essential state capacity rather than a private market commodity.

• Pro-growth policies have to address inequality
  The Predistribution Solution—Sunny Malhotra and Steven K. Vogel (Roosevelt Institute Policy Brief)
  “Predistribution” policies focused on growing the economic pie should also target inequality, which functions as a structural limit on production. By rewriting market rules—empowering labor and breaking monopolies—policymakers can democratize economic power and unlock suppressed productivity.

🤜 State Preemption

• Loss of local control stymied congestion pricing experiments
  Transportation Law’s Congestion Problem—Sara C. Bronin (Yale Law Journal)
  Traffic congestion is legally entrenched. Federal and state laws actively subsidize driving while stripping cities of the power to manage demand. This regulatory architecture preempts local solutions like New York’s congestion pricing experiment, ensuring that infrastructure policy serves vehicle flow rather than efficient urban mobility.

• Cities should switch to public ownership to pursue climate policies blocked by new state preemption laws
  Navigating State Law in Local Climate Action—Vincent M. Nolette, Daniel J. Metzger, Olivia N. Guarna, Amy E. Turner (Columbia Law School Sabin Center for Climate Change Law Report)
  In nineteen states, new preemption laws block local governments from enacting climate policies, often by using state authority to override municipal “home rule.” Legal analysis suggests that local governments can bypass these restrictions by pivoting from regulation to public ownership (municipalization), allowing cities to achieve climate goals through direct service provision rather than vulnerable regulatory mandates.

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