Great post! I think the outcome vs process split is a very accurate description, but also allows for other policies to aid in fixing the problems that are focused on by the Abundance movement. As some other comments mentioned, there may be issues with hard costs from construction supplier monopolies, this means that there is room to include anti-monopolists in an outcome-focused policy framework. If the goal is to lower housing costs, we can both reduce process hurdles and target upstream monopoly power. The groups that should still be excluded are ones pushing for policies hampering healthy (intervention needed for unhealthy ones) market dynamics and benefitting specific groups over the average constituent.
Absolutely, well said. Abundance thinking doesn’t solve all problems or even try to, but it provides a useful set of tools to help solve many problems. Solving consolidation in the construction industry may require not just classical anti-trust but training a new class of contractors, developers, bankers able to invest and build smaller-scale projects. Abundance doesn’t (yet) solve any of that! But it is a prerequisite for any solution to work
It's less a civil war than a rout. I've listened to lots of purported dialogue between Klein/Thompson and their self-professed critics. The critics have uniformly embarrassed themselves. I don't think Zephyr Teachout read the book (or, if she did, it casts doubt on her ability to comprehend a pretty basic argument). Sam Seder repeated "big money" like a malfunctioning chatbot who couldn't grasp that perhaps you can't build a coherent policy agenda by measuring up where the "big money" goes and taking the opposite side.
The next smart critique of Abundance that I read will be the first. I'm more than open to them, but what they've done with spectacular success is convinced me that the self-proclaimed progressives are not serious people who have thoughtful policy ideas, but rather an internet comment section come to life.
It’s a civil war in the sense that no matter how what happens in arguments among pundits and intellectuals, anti-abundance ideas still hold a lot of sway in the party itself. Abundance thinking hasn’t yet transformed how most Dems govern in practice
Unrelated, Charles Marohn had a smart critique about the dangers of top down federal power vs bottom up local power. I largely disagreed with it bc the political incentives for local govs are too anti-growth, so state preemption and federal guidance seem essential to scale political change. But he was a lot more coherent than any anti-abundance lefty I’ve read.
That does sound like it at least engages with the argument. And there's something to that on a macro level. But the standard arguments against local power nevertheless apply-- local interests tend to be provincial and entrenched, and sometimes you need policy experts to jar those interests loose. It's also needed to fight a local power asymmetry: existing homeowners who don't want the value of their houses to go down in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, etc. have a ton of visible power. Renters, both existing and prospective, who want to move to a place but can't find anywhere to live, or who are looking for a place to move their growing middle-class (and working class) families don't have much sway, and also really aren't persuaded by the somewhat esoteric argument that building luxury high rises will, in an indirect way, drive down their own rents.
Chris Hughes, who also has a book out recently (Marketcrafters -- it's good!) has said he thinks the book pays less attention to market structure issues, rather than process regulations, than it should have. In a recent interview Ezra did with Roman Mars, he actually acknowledged that -- towards the end Mars asks him what he would change about the book, and he says he thinks the housing chapter should've discussed how housing is financed, and how "hard costs" have increased due to consolidation in the supply chain to homebuilders.
If you can get past the kind of aesthetic critique here, I think the detailed history of how Dallas / Fort Worth has become less-affordable over time makes a good case that the anti-competitive coordination between banks and big homebuilders, and the disappearance of regional Savings & Loan financiers, have helped to crush small developers who might otherwise compete with the bigger players.
Perhaps. Is there evidence that lack of financing has been a constraint on home building? And I think that doesn’t really have any explanatory power when it comes to the gap in the cost of construction between, say, Texas and California.
And it has no explanatory power when it comes to explaining why it costs government so much to build period (and so much more than the private sector comparatively)— the government isn’t reliant on financial institutions to finance construction.
So it may have some truth to it, but it doesn’t seem to address the core issues.
I agree that it's not a good diagnosis for the superstar cities like SF and NYC. But it's something to keep an eye on. Nolan Gray -- who's no slouch when it comes to criticizing local regulation of land use -- has suggested that we should think of the US as having a few distinct housing crises.
Interlocking relationships between finance and builders appears to play a role in the "housing choice crisis", where land and materials get directed to a narrower range of standardized housing "products", than we'd get with more fine-grained development by a larger number of small participants. That is: certain housing types (especially the SFHs and Texas Donut type apartment buildings) have become more legible and fungible to the financial system, and that leads to them having relatively lower finance costs. Missing middle types are missing in part because they feel weird and risky to the people making construction loans.
I’ve seen variations of this argument. It’s mostly true so far as it goes, but it’s also not particularly conceptually difficult. Like the issue with very poor people being unable to afford housing in very poor places isn’t a housing crisis— it’s a problem of poverty. You can fix that by giving very poor people money to buy housing. Problem solved.
That’s also pretty much the third problem that post cites— if people can only afford housing in undesirable areas, the issue is that those areas are undesirable, not that housing isn’t affordable. Fact is, we shouldn’t much care where mega rich people live— they’ll be fine no matter what. It’d be nice if we could integrate self-segregated areas, but that’s not a housing cost issue; it’s an income/wealth inequality issue. The solution there is to make those areas better— build out transit so that it can take people from where housing is affordable to where jobs are, invest in social services to make those areas more attractive, etc.
Classifying that as a housing cost issue isn’t really useful. And that’s my critique of that post altogether— it conflates poverty/inequality issues with housing issues. The two are distinct and have a very different set of policy solutions.
Teachout appeared not to have read the book. Seder somehow couldn't grasp that sometimes there are people with money who are at odds with each other, and you can't explain every problem by figuring out who has the most money and doing the opposite of what they want.
It's so annoying how people try to claim YIMBY is the right-wing position and NIMBY is the left-wing position, they are really just totally uncorrelated. Particularly frustrating how a bunch of oligarch money is now flowing into the "Abundance" movement with the goal of using it as a tool to attack the left: https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/welcomefest/
Sort of unrelated but Texas actually had an organized YIMBY group in 2013, before the YIMBY brand existed (AURA, in Austin). I’m working on a piece about how YIMBY groups formed spontaneously around the country even before the YIMBY brand emanated from CA
That said Austin is a very blue city. Lefties can and should (and often do!) claim some stake in YIMBY’s origins
Movement capture will always be a risk. At the same time, a strong abundance movement may need funding from a range of sources. The Dems must build institutions to rival the conservative movement. A Federalist Society and a Heritage Foundation, but for lefties
Hi Jeremy. I wanted to mention another issue that is scrambling political alliances and winding its way through the legislature and the California courts at the same time. The bill is AB882, which is an attempt to get out ahead of a case pending in the California Supreme Court. The issue is whether a court can make electronic recordings of court proceedings, and it pits unionized court reporters (who want to prohibit or minimize recordings) against advocates for low-income litigants (who want the option of electronic recordings to be available). I summarize the dispute and criticize the California legislature here: https://www.dailyjournal.com/article/385571-the-failure-of-the-california-legislature-to-provide-access-to-courts-of-appeal
I feel like this used to just be the left right axis of normal politics but because of Dem hegemony in CA we need Republican flavored dems - at least in the economic sense - (moderate/abundance) to actually fix the problems caused by Lefty-Dems in the late 20th century like the environmental movement, NIMBYism, sprawl, etc.
These issues have always cut across partisan lines in interesting ways. Ronald Regan signed the California Environmental Quality Act into law in the 70s, CA’s Republican strongholds like Huntington Beach fight state housing law as vigorously as any other city today. TX and FL have been better on infill in the last few years but they also both build a ton of sprawl. The unsustainable infrastructure burden will catch up to them in 20 years just like it has CA
Abundance ideas are a sort of third rail beyond traditional party politics. Dems of all stripes (and Republicans too) should embrace making the government more efficient, not just bigger or smaller
I think the problem with essentially the entire “center left wonk” movement is that it wants solutions from decades ago when the coasts weren’t deep blue one party states where the real election is the primary and the groups control the primary. Basically, they want republicans to save them from their own “allies” but there aren’t enough republicans left in these areas.
Great post! I think the outcome vs process split is a very accurate description, but also allows for other policies to aid in fixing the problems that are focused on by the Abundance movement. As some other comments mentioned, there may be issues with hard costs from construction supplier monopolies, this means that there is room to include anti-monopolists in an outcome-focused policy framework. If the goal is to lower housing costs, we can both reduce process hurdles and target upstream monopoly power. The groups that should still be excluded are ones pushing for policies hampering healthy (intervention needed for unhealthy ones) market dynamics and benefitting specific groups over the average constituent.
Absolutely, well said. Abundance thinking doesn’t solve all problems or even try to, but it provides a useful set of tools to help solve many problems. Solving consolidation in the construction industry may require not just classical anti-trust but training a new class of contractors, developers, bankers able to invest and build smaller-scale projects. Abundance doesn’t (yet) solve any of that! But it is a prerequisite for any solution to work
It's less a civil war than a rout. I've listened to lots of purported dialogue between Klein/Thompson and their self-professed critics. The critics have uniformly embarrassed themselves. I don't think Zephyr Teachout read the book (or, if she did, it casts doubt on her ability to comprehend a pretty basic argument). Sam Seder repeated "big money" like a malfunctioning chatbot who couldn't grasp that perhaps you can't build a coherent policy agenda by measuring up where the "big money" goes and taking the opposite side.
The next smart critique of Abundance that I read will be the first. I'm more than open to them, but what they've done with spectacular success is convinced me that the self-proclaimed progressives are not serious people who have thoughtful policy ideas, but rather an internet comment section come to life.
It’s a civil war in the sense that no matter how what happens in arguments among pundits and intellectuals, anti-abundance ideas still hold a lot of sway in the party itself. Abundance thinking hasn’t yet transformed how most Dems govern in practice
Unrelated, Charles Marohn had a smart critique about the dangers of top down federal power vs bottom up local power. I largely disagreed with it bc the political incentives for local govs are too anti-growth, so state preemption and federal guidance seem essential to scale political change. But he was a lot more coherent than any anti-abundance lefty I’ve read.
That does sound like it at least engages with the argument. And there's something to that on a macro level. But the standard arguments against local power nevertheless apply-- local interests tend to be provincial and entrenched, and sometimes you need policy experts to jar those interests loose. It's also needed to fight a local power asymmetry: existing homeowners who don't want the value of their houses to go down in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, etc. have a ton of visible power. Renters, both existing and prospective, who want to move to a place but can't find anywhere to live, or who are looking for a place to move their growing middle-class (and working class) families don't have much sway, and also really aren't persuaded by the somewhat esoteric argument that building luxury high rises will, in an indirect way, drive down their own rents.
Chris Hughes, who also has a book out recently (Marketcrafters -- it's good!) has said he thinks the book pays less attention to market structure issues, rather than process regulations, than it should have. In a recent interview Ezra did with Roman Mars, he actually acknowledged that -- towards the end Mars asks him what he would change about the book, and he says he thinks the housing chapter should've discussed how housing is financed, and how "hard costs" have increased due to consolidation in the supply chain to homebuilders.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/629-build-interrupted-conversation-ezra-klein/
If you can get past the kind of aesthetic critique here, I think the detailed history of how Dallas / Fort Worth has become less-affordable over time makes a good case that the anti-competitive coordination between banks and big homebuilders, and the disappearance of regional Savings & Loan financiers, have helped to crush small developers who might otherwise compete with the bigger players.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/messing-with-texas-how-big-homebuilders
Perhaps. Is there evidence that lack of financing has been a constraint on home building? And I think that doesn’t really have any explanatory power when it comes to the gap in the cost of construction between, say, Texas and California.
And it has no explanatory power when it comes to explaining why it costs government so much to build period (and so much more than the private sector comparatively)— the government isn’t reliant on financial institutions to finance construction.
So it may have some truth to it, but it doesn’t seem to address the core issues.
I agree that it's not a good diagnosis for the superstar cities like SF and NYC. But it's something to keep an eye on. Nolan Gray -- who's no slouch when it comes to criticizing local regulation of land use -- has suggested that we should think of the US as having a few distinct housing crises.
https://mnolangray.substack.com/p/the-united-states-doesnt-have-a-housing
Interlocking relationships between finance and builders appears to play a role in the "housing choice crisis", where land and materials get directed to a narrower range of standardized housing "products", than we'd get with more fine-grained development by a larger number of small participants. That is: certain housing types (especially the SFHs and Texas Donut type apartment buildings) have become more legible and fungible to the financial system, and that leads to them having relatively lower finance costs. Missing middle types are missing in part because they feel weird and risky to the people making construction loans.
I’ve seen variations of this argument. It’s mostly true so far as it goes, but it’s also not particularly conceptually difficult. Like the issue with very poor people being unable to afford housing in very poor places isn’t a housing crisis— it’s a problem of poverty. You can fix that by giving very poor people money to buy housing. Problem solved.
That’s also pretty much the third problem that post cites— if people can only afford housing in undesirable areas, the issue is that those areas are undesirable, not that housing isn’t affordable. Fact is, we shouldn’t much care where mega rich people live— they’ll be fine no matter what. It’d be nice if we could integrate self-segregated areas, but that’s not a housing cost issue; it’s an income/wealth inequality issue. The solution there is to make those areas better— build out transit so that it can take people from where housing is affordable to where jobs are, invest in social services to make those areas more attractive, etc.
Classifying that as a housing cost issue isn’t really useful. And that’s my critique of that post altogether— it conflates poverty/inequality issues with housing issues. The two are distinct and have a very different set of policy solutions.
If it’s a rout why can’t I see it in the housing starts?
I think you guys are going to win the substack war and lose the building war.
Definitely not a rout yet, will take years of Dem debate and realignment in the very best case scenario before the party as a whole is ready to build
I read that interview and both Seder and Teachout had very weak opinions about Abundance 😁
Teachout appeared not to have read the book. Seder somehow couldn't grasp that sometimes there are people with money who are at odds with each other, and you can't explain every problem by figuring out who has the most money and doing the opposite of what they want.
It's so annoying how people try to claim YIMBY is the right-wing position and NIMBY is the left-wing position, they are really just totally uncorrelated. Particularly frustrating how a bunch of oligarch money is now flowing into the "Abundance" movement with the goal of using it as a tool to attack the left: https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/welcomefest/
Exactly. YIMBY was started in the SF region not Texas 😎
Sort of unrelated but Texas actually had an organized YIMBY group in 2013, before the YIMBY brand existed (AURA, in Austin). I’m working on a piece about how YIMBY groups formed spontaneously around the country even before the YIMBY brand emanated from CA
That said Austin is a very blue city. Lefties can and should (and often do!) claim some stake in YIMBY’s origins
Movement capture will always be a risk. At the same time, a strong abundance movement may need funding from a range of sources. The Dems must build institutions to rival the conservative movement. A Federalist Society and a Heritage Foundation, but for lefties
Wtf are you talking about Texas builds and California doesn’t
Because right wing polities build and left wing ones don’t.
Hi Jeremy. I wanted to mention another issue that is scrambling political alliances and winding its way through the legislature and the California courts at the same time. The bill is AB882, which is an attempt to get out ahead of a case pending in the California Supreme Court. The issue is whether a court can make electronic recordings of court proceedings, and it pits unionized court reporters (who want to prohibit or minimize recordings) against advocates for low-income litigants (who want the option of electronic recordings to be available). I summarize the dispute and criticize the California legislature here: https://www.dailyjournal.com/article/385571-the-failure-of-the-california-legislature-to-provide-access-to-courts-of-appeal
I feel like this used to just be the left right axis of normal politics but because of Dem hegemony in CA we need Republican flavored dems - at least in the economic sense - (moderate/abundance) to actually fix the problems caused by Lefty-Dems in the late 20th century like the environmental movement, NIMBYism, sprawl, etc.
These issues have always cut across partisan lines in interesting ways. Ronald Regan signed the California Environmental Quality Act into law in the 70s, CA’s Republican strongholds like Huntington Beach fight state housing law as vigorously as any other city today. TX and FL have been better on infill in the last few years but they also both build a ton of sprawl. The unsustainable infrastructure burden will catch up to them in 20 years just like it has CA
Abundance ideas are a sort of third rail beyond traditional party politics. Dems of all stripes (and Republicans too) should embrace making the government more efficient, not just bigger or smaller
California used to be right wing, remember.
I think the problem with essentially the entire “center left wonk” movement is that it wants solutions from decades ago when the coasts weren’t deep blue one party states where the real election is the primary and the groups control the primary. Basically, they want republicans to save them from their own “allies” but there aren’t enough republicans left in these areas.
That's "Recoding America", not Recording.
Ha good typo catch, will edit. Thanks for reading everything, even the footnotes
I’m almost finished reading the book right now, definitely going to write a “Recoding Local Governments” book review