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Notes -
I'd argue the problem stems from having tons and tons of empty land.
Other countries (specifically Asian ones) simply can't afford inefficiency or the death cult of "environmentalism, therefore do nothing ever" in this area; North America is unique in having the vast majority of its land unsettled so the moralization to preserve its "character" is appealing (to the corrupt citizens and politicians that are getting rich off the inherent rent-seeking this enables).
Most of the places that are growing these days are in deserts or upon flat land as far as the eye can see partially for this reason (US Southwest and to a degree the Midwest up through Idaho, Alberta, Saskatchewan)- can't spoil a view that really wasn't much to begin with (realistically, it's just another farm field), the hard requirement for life support to survive outside 6 months of the year (extreme heat for Southwest, extreme cold for Canada) is complementary to building for cars (obligatory "future car sanctuary states"), while most of the places that are locked in the hardest are the places that look the nicest.
Also, local government and people within that local area actually having actual power.
The dirty secret is one of the ways France, Spain, Germany, etc. can cheaply build trains, metros, and even housing at times is simple - the federal government has immense powers to step in and say, "sorry, we're doing this, giving you market value for your land, and you have no recourse in the law at all to stop us."
There's other things, but this is something people on both sides overlook.
"Moses tore down America's great old cities, Jacobs ensured you could never build great new ones."
I want to emphasize that this is indeed how things used to work in the United States, most notably in postwar New York City, where Robert Moses legendarily used eminent domain to raze neighborhoods to build his projects. (If you have plenty of time, the Henry George Program had an excellent discussion about Moses.) The environmental movement of the sixties and seventies was in large part a backlash to Moses; the edifice of law and regulation they erected made it harder to build bad things by making it harder to build anything.
The tradition that separates us from better-functioning countries dates back seventy years at most.
You see this in our transit projects, where things simply get bogged down because it's much easier to say no or be cautious or add requirements than it is to say yes. You see this in our environmental laws like CEQA and NEPA (the federal version of CEQA), where they're used to delay obviously environmentally-friendly projects (congestion pricing, solar panels, offshore wind) in favor of an environmentally-unfriendly status quo. You see it in the way that these processes provide a foothold, so, for example, labor unions fight against CEQA reform because their process involves threatening obstruction to get labor benefits. And you see it in the infuriating "precautionary principle" which acts as a fully-general excuse for inaction, because you're comparing the worst case of "Life Continues" if you don't do something and "Extreme Catastrophe" if you do.
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