Op-Ed: The High Cost of Everything-Bagel Liberalism in the Housing Crisis

Key points:

• “Everything-bagel liberalism” prioritizes every progressive value simultaneously.
• Tradeoff denial prevents meaningful change and sacrifices key values.
• Mature governance requires acknowledging value conflicts and making hard choices.

There’s a biting line in the film Everything Everywhere All At Once about a bagel that contains everything—so much, in fact, that it collapses into a black hole. It’s a perfect metaphor for the political tendency that journalist Derek Thompson and legal scholar Michael Gerrard have labeled “everything-bagel liberalism”: the attempt to uphold every progressive value simultaneously, refusing to acknowledge that meaningful change requires hard choices.

This refusal is what Gerrard calls tradeoff denial, and it’s killing our ability to build—whether it’s solar farms to fight climate change, or desperately needed housing to tackle homelessness and affordability crises. As Gerrard argues in his 2022 article “A Time for Triage,” we are long past the point of saving everything. We must make decisions. We must choose. Yet far too often, liberal governance is paralyzed by the opposite impulse: to preserve every value in full, indefinitely, and at once.

A recent online comment illustrates this dynamic perfectly.

In a housing debate, a critic sarcastically wrote, “The window that was installed via slave wages.”

The comment was intended to highlight a perceived hypocrisy: progressive housing advocates support building more homes, but also demand fair wages for immigrant workers. If housing is built cheaply, they’re accused of exploiting labor. If they uphold high labor standards, they’re told they’re making housing unaffordable. The irony, the commenter implied, is that you can’t have it both ways.

At first glance, the comment seems harsh, even inflammatory. But beneath the sarcasm is a real moral and political tension—one that progressives urgently need to face. We are living in a time of constrained resources, skyrocketing costs, and worsening crises. It is not always possible to achieve every goal at once. Pretending otherwise has dire consequences.

In the context of housing, the refusal to confront tradeoffs has produced a paradox: We want abundant housing, but also want every project to be union-built, carbon neutral, perfectly designed, deeply affordable, and publicly approved by consensus. We want to streamline approvals, but we also want unlimited opportunities for community input. We want infill density near transit, but also demand environmental review processes that take years. We want housing now, but our rules say not here, not like that, not unless it checks every box.

And so we build nothing.

This is what Gerrard calls tradeoff denial: “Rather than climate denial, the environmental community has tradeoff denial. We don’t recognize that it’s too late to preserve everything we consider precious, and to linger in making decisions.”

Substitute “housing advocates” for “environmental community” and the diagnosis fits just as well. The result is that by trying to save everything, we sacrifice the very values we claim to defend.

If we insist that all new housing be union-built but offer no subsidy to cover the added cost, fewer homes will be built—and fewer immigrant workers will be paid. If we insist on five-year environmental reviews for infill housing near transit, fewer people will live near jobs and fewer emissions will be reduced. If we demand that every unit be deeply affordable but reject density in high-opportunity areas, we trap low-income families in segregated neighborhoods. If we try to uphold every ideal, the result is stasis—and stasis is deeply unjust.

None of this is to say we should abandon our values. Fair wages matter. Environmental justice matters. Design excellence matters. But mature governance requires choosing—sequencing, prioritizing, and budgeting for what we can do now and what must wait.

This is the adult truth that “everything-bagel liberalism” avoids: values often conflict, and achieving real progress demands acknowledging that conflict. It requires ideological clarity and political courage.

So what does that look like?

First, acknowledge tensions honestly. Don’t pretend affordability and high labor standards are always aligned. Often, they are not. That doesn’t mean one must give way entirely, but it does mean we can’t hide behind a fantasy where everyone gets everything without cost.

Second, prioritize transparently. If union labor is a core value, then subsidize it. Don’t just impose the requirement and walk away. If affordability is critical, then loosen zoning and streamline approvals—even if that means accepting some imperfection.

Third, design policies that balance rather than deny tradeoffs. This could mean direct public investment in affordable, union-built housing. It could mean permitting faster approvals for projects that meet baseline environmental standards. It could mean legalizing more market-rate housing in high-income areas to relieve displacement pressure elsewhere.

And finally, we must stop confusing process with justice. Community input matters, but endless delay does not equal equity. When renters are priced out, when families are crammed into garages, when workers lose jobs because nothing gets built—that is injustice, too.

The cruel irony is that tradeoff denial doesn’t protect the people we think it does. The people who suffer from paralysis are not the well-off homeowners or process activists. It’s the low-income renter waiting for housing that never gets approved. It’s the immigrant laborer whose job disappears when a project stalls. It’s the climate, deteriorating as infill housing near transit dies under red tape. It’s the student couch-surfing. The single mom in a motel. The janitor commuting three hours.

We need a serious liberalism—one that doesn’t retreat into slogans or maximalist fantasies, but faces the world as it is and works toward change that is not perfect, but real.

So let’s confront the question the commenter’s quote poses: If you care about immigrant workers, how do you justify policies that prevent them from working? If you care about affordable housing, how do you justify blocking it in pursuit of gold-plated standards? If you care about justice, how do you justify inaction?

These aren’t gotchas. They’re the costs of denial.

The solution is not to do less. It’s to do what matters most first—and build from there. Prioritize. Budget. Build coalitions. Accept imperfection. And most of all, reject the fantasy of the everything bagel.

Because if we keep trying to build it all at once, we may end up building nothing at all.

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