Reading List 08/08/2026
The Endangered Species Act and housing production, why it’s hard for LEGO to use 3D printing, robotic welding and shipbuilding, modular data centers, and more.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at the Endangered Species Act and housing production, why it’s hard for LEGO to use 3D printing, robotic welding and shipbuilding, modular data centers, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Housing
A paper by Max Tabarrok finds that the Endangered Species Act reduces housing construction by 10% in places near species’ listed habitats. Across the US, this works out to about a 4% reduction of total US housing stock. “In 1980, for example, 200 plant and animal species were listed as endangered or threatened and in 2025 there were 1,465 such listings. Each listed species has a distinct habitat. Thus, the growing list of protected habitats is a source of detailed variation in the intensity of land use regulation. This paper studies the effect of these regulations on housing construction. In a staggered difference-in-difference framework, exploiting 1,200+ species listings across the U.S. from 1980–2024, I find that the average treated place reduces its annual permit flows by 0.52 permits per thousand 1980 residents after a species listing, about 10% of the average annual flow.” [MTabarrok]
It’s been widely noted that people often pay a premium for access to good school districts. Elizabeth Warren, before she went full slopulist, wrote a book about this, and I noted in my look at build to rent housing that one benefit of build to rent is that it allows people to gain access to school districts that they otherwise couldn’t afford to live in. This cuts both ways though: if a good school near you closes, the value of your house might decline. “More than 1,000 public schools across 700 communities closed last year, according to new data—shuttering a prized neighborhood amenity and potentially putting nearby home values at risk.” [Realtor.com]
Manufacturing
Claims about why it would be hard for Lego to replace injection molding with 3D printing. “Even if you can get bricks that will mate the tolerances for clutch force, color accuracy, part durability, longevity, and more are so unbelievably tight…Polymer manufacturing has hard mode, expert mode, and then there is legendary god mode where LEGO delivers from on high. It is literally the pinnacle of what injection molding is capable of when held to standards like this.” [X]
Earlier this year we noted the risk of a chemical explosion at a California manufacturing facility. That manufacturer made commercial aircraft windows, and as a result there’s apparently now a looming shortage of them. “GKN Aerospace, one of the world’s biggest suppliers of cockpit and passenger windows, halted production in late May at its factory in suburban Los Angeles after an overheating tank raised fears of an explosion and prompted the evacuation of 50,000 nearby residents for several days.” [Reuters]
Automated factory startup Hadrian raises $1.37 billion in funding. [X]
Thanks to the on again, off again war with Iran, the US is apparently running low on long-range precision missiles. [Reuters]
Dylan Matthews argues that Trump’s suspension of the Jones Act (the much-reviled law that requires goods carried between US ports must be done on US-built ships) has created the opportunity to reform it. “But that a waiver actually went through this year, and has continued to be renewed, suggests the law’s critics are winning the intra-administration fight this time around. This makes 2026 perhaps the single most promising moment for meaningful Jones Act reform in decades. Durable reform, though, has to go through Congress, and will have to be bipartisan. It will also have to grapple seriously with what transitioning to a new regime looks like.” [Abundance & Growth]
As I note in my book, the best-quality iron ore in the US was mined out many years ago, and iron ore mined in the US needs to go through a process of “beneficiation,” which produces higher iron percentage pellets that can then be processed in a blast furnace. The US is apparently getting its first new iron pellet plant in almost 50 years, to produce pellets not for blast furnaces but for direct reduction in electric arc furnaces. [Industrial Sage]
Mariana Minerals raises $310 million in funding after restarting a shuttered US copper mine. [PRNewswire]