Can New York Still Build Transformative Infrastructure?

Three new books by liberal urbanists explore why it’s gotten so tough to build multi-family housing, high-speed rail lines and large-scale renewable energy plants. Beyond lamenting the state of things, the authors urge Democrats and progressives to shake off more than a half-century of accumulated rules and regulations that have helped make major civic infrastructure prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.

It’s fitting that “Why Nothing Works” by Marc J. Dunkelman, “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and “Stuck” by Yoni Appelbaum have stirred discussion in this 200th year since New Yorkers celebrated the first massive American public works project: the transformational Erie Canal right here in New York. As these writers try to build a new consensus for the current moment, the history of the canal offers important lessons about the cultural and political conditions necessary to build bigger and more efficiently.

The key difference then was that a critical mass of Americans concurred on what progress meant, while today there is little cultural or political agreement on whether the cost, disruption and sacrifices involved in building big are worth incurring. While there have certainly been many left-leaning advocates of building big, those on that side of the political spectrum typically fragment into a half dozen camps on whether the benefits of a given development outweigh the costs. It’s not as though the Erie Canal was universally supported — its construction was indeed contentious — but back then, progress was largely understood by the middle classes to be synonymous with producing some major piece of infrastructure that advanced the nation’s economy and the common good. Now, many on the left define progress variously as an incremental increase in the wages of workers, or a shrinking in emissions that might make climate change fractionally less likely, or reducing entrenched inequalities. 

Almost overnight, the mother of all canals in the young republic supercharged the economy of the state and inspired canal construction in and beyond New York. The Erie Canal opened access to the agricultural lands of the Midwest, providing reliable and lower-cost shipping from Buffalo at Lake Erie all the way to the Hudson River at Albany. No longer, as a consequence of this project, were the Appalachian Mountains and other natural barriers to stand in the way of an unfettered flow of commerce and migration into the interior.

The canal’s principal booster was the powerful DeWitt Clinton, nephew of the state’s first governor, George Clinton, who smoothed the way to his nephew’s appointment as mayor of formerly British-occupied New York City in 1803, when the city’s population numbered just 62,000. A former U.S. senator by then, the younger Clinton served 10 single-year terms as mayor and went on to more than three terms as governor, with the canal’s legislative approval materializing as he pursued the first in 1816.

Clinton was among many politicians who opposed a dominant federal government, warning that it would foster aristocracy. Among his lasting accomplishments, the New Yorker advanced the European-style street grid for New York City to guide future development and helped establish free public education. 

But he’s best remembered for the Erie Canal, which he championed through war, national debt, financial panic and high-level questions about the project’s potential cost, feasibility as well as constitutionality. He held strongly expansionist views.

The plan that opponents called “Clinton’s big ditch” was formulated in 1810, when Clinton trekked around the state to plot the canal’s route through rude burgs, rocky hills and deep ravines with his surveyor general/cousin, an assistant in the surveyor’s office, the owner of a lock-navigation concern, and a wealthy congressman and land speculator. The respectable quintet’s 700-mile-long journey, lasting 53 days, convinced Clinton of the upstate landscape’s particular geographic suitability for the kind of artificial river he and other politicians had in mind. As the American historian Henry Adams would later observe, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas had to build roads and canals “across a hundred miles of mountains,” whereas New York State “had but to people a level and fertile district, nowhere fifty miles from navigable water, in order to reach the great Lake system.” The average canal in the former British colonies of the Atlantic basin at the time of the journey was only two miles long. This canal would stretch a distance of 363 miles.

Still, the dream was stalled by the War of 1812, which quadrupled federal spending. Albert Gallatin, secretary of the treasury, proved unwilling to part with grants of revenue or even federal land. President James Madison — no fan of Clinton, who ran against him as the candidate of both the Federalist Party and a small group of antiwar Democratic-Republicans — questioned the constitutionality of using the federal purse to pay for a state’s internal improvements. Madison’s predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned America’s economic future and liberty would have yeoman farmers at the center, had told an early advocate of a major new waterway for New York that constructing a more-than 350-mile-long canal through wilderness was “a little short of madness” and best left to 100 years hence.

Some upstate legislators were especially cool to the planned canal tolls. Downstate officials, including the Tammany Society, which was closely tied to Clinton’s foe Aaron Burr, could not envision benefits reaching 150 miles down the Hudson to New York City. They fretted about “cheap competition” from goods arriving from out west.

After what amounted to six years of commissions, explorations, land surveys and debates, the commissioners' final report in February 1817 recommended that work on the project be limited at first to a mid-section 75 miles in length. Because of the relatively level landscape there, engineering would be simpler and costs lower — and this work, too, could serve to demonstrate the project’s technical feasibility.

And with that, the Assembly approved the canal bill two months later. The clincher came in the state Senate, where Martin Van Buren, a leading Republican, had tried to keep Clinton from winning the recent gubernatorial special election. Van Buren surprised virtually everyone in the chamber by abandoning his long-held objections to the canal, calling the project a salve for unemployment and “essential for the defense of the United States.” The Senate gave final approval, and the legislature agreed to cover the staggering total estimated price of $7 million ($225 million in today’s money) by selling bonds, then a novel form of state financing, as Peter L. Bernstein explains in his history of the canal, “Wedding of the Waters.” Since commercial banks and wealthy individual investors held back for fear the project could fail and they’d lose their money, a group of canal proponents recommended a novel savings bank that would draw deposits from working people and was restricted to investing in government-backed securities. The legislature chartered the bank in 1819.

Considered a marvel and soon after to inspire similar projects in New York and the western interior, the canal was completed two years ahead of schedule. That was a result that would be virtually impossible today, to hear Dunkelman, Klein, Thompson and Appelbaum describe the present-day obstacles to civic modernization.

 These new Democratic apostles of government efficiency and “abundance” are understandably impatient with the party’s difficulty in getting major infrastructure work done. They attribute the problem to the overriding centrality of zoning laws, local permits, bidding requirements and other red tape. Dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, the defensive layers of bureaucracy were well-intentioned — meant to protect middle- and lower-class communities from noise, traffic, pollution and unaccountable mega-builders. In the years since Robert Moses rammed a highway through the heart of the working-class South Bronx, though, environmental permitting rules have generally privileged local veto over final approval. It’s an outgrowth, says Dunkelman, of “a deep-seated aversion to power.” 

Ironically, wealthy communities and their lawyers have since used these laws and regulations to protect their enclaves from development and projects designed to improve housing affordability and expand transit for the middle class and the poor. Meanwhile, gridlock feeds into the conservative view that government is the problem — indeed, the Trump administration just proposed a rollback of air-quality protections that were enacted by Congress, displaying brash disregard for the environment and public health. These new books argue that Democrats and the left must overcome the type of political parochialism that initially stood in the way of the Erie Canal, when some legislators objected to the proposed route because it bypassed their districts, while others resisted because they did not want it in their backyard.

The economic spillovers from the canal were in fact widespread and dramatic, turning detractors into supporters. New York City’s harbor was transformed into a major hub for agricultural harvests, salted meats and, later, anthracite coal from the north and west, with boatloads of domestic cereal grains sold to England at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. 

Galvanized by this colossal tide of imports, sleepy towns along the new waterway burgeoned into trading hubs and cities in their own right, whether Syracuse, Rochester, or Utica, while New York City emerged within just two decades as the country’s de facto capital city. The city’s economic success was fueled, and sometimes destabilized, by the resulting land speculators, international and national investors, merchants, shippers and multiple banks. While some politicians still warned about the dangers of federal power, their voices tended to be muffled by the profit-seeking and risk-taking. What was also true was that the national government girded Manhattan’s capitalists with all kinds of support — from forts to protect the harbor, bans on foreign vessels and favorable postage rates, wrote historians Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows in their epic synthesis of 19th-century New York City, Gotham. The canal was also a government-run waterway, operated by a state board.

In 20th and 21st century America, the only civic projects that can compare to the Erie Canal’s impact are New Deal projects like the Hoover Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the electrification of the rural Hill Country in Texas, or, the Interstate Highway System that began in 1956, and like the Erie Canal, compressed time and space. But technology has greatly enlarged our capacity since then; Why have our civic ambitions and accomplishments stalled?

Building major infrastructure remains staggeringly expensive. Yet one of the projects cited by those who say that contemporary priorities (like satisfying the interests of trade unions) inflate the price of major projects and make them harder to get done is the two-mile-long East Side Access rail connection to Grand Central Station. Offering transit flexibility to the densely populated metropolitan region, East Side Access tallied up at $12.5 billion at completion in January 2023 — four times the original estimate. 

And the time needed to mount big projects often makes bond investors uncomfortable. Opened in 2017, Manhattan’s Second Avenue Subway took over 10 years to plan and another 10 to build — for just three stops to date. Bistate and private partnerships, such as a planned high-speed rail link between LA and San Francisco, drag on interminably and expensively, unlike those serving travelers in China, Spain, France and Japan. U.S. high-speed rail projects, by contrast, get snarled by the requirement of complex environmental reviews and litigation — hurdles the builders of the Erie Canal did not have to deal with. “The dream of high-speed rail in the United States has been long deferred,” Eric Goldwyn of NYU’s Marron Institute wrote with other researchers in a recent report that lays out what’s needed to get things moving.

It’s vital to protect the environment, stand up for unions and respect local objections. But “progress” exemplified by projects like the Erie Canal have a potential value that exceed the disruption of building them. It’s long past time for Democrats and progressives to acknowledge that.