A lot of the examples in “Abundance” are from California, where I’m from, where I was when we wrote much of the book. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has very much embraced the “Abundance” critique. So I want to play this clip of Gavin Newsom on Jimmy Kimmel.
Archival clip of Jimmy Kimmel: Is California overregulated?
Gavin Newsom: Yes.
Kimmel: Because it feels like there are a lot of well-meaning laws, rules, etc., that get in the way of building your house, of opening a restaurant. I’ve experienced this myself. What do we do about that?
Newsom: I mean, we need a liberalism that builds, and we have to own that. I’m very much part of this new nomenclature we call the abundance agenda. We have to reconcile that.
We have to be more focused on time to delivery. Not just rhetoric, not just what we’re for. We have to actually deliver and manifest it. That’s why this year we did the most significant housing reforms in our state’s history. We did something that hadn’t been done in decades — we tried to address land-use reforms, what we call secret reforms. We weren’t able to get it done.
We finally were able to get it done this year in a meaningful way. But this is a meaningful topic for Democrats to recognize we have to deliver on big and bold things. Trump breaks things. Democrats need to build things, but we have to actually deliver on that promise.
Derek, what do you think when you hear that?
Thompson: I definitely don’t want to give the same answer to every question, but I hear the governor of California describing a legislative victory in terms that literally quote our book: “a liberalism that builds” abundance. He’s being asked questions by a late-night host that are basically like large language model summaries of our book.
But then you look at the outcomes, and California still hasn’t actually increased housing starts in the six months since that bill was signed, nine months after the debate over that bill really began. That’s not the fault of that legislation, necessarily.
You could think of it in a couple of ways. You could think, one, that there’s a set of problems that have accumulated in California over the last 50 years that have made it harder to build housing, and this is one important step to ungunk that process. Maybe that’s an optimistic way to frame it.
Another way to frame it is that legislation is not the only ingredient when it comes to housing construction. We’re in an environment with an elevated interest rate, where Trump is waging war against legal and undocumented immigration — which is complicating the fact that 40 percent of construction workers in California are foreign-born. So the labor supply of construction work in California is scarce, and therefore very expensive, also raising the cost of housing.
Source:
www.nytimes.com
