Abundance — Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (2025)
Source: Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (Avid Reader Press, 2025)
Core Argument
The United States has lost its ability to build. Housing, clean energy infrastructure, scientific research pipelines — all of these are being strangled not primarily by conservative opposition but by the left’s own accumulated procedural commitments. The regulatory and review apparatus that progressives built to protect communities and the environment has become a tool for blocking the future. Klein and Thompson call this “a liberalism that prevents rather than builds.”
Their prescription: an “abundance agenda” — a pro-state, pro-government-capacity liberalism that strips away obstructive process while retaining the goal of public goods. Not deregulation in the Reagan sense, but de-obstruction in the service of a more interventionist state. Scarcity is a policy choice, and the left owns more of that choice than it wants to admit.
The Blocking Coalition Problem
Klein and Thompson describe a consistent pattern: well-organized, often affluent, often progressive minorities using process to block projects that would benefit larger and more diffuse populations. Homeowners blocking apartments. Environmental groups litigating solar farms. Neighbors blocking homeless shelters.
The mechanism is usually not explicit opposition to the goal — it’s “not here, not like this, not without more process.” The result is that nothing gets built.
Worth sitting with: the people blocking infill housing in progressive cities frequently vote correctly on national issues and use the language of community and character to protect property values and exclusivity. The blocking coalition is not always who we expect.
What the Book Gets Right
The cost-per-unit problem is real. Government-funded affordable housing in DC and Chicago has run $1.1–1.2M per unit — well above market-rate median sale prices in those cities. If redistribution and subsidy can’t deliver housing affordably, the mechanism matters, not just the intent.
NIMBY veto power is structural. Homeowners — older, richer, more politically engaged — have effective veto rights over local development through public planning processes and legal standing to sue. The people who most benefit from scarcity are also the most empowered to enforce it.
Proceduralism can become conservatism. CEQA battles, endless environmental review cycles, the neighborhood meeting gauntlet — designed for accountability, but reliably producing inaction. “Process as protection” has become “process as blockade.” NEPA, originally passed as a disclosure requirement, has been reinterpreted by courts into a substantive blocking mechanism — not what Congress intended.
“Community input” can be weaponized. The same participatory processes we might want for internal governance can be captured by adjacent homeowners, NIMBYs, or preservation interests. Process is not inherently democratizing.
What the Book Gets Wrong or Ignores
It elides the extraction problem. Desmond’s analysis in Poverty By America - Desmond names what Abundance sidesteps: the people profiting from scarcity aren’t just obstructionist homeowners — they’re landlords, investors, and financial institutions whose returns depend on housing remaining scarce and expensive. Removing regulatory friction without addressing who captures the gains doesn’t solve the housing crisis; it accelerates gentrification.
The supply-side lens is incomplete. Critics note that zoning can’t explain the full stagnation — California was building plenty in the mid-2000s under the same zoning regime. The 2008 financial crisis plays a larger explanatory role than the book acknowledges. Klein and Thompson write around the bubble, describing the shift in California homebuilding “since 2007” without naming the collapse.
“Build more” is not a neutral act. More supply doesn’t automatically mean more affordable supply. Without mechanisms to prevent speculation and rent extraction — like CLT structures or non-market ownership — building more can simply create more investable asset stock while the lowest-income households remain priced out.
It ignores antitrust and monopoly. Homebuilder cartels have been documented building less and charging more by hoarding land. Market concentration in the housing industry goes unaddressed.
The geographic scope is narrow. The framework centers on San Francisco, New York, and Boston while presented as universal. The “dynamic Texas” counterexample is selective — Texas builds more, and also has low wages, no tenant protections, and highly volatile housing markets.
The Political Economy Concern
The book landed in a moment when “abundance” became a brand, attracting libertarians, center-right Democrats, and tech-sector types who read it as a deregulation mandate. Klein and Thompson are genuinely pro-state-capacity liberals — but the political movement their book catalyzed has not been careful about that distinction. As one critic put it, the 1980s also had a lens (“affordable homeownership”) and a list (deregulate housing finance). The lens produced the 2008 crisis. Lens-first thinking without attention to who captures the gains is dangerous.
The Productive Tension with Desmond
Read alongside Poverty By America - Desmond, Abundance reveals a real disagreement in left housing politics:
- Desmond: the market is extractive by design; build alternatives outside it and regulate it harder
- Klein/Thompson: the left’s own proceduralism is part of what keeps supply constrained; get out of the way of building
Both are at least partially right. The failure modes are different:
- Desmond’s prescription without Klein/Thompson’s critique produces well-intentioned affordable housing programs that can’t get permitted and can’t get built
- Klein/Thompson’s prescription without Desmond’s critique produces market-rate construction and persistent un-affordability for the bottom quartile
The synthesis: build non-market housing, and make it easier to build. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the built.
Relevance to Wellspring
The cost-structure critique applies directly. If we want to argue that Wellspring delivers dignified, permanently affordable housing, we need to demonstrate defensible per-unit costs. If publicly-built affordable housing runs 150–300K in mid-sized markets, that’s a structural argument for the model that deserves to be made loudly.
The permitting problem is real for us too. If Wellspring wants to build density, it will face the same gauntlet. The progressive coalition is not uniformly on the side of building — especially once a project reaches the neighborhood level.
The state capacity question. Abundance is ultimately a statist book — it wants better government, not alternatives to it. The Anarchism as Political Theory tradition would push back: state capacity can be captured. The question is whether we’re building institutions that reduce dependence on state capacity over time, or ones that require it permanently.
A CLT addresses both critiques simultaneously — it removes Desmond’s extraction mechanism while potentially answering Klein/Thompson’s cost and buildability challenge. That’s worth naming explicitly in how we describe the model.