This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In 2022, a group of developers in San Francisco proposed turning a Nordstrom parking lot into housing.

They wanted to build nearly 500 apartments, many of them affordable, right near public transit.

But before they could even start the formal approval

process, they had to go through what's called a preliminary review. That's when city planners

take a first look and tell you what studies, hearings, and permits your project will need.

It's not a green light to build. It's not even a red light. It's just a list of what paperwork

you'll need to file.

And that step alone took over 500 days.

That kind of delay isn't rare.

All over the country, efforts to build housing,

transit, and clean energy get tangled up

in procedures that are supposed to help,

but often just stall everything.

Ezra Klein has been thinking about this a lot. His new book that he co-authored with Derek Thompson is called

abundance, and at its core, it's about infrastructure, not just roads and bridges, but the systems

that make it possible or impossible to build anything at all.

He argues that the biggest obstacles to building the stuff we need aren't technological or

financial. They're legal and procedural, and they're largely self-imposed.

His book, which came out a couple months ago, has been making waves and causing arguments,

and so we wanted to have him on the show to talk about it.

So for people who are not familiar with the book, tell us about the idea of abundance.

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