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Jeanne Kuang for CalMatters, "Abundance meets resistance: Are Democrats finally ready to go all in on building housing?". (Part of an ongoing series on housing, mostly in California. Now also at TheSchism.)
Those of you who have followed this series may remember the sad history of attempting to upzone around transit in California. It's a straightforward idea: transit infrastructure is expensive to build, more people will ride it if more people live near the stations, and it's a bad idea for cities to enforce apartment bans in those areas. California has made two major attempts in the last decade to fix this, and is embarking on a third.
First, 2018's SB 827, which didn't even make it out of committee. Then, 2019's SB 50, which was delayed until 2020 and then failed to pass the Senate. Since then, there have been some significant reforms; see 2021, 2022, and 2023. But the YIMBYs haven't taken another big swing since 2020, and they're doing that and more this year.
The latter two bills have been absorbed into the budget process, which is the Governor's way of pushing them forward. The former has not.
The politics are interesting. The SB 79 Housing committee hearing is worth watching; the chair, Aisha Wahab, was opposed to the bill, but it passed by a single vote. (This is called "rolling the chair", and it's a big lift.) And then it happened again, in the Local Government committee, the chair, Maria Elena Durazo, opposed the bill, and it again passed by a single vote; it's headed to the Senate floor for a likely vote in early June.
The stunning thing here is that, despite the years that have passed since 2018, the discourse among the bill's opponents hasn't changed. Because this is California, and most of them are Democrats, they oppose it from the left, and seemingly sincerely; Wahab talks about how "affordable" (i.e., subsidized) housing would be preferable, but there's no mention of how to pay for that, so in practice, the alternative is what we've been doing for the last couple decades, i.e., nothing. The Building Trades representative talks about any bill which doesn't mandate union labor as being tantamount to murder because the working conditions and the produced buildings will be unsafe. And there's generally an idea that market rate housing is bad, but affordable housing is good, and somehow if we outlaw the former, the latter will prosper. This has clearly not happened.
This rhymes with the current Abundance discourse, which has been extensive. (I can't do it full justice, but the basic idea is that we've regulated the government into an inability to accomplish anything, and we should stop doing that. It's most dire in housing, but the same idea applies elsewhere.) Reactions on a national scale oddly mirror the left-NIMBY discourse in California, ranging from Zephyr Teachout describing zoning reform as "relatively small-bore" to Robert Jensen suggesting that maybe poverty and death would be better for the environment instead. (As a treat, enjoy Sam Seder beclowning himself in front of Ezra Klein.)
My theory of this, developed over a series of infuriatingly circular conversations, is that there's a faction which is very attached to the idea that every problem is caused by a failure to write big enough checks or a failure to sufficiently tax (or if you're edgy, guillotine) the wealthy. So, if housing is unaffordable, it must be because we haven't sufficiently subsidized below-market-rate housing, or down payment assistance, or because rich people are hoarding homes and leaving them empty, and if you think otherwise, you must be simping for billionaires. This view is incompatible with understanding the details; for example, in that Sam Seder interview, Seder would talk about the corrupting power of money, Klein would talk about cartels of homeowners, Seder would say that that's just more corrupting power of money, but Seder's approach is very specifically to target oligarchs and corporations, not homeowners.
And this is the kind of equivocation I see in the best-regarded left critique of Abundance I could find, from Sandeep Vaheesan at The Boston Review. He gets the details wrong--he points to the government's support of nuclear power via liability limitation and ignores ALARA; he claims that upzoning doesn't actually produce more housing (so why do the NIMBYs fight so hard?); he defends the exorbitant rents in San Francisco by saying that it's a "superstar" city unlike Houston (is San Jose?)--but at its core, he wishes the book had clear villains like Thomas Piketty's "clear portrait of patrimonial capitalists and lavishly compensated executives thriving at the expense of everyone else". His proposed solutions are, naturally, to break up large corporations and to write bigger checks to bureaucrats so they can do more paperwork.
At each point, Vaheesan equivocates: about "deregulation" (if you want to end apartment bans, you must want poor people to live on Superfund sites!), about "democracy" (if you don't want to hand out veto points like candy, you must love oligarchs), and about the efficacy of reforms (upzoning and streamlining are simultaneously ineffective and giveaways to the wealthy).
"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed." This sounds like a promise, but in California's case, it's a warning. The problems, contradictions, and failures of blue governance are at their sharpest here, and if there's a way forward, it'll be here as well.
The discussion surrounding this is a never ending source of amusement. Ezra says "please just let the government build shit and stop getting in the way", and then leftists say "what do you mean? I'm not getting in the way? but also, did you stop to consider... [words words words]" It's beyond parody. I'm impressed they don't ever see the irony.
If there's one thing the leftists get right, it's that this is a political nonstarter. The whole reason they're in this mess in the first place is that populists are fundamentally opposed to progress. Populists want handouts and they want their enemies destroyed. Higher principles are of no particular interest. And the Dem coalition is only getting more and more populist in the wake of Biden's presidency, despite its legislative successes, failing to build anything or deliver real results for the poor and stupid and over-socialized -- a case that Ezra made quite well in his book. Leftists look at Trump and don't think there's anything particularly wrong with having a retarded president (and why would they? they tried non-retards and got no handouts and no enemies destroyed), they just wish it was their retard.
Can we really blame the average left-leaning voter for feeling this way? It wasn't given a name until recently, but this whole "housing theory of everything" idea has been floating around in wonky circles for at least 15 years now and totally ignored by Dem lawmakers. People have been griping about the cost of housing since the Occupy protests. Obama could have, in the popular imagination, been the president who builds instead of the president who bailed out wall street, if he were so inclined and better advised, but it wasn't on his radar in the slightest. In what sense do Dems deserve the mantle of technocrats when they're so behind the game? Being right in this case doesn't really matter when the median voter can barely read.
The thing about housing is that, except for the interests of existing homeowners (about the only thing that gets negative publicity), nearly everything blocking it is supported more by the Democrats or has been for most of its existence. Zoning and building codes, unions and labor laws, urban growth boundaries, environmental considerations, affordable housing mandates, etc. This makes it very hard for Democrats to build housing because the only problem they can see is "existing homeowners".
You're being too charitable; consider Sam Seder, who isn't that far to the left, being constitutionally incapable of blaming anything other than corporations and billionaires for high housing costs. This is how you get left-NIMBYs tying themselves into weird knots, like blaming Blackrock (which owns something like 0.1% of single-family homes) or asserting that we don't need more supply, because there are fewer homeless people than vacancies, or because all of those houses are secretly being kept empty by "speculators".
Vaheesan:
This is the kind of equivocation I was talking about. ("Public power" in this case doesn't mean elected officials doing things, but rather the power of individuals to block the entire process.) When the only tools you have are taxing the rich and breaking up big companies, every problem looks like oligarchs and monopolies.
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Yep, Abundance holds up a mirror to Democrats and many don't like what they see. A lot of their assumptions about governance and economics has be thrown out to accept its thesis. That's why there's so much nitpicking about political strategy and messaging efficacy and never any criticism of its actual prescriptions. Moreover, the existing homeowners (the much maligned NIMBY liberal) are usually moderate Democrats, so they make a good villain for leftists to blame. Meanwhile, The Groups are mostly leftist sinecures and axe grinders, making a good villain for technocrats to blame. Cue internecine conflict.
I think if COVID lockdowns had not tanked the credibility of technocrats everywhere, there would be enough trust that this agenda could get motion. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. It's almost absurd we live in this reality where we have such boundless wealth and nothing but frivolities to spend it on, where "We need more houses? OK, let's build more houses" and "We need more energy? OK, let's build more solar/wind farms" faces such extreme and multi-pronged resistance, but so it is. Put another trillion into NVIDIA. Perhaps God can save us from ourselves.
The reason is that it's not actually wealth, it's all debt. It's all people running away from debasement and trying to get decent interest to avoid value being destroyed.
So collapsing the ridiculous real estate prices by making them real is out of the question. And everyone, including the government, is locked in the line-go-up suicide pact because if you stop, you get a singularity where anything might happen. So we just manage decline and plug the holes with anything that is at hand.
God's coming alright, but he tends to take his sweet time, and you're not going to like the hangover when he does. Nobody will.
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