"Quantify bureaucratic costs before accepting them as fixed Most people assume that permitting delays and neighborhood opposition battles are just an unavoidable cost of development — but economists at MIT and Princeton measured the actual price. They found that in Los Angeles, developers pay 50% more for land that already has permits approved, and that the slow, messy permitting process accounts for roughly "a third of the construction costs of a project." Because the Squamish Nation controlled their own zoning, they bypassed this entirely and built three towers in three years — a pace Jacob Lewis called "crazy fast." Before accepting a slow, friction-filled process as the default, ask whether there is a structural workaround that eliminates the friction at the source. Source: Planet Money hosts citing MIT/Princeton research, Planet Money, The Squamish Nation's Economic Experiment"