Reading List 06/27/26
This edition covers Trump's refusal to sign a housing bill, the high cost of US-made doors, slowdowns in the trucking industry, and reasons behind the halt in creating new land development.
Background
Construction Physics is a Substack newsletter written by Brian Potter, a former physicist who now writes about the construction industry, infrastructure, and why building things in the US has become so slow and expensive. This "Reading List" is a regular roundup of links on that theme. The bullet "why we stopped making new land" refers to the decline of land reclamation (creating land by filling in water, e.g., in Boston or the Netherlands), which was once common but has largely stopped due to environmental regulations and costs. "Slow trucking" likely refers to bottlenecks and delays in freight transport. "US-made doors" is a concrete example of how domestic manufacturing regulations (like the Davis-Bacon Act or Buy American rules) can drive up costs for basic building components.