One researcher who has studied the topic, Yale Law School’s Zachary Liscow, said there are a variety of short-term and long-term factors that have contributed to the growth in infrastructure spending, including the cost of materials and labor, as well as public demand for pricey highways.
The biggest shift in costs, however, coincided with a rise in what Liscow and a co-author dubbed the “citizen voice,” in
a 2019 paper. Essentially, their theory goes, as citizen advocates became more successful at holding up projects over environmental or neighborhood concerns, the cost of completing those projects exploded.
“There have been many good impacts of this, in the 1960s the U.S. bulldozed neighborhoods, they were often low-income neighborhoods, in ways that were very destructive,” Liscow told CT Insider. “Now we have a different regime with its own costs.”
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“The No. 1 thing that increases the cost of projects really is time,” said U.S. Dept. of Transportation Assistant Secretary Carlos Monje.
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Other commonly-hypothesized reasons for inflated infrastructure costs include the use of unionized workers or differences in geography between projects, though Liscow said there is less evidence to support these claims.
“We used to build things more cheaply and it’s become a lot more expensive over time, labor unions cannot have explained that because unions have
become less dense over time,” he said.
