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Catherine O’Hara has died at the age of 71, TMZ reports. (tmz.com/2026/01/30/cat…)

Latest in @CityJournal newsletter! New York needs a lot more new housing if rent-burdens are to come down, and both City Hall and the City Council need to do everything they can to enable large-scale, affordable development. Unfortunately, the do-gooder attitude that predominates in the city council results in bills that often undermine that goal. The latest is Int-0910, or the “Construction Justice Act”, which raises the compensation floor for workers on (city-funded) affordable housing projects to $40 / hour. The City Council passed the bill almost unanimously, and it is now law. Some might ask: “why would anyone oppose higher wages for workers?” Because, the above question ignores that resources, especially public funding for things like affordable housing, are scarce. It’s a 1:1 trade off: more housing OR higher compensation for construction workers (unless, higher pay is linked to higher productivity, which in this case it isn’t). In this case, politicians have chosen wages which exceed (“prevail over”) those which would otherwise have been voluntarily agreed between employers and employees, over more housing. It’s nothing short of a handout. Usually, wages rise alongside productivity: as workers gain experience and leverage capital (tools, equipment, etc.) they gain bargaining power and wages increase. But prevailing wage requirements like those just enacted push up pay without pushing up productivity. To recognize how absurd this is, consider that in most other industries you wouldn’t walk in on the first day and expect to be paid the same as workers with significantly more experience. Sure, it would be *nice* if everyone were paid $1,000 an hour, but again, since resources are scarce, the impersonal law of supply and demand usually does the best job in allocating labor. All of this pushes up costs: projects with prevailing wage requirements (usually publicly funded) cost 23% more to build. That 23% could instead have gone towards more housing (with workers having been paid the same, voluntarily agreed wage, as most other workers working for private firms). In this case, the city is paying and is only loosely accountable to voters (it’s hard to notice the housing that’s not being built for precisely the reason that… it wasn’t built), meaning they can get away with what is effectively a hand-out to the construction trades. In the end, it does all make a difference: New Yorkers pay some of the highest taxes in the country, we end up with less in our pockets, and we don’t even get what politicians promised (Mamdani’s campaign was built on a pledge of 200,000 new homes). Overcoming this type of unfocussed, “fix-everything” politics is the only way in which New York will be able to make progress in addressing key issues like housing affordability. #NewYorkCity #ConstructionJusticeAct Read the full piece here 🔽 go.adamlehodey.com/construction-j…