OPINION: The Abundance Agenda—A Bold Vision, but at What Cost?

Key points:

• Democrats embrace “abundance” as a new political mantra, promoting more housing, transit, and clean energy.
• Critics warn the abundance agenda risks privatization and deregulation, enabling corporate capture.
• Affordable housing crisis is a moral failing that defines poverty in America.

In recent months, a growing number of Democrats have embraced a new political mantra: abundance. Promoted by writers Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their bestselling book Abundance, and echoed by California leaders like Governor Gavin Newsom, the idea is that progressive politics should shift from managing scarcity to delivering more—more housing, more transit, more clean energy, more prosperity.

On its face, this sounds like an overdue course correction. After decades of liberalism focused on limits, redistribution, and regulation, abundance proposes a return to building—with government playing an active role in unleashing supply.

Klein and Thompson argue that America’s core problems aren’t just about who gets what, but about there simply not being enough to go around. The answer, they say, is not austerity or redistribution alone, but construction—massive, accelerated, and modern.

But critics see something more troubling in this new ethos.

In a widely discussed essay on Naked Capitalism, David Smith warns that the abundance agenda risks forming a kind of “accelerationist uniparty”—a bipartisan elite consensus that fast-tracks privatization and deregulation under the guise of progress.

By tearing down hard-won regulatory safeguards, he argues, Democrats may be enabling a new kind of corporate capture cloaked in populist language. In this view, abundance is not a bold new vision, but neoliberalism with better PR.

There is truth on both sides of this divide.

On the one hand, the abundance framework rightly identifies real bottlenecks.

Anyone familiar with California’s housing crisis knows how paralyzing local zoning laws, CEQA lawsuits, and permitting delays can be.

Even well-intentioned policies meant to protect the environment or ensure local control are often wielded by wealthy homeowners to block affordable housing, transit, and shelters. In this context, dismantling red tape isn’t anti-progressive—it’s essential.

Meanwhile, it is clear that housing scarcity in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and even Davis is fueling homelessness, displacement, and spiraling rents.

The Vanguard has reported extensively on how streamlining approvals and upzoning can make it easier to build infill housing and address affordability.

New state laws, like SB 423 and the proposed CEQA modernization package, reflect the belief that permitting reform is a civil rights issue, not just a market one.

Housing affordability, particularly acute in blue states like California, has emerged as the center of this debate.

The Vanguard argues Democrats’ scant progress on housing has left voters stranded in a scarcity mindset—even though building more could stabilize rents and reduce pressure on the working class.

In response, Governor Newsom and state lawmakers have introduced bills aimed at speeding up permitting, eliminating environmental chokepoints, and promoting dense development near transit and jobs.

But the Vanguard and other progressive voices caution that supply-side fixes alone—downsizing zoning restrictions, streamlining so-called “white-blade” zones—won’t deliver justice. Without mechanisms to ensure affordability, equity, and democratic accountability, new development risks reinforcing existing inequality.

Progressives warn that markets tend to prioritize higher-income housing unless paired with public measures like vacancy taxes, nonprofit or public production, union labor mandates, and tenant protections.

Ultimately, they argue, equity—not just volume—must stay central to any abundance agenda.

“Abundance without affordability is a false promise,” the Vanguard argued, noting that luxury condos alone will not alleviate homelessness or displacement. Urban housing advocates have echoed that view, arguing that if abundance is to be more than a slogan, it must be embedded with a moral and policy commitment to the human right to housing. Building more is necessary, they argue, but not sufficient—it must be equitable.

What’s needed is a principled middle path.

Abundance should be pursued—but with guardrails.

We need to clear the path for deeply affordable and supportive housing while maintaining robust protections for tenants, workers, and the environment.

Additionally, we should build clean energy and high-speed rail, but not by handing public assets to private equity firms. We can make it easier to construct, while ensuring what we build is governed by justice, not just efficiency.

Klein and Thompson deserve credit for reintroducing ambition into the liberal imagination.

Their book asks a crucial question: why has it become so hard to build in America, and how can we change that? But their critics, from grassroots organizers to progressive economists, remind us that who builds, for whom, and under what rules still matters.

The challenge for Democrats is not whether to embrace abundance, but how to do so without reproducing the inequities of the past. If they can marry supply-side dynamism with redistributive justice—abundance with accountability—they may yet offer a compelling vision for the 21st century.

But if they settle for speed without values, scale without equity, and growth without consent, then abundance may turn out to be little more than the next buzzword for business as usual.

Still, there is no escaping the basic truth: America needs more housing. But it must be the right kind of housing.

As sociologist Matthew Desmond argues in Evicted, the affordable housing crisis is not just an economic issue—it is a moral failing that defines the very structure of poverty in America.

Without stable, affordable shelter, families are pushed into an exhausting cycle of job loss, school disruption, and health crises. Simply building more won’t fix that unless what we build meets people where they are—in need.

Urban scholar Alan Mallach, in The Divided City, reaches a similar conclusion. In deeply unequal cities, new development often bypasses the poor entirely. Market-rate housing gravitates toward already gentrifying neighborhoods, widening the gulf between thriving enclaves and concentrated poverty.

The solution, Mallach writes, requires both loosening restrictions and dramatically expanding public and nonprofit development—targeted where need is highest.

The abundance debate cannot ignore these realities. More housing is essential, but housing policy must be re-centered around justice, not just growth. That means bold investments in affordable construction, community land trusts, renter protections, and fair taxation. It means ensuring that housing abundance is not a proxy for market-led expansion, but a pathway to social equity.

If abundance becomes an excuse to bypass the poor, then it has failed. But if it becomes the rallying cry for a new era of public investment and inclusive building, it may yet live up to its promise.

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