06-25-2025
Why does it cost $700,000 to build a single affordable housing unit in San Francisco? Why, after spending billions, do states like California continue to struggle with homelessness and housing shortages? Why can’t these states provide and maintain the modern infrastructure we need?
These questions aren’t academic — they address the cost of living, the future of cities and the prospects for meaningful reform. And they’re at the heart of the “abundance agenda,” an idea that has recently gained considerable traction among progressive thinkers.
In their recent bestseller, Abundance, the prominent liberal journalists Ezra Klein (New York Times) and Derek Thompson (The Atlantic) argue that America’s persistent shortages in housing, infrastructure and energy stem from well-meaning policies that end up restricting supply. Instead of subsidizing demand, they say, progressive legislators should make it easier to build more of what we need.
Klein and Thompson argue that progressive policies have backfired. Designed to promote equity, inclusivity, environmental protection, and labor rights, these policies create layers of bureaucracy and regulatory hurdles that drive up the costs and slow completion of essential projects. The result? Persistent scarcity and steadily rising prices.
The authors use a vivid metaphor: trying to reach an ever-rising elevator by building a ladder. The more we subsidize demand, the higher prices climb, making the goal ever more elusive.
Consider California. With just 12% of the U.S. population, the state hosts about half the nation’s unsheltered homeless. It spent $24 billion on homelessness between 2019 and 2024, only to see the problem grow by 24%. This far outpaced increases in red states, like Texas and Florida, which spent far less and imposed many fewer housing mandates.
Klein and Thompson blame California’s regulatory overreach, restrictive zoning, and permitting delays. They note that in San Francisco, building a single “affordable” unit can cost $700,000 and take years to complete.
Klein and Thompson’s prescription — streamline permitting, slash red tape and eliminate mandates — sounds almost libertarian. Yet they ultimately argue that only an empowered, more effective government can guarantee access to essentials like housing, education and healthcare.
In essence, they want less bureaucracy but a more powerful government to guarantee outcomes — a tension that’s difficult to resolve. Their stance contradicts their earlier critique, since both supply- and demand-side government interventions led to the shortages, wasted resources and stunted innovation they decry.
Klein and Thompson see the abundance agenda as both an economic necessity and a political strategy to revitalize liberalism. But shifting the Democratic Party’s focus from redistribution and regulation to supply-side growth — without alienating labor unions, environmentalists and other core constituencies — is a daunting challenge. Institutional inertia and coalition politics may explain why this agenda has yet to gain significant traction among Democratic lawmakers, even as it stirs debate among progressive thinkers and journalists.
The abundance agenda is an ambitious and thought-provoking idea filled with contradictions that make its promises hard to realize. I explore this vision in more detail in my review of this important new book in the June issue of Commentary. Let me know what you think through the link at the end of my review.
Michael Woronoff joined Purdue in February 2025 as a Business Fellow at the Daniels School of Business. He practices law in Los Angeles and writes frequently about capitalism and freedom.
