How to meaningfully build on the newest buzzword in policy and politics
For those feeling lost on the left, a light is flickering in the darkness. It’s called abundance. Want to fight authoritarianism? Build lives people can afford, unlike what America is doing today — or, more ominously, unlike what Weimar Germany did during the hyperinflation of the 1920s. Want to help the working class? Build lots of working-class housing, unlike the trickle of new, often luxury housing we see underway in New York and California. Want clean energy, better mass transit, universal broadband and ubiquitous EV charging stations? Build them all, unlike what we did under President Biden, which was to pass extraordinary bipartisan federal legislation to fund them, but without the streamlined means to quickly deliver them locally.
If President Trump wants to drill baby drill, a movement is coalescing that wants to build baby build. Many progressives, still in shock from November, need to stop believing that everyone who voted differently than them are craven misogynist racists. A lot of people, including those in over 200 counties that voted twice for Obama before they voted for Trump in 2016, are desperate for tangible results that improve their lives. Addressing their needs is not only long overdue, it could be the calling that shifts our national politics.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are making a version of this argument in their new book, “Abundance.” But the literature around abundance is suddenly now, well, abundant. There is Marc Dunkelman’s more philosophical volume, “Why Nothing Works — Who Killed Progress and How to Bring it Back,” Yoni Applebaum’s controversial writings, and the widespread works of Jerusalem Demsas, who brings some much-needed diversity to the group. The Atlantic has made itself the epicenter of this movement, which has clearly reached the ears of new leaders like the searingly articulate Massachusetts congressman Jake Auchincloss. Nonprofits such as Open New York have formed around the abundance agenda nationwide, representing youth activism for policies such as deregulating housing production to meet the needs of the next generation.
I’ve advocated along similar lines for well over a decade, but in this case, the phoenix of “abundance” arose from the ashes of the pandemic — an agenda intended to counter the right’s advocacy of austerity, scarcity and all that Hobbes believed in terms of individuals fighting over the scraps of a resource-constrained, zero-sum, Malthusian world — a world so fraught that might must make right.
While the right primarily focuses on the prerogatives of power, the left primarily focuses on the protections of process.
Abundance emerges partly as a reaction to the often racially-charged grievances of today’s GOP: Can’t afford rent? It’s because migrants are stealing your housing. Social Security going bankrupt? It’s because “welfare queens” are stealing your money. The local factory shut down? It’s because foreigners are stealing your jobs. Forget our topsy-turvy taxation that famously allows billionaire Warren Buffett to pay a lower tax rate than his assistant Debbie Bosanek — it’s the shiny ball threat of thievery by the other, against which you must bear arms.
But it’s also a reaction to the bureaucratic forces on the left that have so slowed down government that it sometimes takes a decade or more to approve and build projects that communities actively support, such as my own affordable housing work in East New York. Reform will be difficult to accomplish. Going after even the most obviously problematic regulations, such as lengthy, costly and unsustainable environmental impact reports, will not happen overnight.
While the right primarily focuses on the prerogatives of power, the left primarily focuses on the protections of process. It is no shock then that the primary detractors of the abundance movement come from the far left — who, like the far right, excel at criticizing everyone but themselves.
Despite these naysayers, the abundance movement largely gets things right in terms of the critiques it poses and the solutions it proposes. Still, it would benefit from more knowledge and nuance. For a group of authors so focused on building, they rarely seem to speak to builders who know firsthand what the obstacles are.
Those of us on the frontlines of efforts to create new workforce housing, build climate resilience or fix dilapidated infrastructure like Penn Station might have a suggestion or two, not only about the how but the who and the what.
The hardest part of this debate is having to jettison the 20th-century binary of regulation versus deregulation.
We understand, for example, that the NIMBY vs. YIMBY debate is an oversimplified caricature. I count among many of my dearest friends preservationists who have fought hard to maintain the character of our historic fabric, and I find those who lampoon that movement as the main obstacle to housing production to be wildly ill-informed. Sure, a few zealots take the protections too far, wanting to save gas stations in SoHo to prevent new housing, for instance — but from my experience, to frame preservation or other reasonable safeguards against bad development as the source of the scarcity problem writ large is to fiddle while Rome burns. We are asking to build in people’s communities, and we need to do so with both more respect and with higher standards than the chain-store widgets the development community too often promulgates. Quality is as much the problem as quantity.
And as the debate evolves, we need to go beyond polemics. In my experience, the hardest part of this debate is having to jettison the 20th-century binary of regulation versus deregulation. Could we perhaps focus upon free regulation, meaning reforming government regulations such that they help produce the freedoms of abundance such as affordable housing and reliable transit? This would demand that we test the merits of regulations not only by what they protect us from, but by what they produce for us — it demands evaluating government not only by the harms it averts, but also by the public goods it advances. Klein, Thompson and the others do pay attention to these matters, but they demand more study and strategizing to get us from idea to implementation.
When it comes to building, quality is as much the problem as quantity.
How do we pay for abundance? The answer to this is far simpler than we admit: Abundance begets abundance, as former New York City Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff has long argued. He cites the fact that the City’s budget consistently increases as its population grows because through hard work, innovation and entrepreneurialism, new residents bring more tax revenue than they cost in terms of public services. Neither the right, which tends to argue for austerity, nor the left, which tends to be anti-growth, understands this virtuous cycle well.
Left, center, right — I wish these were all driving instructions rather than political monikers. We need to build not for the sake of growth, but for the sake of people in need across the political spectrum. Yes, we need to build an affordable world smartly, beautifully and cost-effectively, with ecologically advanced materials, employing the adaptive reuse of existing buildings where possible, in conjunction with improvements to the social infrastructure of transit, schools, healthcare, parks, and public safety. Once such meritorious characteristics are demonstrated to the government, it should get out of the way. The devil is in the demonstration of course: Who assesses such merits, through what process, and for how long? To me this is the central challenge of traditional left-leaning government, which today almost always advocates for more stakeholders, more process and more time, which in turn leads to the limited, extraordinarily expensive outcomes we see in New York and San Francisco.
That era must come to an end because the lack of results for people in need has come home to roost for everyday people nationwide. These are the swing voters who determine our elections, not the hardcore base of either party. If elections keep going the way of 2024, it will not bode well for those who want cultural and environmental progress, those who want Americans to be freer from scarcity and those who want to move towards a new light. But a different outcome depends not only on different rhetoric, but on different and better results, and that is now on all of us to build.