I've been thinking about how to scale American cities. China and the UAE can will new bridges, highways, and skyscrapers into existance, like America could 100 years ago. In contrast, today every new toilet has to go through 10 sessions of review just to get finished late and over-budget. Why can't we just build things?
The Minimum Viable City
As De Gaulle once put it: "Brazil is the country of the future and always will be." Rio went through a "housing crisis" over 50 years ago, and instead of waiting for more high rises to be built, the construction workers built new homes on the outskirts of the city where no one was looking - usually in flood zones, hills, etc. - any place where the more legit real estate developers and land owners didn't care about. Eventually more and more people moved to the slums and now they are packed with tens of thousands of people. Last November I saw a nine story building in Rochina made of nothing but bricks and cement. I also saw the ruins of a house that collapsed (I was told only a few people died). Thankfully, there is no zoning in Rochina, and so people just started building more floors on their roofs to rent out (no regulatory approval required). I heard another story about a guy that bought a house with an ocean view (Rio is one of the only places on Earth where the poor have better views than the rich). A Swedish/American couple ended up buying the property right in front of his vista and built a 6 story hotel to block his view. Life in the favela is very PvP - in this case the guy just took the L. Later, I went through an alleyway where a grenade exploded and you could still see the damage in the cinderblocks.
We Can Just Build Things (Crime is Legal)
People are already living in tents and cardboard boxes in American cities. Building literally anything permanent (even a favela made of cement and bricks piled up on top of eachother) would improve everyone's standard of living. The homeless get some permanent housing, and the rest of us don't have to step over needles and feces on our way to work. We can just put something down in the East Bay and check back in on it in 10 years. Maybe it turns into Mad Max, or maybe it turns into the Amalfi coast. Crazier things have happened; Singapore was once just bunch of opium dens on a rock.