The analyst’s voice-crisp, educated, utterly useless-was arguing the fine points of a new planning directive. I was stuck in the left-most of the 7 traffic lanes, watching the rainwater smear the brake lights ahead into impressionistic red streaks. Ninety-seven minutes into this supposed ninety-minute commute, and the man on the radio was discussing the marginal impact of adjusting the Capital Gains Tax exemption on second homes. My internal monologue, crude and escalating, kept repeating the same instruction: Just build the damn houses.

Every week, another report. Another panel. Another 47 recommendations that will be debated for another 17 months. We are performing diligence, not delivering homes. We’re drowning in data points and financial projections. We know the projected housing deficit for the next 7 years. We know the exact percentage of people aged 27 to 37 who will never own a home without massive state intervention. We treat housing as a macroeconomic balancing act, a spreadsheet problem solvable by tweaking coefficients, when it is fundamentally, irrevocably, a production problem.

The Museum Methods of Modern Building

I remember thinking, after reading a particularly impenetrable government summary last spring-the thing was 237 pages long-that we’d spent more on compiling the report than the average cost of laying the foundations for seven small apartments. That’s an exaggeration intended to convey the feeling of profound displacement of resources. We are world-class at diagnosing the symptoms while pretending the industrial body that should be building the cure is perfectly healthy.

The real bottleneck isn’t the political will (though that’s thin), or even the financing (though that’s volatile and inefficient). It’s the simple, brutal reality of how buildings are built. Traditional construction is site-dependent, weather-dependent, labor-intensive, sequential, and reliant on a complex, often adversarial supply chain that has barely evolved since the 1957 building boom. We mandate incredibly high standards of energy efficiency and build quality, which is fundamentally the right thing to do, but then insist on achieving them using methods that belong in a museum.

The Fear of Action

I’m prone to thinking this way-seeing systems break down because I used to work a short stint trying to manage logistics for a regional council’s recycling scheme. The sheer amount of wasted motion involved in anything large-scale and governmental is staggering. We were constantly having meetings to discuss why the truck routes were inefficient, instead of just sending out the damn trucks on the new, improved routes.

This paralyzing complexity gives us an out. We can blame ‘archaic zoning’ or ‘vulture funds,’ and those are real, corrosive problems, yes, absolutely. But they act as convenient smoke screens for the underlying structural incapacity of the building industry to scale up effectively. They divert attention from the industrial solution that is staring us in the face. A truly scaled-up, efficient construction sector is the ultimate antidote to volatility, because volume smooths out cost fluctuations and accelerates delivery.

Operational Reality

I spoke to Nora C.-P. last month. She’s a hazmat disposal coordinator, and the way she talked about managing dangerous, volatile materials was actually deeply instructive. She said, “You don’t solve a containment problem by having a better debate about the budget. You solve it by having better seals, better protocols, and better training. It’s an operational failure until it’s an operational fix.”

Nora’s world is about ruthless efficiency because the stakes are immediate. If she spends 17 meetings discussing the perfect shade of yellow for the safety suits, someone gets hurt. In housing, the stakes are social, diffuse, and delayed. So we indulge the policy debate. We engage in Productivity Theater.

The Engine vs. The Levers

Traditionalists fight it. They see factory production as cheap or temporary, forgetting that every high-quality, durable product we rely on-from cars to medical equipment-is manufactured in a controlled environment, not pieced together outside in the rain, relying on 47 different subcontractors showing up on time.

And I am guilty of this, too. I spent two years arguing against a specific land tax model, convinced that if we just got the financial incentives right, the construction would magically appear. I was so focused on the levers that I forgot the engine. I mistook the complexity of finance for the complexity of construction. The truth is, building a modern home is complicated, but assembling one from pre-engineered components is a predictable industrial process. It’s simpler. It just requires capital investment and a profound shift in mindset away from the site-based craft tradition.

I once found myself laughing, entirely inappropriately, at a funeral. It was during the eulogy… It was the sudden, jarring realization that even the most careful plans are just fragile blueprints against the overwhelming, chaotic reality of the world. Housing policy feels exactly like that meticulous planning-perfect in theory, entirely divorced from the unpredictable mess of actually acquiring materials, getting labor, and dealing with the inevitable 17 unforeseen site delays.

The Industrial Logic Demands Volume

This constant policy chatter is a form of collective procrastination. We are afraid of the scale of the industrial shift required, so we retreat into the familiar comfort of legislative text and economic forecasts. It’s easier to spend $777 million on infrastructure planning reports than it is to actually authorize 237 new high-volume production facilities. The former is a process; the latter is a commitment.

The fundamental industrial logic is this: you cannot solve a predictable, high-volume demand problem with an unpredictable, low-volume supply solution. You simply can’t. We need to treat construction like the manufacturing sector it should have become 47 years ago. We need to ask what industrial input is needed to deliver 27,007 homes next year, and then ensure that capacity exists.