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Here's what my experience working for a govt agcy that, at the time (~2000), was the world's biggest real estate developer (LAUSD) taught me about the question of government agency as developer: 1/ https://twitter.com/drschweitzer/status/1350130499977580544
The statement that most govt agencies are bad at developing real estate is objectively true. But it's not because they're public agencies, per se. It's because of how they metabolize risk. There are lots of private companies that have identical dynamics & mess up similarly. 2/
Most public employees are evaluated on how they do their individual jobs rather than whether their teams' projects succeed or fail. This contributes to agency cultures build on "blame and shame" dynamics, which paralyze people and reward cynicism. 3/
Because every single urban project hurts some people even while helping others, it's very difficult for compassionate, intellectually honest people take any action at all. There are often no mitigations/community benefits that could mend the wounds created by development. 4/
This makes it very appealing to commit to *process* rather than *outcome,* because if you've done something "the right way," it's easier to feel like whatever pain it caused was unavoidable. 5/
But, again, if you're a caring person (as many public employees tend to be) and intellectually honest, it's tough to stomach the often terrible outcomes we get when a highly prescriptive process encounters a unique, dynamic real community. 6/
So we're back to blame, shame and paralysis. 7/
Now, this happens in private companies all the time, too. In my experience, it's worse in larger, incumbent firms whose continued viability doesn't require any growth at all, and those that are subject to processes that are highly regulated and prescriptive. 8/
(As an aside, this is why it turns out that private developers often have all the same challenges as government agencies do when building public works. Public versus private doesn't matter much if everyone has to follow the same rules.) 9/
We have to decide what's more important: following a rigid process or delivering good outcomes. The more complex the environment, the more impossible it is to do both. 10/
But the lower the level of trust is in the world, the more we'll fixate on highly prescriptive processes over outcomes, and the more harm we'll end up doing in communities, especially if our focus is big projects and big plans. (Rinse and repeat) 11/
This is the same issue no matter whether a developer is public or private. The answer, I believe, requires regulations that support small projects -- even from public agencies. Incrementalism lowers the cost of innovation. 12/
Ultimately, we need projects that respond to the real context of the people and things that surround them. Our current process for regulating development makes it nearly impossible to do that well, no matter who the builder is. /end
