Brendan McDermid/Reuters
There’s a new war within the liberal intelligentsia and it’s got to do with a funny word: “abundance.” Is it good or bad to be abundant? Does it symbolize dynamism or shadow libertarianism? What ills will so-called zoning reform actually fix?
Two new books are at the heart of this struggle. One is called, of course, Abundance, by Ezra Klein, the star New York Times columnist and podcaster, and Derek Thompson, a journalist at the Atlantic. The other, Why Nothing Works, comes from Marc J. Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. All three writers are Democrats or sympathetic to the Democratic cause. All dislike Donald Trump. All want blue cities, blue counties, and blue states from coast to coast.
But each man has riled up a certain number of left-leaning Democrats for somewhat similar reasons. One overriding issue is that many on the left are annoyed or even angered that such a debate is happening right now with the backdrop of Trump’s assault on the federal bureaucracy and democratic norms. Why care about “abundance” when the president is threatening judges and trying to deport legal residents for their political beliefs? It’s a fair argument, as is the reality that such an agenda — making government better at building and doing — isn’t an automatic salve for the Democratic woes in the heartland or anywhere really.
What has become obvious, though, is that the United States, despite its inordinate wealth, is not matching its twentieth century dynamism. Could this government — Republican or Democratic-run — stand up another interstate highway system? A network of railroads? Could this Department of Defense effectively invent the internet? There will be an America after Trump, and a republic too, and it’s worth mulling the greater arc of our nation. Not all issues are bound to electoral cycles, team red against team blue. If we are going to save our climate or guarantee every American an affordable place to live, these debates must be had — now.
The Klein-Thompson duo argues that an “anti-growth” mentality has constrained the left for the last several decades. NIMBYism and aggressive regulations have strangled housing supply and innovation. As government support for research and development dried up, science produced fewer society-wide breakthroughs. Once, we built whole subway systems in a decade, sent human beings to the moon, and created the internet. Klein and Thompson do blame neoliberalism — a long-running retreat from government investment and a foisting of responsibilities on the private sector — for this, which should make many progressives nod along. But they’d prefer lighter zoning and environmental laws to speed up growth. Can the Green New Deal come to fruition if NIMBYs can always sue to halt new solar plants and transmission lines?
Dunkelman’s thesis is similar. For New Yorkers, there’s plenty in Why Nothing Works to devour. He begins with the great bête noire of the modern left, Robert Moses, and argues — as I have — that the master builder’s legacy is somewhat misunderstood. Or, at least, we’ve overlearned the lessons of the Moses era. Moses, of course, ran roughshod over much of New York, ramming highways through thriving neighborhoods and thwarting the expansion of mass transit. He behaved like a tyrant and cared little for conventional democracy. Politicians couldn’t move him, nor could protest. For 40 years, he was emblematic of an imperial approach to governing, and it was Robert Caro’s The Power Broker which exposed, finally, many of his excesses.
But Dunkelman, with a half century of hindsight, is able to tell another story. Moses wasn’t merely a villain. Harnessing the collective powers of the federal, state, and local governments, he built enormous amounts of public housing and parkland. He transformed the Valley of Ashes of Great Gatsby lore into Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. He dreamed up Jones Beach and Riverside Park. He built Lincoln Center and the United Nations. He finished what was, at that time, the largest suspension bridge on Earth. His public housing developments ensured hundreds of thousands of working class people could permanently reside in New York, no matter how expensive it became. Under Moses, the government could be unfeeling — but it worked. And it was not Moses-style development that triggered New York’s decline in the 1970s, as Caro strongly intimated. Rather, it was the collapse of the manufacturing sector, white flight, and fiscal mismanagement. The public works Moses left behind were necessary for New York’s post-fiscal crisis renaissance.
Dunkelman frames American views of governance as a centuries-long clash between Hamiltonians, who argue for stronger centralized authority, and Jeffersonians, who are wary of government overreach. Both, in his view, have a point. In the twentieth century, urban planning could go awry, leading to interstate highways obliterating vibrant, walkable downtowns. Ignoring the will of ordinary people had dire consequences. But the trouble began when the Jeffersonians kept winning. Beginning in the 1970s, skepticism of government power began getting baked into both political parties. Conservatives, of course, longed to dismantle the New Deal legacy: they wanted lower taxes, weaker unions, and more influence for private enterprise at the expense of federal oversight.
The left’s role in this push is more poorly understood, and Dunkelman is a wonderful guide to this dispiriting stretch of history. Beginning with Watergate, which taught a generation of young progressives to distrust federal power, the left began to favor hamstringing government whenever possible. Numerous new chokepoints, some of them well-meaning, were invented, from arcane local laws to community boards that could stifle building that alienated locals. Preservationists warred to freeze urban neighborhoods in place, hoping to avoid catastrophes like the obliteration of the old Penn Station — but they also, in their zeal for saving the Old, helped to ensure these cities would grow less affordable. Building new affordable housing, commuter railways, or any other type of large infrastructure project became far harder in the era of community control.
How to make America dynamic again? How to build here like they do in China and Japan, where it’s routine to throw up new high-speed rail lines every decade? And if we solved these problems, would it be enough? David Sirota, the founder of Lever News and a former Bernie Sanders speechwriter, summed up one stinging progressive critique of the whole project: “Abundance™ being defined as ‘kill zoning laws and corporate regulation’ but not ‘give everyone decent medical care’ — that’s the tell, and you’re the mark.” It’s true that this is not a focus among the advocates of abundance. Relaxing zoning laws won’t do anything to bring us universal healthcare or bolster the social safety net. It may not even, in the short-term, do enough to create affordable housing. One of the great divides within the YIMBY movement, which can be folded into the abundance push, is how much regulation should exist around what people pay in rent. Some YIMBYs do back stronger tenant protections and versions of rent control while others, like Klein ally Matthew Yglesias, plainly do not. Yglesias is also skeptical of lifting the federal law that effectively bans the construction of new public housing.
Abundance, then, can hold different meanings for different advocates. If the belief is that a robust, efficient federal government should do more to help working class Americans, then we need a new program of mass home-building like we saw in the 1930s and 1940s. Without the New York City Public Housing Authority, the largest city in America would probably have an unfathomably large amount of homeless, the tent cities in the five boroughs making the Tenderloin and Skid Row look like minor, quasi-pastoral encampments. If you believe zoning reform is enough — and the government need only get out of the way — then how much housing must be built, exactly, for rents to start falling enough so a family making well under $100,000 can comfortably afford a market-rate apartment? Turning New York (or any city) into Tokyo is easier said than done.
What abundance advocates do get right is that governments — federal, state, and local — must do far better. We have fallen a long way from the twentieth century; we led the world in building and innovation until we didn’t. We are still a remarkably wealthy nation and we must find a way, as we persevere in this new century, to beat back stagnation. Otherwise, the future is going to be much more frustrating.
