Signs Without Referents

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In my writing about YIMBYism and abundance more generally, I generally tried to avoid dealing with abstractions. Instead, I talk about empirical research and specific policy proposals. Whenever possible, I keep any discussion of politics rooted in the material interests of various actors; I’m careful about ideological labels like “leftist,” “centrist,” or “neoliberal,” which sometimes obscure more than they reveal.

There are a couple reasons for this. The first is that concrete material interests tend to grow in salience as you get closer to local issues, while the salience of broader ideological agendas weakens somewhat. This is true even in an era of hyper-polarization and the nationalization of politics; the homeownership rate in a particular jurisdiction is still more predictive of local land use decisions than how blue the town happens to be.¹

The other reason, which I’ve written about before, is my frustration with the ethereal nature of recent abundance discourse. The core thesis of the pro-abundance argument — that “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need,” as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson write in the introduction to Abundance — raises a lot of important questions: Where do supply bottlenecks get in the way of our societal goals? What policy levers can we pull to ease those bottlenecks? What are the tradeoffs associated with pulling those levers, and are they worth it? And in what areas is scarcity relative to current demand a good thing? But the public debate about abundance has only occasionally touched on those questions. Instead, it has a tendency to slip into vague yet ominous generalities regarding neoliberalism and deregulation.

I found Aaron Regunberg’s recent piece for The Nation clarifying in that regard, because it at least tried to make the terms of the debate explicit. Regunberg was replying to my own latest Nation piece, where I tried to provide something like a comprehensive account of how progressive YIMBYs think about housing politics and power. In my piece, I suggested that critics of the abundance agenda view it as “at best, a list of policy ideas without a theory of power—a dry, technocratic exercise with no political core.” Regunberg didn’t think this was a fair characterization; instead, he says, critics see something far more sinister at play.

He writes:

So the issue with the abundance agenda, in Regunberg’s telling, is apparently not its policy content. It’s a problem of framing and attention conservation: abundance as a political program is both an alternative to the Democrats’ much-needed “economic populist rebrand” and an intentional diversion from it. Abundance-centric messaging “swap[s] out a villainization of corporate elites that evokes FDR with a demonization of bureaucracy, regulation, and red tape that lends credibility to Elon Musk.”

In response, let me begin by reassuring Regunberg that I could not be less interested in having a fight over the Democratic brand. That isn’t because branding is unimportant; it’s just not my department. Campaign comms are very much not my strong suit. I’ve only ever worked on one political campaign, when I was sixteen years old; I was an unpaid intern, and we lost. So I’m happy to defer to others on questions of branding. I literally have no opinion as to whether Democratic presidential candidates should use the word “oligarchy” nor not.

But I absolutely reject the notion that there’s any inherent tension between abundance policy and economic populism. Why should there be, when the whole point of abundance policy is to make basic necessities like housing, renewable energy, and high-quality transportation available to people who currently can’t access them? I’ve spent much of my recent writing career insisting, in a variety of progressive publications and with growing exasperation, that abundance-flavored supply-side tweaks like upzoning are complementary with more directly redistributive demand-side interventions.² Part of my exasperation is no doubt a result of the fact that the abundance-bros-versus-economic-populists story only works if you assume people like me, who have a foot in both camps, simply don’t exist.

And it’s not just me. Regunberg cites Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as one of the “preeminent leaders” of Team Rebrand. AOC has also become increasingly YIMBY over the past few years. And you could argue that one of her signature campaigns — the public call for a Green New Deal — essentially embraces an abundance-inflected prescription for climate change adaptation, countering degrowtherism with a call for massive investment in green infrastructure.

Consider also California state senator Scott Wiener, one of the public officials most closely identified with abundance policy. Only in the topsy-turvy world of San Francisco factional politics is Wiener a “moderate.” In addition to running legislation on such abundance priorities as housing, renewable energy and transportation, he has proposed a state-level estate tax and tried to allow wildfire victims to sue oil companies for fueling climate change — two unabashedly economically populist proposals. And as far as branding goes, he’s made liberal use of the word “oligarchy.”

My point is not that “abundance” is inherently a leftist or progressive idea. Rather, it’s that the left-versus-center heuristic for understanding intra-Democratic disputes isn’t particularly useful when it comes to abundance. There are plenty of centrists who violently object to the whole premise of the abundance agenda, such as self-described Blue Dog Democrat and unreconstructed degrowther Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez. And there are plenty of people who come to a sort of abundance politics from the left. It’s a set of ideas that scrambles older ideological battle lines in ways that are both valuable and — to people who are really attached to certain factional grudges — confounding.

If Regunberg’s objections to the abundance agenda really are about branding, then this should come as good news. Instead of allowing his ideological enemies to monopolize good ideas like upzoning and streamlined renewable energy permitting, he can co-opt them! He doesn’t even need to call these ideas “abundance” if he doesn’t want to. If anti-abundance members of the left want to propose something that is similar to the abundance agenda in terms of policy but differs from it in terms of vibe, that’s marvelous. I’ll whole-heartedly endorse the shmabundance agenda, or whatever you want to call it.

If, on the other hand, there are meatier disagreements lurking below the surface, we should talk about those instead. At least that would be a debate about something real. And, frankly, it’s a debate I find more personally interesting.

1  See chapter seven of Sarah Anzia’s Local Interests for some quantitative data on this.

2  See, for example, my debate with Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan in Dissent.