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When a Democrat contemplates their nations biggest problems today, minimum lot sizes in suburban housing codes probably dont rank very high on the list. After all, the US president is a reality star turned insurrectionist, whos ordering investigations of his political enemies, subverting court orders, gutting entire federal agencies, and fomenting a global trade war. To many liberals, this may not feel like a moment for turning inward and sweating the details of blue Americas permitting regulations.But a new book asks Democrats to do precisely that. In Abundance, journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson catalog American liberalisms failures to deliver material plenty the housing shortages that plague blue cities, the green infrastructure that Congressional Democrats funded but then failed to actually build, the high-speed rail system that California promised but never delivered. Klein and Thompson argue that these disappointments have a common source: Since the 1970s, American liberals have been more concerned with obstructing harmful economic development than promoting the beneficial kind. Democrats have prioritized process over outcomes and favored stasis over growth, most notably through their support for zoning restrictions, stringent environmental laws, and attaching costly conditions to public infrastructure spending. To revitalize American progressivism, they sketch an abundance agenda: a series of regulatory reforms and public investment programs aimed at facilitating higher rates of housing development, infrastructure construction, and technological progress. Klein and Thompson speak for a broader faction of abundance liberals, which encompasses the Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) movement, various pro-innovation think tanks, and scores of commentators. In addition to Abundance, the faction has recently produced two other books outlining its critique of American liberalisms evolution since the 1970s, Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman and Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum.It is surely true that blue states governance failures are not this moments most pressing crisis. But Democratic areas inability to avert cost-of-living crises or to build infrastructure on time and budget is a political liability for the party. Such mismanagement has not only called liberals competence into question, but also chased millions of people out of large blue states and into red ones over the past 10 years. California and New York have been shrinking while Florida and Texas have been growing trends that will make it much harder for Democrats to win the Electoral College or Congress after the 2030 census. Disempowering an increasingly authoritarian GOP should be Democrats top priority in 2025. But bringing abundant housing, energy, and infrastructure to blue states is conducive to that task. This makes Klein and Thompsons analysis politically relevant. Nevertheless, not everyone on the left buys what theyre selling. And Abundance has some real flaws. In their concern with winning over progressive skeptics, Klein and Thompson sometimes elide the genuine tradeoffs between their vision and progressive ideology. For example, while they lament the stifling impact of various environmental regulations on housing and clean energy construction, theyre cagey about precisely how, and how much, they want to change such laws. Rather than stating plainly that theyre willing to reduce regulatory obstacles to fossil fuel infrastructure for the sake of abetting the build-out of renewables a position Klein has endorsed in his New York Times column they argue that going into details about how environmental laws should be amended would be beside the point, since no individual law would solve all the problems they identify and What is needed here is a change in political culture, not just legislation. Such slipperiness may make Abundance more palatable to progressives, but also invites distrust. This said, much of the lefts criticism of abundance liberalism is off-base and unfair. One especially prominent charge is that the abundance agenda entails a retreat from the progressive movements commitments to economic justice and equality. In this account, Klein and Thompson want Democrats to stop catering to the particular needs of poor and working-class Americans through expansions of social welfare programs or labor regulations and start concentrating on maximizing economic growth. The New Yorkers Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes that the abundance movement views stagnation as a national emergency that requires liberals to sideline their quest for a Scandinavian-style social democracy. And he fears that the pursuit of Klein and Thompsons vision could yield a less equitable society.Wallace-Wells nevertheless endorses some aspects of the abundance agenda. Other critics are less measured. Dylan Gyauch-Lewis argues in the American Prospect that abundance liberals prize growth above all, and that their ideology is merely a repackaging of free-market dogma.Likewise, the Bafflers Alex Bronzini-Vender derides the abundance agenda as a Koch-funded initiative aimed at reversing the Democratic Partys skepticism of neoliberal orthodoxy.These criticisms are off-base in more ways than one. First, its simply not true that Klein and Thompson call on liberals to abandon welfare state expansion or to pursue growth at all costs. They explicitly state that redistribution is important their argument isnt that expanding the safety net is undesirable, but rather, that doing so is insufficient for maximizing ordinary Americans living standards. Further, Abundance argues that the federal government should play a larger role in managing the economy, so as to accelerate the development of socially valuable technologies and steer economic growth in an ecologically friendly direction. To say that Klein, Thompson, and other abundance liberals are free market dogmatists because they oppose some regulations is a bit like saying Joe Manchin is a Stalinist because he opposes Medicare cuts. But those who critique the abundance agenda on egalitarian grounds are making a more fundamental analytical error: Combating regulatory obstacles to housing construction, infrastructure, and energy production is not just compatible with prioritizing the interests of working-class Americans; it is synonymous with that task. An economic system biased toward scarcity and stagnation is one that serves the already comfortable better than the disadvantaged. The lefts suspicions of abundance liberalism are understandable. On a variety of fronts, Klein and Thompson call for paring back rules and regulations that are coded as progressive, in the name of abetting faster economic development. The left is used to denouncing this general proposition.Yet abundance liberals are not calling on Democrats to forsake genuinely progressive restrictions on production, such as the Clean Air Act or minimum wage, for the sake of maximizing GDP. Rather, they are imploring their party to judge regulations on the basis of results rather than vibes. Rules that ostensibly subordinate free markets to the public good but actually undermine ordinary Americans living standards are not worth defending.Why Democrats should make priority-setting a prioritySuch regulations fall into a few broad categories.One consists of seemingly progressive but ultimately counterproductive mandates appended to public spending. In recent decades, liberals have gotten accustomed to using government-funded projects as vehicles for delivering wins (however minor or symbolic) to their coalitions myriad stakeholders. Yet as Democratic legislators multiply the number of different causes a discrete project is supposed to serve, they often undermine their policys core purpose.San Franciscos approach to public housing is one of Abundances signature examples of this phenomenon. The Golden Gate City suffers from one of the highest homelessness rates in the United States. Increasing the supply of publicly subsidized housing should therefore be one of its governments priorities.Yet the citys public housing policy is not designed to maximize the number of affordable homes in San Francisco but rather, to build some affordable homes, while promoting small businesses, signaling concern for disabled people, improving the aesthetic quality of the citys architecture, increasing employment among local construction workers, and furthering a wide array of other liberal causes.The rules that San Francisco has attached to its affordable housing program may sound progressive on their face. The city reserves publicly subsidized housing contracts for small builders, in a bid to combat the power of big developers. It also requires public housing projects to pass a review by the Mayors Office of Disability and the San Francisco Arts Commission, hire locally, buy power from the citys public utility, and meet a panoply of other criteria. But each of these provisions increases the costs of construction. Prohibiting large contractors from building affordable homes leads to delays, as there are only so many small construction companies in the Bay Area and each has limited capacity, by definition. Ensuring that housing is accessible for the disabled is surely vital. Yet all housing projects in the United States must already be compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act; mandating an additional review by the San Francisco Mayors Office just adds a redundant layer of bureaucratic processing. And while pretty buildings are preferable to the alternative, when thousands of San Franciscans are going unhoused, architectural aesthetics should take a backseat to rapidly growing the affordable housing stock. Taken together, these little rules add tens of millions of dollars to the price of every affordable housing project in the city. The typical publicly subsidized apartment building in San Francisco takes more than 6 years to build and costs more than $600,000 per unit. By contrast, a private philanthropy in the city recently erected 145 studio apartments for the chronically homeless in three years, at a cost of just $400,000 per unit. This efficiency is derived largely from the fact that privately funded housing projects dont need to comply with as many requirements as public projects do. Saying that San Francisco should cut red tape in its affordable housing program may sound like a conservative sentiment. But in its actual effects, that red tape is reducing the supply of affordable housing while reinforcing the impression that the government cannot build things as competently as the private sector. These do not seem like progressive outcomes.The progressive case for a freer housing marketAbundance liberals tell a similar story about zoning restrictions. American municipalities in general and Democratic ones in particular heavily restrict the types of housing that the private sector can build. It is illegal to construct anything but a detached single-family home on roughly 75 percent of Americas residential land. Local laws add various other cost-increasing limitations on housing development, from large minimum lot sizes to parking mandates to design requirements. The progressive case against restrictive zoning is straightforward: Affluent suburbs use single-family zoning to keep out working-class families, who might be able to afford an apartment in their municipalities but cant shoulder the expense of a large house with a yard.More broadly, making it illegal to build multi-family housing in most of the country ensures scarcity. According to some estimates, America has 4.5 million fewer homes than its people require. This shortage increases the value of our nations existing housing stock which is good for homeowners and landlords but bad for renters. A policy that benefits those who own property at the expense of those who dont is regressive by any definition.Many progressives have accepted the force of this argument. But some further to the left still disdain the push to liberalize zoning laws. And their aversion to that project is not difficult to understand. The idea that one of Americas biggest economic problems can be mitigated by loosening restrictions on free enterprise is ideologically unpalatable for many.Bronzini-Venders essay in the Baffler well illustrates many leftists allergy to this argument. In it, he argues that abundance liberals are selling the public a fiction: Unleashing homebuilders from zoning regulations would increase Americans living standards, since the private sector would supply more goods at lower costsif only it could.He suggests this simply is not plausible and betrays a deep misunderstanding of capitalist production: Firms do not want prices to fall as that would erode their profit margins, so they will choke off production long before it starts substantially increasing affordability. There are a few problems with this reasoning. The first is empirical. Capitalist production has, in fact, routinely yielded more goods at lower costs. Since 2000, the prices of durable consumer goods in the US have fallen by roughly 25 percent.And in the realm of housing specifically, zoning reforms have led to increased production and greater affordability. In Minneapolis, the lifting of various zoning restrictions in 2018 was followed by a surge in housing construction and a decline in the citys median rent: Adjusted for local earnings, a home in Minneapolis was 20 percent cheaper in 2023 than it had been in 2017. In New Zealand, the city of Aucklands experiment with zoning liberalization yielded similar results.The second problem with Bronzini-Venders argument is theoretical. It assumes that the only way capitalist competition can yield lower prices is by forcing companies to accept lower profit margins. And since developers do not want their profits to fall, he reasons that they will tacitly collude to limit housing production, irrespective of zoning laws.This is not a sound economic analysis. If you reduce how much it costs to produce a unit of housing by legalizing apartment buildings or eliminating expensive regulatory requirements then developers can charge lower prices while keeping their margins constant. Further, firms can outcompete each other on price without forfeiting profitability if they increase their productivity. Durable goods have not become cheaper over the past quarter century because manufacturers and retailers have become more altruistic or less profitable, but rather because theyve increased the amount of stuff they can supply per worker hour. (Some of this productivity increase is the result of outsourcing production to low-wage countries, but much of it is from innovations in production and logistics.)One surprising thingThe National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires the federal government to draft statements analyzing the environmental impacts of its decisions. When the law was first enacted, these statements were as short as 10 pages. Today, the average one is 600 pages long.As Klein and Thompson note, between 1935 and 1970, construction productivity steadily rose in the US. But over the past half-century, it has actually fallen. Zoning reform could plausibly reverse that trend by making it easier to mass produce sections of housing in factories, a process known as modular construction; as is, in order to conform with housing regulations, builders typically need to construct homes almost entirely onsite. Mere deregulation will not ensure universal housing affordability. It will never be profitable to provide housing to low-income people, in the absence of public subsidies. And the private sector is liable to underproduce housing for middle-income people as well. The government can help fill in these gaps by creating public developers, which build market-rate housing and then reinvest their proceeds into new construction (the left flank of the abundance movement has been popularizing the public developer model for years now). Nevertheless, the private sector could produce far more housing than it does, were it not for regulatory restrictions. A freer housing market would therefore make America richer and more equal. This fact may make some progressives uncomfortable. But defending our favorite ideological abstractions should not take precedence over improving peoples lives.Not all environmental regulations are worth defendingMost controversially, abundance liberals argue that some environmental regulations are undermining shared prosperity, trust in government, and the green transition.Their complaint is not with environmental laws that directly constrain pollution, such as the Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act. The issue lies primarily with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and its state-level equivalents. NEPA does not actually ban any pollutant or set any specific constraints on industrial production. Rather, the law mandates a process: Federal bureaucracies need to consider the environmental impact of their decisions, and draft statements outlining those impacts. As Dunkelman explains, the law was intended merely to encourage government agencies to contemplate ecological concerns before greenlighting various projects, not to reduce their autonomy over such decisions. But activist lawyers took an expansive interpretation of the statute: In their view, if the governments environmental impact statement underestimated the ecological implications of a given project, then private citizens and community groups could sue to block that project in court. And a series of judicial rulings enshrined this interpretation of the law. Many states proceeded to draft their own versions of NEPA, some of which applied its requirements to private projects as well as public ones. The effect was to render economic development of all kinds slower and more expensive. To ward off litigation, governments were forced to make their environmental impact statements lengthy and exhaustive: When the law was first enacted, those statements were as short as 10 pages. In 2022, the average one ran 600 pages long and took four and a half years to complete. And once completed, those statements still need to make it through a legal gauntlet before the ground on a given project can actually be broken. All this has made building infrastructure in the US radically more expensive. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the cost of building a mile of interstate highway in America tripled. Mass transit was similarly impacted. It cost New York $2.6 billion to construct each mile of its Second Avenue Subway. By contrast, at around the same time, social democratic Copenhagen built a rail line for just $323 million per mile, and Paris built one for $320 million per mile.NEPA and its state-level equivalents also inhibit housing construction: In Berkeley, California, locals delayed the building of new undergraduate dorms through a three-year-long lawsuit, in which they argued that the project violated the California Environmental Quality Act, since enabling more college students to live in Berkeley would increase noise pollution. This state of affairs undermines trust in the public sectors competence, while making infrastructure and housing more expensive, raising tax burdens, and slowing economic growth.The Democratic Partys complacency about these outcomes bespeaks an insensitivity to working-class priorities and interests. According to some leftwing narratives, Democrats took an ideological turn in the 1970s, one that led them to sacrifice the interests of blue-collar Americans to the pursuit of growth at all costs. But on some policy fronts, this gets the story backward. Democrats became less committed to economic growth in the seventies, largely because they started prioritizing educated middle-class peoples ideological and quality-of-life concerns over the material interests of working people. The environmental movement of the 1970s was overwhelmingly comprised of economically comfortable college graduates, many of whom regarded economic growth as undesirable and unsustainable, a position rejected by the vast majority of working-class voters. As political scientist Ronald Inglehart showed, blue-collar Americans were much less likely than their more affluent compatriots to prioritize environmental concerns over economic ones. And working-class voters priorities were well-founded: The costs of a regulatory system biased toward stasis and scarcity are more burdensome for those who do not yet enjoy material security than for those who do. As civil rights icon and trade unionist Bayard Rustin lamented in 1976, the vanguard of the environmental movement, themselves members largely of the upper classes, have often sought policies that are clearly detrimental, and in some casesthe growth controversy being the most significant exampledestructive to the needs of those less better off.Many of the environmental movements achievements were laudable, and greatly improved and extended the lives of ordinary Americans. And the harms of NEPA arent all attributable to earnest environmentalists: Well-heeled interests have exploited the law to obstruct all manner of economic development. Yet refusing to pare back the scope of NEPA and similar laws in light of such abuse was a choice one that constrained economic opportunity and diminished the federal governments capacity to build public works.What makes NEPA and its ilk particularly perverse in the present moment, however, is that they are making Americas greatest ecological challenge climate change more difficult to meet. The reason for this is simple: Building a clean energy economy requires constructing gargantuan amounts of new infrastructure (vast solar installations, wind farms, transmission lines, and geothermal plants, among other things). Maintaining a carbon economy, by contrast, requires building scarcely any, since the existing energy system is built around the needs and capacities of fossil fuels. A regulatory regime that favors the status quo is therefore one that favors fossil fuels. As of 2021, NEPA reviews were holding up twice as many green projects as carbon energy ones. According to an analysis cited by Klein and Thompson, 95 percent of energy projects that are looking to connect to the grid but which are as yet obstructed by permitting consist of solar, battery storage, or wind power.The abundance agenda is a starting pointPro-growth deregulatory policies are not sufficient for achieving shared prosperity. Indeed, such proposals arent even adequate for realizing Klein and Thompsons vision for abundance, which also entails increasing government funding for technological development, among other things. But loosening some regulatory restrictions on housing and infrastructure development would directly advance many progressive economic goals while indirectly making it easier to expand the social welfare state. After all, higher economic growth translates into higher government revenues, which can then be redistributed to the economically disadvantaged. The abundance agenda is also compatible with increasing workers bargaining power through sectoral bargaining (even as there exist some genuine conflicts between the narrow interests of discrete unions and the achievement of material plenty). Abundance is directed at a progressive audience and aimed at winning an argument internal to blue America. In the current moment, this may strike some readers as myopic. Even if all progressives decided tomorrow to prioritize making it easier for the federal government to do big things, Elon Musk would still be gutting its capacity to execute its most basic functions. Even if permitting issues werent stymying the green transition, Donald Trump would be. And Klein and Thompson do not fully grapple with the challenge that the GOPs radicalization poses to their ambitions. Much of the abundance agenda is aimed at increasing the administrative states power, at the expense of the judiciarys. This strikes me as indispensable for realizing liberalisms long-term goals. But today, it would entail giving Trump and Musk an even freer hand to reshape government to their reactionary whims.Nevertheless, abundance liberalism remains relevant. The MAGA movement is not the reason why New York cant build enough housing, California cant build high-speed rail, and Massachusetts cant build a transmission line between its cities and Quebecs hydropower plants. Democrats have full control of government in some of Americas largest and wealthiest states. They have the power to prove that they can deliver rising living standards and falling costs for ordinary people. There are many reasons why blue states have had such limited success on these fronts. But one is that progressives have not mounted a unified front against zoning restrictions that help landlords gouge tenants, environmental laws that enable rich NIMBYs to block renewable energy, and liberal policies that seek to advance so many disparate priorities that they end up achieving none. With any luck, Abundance will bring us a little closer to such a consensus.See More:
