Abundance Isn’t Going To Happen Unless Politicians Are Scared of the Status Quo

It’s A Race Between Building Up and Burning Down

“Too many goods created a bad.”

That’s how California Governor Jerry Brown put it in 2017 when he signed a package of 15 housing-related bills, the first YIMBY-supported pro-housing bills. He was explaining, in his meandering way, how the housing shortage was the result of hundreds of well-intentioned laws, which had promised all kinds of things, but mostly succeeded in slowing down the production of new housing.

In many ways, Jerry was ahead of the curve. He was lamenting “everything bagel liberalism” and “process over outcomes” before it was cool.

But at the same time, there was a distinct lack of fire under the Governor’s ass. He was skeptical that this new legislation would do much to unwind the tangled legal web holding back housing production. And while we YIMBYs were bright eyed and bushy tailed, seeing as it was the first state bill signing we’d been invited to, it was also kind of depressing.

Less than ten years later, the discourse is suddenly all about the seemingly simple idea that we should “do things and build things,” and there is finally a sense of urgency. I’m heading to Atlanta this week to interview Derek Thompson about his new book Abundance with Ezra Klein at the Georgia Center for the Book (tickets). Their thesis is simple: we need more of everything. More housing, more immigrants, more clean energy infrastructure.

And Klein and Thomson’s book is just the latest entry into the growing genre that attempts to address the root causes of stagnation in America and prescribe a path towards abundance and renewal. Recent books in this genre include:

• Why Nothing Works by Marc J. Dunkelman

• Stuck by Yoni Applebaum,

• Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka,

Meanwhile Ned Resnikoff is pointing out that YIMBYs were doing abundance before it was cool (or maybe were the driving force in making it cool). While I appreciate the credit to the original YIMBY brand, I’m choosing to adopt an abundance mindset about abundance. More is more, after all.

As I see it, the Abundance concept isn’t quite an ideology, it’s more of a refocusing on outcomes. It’s a framework that points to tangible outcomes and asks us to tactically identify what is blocking progress to that goal, irrespective of what the intention of that blockage might be. It extends the classic YIMBY way of doing politics into a larger philosophy. It is a re-focusing on “ends” over “means,” and allows for a variety of ideologies to come together on specific ends. The language around “outcomes focused legislating” brings some degree of sanity to our often self-sabotaging process.

Outcome-based politics seems so obvious that it can sound silly to say it out loud. Government should deliver material outcomes. Elected officials should be extremely motivated to produce tangible outcomes for the largest number of people.

So why isn’t that happening?

What’s eating state capacity?

The hot topic in the growing abundance discourse is state capacity. That’s a fancy term for a simple concept — the government’s ability to deliver outcomes, whether those are growing the economy, establishing laws, or just picking up the garbage.

It’s not a new idea. In fact, five decades ago, some of the world’s most pre-eminent political scientists fretted about the erosion of state capacity in democracies across the world. “The demands on democratic government grow,” wrote Michael Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, “while the capacity of democratic government stagnates.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? They argued that in countries like the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, citizens were asking their governments to take on more and more without increasing their government’s ability to carry out those projects. That led to an erosion in legitimacy, and decades of retrenchment and cutbacks. About the only thing that the left and the right seemed to agree on was that the “era of big government is over.”

The 70’s was an era of community organizing to stop The Big Bad Thing, and this urge to tap the brakes continues to this day. Elaborate outreach processes, reporting requirements and the opportunities for objections about those reports… they all can seem reasonable. But added together they created a mighty web. Marc Dunkelman explained the problem of this approach on a recent episode of the Political Gabfest: “We've now created a system where there are so many veto players and you need so many approvals that government fundamentally doesn't work.”

Little by little, we stitched together a gigantic wet blanket that continues to hold back housing production. It’s easy to blame liberals, but like all of our worst problems, it was bipartisan. Conservatives liked constraining government because they didn’t trust it. Liberals liked constraining it because they overestimated how much those constraints would produce better outcomes like protecting the marginalized, preserving the environment, and elevating the voices of the community. And people who felt that integration was a threat, helped create innumerable local processes to tap the brakes on all kinds of public goods and housing.

As a society, we have chronically underestimated the cost of all this. It’s a chronic case of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Every constraint makes the continuation of the status quo more likely. Legislators and advocates know this, but treat it like the normal cost of getting the sausage made. In the process of getting pro-housing bills passed, I’ve had countless arguments with other advocates and legislators over the innumerable ways bills are weakened. And while we’re taking steps in the right direction, the outcomes still aren’t great.

State capacity is being eaten by excessive process. Overly restrictive rules (zoning) and elaborate process (permitting and planning) create chronic shortages driving prices higher and creating an angry populace. That’s the TLDR thesis of a lot of the abundance books. Things grind to a halt. People suffer. It all feels incredibly self-sabotaging and frustrating.

Two paths forward

That brings us to today, in which people across the country are mad that shit sucks. I could say more but, come on, shit sucks. Prices are high, infrastructure is crumbling, people are pissed, you’ve heard this already.

There are two big responses happening right now:

1. Tear down (DOGE vibes)

2. Build up (Abundance vibes)

The DOGE point of view says if the government can’t do anything, we should just get rid of the government. That appeals to many Americans because they are angry. The frustrated urge to blow it all up is strong. As a rule, shortages do not bring out the best in humanity. They make us blame perceived-outsiders and foster the urge to topple governments.

The housing shortage fosters a “crabs in a bucket” mentality everywhere, from Blue-dot cities to Red rural communities. Whether your enemy is yuppies, coastal elites or immigrants, the through-line is that there isn’t enough to go around and someone is stealing from us. The DOGE-style of governance is about trying to tell everyone who has been stealing and publicly firing those people.

The alternative gaining traction is a (sometimes vague) notion of abundance, which boils down to “things should work.” But if these new books are any indication, the Build Up team is feeling more urgency. The consensus that government is not delivering tangible good outcomes for average people is finally being recognized as an existential threat to the democratic project. The constituency for “can we please just fucking do things” is real.

YIMBY has a practical goal of housing abundance. And for years, YIMBYs have been building ideologically diverse coalitions aligned on that specific, narrow goal.

And while that work is great, my key point is that we are running out of time. “Get your house in order” should have a deep level of urgency right now. Elected officials at the state and local level need to rebuild the belief that government is worth preserving and can deliver a thriving middle class.

We are in the middle of a race between the destroyers and the builders, and too many elected officials are twiddling their thumbs the sinking ship of the status quo.

Who needs to change?

People will nod and agree to everything I just said above, but what does it actually look like in practice?

Literally yesterday I spoke with a city council member who was thinking about introducing single stair reform in their city. He knew how it could be a deeply impactful reform and is completely safe. But then he said “We can’t do it without the support of the firefighters union, and they’re deeply opposed.” Every redundant requirement was deliberately put there by someone who doesn’t think it needs reform and will fight it. Most elected officials weigh the various highly engaged stakeholders, as if they represent the average voters in their district. They’re not.

YIMBY Action, through our local chapter model, is building a visible constituency to incentivize politicians to take bolder action on housing. But politicians need to get ahead of this. To critique my own work: it shouldn’t be necessary! Elected officials should be more concerned that the general public is feeling economically stunted and enraged!

Incumbents should be more terrified of not doing things.

The status quo is a downward trajectory and you will be punished electorally for maintaining it. If people continue to feel economically stunted, they will continue to boot incumbents. Being committed to outcomes requires continuous deep commitment to pushing back, with the knowledge that outcomes add up to that important “right track / wrong track” polling data.