May 5: Increasing housing supply decreases racial segregation, and other findings
New Legal Research on Building Abundance
Highlights
⚡️ Energy: Utilities are gaming the system to avoid building needed transmission lines
🏡 Housing: Metros that built more housing saw larger drops in Black-White segregation
🏛 State Capacity: Election pressure makes public officials throw good money after bad
🏗 Public Infrastructure: Fairness perceptions, not information campaigns, drive wind project acceptance
⚡️ Energy & Transmission
Utilities are gaming the system to avoid building the transmission lines America needs
Towards a National Transmission Planning Authority—Joshua Macey and Elias van Emmerick (Harvard Environmental Law Review)
Incumbent utilities channel investment toward small, local transmission projects that dodge competitive bidding, regional planning, and regulatory review—in PJM, 73% of transmission spending went to such projects between 2014 and 2021. The result is chronic underinvestment in high-voltage interregional lines that would cut congestion costs (up 220% since 2016), improve reliability, and connect renewables to demand centers. Proposed fixes include a new National Transmission Planning Authority, aggressive use of FERC’s existing siting and cost allocation powers, and governance reforms to reduce utility control over planning processes.Grid governance, not technology, is the main barrier to U.S. transmission buildout
Governance Challenges Preventing Better Integration of the Electrical Grid in the USA—Shelley Welton and Joshua Macey (Nature Energy)
The U.S. electricity grid remains fragmented because its governance structure—split across FERC, regional transmission organizations, states, and incumbent utilities—systematically underinvests in interregional transmission. Reforms to cost allocation, planning authority, and siting jurisdiction are preconditions for the grid expansion needed for reliability, affordability, and decarbonization.
🏡 Housing
Metros that built more housing saw larger drops in Black-White segregation
Housing Supply and Racial Integration: Evidence from Building Permits in U.S. Metropolitan Areas—Aaron Fernandez; (SocArXiv preprint)
Panel data from 1990 to 2020 show that U.S. metros issuing more building permits experienced greater declines in Black-White residential segregation — a finding that holds using an instrumental variable strategy based on geologic constraints and at the town level within metros. No single mechanism (costs, mobility, location of new units) fully explains the link, suggesting housing supply functions as a structural condition shaping racial sorting rather than operating through one causal channel.Parks and community input matter more to neighbors than who moves in
From Opposition to Acceptance: How Development Characteristics Shape Local Support for Housing Projects—Britt Voesten (Eindhoven University of Technology)
A choice experiment with 407 Dutch residents found that adding public amenities—especially parks—and offering participation in the design process were the strongest drivers of support for nearby housing projects. Affordable housing shares up to 60% did not reduce acceptance, and apartment height mattered more than project size.Nuisance law should protect the activities that make neighborhoods grow
Urbanizing Nuisance—George F. K. Werner (Brooklyn Law Review)
Courts struggle to decide nuisance claims when newcomers to gentrifying neighborhoods sue over the very sights, sounds, and smells that drew them there. An activity should only count as an unreasonable interference based on local fit when it falls outside established land-use patterns and is more likely to deter neighbors than attract them. Reorienting nuisance around this “urban growth principle” would make the doctrine more administrable while removing a legal obstacle to dense, mixed-use city life.New Jersey’s Mount Laurel mandate has produced 75,000 affordable homes
Federalism and Fair Housing: State Innovation Amidst Federal Retrenchment—Paula A. Franzese (Fordham Urban Law Journal)
As HUD’s budget and workforce shrink, New Jersey’s court-enforced Mount Laurel doctrine offers a model: state constitutional mandates requiring municipalities to zone for affordable housing have outperformed federal enforcement, with 94% of towns filing compliance plans under a 2024 reform law.
🏛 State Capacity
Election pressure makes public officials throw good money after bad
Escalation of Commitment in the Public Sector: The Impacts of Electoral Effects and Visualization Aids on Blame Avoiding Behavior—Philipp Herrmann, Bernhard Hirsch, and David Lindermüller (Public Management)
Public officials facing electoral accountability are more likely to escalate commitment to failing projects as a blame-avoidance strategy — continuing to invest rather than admitting a sunk cost. Data visualization tools that make performance shortfalls more salient can counteract this tendency by making it harder to obscure poor outcomes from oversight bodies and voters.Simplifying rules helped administrators distribute rent relief faster—but tenants didn’t notice
Lessons from California’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program: The Experience of Administrative Burden in Policy Implementation—Katharine Lee Nelson, Cypress Marrs, and Vincent J. Reina (Social Service Review)
California legislation that simplified paperwork, fully funded arrears, and enabled direct-to-tenant payments increased the rent relief program’s reach, especially for women, Hispanics, and those in low-density housing. But applicants still faced long waits and poor communication, suggesting burden reduction helped administrators more than it improved tenants’ experience.NYC’s affordable housing lottery is too slow and opaque to serve applicants well
The House Doesn’t Always Win: Understanding NYC’s Housing Connect Lottery System and How to Improve It—Vicki Been, Jacob Waggoner, Brad Greenburg, Christine Wendell, Dan Waldinger, and Nick Arnosti (NYU Furman Center)
Housing Connect’s complex verification and approval processes create long delays in filling income-restricted units, raising costs for developers and frustrating the millions of applicants in the pool. The report recommends streamlining eligibility checks, leveraging applicant data to drive pipeline planning, and using the new mayoral task force on administrative reform to make the lottery faster and more transparent.
🏗 Permitting & Infrastructure
Parametric bonds could replace NEPA litigation with automatic environmental payouts
Utilization of Parametric Insurance Bonds as Part of NEPA Permitting Reform—Paul E. Traynor (Oil and Gas, Natural Resources, and Energy Journal)
NEPA review delays infrastructure projects that would improve the human environment, while third-party liability litigation over environmental failures is slow and uncertain. Parametric insurance bonds — which trigger automatic payouts when predefined environmental thresholds are breached — could streamline permitting by replacing adversarial litigation with guaranteed remediation funding, letting projects proceed while protecting the natural environment.Fairness perceptions, not information campaigns, drive wind project acceptance
Getting to Yes: What It Really Takes to Build Social Acceptance of Wind and Transmission Projects—Louise Comeau (Re.Climate)
A national survey of 4,232 Canadians finds that support for wind and transmission projects depends on whether residents believe the process is fair, benefits are tangible (lower power bills, property tax reductions), and institutions are trustworthy. Dismissing opponents as NIMBYs backfires; the “decide-announce-defend” model should give way to early co-development, real community benefit commitments, and trust-building before siting decisions are made.Permitting obstacles to Texas’s looming water crisis
Dammed if You Do, Dammed if You Don’t: Texas’s Water Crisis and the Need for Reform—Crafton Deal (Texas A&M Law Review)
Texas’s population is projected to grow over 70% in 50 years while existing water supplies decline by nearly 18%. Two proposed North Texas reservoirs—Lake Ringgold and Marvin Nichols—illustrate the legal, environmental, and financial obstacles to large-scale water infrastructure, including eminent domain conflicts and massive capital costs.
🚗 Autonomous Vehicles
Private safety standards can fill the AV liability gap courts face today
Swords and Shields: Impact of Private Standards for Liability Determinations of Autonomous Vehicles—Gary Marchant (Journal of Tort Law)
Federal regulation of autonomous vehicles lags the technology, leaving private standards from SAE, ISO, and IEEE as the primary safety governance tools. Courts should treat manufacturer conformance with these standards as a partial shield against liability — especially punitive damages — while non-conformance should serve as a partial sword for plaintiffs to argue lack of due care.Robotaxi benefits depend on regulation, not just technology
Regulating Robotaxis—Bryant Walker Smith and Matthew Wansley (Southern California Law Review)
Commercial robotaxi service is scaling fast, but whether it reduces congestion and expands access or entrenches a private monopoly depends on regulatory choices. Externality pricing for congestion and pollution, open-entry rules to prevent platform lock-in, and fare transparency mandates can capture the upside while reclaiming parking land, refocusing transit on high-throughput routes, and expanding mobility for low-income and disabled riders.
®️ Intellectual Property
Geographical indication laws manufacture scarcity by legal designation, not nature
The Protection of Geographical Indications Under Comparative Lens: Whether Law Artificially Creates Scarcity of Goods—Domenico di Micco (FIU Law Review)
Champagne is not scarce because grapes are rare — it is scarce because law restricts the name to one region. Geographical indications create artificial scarcity by attaching legal denominations to geographic, physical, or cultural particularities regardless of actual availability, engineering higher prices through supply restriction. A comparative study of major GI regimes reveals both the consumer-protection benefits and the market-distortion costs of this legal construction.
📮 Request for Abundance Policy Proposals
Inclusive Abundance sent out a call for policy proposals to address causes of artificial scarcity in eight domains (or more), including housing, energy, workforce, and government effectiveness. Proposals are due June 5.