Abundance for Whom?

Kudos to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson for pointing out that states and cities ruled by Democrats continue to demonstrate their failure to get anything built—even as they continue to insist that they are dead set on solving the “housing crisis” and the “climate crisis.”

In their new book, Abundance, California comes in for an outsized—and deserved—share of the blame. The state has expended over $20 billion on a train to nowhere with nary a mile of track completed. The city’s budget to build one public toilet on a pre-plumbed pad in an existing San Francisco city park topped $1.7 million. Government fees to build a single apartment in San Francisco top $150,000. And the cost of building one small apartment for a low income household in Silicon Valley and the westside of Los Angeles routinely exceeds $1 million (more than $900 per square feet).

Business as usual in California means delays measured in decades (including lawsuits that can be filed by anyone against anything for any reason), and an “Everything Bagel” regulatory regime that denies, then delays, and then adds multiple millions in fees and mandates to every housing, energy, infrastructure, and industrial project that endures the indefinite torture and actually gets approved. As a result, California had no “shovel ready” clean energy, infrastructure, or advanced manufacturing and chip facilities ready to begin construction when the Biden administration was doling out billions to the mostly red states that actually got their act together and issued permits to build.

Meanwhile between 2019 and 2024, California tax collections rose by 58% from $140B to $222B, and the state’s employee roster expanded by 58,000 – even though the state’s population decreased by more than half a million people. State employees do not teach school, or provide health care outside prisons. They don’t build housing or factories or solar farms. But they can look forward to a pension that pays 90% of their salary and guaranteed deluxe health care for the multiple decades between retirement and life expectancy.

In their defense, California’s ruling progressives have achieved “abundance” in a few categories. We have the nation’s highest poverty rate, the highest homeless rate, and a million people without safe drinking water in their home. This is the deep dysfunction that Abundance argues must be corrected by Democrats (and the socialist left) to regain any semblance of voter trust in deep blue states like California if they wish to build a lasting governing majority nationally.

So thank you Klein and Thompson for pointing out that the Democrats’ policy choices, fetishization of regulatory proceduralism, and failure to make housing, energy and the cost of living affordable to working households, has been a governance catastrophe—and for urging Democrats to actually prove the party is still committed to the working class by getting stuff done (and built).

But the ugly elitist underbelly of Abundance, in what I hope is just version 1.0, is that it only seems to apply to those of us who live in cities, can afford renewable electricity and electric vehicles, or are content to get around by bike or bus. Klein and Thompson, like many YIMBYs, swoon about the joys of city life as the launching pads of upward mobility, as capitals of arts and culture, as pantheons for smart people who dine, drink, and complain about daycare costs, schooling costs, public safety, and the need for deeper income redistribution. I get it: been there, done that.

But nowhere in Abundance is there even a passing wave to those who choose not to live in city centers, who want to be able to buy a detached, single family home, and who don’t want to share a wall, sound, ride or odors with their neighbors—or find cities claustrophobic or dirty or unsafe or annoying or just not what they prefer for themselves and their families.

I grew up in a factory town, not a city. Like many of my upwardly-mobile peers, I went to college and then graduate school, and chose to live in a “city,” Berkeley, that is actually dominated by suburban-scale densities and single family homes. Those homes are entirely unaffordable to median income families—as are the higher density small rental apartments that California’s infill-only progressive urbanists prescribe as the only sanctioned solution to the housing crisis.

Of course, part of the housing solution is building a lot more housing, including small high priced rentals and taxpayer-funded “affordable” units for low income residents in high-demand cities. But another part of the housing solution is building housing that people can afford to buy in places that they want to live. And for a lot of Americans, that means towns, suburbs, and rural communities.

So my question for the Abundance movement is this: is Abundance for you and your urbanist college-educated friends, and perhaps the plumber, teacher and driver you and your friends interact with on occasion and whom you appear to think should be content with renting a small apartment and riding the bus? Or is Abundance for all Americans—from both parties or neither—including those who choose not to live in high density areas, who wish to buy a home and build the intergenerational wealth that created the American middle class?

Because one thing we know from decades of experience, everywhere in the world, is that containment policies that allow new housing only within the existing urban footprint, in any area experiencing significant population and economic growth, have four unambiguous consequences: housing supplies fall short of demand, prices increase, the lowest cost land is converted to higher density housing, and those living in lower cost neighborhoods are displaced.

And even if the Abundance movement can succeed in building more housing in more places, it must also contend with the increasing cost of everything else, especially energy. It’s no coincidence that Democratic states with the most wind and solar, and the most electric vehicles, also have the highest electricity and gasoline costs. That is because these technologies are not yet ready to be the backbone of our electricity or transportation systems. Democrats - my party - have continually endeavored through mandates, regulations, and taxes to increase the cost of fossil energy-based electricity and transportation, and to force a shift toward costly intermittent sources of electricity and electric vehicles with limited power and range.

These technologies can’t supply 24/7 electricity to our homes, can’t meet the transportation needs of many households and businesses, and certainly can’t supply enough power for industrial facilities from the most advanced manufacturing to the simplest seasonal food processing. So instead, places like California have effectively built two electrical grids. One is powered by wind and solar, is supposed to save us from climate change, and, sometimes, for a few hours on a sunny spring day meets all of the state’s electricity demand. The other is powered by natural gas, nuclear energy, and hydroelectric power and actually keeps the lights on most of the time. Unsurprisingly, it costs substantially more to build, maintain, and operate two often redundant electrical energy infrastructure systems at the same time than one.

Similarly, California and other Democratic states have increased the cost of driving conventional cars and trucks - with direct consumer costs through tolls, registration fees, gas taxes, cap and trade programs, and indirect costs through regulatory mandates on tankers, ports, production, and refineries. The state has heavily subsidized and otherwise incentivized electric vehicles and charging. The result has been that upper income households increasingly own both electric and internal combustion vehicles. Big companies with large fleets have also begun to switch to electric delivery and service vehicles. But low and middle income households, small business owners, and everyone else just end up paying the tab.

Klein and Thompson do get it right when they say that Abundance requires prosperity, and prosperity creates the economic and political foundation for tackling tough issues like climate change and income inequality. But that requires “all of the above” strategies that create much more housing, both in and outside the urban core without endless bureaucratic procedures and vetocracy lawsuits. It requires abundant and affordable energy, which today and well into the future will likely have to include natural gas and petroleum fuels while we work to scale up clean technologies where we can and develop better ones where we need them.

If Abundance is limited exclusively to coastal urbanists and climatists, then Klein, Thompson, and Democrats didn’t hear—or chose not to hear—the November 2024 vote, or the massive rightward swings from Latinos, Blacks, younger voters, non-college educated voters, and suburban and rural voters who cannot afford (or choose not to occupy) city life.

It’s not too late for a nascent Abundance movement to acknowledge its urbanist bias. Failing to do so will prolong rather than repair the chasm of distrust the majority of Americans have for Democrats, the cities and states they run, and their policy choices, from housing to energy to education to public safety to drug abuse to immigration.

Klein and Thompson are plenty smart, and have offered an important corrective to a modern liberalism overdosed on environmental extremism, public interest proceduralism, and anti-capitalism. But we all live in our own bubbles. As my Dad used to remind me every month or so, “for being so smart you sure can be stupid sometimes.” He was right about that and so was the American public in their November 2024 rebuke to other “smart” people.

The simple fact is that neither Democrats nor the Abundance movement can succeed unless they offer solutions for the great majority of Americans who live in suburbs, exurbs, and rural communities, don’t have fancy college degrees, and don’t work in or for the keyboard economy.

Jennifer Hernandez is an environmental and land-use lawyer and Breakthrough Institute Board Member.