Abundance liberalism is all about stuff. More apartment buildings; more trains and buses; more solar panels and transmission lines; more vaccines; more of the physical infrastructure that can serve as a foundation for broad-based prosperity. When you dig into the nitty-gritty of abundance thought, you generally find a bunch of nerds fretting over technical issues like elevator codes and utility hookups—the rules that govern how we construct the material world around us.

And yet the recent public discourse around abundance — instigated by the publication of a few new books — has had a peculiarly weightless quality to it. Is regulation good or bad? Is abundance neoliberal or does it represent an attempt to move past the neoliberal era? Maybe the debate over abundance is downstream of the great 2020 fissure between Bernie leftists and Warren progressives? Or maybe its tributary lies even further back in the misty past, around the 2016 Democratic primary? Would Bernie have won? What do you think of Ezra Klein as, like, a person?

In other words, the debate over abundance is turning into another one of those perennial turf wars over which broad, amorphous coalition should steer the future of the party: The Left (broadly defined) or The Center (broadly defined, and sometimes also called The Establishment). You may be surprised to learn that a debate over, for example, the relative merits of adopting European elevator safety standards falls so neatly along these these ideological lines. But of course it does, because American elevator codes are a Regulation (left-coded), and transitioning to a slightly less onerous set of standards is therefore a Deregulation (right-coded).

Considered from that perspective, there’s nothing really new about the abundance agenda: it’s just The Establishment with a new face. Or, as Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg put it in a recent critical essay on abundance for The Washington Monthly: “At the moment, the abundance liberals seem like the closest thing we have to the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s: a group of centrist thinkers plotting a revival of liberalism by way of pragmatism and policy innovation.”

All Abundance Politics is Local

The analogy to the DLC is indeed a revealing one, although perhaps not in the way that Glastris and Weisberg intended. The DLC’s founder was a political strategist; over the course of its quarter century lifespan, it was chaired by a succession of Beltway heavies and Meet the Press regulars that included Bill Clinton, Joe Lieberman, and Dick Gephardt. It was a product of official Washington, staffed by professional Washingtonians, and dedicated to a mission of elite persuasion.

Glastris and Weisberg seem to believe that abundance liberalism is something very similar: a constellation of Washington think tanks and Democratic Party boyars speaking to an audience of their fellow boyars. To the extent that abundance liberalism has any purchase elsewhere in the country, its success is still a product of this elite discourse. For example, Glastris and Weisberg note that abundance liberals’ “call to roll back residential zoning restrictions has been taken up by the grassroots YIMBY (‘Yes in My Backyard’) movement.”

I find this blithe suggestion that Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and the Niskanen Institute inspired the YIMBY movement astonishing. Sonja Trauss launched SF BARF in 2014; the first YIMBYtown conference, held in Boulder, Colorado, took place in 2016; Minneapolis approved its new draft comprehensive plan in 2018, and California enacted accessory dwelling unit reform in 2019. Ezra Klein didn’t coin the term “supply-side progressivism” until 2021, and Derek Thompson’s “abundance” essay appeared in 2022.

In other words, YIMBY volunteers were showing up to local planning commission meetings for years before the elite abundance discourse really took off. It was the local activism that inspired the discourse, not the other way around. Klein and Thompson themselves note this near the end of Abundance, where they describe the YIMBY movement as “a motley collection of housing obsessives who went from haranguing officials at public hearings in San Francisco to wielding influence nationally.”

I’ve met hundreds of YIMBY activists from around the country, and I know many of the people who helped launch the movement in its early days. Some of them could be described as moderate liberals, but quite a few of them are progressives, social democrats, or outright socialists. Others are libertarians or members of the center-right. In general, the ideological complexion of local YIMBY organizing tends to be a function of where it is located; that’s part of why YIMBYs have been able to win over both AOC in New York and Greg Gianforte in Montana. The most prominent abundance-aligned intellectuals on the national stage may be broadly affiliated with the center-left, but the people doing the on-the-ground work come from across the political spectrum.

It is this inattention to the local texture of YIMBY/abundance organization that gives so much of the recent discourse its weightless quality. Focusing on local or regional context forces us to understand “abundance” as a loose political coalition, held together by a shared diagnosis of the housing shortage and some overlapping social problems, but lacking a single totalizing ideological vision. Every YIMBY has at least some philosophical commitments that don’t fit neatly into an “abundance” frame, because the abundance frame is a set of heuristics that work better for some policy areas than others. (I’m reminded of the criminal justice reformer who I saw speak at a one-day abundance summit a few weeks ago. She began her talk by saying, “I’m not sure if any of this really fits into the abundance agenda, but anyway, here’s the work I’ve been doing.”)

Glastris and Weisberg called their essay, “The Meager Agenda of Abundance Liberals.” The meagerness charge seems to come from a recognition that abundance liberals have answers to some policy questions but not others. For example, they complain that abundance liberals “have little to say about homebuilder consolidation — about the problem of growing corporate monopolization.” I’ll freely cop to the latter accusation: I have little to say about monopolies, other than that I think they’re bad, because that is well outside my area of expertise.¹ I like Lina Khan, if that means anything. And from my non-expert perspective, the work she did at the FTC seems perfectly compatible with an abudance-flavored approach to other policy areas.

But Glastris and Weisberg’s other accusation — that abundance liberals are silent on the problem of homebuilder consolidation — is simply false. And this points to another issue with using a handful of particularly influential figures as avatars for the entire abundance school: you miss a whole lot of what the actual practitioners and policymakers are doing and saying.

Meanwhile, Outside the Discourse

Take California’s ADU reform, a major YIMBY advance that Glastris and Weisberg inexplicably skip over. As I’ve written previously, ADU reform was actually a significant blow to homebuilder consolidation, because the local developer oligopolies in much of California did not specialize in building that type of housing. This created an opening for smaller, scrappier developers to enter the market—which they did, in droves.

That’s on the homebuilding side. On the landlord side, the entire YIMBY agenda is a threat to incumbent market power: the more housing you build, the less flexibility you give to large real estate investment trusts to price gouge their tenants. (If you ever look at what REITs are telling their investors, they will frequently say out loud that more homebuilding is bad for business.) Plus, when you make it legal for middle-class homeowners to add a rental unit or two onto their existing property, you add a bunch of new, smaller, non-corporate actors to the rental market.

You might argue that lowering barriers for other players to enter the market isn’t enough — that existing giants in the housing sector need to be more heavily regulated, or even broken up. I agree, which is part of why I supported the efforts of California Asm. Buffy Wicks, a YIMBY champion, to create a rental registry that would have allowed us to more systematically monitor corporate landlords.

Incidentally, Wicks also authored the YIMBY-backed legislation AB 2011, which legalized homebuilding on some commercial lots. Sen. Scott Wiener, another YIMBY hero, has authored multiple YIMBY bills intended to spur denser construction near transit stops. Glastris and Weisberg seem to endorse both these ideas in their essay; but, in a mystifying move, they suggest that both transit-oriented development and building on underutilized commercial space are alternatives to YIMBYism rather than core elements of the YIMBY agenda.

Even when Glastris and Weisberg descend from the realm of airy generalities and look at what YIMBYs are actually doing, they tend to misread the evidence. Take the following passage, where they lay out the case that YIMBY reforms are fruitless:

As perhaps can be expected from a one-paragraph survey of the evidence for land use reform, none of this really holds up to scrutiny. For why Glastris and Weisberg are wrong to pooh-pooh the Minneapolis rezoning, I recommend this thread from Zak Yudhisthu, a close observer of housing policy in the Twin Cities. I know the Los Angeles context a little better: the “law getting rid of single-family zoning” that Glastris and Weisberg are referring to is SB 9, which passed in 2021. While this bill did in fact preempt single-family zoning statewide, there’s a little less to it than meets the eye. That’s in part because cities have broad flexibility in how they implement SB 9, and many of them have added in various rules and restrictions to ensure that virtually no SB 9 projects within their jurisdiction are market-feasible.² Many single-family homeowners that want to add one or two units to their property end up foregoing the SB 9 process in favor of the far more user-friendly state ADU law. Ironically, this means the relative dearth of SB 9 permit applications is due in part to the success of another, earlierYIMBY reform.

As for the last piece of evidence that Glastris and Weisberg cite in the above passage—the Urban Institute study—we’ve talked about this before. But to recap, this study actually tells us very little, because it treats a huge spread of different land use reforms as essentially interchangeable. As the study’s authors put it, “we do not have the statistical power to assess the varying impacts of reform types, like ADU or height-limit policy.” Their model doesn’t even distinguish between, say, a ten-foot height limit increase and a fifty-foot one.

To understand why that’s a problem, imagine a housing voucher trial where you gave 20 low-income renters a $3,000 monthly rental voucher and 100 low-income renters a $10 monthly voucher. Then imagine you studied all 120 voucher recipients as a single group in order to determine how rental vouchers affect housing stability. If most of the renters with $10 vouchers lost their housing, but all 20 renters with $3,000 vouchers kept theirs, would you conclude that vouchers generally aren’t very effective? Or would you conclude that the magnitude of the treatment might have something to do with the size of the effect?

If there’s a lesson here, it’s not about the futility of land use reform. Instead, it’s that the nuts and bolts of land use reform are extremely important. In order to assess the potential effect of any given upzoning or permit streamlining plan, you need to read the details. And to evaluate the overall impact of the YIMBY program, you need to look at more than a single methodologically flawed study.

Back to the Clouds

From futility, Glastris and Weisberg move to jeopardy. “[T]he crusade to eliminate zoning restrictions in residential neighborhoods … tends to infuriate existing homeowners, especially affluent ones who have political connections and money for lawyers,” they write. “If abundance liberals succeed, as they seem to be, in convincing senior Democratic leaders to push for broad zoning reforms, they could be unwittingly walking into a trap.”

I don’t think Glastris and Weisberg have fully thought through the implications of this strikingly conservative argument. How much should we concede to wealthy, NIMBY homeowners for the sake of political expediency? Zoning has, since its inception, been used as a tool to enforce both racial and wealth-based segregation; some of single-family zoning’s early proponents made the case for it in explicitly racist terms, and some NIMBYs in exclusionary suburbs still do. This isn’t just an issue of overall housing supply, but a fair housing issue. Liberal advocates and policymakers have both a moral imperative and good long-term strategic reasons for not simply giving up on desegregation.

Anyway, Glastris and Weisberg’s proposed alternative of transit-oriented development on commercial lots is not the conflict-free workaround they seem to think it is. Entrenched interests in Sacramento put up a real fight against AB 2011 and managed to defeat SB 50 (one of Weiner’s transit-oriented development bills). NIMBY homeowners even fought a years-long rearguard action against a plan to develop multifamily housing on a mostly vacant parking lot in North Berkeley. There is no escaping local politics if you want to build dense infill housing, and YIMBYs have the battle scars to prove it.

Similarly, recent history thoroughly undermines the notion that YIMBY politics is a surefire electoral loser. San Francisco has returned Scott Wiener to the State Senate not once but twice; he is now a serious contender to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress when she retires. Tina Kotek went from speaker of Oregon’s State House to governor; Tim Walz remains above water in Minnesota after having signed a raft of pro-housing legislation; Kirk Watson won reelection as mayor of Austin, Texas after presiding over a series of YIMBY reforms.

There is a reason why ambitious politicians around the country have latched onto the abundance agenda, and it’s not because a bunch of centrist think tank wonks told them to. When presented in the right way and in the right context, this stuff turns out to be pretty smart politics. A lot of voters actually like the abundance agenda, including more than a few well-off homeowners.

That is not to say I think the Democrats’ 2028 presidential nominee should run on a platform of abolishing the suburbs. Because, again, the key word here is context. Just as the abundance agenda’s conceptual toolkit works better when applied to some problems than it does when applied to others, the politics of how you apply that toolkit are going to vary from place to place. The YIMBY coalition in Montana looks pretty different from the one in New York, out of necessity. And the composition of both coalitions makes it difficult to neatly wedge either of them into a left-versus-center, Hillary-versus-Bernie narrative.

The abundance moment is very much a national phenomenon. But if you want to understand what it is and why it matters, you need to start from the state and local level and work up, not the other way around. Oddly, it is the people most inclined to tag abundance liberals as Acela corridor elitists who seem most resistant to doing this. They are the ones who have the most trouble looking beyond the Beltway.

1  For the same reason—I know more about some policy areas than others—the rest of this essay will focus mostly on what Glastris and Weisberg have to say about housing, not issues like energy permitting.

2  My former employer, California YIMBY, is sponsoring two bills this cycle to strengthen SB 9.