How Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Affect Housing Supply? Part III
This is my third and final essay looking at the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, and how it’s likely to affect housing supply.
TechEconomics
Construction Physics.
Brian Potter on buildings, infrastructure, industrial technology, and how things actually get made.
Recent essays
30 of 36Reading List 08/29/26
Sinking London homes, US magnesium manufacturing, the World Humanoid Robot games, catastrophic flooding in Nepal, and more.
How the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Works
The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is the largest crude oil storage facility in the world.
Reading List 08/22/26
Los Angeles’ ADUs, electrical transformer manufacturing, gas turbine power plants, how water in the Colorado River is used, and more.
Reading List — 08/15/2026
Home price declines, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, The Boring Company fundraising, and more.
How Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Affect Housing Supply? Part II
This is the second installment of my look under the hood of the recently passed 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, looking at what each provision actually does and trying to suss out its actual impact on housing supply.
Reading List 08/08/2026
The Endangered Species Act and housing production, why it’s hard for LEGO to use 3D printing, robotic welding and shipbuilding, modular data centers, and more.
What Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Do for Housing Supply?
A few weeks ago the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law. This is an enormous housing bill that’s been in the works for roughly a year — I first discussed it on Statecraft back in 2025 — and folks are optimistic that it will, per its description, “incre…
Reading List 08/01/26
Pepper-spray drones, China’s chip Manhattan Project, Commonwealth Fusion’s fundraise, and a proposed Dulles Airport renovation.
Why Is Everyone Trying to Build a Solid-State Battery?
A battery technology that’s getting a lot of attention is solid-state batteries, lithium-ion batteries that replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid material.
Reading List 07/25/26
China’s EV subsidies, the future of aeroderivative gas turbines, a US-Saudi nuclear deal, defective roadway guardrails, and more.
Can We Lower Construction Costs with Cheaper Labor or Materials?
Last time in our series on the nature of the construction productivity problem, we looked at economies of scale, finding that capturing economies of scale in homebuilding is difficult.
Reading List 07/18/26
A setback for California Forever, a $500 million artillery shell plant not producing any shells, the difficulty of recycling EV batteries, manufacturing wire harnesses, and more.
How Predictable Are Laws?
An enormous amount of ink has been spilled (some of it by me) on the trials and tribulations of complying with the National Environmental Policy Act, better known as NEPA.
Reading List 07/11/26
Adults living with their parents, Samsung’s profits, Native American data centers, Puerto Rico’s electricity grid, and more.
Reading List 07/04/26
Households without homeowners insurance, crackdowns on AI chip smuggling, Japan’s two electrical frequencies, Meta’s AI compute business, and more.
The Fall and Rise of Screwworm
Every spring, as sure as the seasons, and for generations unknown, screwworms began their annual march northward from their overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico and South Texas.
Reading List 06/27/26
Trump refuses to sign a housing bill, the high cost of US-made doors, slow trucking, why we stopped making new land, and more.
US Subways Build Too Many Cross Passages
I wrote the following piece for IFP’s Transit Abundance Playbook, a collection of 15 ideas to improve transit delivery in the US.
Reading List 06/20/26
A new housing bill, General Motors joining the grid-scale battery game, skepticism about data center delays, solid-state air conditioning, and more.
Converting Coal Plants to Natural Gas
For the better part of the last several hundred years, coal was the fuel of choice for generating power.
Reading List 06/13/2026
Homes being built on top of libraries, Patriot missile manufacturing, an effort to construct new US coal plants, a tunnel between the US and Russia, and more.
Biological Evolution and Information Acquisition
A few weeks ago we looked at a simulation of technological evolution by economist Brian Arthur, in which he was able to start with simple building blocks (such as a NAND gate) and evolve surprisingly complex circuits (such as a 12-way AND gate or a 4-bit adder…
Reading List 06/06/26
Chatbots replacing realtors, Chinese synthetic diamonds, Australian batteries, Meta’s data center tents, and more
How Long Does It Take to Plan a Bridge?
Many folks, including me, have observed that it seems to take much longer to build infrastructure in the US than it used to.
Reading List 05/30/26
A California chemical leak, weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear reactor startups, a startup that will clean your house to get robot training data, Blue Origin’s rocket explosion, and more.
Where Are the Economies of Scale in Homebuilding?
Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem.
Reading List 05/23/26
Squatter removal services, Apple finding uses for defective chips, process heat use in California, the brewing Colorado River crisis, and more.
The Rise of Build-to-Rent Housing
A major shift in the housing market in the last several years is the rapidly increasing popularity of “build-to-rent” homes — single-family homes that are built specifically for the purpose of being rented out.
Reading List 05/16/26
Tokyo’s cheap housing and expensive land, the House response to the Senate housing bill, an IED near an Alabama dam, Fervo’s IPO, and more.