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The Realignment
595 | Ned Resnikoff: One Year In - Taking Abundance Back to Its Fundamentals
00:57:43
Ned Resnikoff, Roosevelt Institute and author of Lessons from YIMBYism: Taking “Abundance” Back to Its Fundamentals, joins The Realignment. Marshall and Ned discuss the history of how YIMBY housing activism led to the broader abundance movement, how Abundance supporters should think about bipartisanship and navigating the various political factions on the left of right who find the ideas relevant, and the relevance of abundance/YIMBY policy tools like regulatory reform and public investment to the goal of increasing supply of vital goods like housing, medical care, and childcare.
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- [00:00]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Today's episode has been a long time coming after a pretty aggressive focus on the Abundance agenda since Steve Dallas came on to discuss his rise of the Abundance Faction piece back in mid 2024. After this episode, I really think I've run out of things to say on the topic. To be clear, this isn't a Marshall moves on to the next shiny policy thing. I'm still very excited to co produce the Abundance 2026 conference towards the end of this year and my niskanin centric abundance work will continue. So please reach out if you're working on or interested in learning more about the space. Part of why I've been so interested in abundance hasn't just been the policies themselves, but rather abundance's broader context in the politics and policy space. During the Realignment moment when I first came across Abundance, I was clearly in the middle of, or just not really frank and honest with myself about my own ideological movement back towards the center left. After almost a decade living in and covering the Realignment right, I first got interested formally in the right back in 2014 when I read Sam Tenenhaus's New York Times Magazine article on Reform Conservatism. Reform Conservatism was a wonky policy centric crew that tried to push conservatism past its sort of 2012 pre Trump impasse and really upgrade the movement and its framing for the moment. Since the abundance discourse really kicked off just right before Biden withdrew From the 2024 campaign, I saw Abundance as filling the same role in left liberal spaces as Reform Conservatism attempted to in the 2014 right. So with this episode, I really want to end the past year of aggressive coverage where where I began last February. Back then, Steve Taois and I interviewed Felicia Wong, then the head of the left leaning Roosevelt Institute. Talking with Felicia and hearing from lots of folks privately, I concluded that the idea that the left was implacably opposed to the broad sets of abundance ideas was just incorrect. Yes, there was obviously going to be an aggro anti abundance anti as recline set of takes from substackers, youtubers and creators and of course posters on social media. But the actual people who held positions of power in left leaning policy orgs and who held offices where abundance ideas were relevant responded cautiously but ultimately positively to the broad sets of principles. So, not to claim that New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani is officially an abundance person, but his pretty consistent references to abundance state capacity. These sort of sets of ideas didn't really surprise me. With that in mind, if you are on the left and you want government to do a bunch of really big things, I've got good news for you. Abundance has a bunch of really valid ideas in that category and they don't require that you co sign every single thing Ezra Klein has ever said. If you hear frustration from me about the bipartisan aspects of Abundance in this episode, the frustration is really rooted with how the goal is of uniting the center left to the dark Abundance right led to a lot of unhelpful left punching as the unifying force that cured a lot of opportunities for center to left fusion and reconciliation. I want to be very clear that getting anything really big done in this country right now will require bipartisanship. And a huge part of my employer in the Scanning Center's point of view is that there is a whole set of undercovered issues, many of which are abundance coded, where unlikely bipartisan alliances can create real opportunities for big wins. I believe that a hundred percent. But I also believe that successful politics requires strategic thinking and realism. And if you look at transformative political movements over the past century or so, they haven't started with watered down overly broad areas of interest trying to serve every possible ideological faction at once. The market focused, state skeptical neoliberalism that brought the New Deal order to a close during the 1980s and 1990s began on the Libertarian right, won over the Republican Party with Reagan's presidency, and then, because it was politically successful and seemed to answer the questions at the time, forced Democratic President Bill Clinton to accept the new consensus when he declared the era of big government over in the 1990s. For a more recent example, think of how America built a new China consensus that basically lasted until Trump actually assumed the presidency and decided to pivot against his own position on banning TikTok. What happened was in 2015 the MAGA right declared that we would compete with, not just engage with China. Then Trump and his election victory won over the traditional foreign policy right and and then those same folks with the sets of ideas they proposed, maybe not the specifics, but the broad ideas, actually won over the foreign policy crew that would run things during the Biden administration. By 2024, competition, not engagement, was the new consensus on an issue by issue basis. Then there are huge parts of the Abundance project that on their own are easily bipartisan. Yimby housing bills are passed by coalitions of urban Democrats and rural Republicans. At the state level, permitting reform for energy projects has serious bipartisan energy in Congress. One of the big questions for the sets of folks who are interested or skeptical of abundance is just this basic question of like, why is it that red states like Texas, where I live, are able to build more than blue states? But if abundance is going to be a transformative movement, it needs to be more than a specific set of individual policy ideas. So my aim here isn't to reject bipartisanship, but to encourage everyone, myself included, to go a lot deeper in the coming months and come up with a broader theory of change and orientation that would make this decision we've made make a lot more sense. So now to the actual episode. My guest is Ned Resnikoff, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where he researches housing and urban policy. He previously worked as a policy director for California embiid. We discussed a piece he published last month, Lessons from Taking Abundance Back to Its Fundamentals, which you could find in the show notes. As I said earlier, we're really back to where we started this time last year. Left leaning orgs and figures are more open to these ideas than a lot of people assumed and there is a lot of opportunity there and I would.
- [06:42]
B
Love to focus a lot of time.
- [06:43]
A
And attention in that space itself. I hope you all enjoy the conversation.
- [06:48]
B
Ned Reznikov, welcome to the Realignment.
- [06:51]
C
Thank you. Happy to be here.
- [06:53]
B
So, as I reiterated in the intro to this episode, I am nearing the end of my hyper coverage of Abundance the Abundance Agenda for a while. I'm going to do lots of great work with the Abundance Conference later this year, but I want to give listeners a break. So it's going to be sort of towards the end of my series covering this. But I'm really excited to talk with you, Ned, because you've written a new paper for the Roosevelt Institute titled Lessons from Taking Abundance Back to Its Fundamentals. And I think you more than anyone else that I've read over the past year, especially given the fact that it's been over a year this has been a topic, have really gotten to the core of both what we've learned from this experience and how that should guide people moving forward. So I'm really excited to talk with you in that context. Before we get into the actual paper, we're going to do a little definitions bit and then get into some of the history that folks really need to understand to sort of get the journey that led to this paper. I'm going to reference one of the key Abundance texts that people had a lot of fun with at the Abundance Conference last year, which was Steve Talley's Varieties Abundance piece, which is basically arguing that abundance is a bipartisan movement. The reason why you'll see right wing orgs like the Abundance Institute or the foundation for American Innovation where I used to work, but also center left places or centuries places like Niskanen, all on the same stage together sponsoring the same conferences is because we should understand this is something that has a bunch of different varieties. So the varieties are Red Plenty, and this is linked from left to right. Cascadian Abundance, Liberal Abundance, Moderate Abundance, Synthesis Abundance Dynamism, and Dark Abundance, which of course these varieties had. Without saying that this is your. The entirety of your identity which you most identify with. Yeah, good question.
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C
And this is a pretty fun game. I think that the one that's probably the best fit for me is the. The leftmost one, Red Plenty Abundance. It's not a perfect fit. I mean, I'm not a. I'm not a DSA member. I would. If I'm going to do the very typical left thing of drawing pedantic micro distinctions between different political tendencies, I would describe myself more as a Social Democrat probably. But I really like what Mamdani is doing so far in New York. So I'd say maybe somewhere between Red Plenty Abundance and Cascadian Abundance. Because I also think that the focus on decarbonizing the United States, decarbonizing the world, really is also a really fundamental part of why I think this stuff.
- [09:44]
B
Is so important and key defense of the left here. And that happens because I get a lot of skepticism from listeners and deep listeners like my family about this. I actually think it's very important for you to distinguish between being DSA and a Democratic socialist, because the whole party podcast that we're doing here is called the Realignment. And the realignment from my broad perspective is that everything is resorting. There are new issues. And I think maybe, let's say it was the year 2009, it would not be super useful to draw all these distinctions when our politics was more stable. But instead, in this moment where everything is up for grabs and you have to make a lot of very specific decisions about who you ally with, what do I actually believe? How am I interpreting these things? Being precise with this language really, really matters. So I want to defend your instinct to push back against that and say no for at least the next five years. We need to get that specific.
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C
Yeah, I will say that it's kind of contextual. Right? I mean, I think in talking to an audience like this, I'll describe myself as A social Democrat. I think in other contexts where people are less invested in these sorts of distinctions than just saying New Deal Democrat or, or liberal is probably just as, just as good. But yeah, for the purpose of this audience, let's go with social Democrat.
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B
And I'd say for my answer to the question of which variety do I identify with, I identify most with liberal abundance, with sympathies as a Texan to moderate abundance synthesis that they did sort of AI generated photos of the different varieties in the image you see in modern abundance synthesis is very extended to make the big house. That house is probably cheap. They're plugging an EV in. So that's very, very key context there. But I also think it's important for me to place myself within sort of the liberal abundance camp, not just to be pedantic, but also to sort of understand and this is the theme of this conversation, that there are implications for how I interpret abundance and how I act within the abundance cinematic universe for me identify myself there. So that will come up a little later. So as I said, since this is the sort of like near the crescendo of the abundance conversation, I think we've just done a straight up history and I think you're the perfect guest to do this with. So let's just kind of start here. Could you really contextualize like yimbyism as the starting point for everything we're going to discuss today in the 2010s?
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C
Yeah. So the sort of standard historical narrative of yimbyism is that it really kicks off In, I think, 2014 in San Francisco at this point. Housing prices have been going up in, in San Francisco and a lot of other cities for a long time. There was the, the great down zone in much of the United states from the 60s through the 90s that basically capped how much, how much housing you could build in all these cities. And once the urban crisis ended in the, in the 90s and people started going back into the cities, it creates this real supply crunch. But it's in the mid-2010s where the supply crunch becomes so bad in places like San Francisco, like New York, that a lot of young members of the professional managerial class who are moving into those cities, even they're finding themselves rent burdened in a way that would be shocking to the yuppie generation of the 80s or, you know, boomers, when, when they were living in these cities in the, in the 60s and 70s. And so that creates some pressure that finds an outlet in the mid 2010s in San Francisco, beginning with a woman named Sonia Trous and some of the other people who also assembled around her, such as my former boss, Brian Hanlon, Laura Foote, who now runs CBAction. And these are people who a lot of them are civil servants and are fortunate enough to have not super demanding jobs so they can go to planning commission or board of supervisor meetings midday where a lot of working people, that option isn't available to them. And there are also people who are pretty conversant in economics and public policy. And so they realize that the reason why their rents are so high is because of a housing shortage in San Francisco. They also understand that part of the reason for that housing shortage is that incumbent homeowners, especially white, higher income, more conservative, disproportionately male incumbent homeowners are very organized in places like San Francisco and so are able to use that power and that organization to shut down housing production even where zoning permits it. And so they start to get organized too. Sonia's original organization was called SF barf Bay Area Renters Federation because, you know, she's always had like kind of a provocative streak, which has been great for sort of, you know, generating attention for the movement, especially in its early days. But eventually the term that people start to coalesce around is yinby. Yes, in my backyard. And you start to see Yidby organizations popping up in a few other cities and especially in the East Bay as well. You start to see an organization called the East Bay for Everyone emerge, but also in other high cost cities. I think Denver is one of the very early ones as well. And as, as time goes on, there's this sort of tactical or strategic transition, I should say, from first going to these public meetings and speaking in favor of housing projects. So kind of breaking the unanimity of the NIMBY representation at these approval hearings to the formation of a group called called Carla in San Francisco that then starts suing NIMBY jurisdictions for violating state law to then the next step from there is the realization that, well, while we can do that in some cases state law itself is woefully inadequate to the challenge of dealing with the housing crisis. And there's a real collective action problem with local governments where none of them are. San Francisco can't solve its housing crisis on its own, like even if they eliminated zoning, because you have all of these suburbs and exurbs surrounding it that also need to build more homes in order to deal with the regional housing market. So then the next step after that is state legislation and that's where I have spent most of my time working in the Yimby movement. I was the, the policy director of California YIMBY for a couple of years, which the aforementioned Brian Hanlon co founded. And you've started to see this state legislation model in a lot of other states as well, and not just other states, but for example, one of the biggest Yimby victories of the past decade since inception was in Auckland, New Zealand, where they did a series of very ambitious EMV reforms. Because there's also a growing recognition, I think, that this is not just a US problem, but it's actually an Anglosphere problem. There's something about how the Anglosphere in general does planning that has led to significant housing shortages in the cities of the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the uk. So that's, that's sort of a potted history of, of ism. I'd say maybe in like the early 2000 and twenties, like 2021, 2022, as the YIMBY movement is starting to get some more national media attention, you see a group of intellectuals, journalists, you know, including some folks at the Niskanen center or kind of come around to the conclusion that there is a lot in the Yimby diagnosis of the housing shortage that can be applied to other contexts in which there are sort of basic material needs that are not being met for a lot of people because they're way too expensive. So Ezra Klein uses the term supply side progressivism or supply side liberalism to refer to this with the idea that, you know, you can't just kind of subsidize the demand side for a lot of these things. You actually need to figure out ways to increase the overall supply. But the, the term that everyone comes to settle on eventually is, is abundance. And of course that's the, the title of the book that Ezra and, and Derek Thompson co wrote that is sort of the, the defining, the defining statement of what this sort of intellectual tendency is. And so I think that brings us up to the present day and the sort of abundance debates.
- [19:28]
B
Two other details and reading references for those of you who like homework from your podcast listening in the morning that are relevant here. So in 2017, Scan and Center's Brie Lindsay, who recently came on the podcast and of course running the show, Steve Talley's right, the Captured Economy, which is convergently at the same time writing about how there are just all these issue areas where you don't have to reject the idea that there's inequality or there are unfair outcomes and you could do this on a brink. Lindsay on the center right, give helis to the center left and you could just be anti capture of incumbency. So like this is nebbyism, this is examples in regulation and all these other areas. So that actually kicked off this and this had nothing to do with yimbyism. But at least where this, where abundance is ended up today really infuses within the sort of serious policy side of these areas. This idea that bipartisanship and thinking across the ideological spectrum and getting wind that way is huge. And then secondly, and this is a really major piece that I have not talked enough about on this show and more people who talk about abundance should talk about this is that Steve Talley's, Sam Hammond, Daniel Takish have been a scan and center. You know, two of those three are no longer at scannon but they wrote this piece in the early 2000s called cost disease Socialism, which is not just a dunk on socialism but it's actually a very useful type of critique and offer up for the left which basically says if you are on the modern left, you basically think the solution to inequality, to bad outcomes across healthcare, education, housing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera is to subsidize demand. So higher education is expensive. Let's subsidize tuition through grants, debt, loan forgiveness, et cetera, et cetera. Healthcare is expensive, okay, so let's create single payer healthcare or Medicare for all public option. Pick your poison of those various groupings, all of those things are demand subsidies. So what the paper helpfully says is we have some beefs with those demand side subsidies. But even if you think that's the right approach, you're actually in a conundrum because there's another lens by which you should look at these issues, which is the supply, the supply constrained aspect of it. And if all you do is subsidize demand. So when confronted by incredibly high tuition payments, let's say in higher education, if all you do is increase the size of Pell grants at those institutions every single year, and we don't increase the size of Pell grant the recent year, but we did increase them multiple times during the Obama administration, all we are actually doing is creating a feedback loop where they increase tuition, you increase the subsidy, then they increase tuition again and you're just stuck like that forever. And this is not a controversial argument left and right. This is an agreed upon dynamic. So what they say is if you expand your conception of the problem to okay, but like maybe if there are more seats at individual Schools, because schools, speaking of incumbents and capture schools want to maintain their prestige and they want to be highly ranked on the U.S. news World Reports. How do you get your ranking higher? You literally like have a lower acceptance rate. So what if we were to say, hey Harvard, if you want to get a subsidy, Pell grants, federal funding, et cetera, you have to increase the number of seats at Harvard. So that's an example of how you can merge a demand side response with a supply expansion. So that then leads us into, as you said, yimbyism goes from just a focus on housing to this broader sets of issues that you could think about it. So when the actual abundance book came out, what was your reaction to it?
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C
I thought it was a useful summation. I mean I think that it's, it's an important idea to circulate and I, because I think it's, you know, in terms of the intra left politics of this, I think that for some decades now there's been this, there's been a little bit of an allergy in some corners of the left to just, you know, thinking about more stuff, the production of more of the types of stuff we, we need as, as an actual problem that needs to be addressed. I think a lot of this comes out of some of the growth skepticism that you really see beginning in the 1970s. But to me, part of what this is all really about is trying to reconstruct something like the political economy of the New Deal where the understanding was that instead of economic growth being somehow in, in conflict with progressive goals, you can actually use it to underwrite something like American social democracy. Because as long as you have that growth, then even redistributed measures are happening not in a zero sum context. And so you're kind of tamping down on the potential class conflict and building something like a cross class coalition for achieving progressive ends. To me that's part of the core of what's really useful in abundance. And I think it was a valuable intervention both in these sorts of intro left discussions, but I think also just in terms of socializing the idea with elected officials and people who maybe aren't sort of privy to these, these more sort of like think tank or academic type arguments, but are looking for something like a, like a positive useful agenda that they can, that they can champion.
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B
And this is where you start to get to real tensions and we'll get to the paper in a second because you actually just as someone who's clearly not just sort of seeing yourself on the inside baseball, you could sort of offer a direct perspective on the realities here. What's been really interesting, there's a real tension in the Abundance Crew camp. I don't like the word movement. I think movements are a reference to a very specific political strategy conception of what you're trying to do here. And my hot take, and it's the only hot take in a certain set of 10 DC think tanks, is if your strategy is not to mass mobilize people to achieve some end, then you should use the word movement because it confuses people as to your actual objectives. But the actual tension point is banned. Ezra and Derek are podcasters. They're writers, they're pundits. They do their own thing. They don't run any abundance organization. They don't run think tanks. They're not writing checks. They're their own thing. And what people don't get about abundance is a lot of the orgs, I would say with like 95% confidence. I'm sure there are some sort of coattail writers here or there. Most of people actually want to do their own thing and don't want to be known as the unfollowing Derek and Ezra thing, which I think is a good instinct. But something that's been lost there is, I think, a lot of, like, the actual takeaways you should get from the Abundance book success and the specific framing that Ezra, especially because, you know, Derek and Ezra's books were merged together and once you understand that this is a book that is merged together, you understand like what works and what doesn't work in the book. So as you said, when Ezra is talking about supply side liberalism or supply side progressivism, this is really a story about liberalism. And not liberalism in the classical European sense, but American liberalism. And especially when you read Abundance in concert with my Niskanen colleague Mark Dunkelman's book why Nothing Works, this is a story about how, to your point, American liberalism, as Nixon rose and you ran into the slow growth in the laser of the 1970s, just lost its juice and essentially gave up on this sort of set of ideas and confidence that growth was something that could be wielded to liberal ends. Ezra clearly is writing, and he said this on Ross Douthat's podcast, that abundance really was a success because it filled a void that existed in American liberalism. It doesn't feel old, it doesn't even feel a tiny bit of it. But it was the only thing that basically said after 2024, we are just out of ideas. So let's have something enter into the forehead. But by defining abundance as a liberal project and then clearly finding an audience within people who are broadly center left to left, I think that really has some implications for how you then engage with the leftist part of that cohort and left critics, and for whether or not this is actual theory which has broad bipartisan purchase across the ideological spectrum. So something that you specifically write, and I want to actually just like read this exactly so that I could get your perspective, is that you specifically describe how, if you actually look at this actual project, in looking at these different factions, so dark abundance, abundance dynamism all the way to the left version of tidy, these factions are not just different wings of the same movement. They are pursuing entirely different and mutually exclusive objectives. It is not possible to build a coherent synthesis that accommodates both. Talk about this point, because I think this is a very subversive point if you are within the organizing sphere of the abundance cohort over the past year.
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C
Yeah, well, I mean, think about what, for example, Mom Donnie is trying to do, and think about what some of the, the dark abundance folks who are associated with national conservatism and with the Trump administration are trying to do. I mean, you have people who. Their vision of abundance involves welcoming in many, many more immigrants into the United States. And I would put myself in that camp. Uh, I do believe in the one billion Americans thesis. And then you have people on the other side who are talking about deportation, abundance, and who, you know, would. Would seriously want to denaturalize Mamdani. It's. It's not possible to hold together a coalition like that between. Between, you know, someone who has one goal and then someone else who not only has a different, mutually exclusive goal, but also wants to deport person A. Which I think points to. I think there are a couple things going on here. One of them is that the sort of tools and the concepts involved with abundance don't have actual ideological content. So they are. They can be useful to satisfy a bunch of different goals, but to a certain extent on the goals themselves, it's. They're just completely neutral. And you can't really build a movement around just the idea of, oh, well, we should have a larger supply of something, but what the thing is, and why we need a larger supply of it, we're just going to bracket that question. I mean, that's just not really like a sort of coherent political coalition. And so for that reason, this, in this briefing, in this brief, I'm. I'm trying to be very explicit about the fact that I don't really see the. The tools that I'm describing, the sort of policy instruments you can use as themselves, the basis for a political coalition, I see them as things you can use to satisfy a variety of different ends. And the thing that I'm specifically using them for is to advocating for their use for is satisfying the sorts of ends that people who, you know, agree with the Roosevelt Institute would want to see.
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B
Yeah. And I think what's so helpful about that, and this is why we spend a little bit of time at the top of the episode discussing how, in this audience's sense, you're a Democratic socialist versus you're being on the dsa.
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C
Social Democrats.
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B
Social Democrats. Sorry. Thank you. Corrected. I'll leave that in. Won't edit it out. We have to hear my mistakes here. The key thing, though, is this is why I just really harp on that. You have to actually understand, like, these different factions and what they are trying to say. And the thing is, you are on the dark abundance side of things. You are fundamentally aligned with the Trump administration. If you are on the Abundance center to the Abundance left, you are not allied at the Trump administration. And yes, there will be specific policy areas where you could say, I agree with them. This happens all the time in American politics. One faction on the opposite side could find one specific area where there's agreement on, and they could support that thing. But that is different than constructing an entire movement that's trying to do that. One of my goals this year, I hope to integrate this more into the conference. I'm not trying to say, to be clear, that the right will not be welcome at the abundance Conference, but I think what happens when you have a poor theory of bipartisanship, quote, unquote, is it leads to papering over these dynamics and these distinctions. It leads to sort of not thinking deeply about the implications there. And it means you do not think hard about the audience that's actually going to be sort of receiving this work. So an example of this, and this is where I'm also curious for you. I'd love to hear your theory of how change operates on a bipartisan basis, because my theory is really informed by my actual area of focus, which is foreign and defense policy. Think of how American, you and I probably have different views on the US And China and Cold War II and foreign and defense policy. But just putting that all aside, look at how we changed America's consensus on China. Imagine a world where in 2015, 2016, you tried to get together a bipartisan set of policymakers and think tank wonks who have come to the conclusion, wow, our strategy of post Cold War engagement with China has been a failure and we need to now compete with China rather than engage with them in the sense of win wins on everyone's side. So we are going to from that starting point be entirely bipartisan in advance change that way. That obviously would not work. And that wasn't happened. What actually happened was the China hawks via Trump took over the right via maga. They then won the argument within their camp and actually converted even centrist within the Republican camp to their idea. Then they had a presidency and they did a bunch of very specific things that Dem kind of people didn't like. But if you talk to these people who are in the Biden administration, they spent the 2017-2021 off period thinking, oh wow, if we're looking at this policy, literally we don't like what Trump's doing. We have some qualms of Trump's tariffs, but actually the engagement idea was wrong and actually we do need to compete. So by winning on one side, you then convince the other side. And then Biden continued, many of those policies didn't remove the tariffs, actually competed harder past the chips act and then in 2024 and then we're going to leave 2025 alone because Trump overturned the TikTok bill. That was what consensus looked like. So what I really want to say to the abundance crowd is I want this set of ideas to be quote, bipartisan. But I don't think you get there by starting with bipartisanship as the goal. I think what you do here is basically say, hey, center to left, we need to increase the supply of these things. There are various different ways that we could get there. And once the right discovers that just deporting people is not going to lower housing prices, which is the current plan, they are going to need to have to find an option. And if we succeed, if Zora unsuccessful, San Francisco becomes cheaper as cities like Austin provide their own model, there is going to be a clear story that the right could pick up and reinterpret in their own way, the same way as the devs did with China. So I'd be curious what you think about that sort of example and how it should inform how we think about bipartisanship.
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C
Yeah, it's a great question. And actually before I get there, I did want to just say one more thing about the, the question of like abundance as a movement and just putting on my, my resistance lid hat for, for a second. I, I don't think that the sorts of people who are think tank fellows are put on conferences get to get to decide what the actual central political question of a particular era is. And I think it's pretty clear that in 2026America, the sort of central political question is, is the United States going to remain, you know, an imperfect, but still, you know, more or less functional, trending in the right direction, pluralist liberal democracy, or is it going to fully transition into Heron vogue autocracy? And if that's the sort of central question, then I don't think you can have a movement that operates in some way that is, that is relevant to the political moment, that is meeting the political moment that says, well, we're going to just kind of stick a pin in that question. We're not going to address the like should we remain a liberal democracy or not question. I, I just, I, I think that is a recipe for either completely falling apart the first time the coalition actually tries to do something together, or frankly, for becoming way too comfortable with the pro autocracy side of things. But, but moving on to your question about how political change happens and what is then the role of, role of bipartisanship in this. I, you know, a lot of how I think about this is informed by what we've seen from the YIMBY movement and in particular some of the successes of the YIMBY movement in California. And I, I will, I am using movement advisedly here. I do think the YIMBY movement, Quick.
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B
Quick interjection that I will not rant on YIMBYism movement makes sense because think of the way you told the story. It starts with go to city councils and go to meetings and prove that the few people who showed up and vetoed are overwhelmed by the actual people who are looking for housing. So in that context, the word movement and then mobilization makes total sense.
- [38:41]
C
Yeah. And, and fundamentally, pretty much any YAMBI organization worth its salt is still to this day fundamentally accountable, first and foremost to the volunteer base, not to, not to funders, not to, you know, not, not to the elected officials that are lobbying. Like, if you, if you lose those supporters, then you're effectively have dissolved a huge portion of your, your relevance and influence. So yeah, I think, I think movement is appropriate here. And I, I think the California context is an interesting one because obviously California is a very blue state. It's also an enormous state. So something I like to, I like to mention as a, as a data point for this is that there are more registered Republicans in the state of California than there are people of any age or voter registration in the entire state, Alabama, so deep blue state. But you still in absolute numbers have a lot of Republicans. And so you have, you know, Republican members of the state legislature that, that represent a lot of people. And you can't, you can't write off those, those representatives or ignore them. Especially on a question like housing policy, like, like stimulating housing supply where the Democratic Party remains divided. When the party is divide. When the party is divided, the, the center of gravity is shifting. But, you know, something has been historically, I would say maybe fairly evenly divided, then that means that you need additional votes from somewhere. And I think that reaching out to Republican legislators has been incredibly valuable because they're used to being ignored by a lot of, a lot of progressive groups. And I would say that, you know, YIMBI groups by and large tend to be, in terms of the people who make up the groups in terms of, like, their general orientation tend to be fairly liberal. I wouldn't say that's uniformly true or certainly it's not necessarily true in a place like Texas or Montana, where there's also a fair amount of UMB organizing. But in California, that's certainly the case. I think starting out from, you know, a clear position of what your values are and not dissembling about those values or trying to obscure those values, but at the same time going to Republican members of the legislature in good faith and saying, this is what we're trying to do here is here's the evidence, here's like, the empirical evidence for why we think this will work. And also I think critically, being able to code switch a little bit. So not again, not disguising what the value proposition for you is, but just kind of saying, like, and this is why we think, you know, it also fit with your values. It's also compatible with your values. That's not, you're not always going to be able to do that for reasons that I gave earlier, but you certainly can when it comes to, when it comes to zoning and things like property rights.
- [42:11]
B
And to be clear, the code switch in this case is, hey, Republican, especially rural Republican.
- [42:18]
C
Right.
- [42:18]
B
So they're not thinking about, like, urban dynamics as a sort of culture war threat to their sort of, like, experience. There's, you're saying, hey, it's kind of crazy that the government and people are telling property owners how to use their property. And wouldn't it just, like, make sense for property owners to be able to do whatever they want as long as it's reasonable and, you know, it's reasonable housing you know, and that's like the easy way. There's a better, more aggressive version of that. But that's sort of an example when I hear code switching. And here's the key thing, and this is where you're clear, it's not like dishonest, right? You are just using their language and not your language when it comes. So you're not saying we need to welcome more neighbors. You would never say that, but you would just sort of say like, hey, like, what if like your neighbor were able to say in your rural part of Montana or Texas? That's how this, that's actually how this sort of was introduced to me by like a YIMBY organizer. What if your neighbor told you how you could use your farmland? They'd be like, oh, that's crazy, that shouldn't be a thing. And they're like, exactly. So we're trying to do the same thing there too.
- [43:16]
C
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think it becomes a little bit of a self sustaining thing in part because once you have proof of concept about how this scrambles the ideological battle lines a little bit, then that's baked in. But I think the other way it becomes self sustaining is that once you are able to actually also have proof of concept about what a well functioning cosmopolitan jurisdiction with affordable housing looks like, the people who, many of the people who live there, some of whom might, you know, have more conservative politics overall, if, if they like where they live, they're going to really see the value of that. And you know, an example that always comes to mind for me is I think that, I think that a lot of people would be surprised how yimby a lot of young Republican staffers in D.C. are. And it's, I think, I think it's because they live in D.C. and they like living in D.C. and so you look at organizations like the American Enterprise Institute is a great example. I think a lot of people on the left would be surprised to learn that the American Enterprise Institute puts together these great walkability maps to evaluate how walkable different jurisdictions are. And again, I think that's because dc, you know, it has its problems, but it's also like in the American context, like a pretty well functioning, well governed city. It's a pleasant place to walk around. Housing is expensive, but it's not as expensive in, you know, other comparable cities in the United States. And you know, I think people who, people who generally like living there and generally like their lives there can then see the value of. Oh yeah, like there's, there's actually A lot to this idea of having mixed use walkable neighborhoods.
- [45:18]
B
And the last thing, before we get into the specific tools you're recommending in your brief, I just want to know you really helpfully solved the. The bipartisanship thing for me because I don't want sort of abundance associated people to hear this episode and think that Marshall's declaring that he doesn't want the right to come to the abundance conference or bipartisanship is dumb. It's just that I made this joke last week and this just synced with your comment where one of Ezra's big pieces on abundance was this critique of everything bagel liberalism. And the everything bagel liberalism critique is it's looking at the. And I know people on the left have critiqued the specifics of it, but I think the metaphor is very useful. This is the purpose of an op ed. It's a metaphor, not a research research paper that basically when we passed the CHIPS Act, Ezra's telling of the story was the mission was we need to reshore our semiconductor capacity so we could get to 20% of global supply. That's what we're trying to do. But through the passage of this bill, we added on a bunch of extra requirements, we added on childcare facilities and we added on labor requirements and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, until you have an everything bagel. Because within modern liberalism, and this is why I won't defend the metaphor, I've seen this instinct operate itself. So I think that people should take it seriously, not literally early. At this point, everyone's trying to make this thing do everything and not considering how doing everything makes it harder to do the actual thing. And my joke is the problem of abundance for the past year is we've had everything bagel abundance. So by saying abundance is state capacity and abundance is housing and abundance is nuclear power and abundance is AI and abundance is human flourishing and abundance is transportation. Like, literally, like I can add 10 more different things. We've tried to turn it into an everything Babel bagel so we could supply everything. What if our goal is bipartisanship? We would actually and this is going to serve as a guide for my programming of the conference this year. Say, let's just name three things. Like, what if our goal is bipartisanship? What are like three authentic things that you can code switch to either end where you could actually get people just unabashedly saying, like this is really great. And then once you start getting to sort of the frontiers of that, like three. So for example, an area that would be Totally outside of where you could actually work together would be AI. Right. Like most of the dark abundance groups want to do AI promotion. Sorry, that's just like not going to happen. The best you're going to get from abundance on AI from like a left liberal perspective is hey, the data centers are taking all the power in your state. We need to rapidly like upscale clean power so that we can actually make people's toss back in. That is, that is the only AI related context that think we haven't any engagement. You are not going to see people on the left of center to left say actually I'm convinced that AI is going to create human flourishing and not downside. So that is outside of what I think the top three would be. But I want to let you give the policy tools, which is any response to that. Because I want to just not just be poo pooing bipartisanship and an offering a way forward for people who are trying to have that as their objective.
- [48:22]
C
Yeah, I think that's right. Having a bit more of a focus and I would say even, you know, you could even go a little bit broader than that and just kind of start with, you know, and Ezra and Derek do this in their book where they kind of start with the specific vision of the world that they, they seeing being built by abundance. Right. It's not necessarily my vision, but it's, it's like I appreciated that sort of this is like this is actually what we're trying to do with all of this. And I think, I think if you start there then it creates a lot of clarity. And also, I mean even though some people might look at that vision and not recognize themselves in it, at least create some, some sort of appropriate grounds for bargaining or negotiation around individual priorities within it.
- [49:17]
B
So unfortunately you just triggered me with the reference to the start of the book. So instead of going through every single policy tool, because I want to stick to time here, I'll pick what two or three that are of particular relevance to the left audience. But I just want to say a quick thing on that opening I'll actually be opening. And the opening is actually the result is actually the origin of a lot of the confusion. So the opening talks about the future. Right. So imagine GLP1 is delivered by drones. Sorry, I'm good at politics. That is not a vision that like anyone outside of like a very specific quarter of San Francisco, Boston and New York believes in or is motivated by any better version of the book. And this is really a Derek chapter versus the Ezra chapter in Terms of like, understanding the book. A better version of the book would have told actually the prehistory part of the story. So it would have said, for example, at FDR's memorial on the National Mall, there's a quote where he talks about abundance. And I live near the Hill country in Texas, where public private partnership delivered rural electricity through a New Deal program to the people of the Hill Country. There's a great section, Path to Power on it. And this is an example of how innovation and technology and public private partnership actually brought people into the 20th century and made things really, really great. And then what you would you tell that story and then you'd say, in the 70s, as you said, runs out of gas, the environment, a bunch of different problems. And we are trying to continue that left liberal synthesis, fusionist tendency. And that's what this book is. I think defining it that way would have really been, I think, stronger narratively and frankly, I've done a lot more of the work of like, what is this actual thing? So that's just my quick thing there.
- [50:59]
C
Stay tuned for my book.
- [51:01]
B
What's your book?
- [51:02]
C
Oh, I'm writing a book that's sort of about all this stuff in the urban policy context. And one of the things that I'm trying to do with that book is specifically kind of. Try and frame a lot of these ideas as an attempt to carry forward, like I said, the sort of political economy of the New Deal into, into the 2000 and twenties, which is the.
- [51:30]
B
Exactly the right spot. So I look forward to it. Let me know and I will definitely have you on to discuss. So I want to just pick two of the. We do these in like two minutes or less for each. But I'd love you to talk about like two of the policy tools that are like, both controversial but also positive from like a left liberal perspective. So the first one would be regulatory reform. This is where the, like, abundance is just neoliberalism because it talks about deregulation. Contextualize that for us.
- [51:57]
C
Yeah, so the way I think about regulation and deregulation is a little bit different than I think a lot of people on both the left and the right do. I start with the, the Polanyi esque insight that the market itself, as currently constituted, is, is a creature of law. It is something that exists as a sort of creation of state policy down to the most basic level. Like, as I, as I say in the briefing, you know, you need, you need laws against people murdering each other in order to steal their stuff. If you're going to have something like a, like a stable market. So if we kind of say that the inner penetration between the state and the market is deeper than is commonly appreciated, then when we talk about regulation and deregulation, it's, it's less precise than just talking about different ways of structuring that market or different ways of sort of tweaking the, the design of the market or its relationship to the state. And so that's, that's kind of where I start off because I, I think that there's a little bit of a cargo cult thing that sometimes goes on where, you know, regulation is treated as inherently good or inherently bad. Deregulation, same thing, but it's, it's so abstract that it's effectively meaningless. Like, you know, my, my take on it is that good regulations that do what I want them to do are good and poorly designed or, you know, ill intended regulations that don't do what I would want them to do are bad. So instead of talking about regulation and deregulation in the briefing, instead I just kind of talk about how are we kind of structuring the ecosystem, how are we designing this world in which these sorts of market interactions take place.
- [53:53]
B
And that's a great answer because what I'm basically interpreting is, and a lot of them, like regulation is good, regulation is bad conversation, it's just like rooted in the Reagan Thatcher 1980s. And that is just not, I think, the right frame to think about the actual regulations that we are debating for good or for ill in this category. So I think that's a great answer to that. So the last, the question for you then is like you also mentioned public investment, which if you're trying to do this bipartisanly, you're not going to talk about, but in a left liberal context you are going to talk about so close on how people should think of that tool.
- [54:26]
C
Yeah, so I, I talk about a few different kinds of public investment. My argument is that regulatory reform and public investment, again are, are not.
- [54:38]
B
Are.
- [54:38]
C
Not opposed to each other, that you can do them in ways that are complementary and actually kind of enhance the value of each. You know, the, a great example of this is investments in affordable housing go way further and produce a lot more housing if you're dealing with an environment that is generally permissive when it comes to building multifamily housing. So that's one thing I think where public investment comes in then and like what's the role for public investment is you are trying to do things with it that, you know, even in a, well designed market will have a market failure when it, when it tries to do that. So going back to the affordable housing perspective, you can create a housing market that has a lot of what's called naturally affordable housing without subsidies. And that's going to serve most people in that area, including most low income people. But you're still going to have some population of people who have close to zero income or maybe literally zero income. And you still need some way to keep those people safely housed. And so there's, and there's no way to do that without public subsidy because there's, there's no amount of rent that that population will be able to pay that actually, you know, support any kind of, you know, safe housing situation. And so that's where the, that's where the public investment comes in. You can either do that through just directly, directly building the thing, directly filling the gap in the market. You can do it through public options. And the other, the other thing is the more sort of what I think of as the inflation Reduction act approach, which is where you are investing in R D to see if there are ways to provide some of these goods more efficiently, more cheaply to a broader distribution of people. And that's an area where I think federal intervention when it comes to housing is really important because productivity in the construction sector has not budged very much for a very long time. We're still using a lot of building techniques that if we did some hardcore R and D into them, we could probably figure out better, more efficient, more environmentally sustainable replacements for them. And so that's an area where I think there's a big role for public investment.
- [57:15]
B
And that's a perfect combination of the uncomfortable, if you're sort of a card carrying lefty, but also comfortable because it's talking about public investment. There are regulations that would impede the government's ability to build the affordable or public housing you are describing there. And I think that's a good way to think about, oh, that'll be a regulation which folks would not be very comfortable with. So Ned, this has been really great. Thank you for joining me on the realignment.
- [57:40]
C
Yeah, thank you.