The Inadequacy of the Abundance Agenda

Yahoo

27-03-2025

I don't claim to have perfect knowledge about why the electorate chose Donald Trump in the 2024 election, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't because the masses got priced out of Shaker Heights.
The first wave of liberal what-went-wrong books is crashing ashore, and its message, surprisingly enough, is largely about the evils of local zoning. I agree that affluent (and often liberal) communities often use rococo land restrictions to jack up land values and exclude the Wrong Element. Some reforms are in order. But the New YIMBY Order (YIMBY being an acronym for Yes In My Back Yard, in response to the more familiar NIMBY, or Not In My Back Yard) places the same naïve faith in market solutions that led government policy astray starting in the late 1970s. And to whatever extent judicious easing of regulations is necessary, it will not set the proletariat free, because it sidesteps some important questions that deserve some attention.
The books in question are Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—And How to Bring It Back by Marc J. Dunkelman, a former congressional staffer; Stuck: How The Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, by Yoni Appelbaum, an academic historian and deputy executive editor at The Atlantic; and Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, writers, respectively, at The New York Times and The Atlantic. Dunkelman's book, the best of the lot, argues persuasively that Jeffersonian local-control liberalism can get in the way of Hamiltonian big-central-government liberalism—but Dunkelman makes too much of that problem. Appelbaum's book supplies rich narrative detail on the dishonorable history of zoning (it began with the ghettoizing of Jews) but he's weak on economic analysis. Klein and Thompson are better on economics but less persuasively tethered to the real world, replete with sentences such as 'Our era features too little utopian thinking' that lend their book the antiseptic tone of a TED Talk.
Collectively, these books advocate what might be called supply-side liberalism. Like supply-side conservatives, supply-side liberals say the hell with demand, let's just create more stuff. Like supply-side conservatives, supply-side liberals say the government should get out of the way. But their preferred method to achieve this is not tax cuts but deregulation, typically at the local rather than federal level.
'Giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked,' write Klein and Thompson, 'is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward.' Well, sure. But ignoring demand is also a convenient way to dodge potentially divisive questions about distribution. 'The world we want requires more than redistribution,' Klein and Thompson state grandly. 'We aspire to more than parceling out the present.' That doesn't offer much sustenance to the rest of us drudges condemned to inhabit 2025.
Rather than speculate about the future, let's consider the supply-side liberals' revisionist history. To varying degrees, all three books portray Robert Moses, who bulldozed thriving neighborhoods throughout New York City to build his expressways and thruways and parkways, as a force for good. The only reason we don't recognize this, they argue, is that Robert Caro portrayed Moses as a destructive force in his 1974 biography The Power Broker.
Moses's most formidable opponent was Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Moses wanted to build an elevated highway through SoHo and Little Italy that would bisect Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, where Jacobs lived. Jacobs stopped him. Bizarrely, Caro left Jacobs out of The Power Broker because the book was too long to include her. (The missing chapter probably resides in one of the 100 boxes of papers Caro recently donated to the New York Historical Society; some enterprising magazine editor should find it and persuade Caro to let him publish it. But I digress.)
The delicate ecology of the neighborhoods Moses blasted through didn't interest Moses, but it did interest Jacobs. She wrote about how a mix of retail and residential structures enriched a neighborhood, and how pedestrian flow and smaller-scale construction kept neighborhoods safe by allowing 'eyes on the street.' At the time, urban renewal policies favored building the exact opposite: tall Brutalist high-rises surrounded by inhospitable concrete plazas. In lower-income neighborhoods, housing projects of this type became the perfect breeding ground for violent crime.
Appelbaum sees Jacobs as a villain. Her chief sin was that her neighborhood preservation scheme jacked up property values. Jacobs bought her West Village house in 1947 for $7000, sold it in 1971 for $45,000, and today the city assesses it at $6.4 million.
Well, yes, making a neighborhood flourish carries some risk that people will want to live in it. The solution is not to crap up that neighborhood but to help other neighborhoods flourish in similar fashion so that livable neighborhoods become the norm and remain affordable to all. Government regulation can help this process by reserving certain housing in livable neighborhoods for low-income families and/or providing subsidies that allow them to live there.
At times Appelbaum is so eager to attack Jacobs that he misreads her willfully. 'The key link in a perpetual slum,' Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 'is that too many people move out of it too fast—and in the meantime dream of getting out.' To Appelbaum, that demonstrates that Jacobs wanted displace her neighborhood's immigrant renters with 'a stable, gentrified population of homeowners.' This is nonsense. As Appelbaum argues elsewhere in his book, the urban gentry are more mobile than lower-income residents, and therefore less likely to create the stability that makes a neighborhood thrive.
Appelbaum is so determined to defend high-density housing that he even celebrates the old tenements of New York's Lower East Side, which in 1910 housed 619 residents per acre, the greatest number of them Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Appelbaum notes cheerily that one old tenement was refashioned into a museum, 'a shrine to America's first rung on the ladder of opportunity.'
Has Appelbaum been to the Tenement Museum? On display are cramped sweatshop apartments where families slept at night and sewed garments during the day because management was too cheap to give them a workplace. These places were breeding grounds for smallpox, typhus, and other diseases. Jacob Riis wrote a whole book about this. 'An epidemic,' Riis explained in How The Other Half Lives (1890), 'which the well-to-do can afford to make light of as a thing to be got over or avoided by reasonable care' is 'excessively fatal among the children of the poor, by reason of the practical impossibility of isolating the patient in a tenement.'
Appelbaum will have none of this. 'They were just apartment buildings,' he writes. 'Today, the very same units reformers claimed would ruin the health and morals of their inhabitants rent for princely sums.' Eventually Appelbaum acknowledges grudgingly that conditions in tenements 'were frequently horrifying,' as documented by Riis and others. But 'it was also true that reformers hunted for the most appalling conditions they could document, to dramatize their cause.' Oh, please.
All three books cite Paul Sabin's 2021 book Public Citizens to argue that Ralph Nader choked off housing supply by encouraging public-interest lawsuits against local governments to prevent developers from despoiling the environment. (I reviewed Sabin's book, which I mostly admired, in The New York Times.) Dunkelman rather intemperately writes that Nader (along with Rachel Carson and a few others) exhibited a Nixonian 'cynicism' about government.
In fact, all Nader wanted was for the government to be accountable to local communities that had a legitimate interest in preserving clean water and protecting green spaces. Granted, the avenues Nader created were used later for less laudable ends—ends that Nader himself disparages. But I don't believe these excesses, which warrant correction, have much to do with what truly ails this country. And I don't think supply-side liberalism shows much promise as an appeal to a working class that's abandoning the Democratic Party in droves. I'll continue this discussion in a forthcoming follow-up.