On April 1, I posted on this blog about The Abundance Agenda, citing a story in the DesNews which included an interview with Derek Thompson, co-author along with Ezra Klein of the book Abundance. In the weeks since, I’ve encountered a number of political podcasts, stories and articles, and two more books that all talk about the growing awareness of The Abundance Agenda. For reference and your reading enjoyment, the other two books are Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, by Yoni Appelbaum (I posted about this book back on Feb. 11), and Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back by Marc J. Dunkelman.
The origins of what is being called The Abundance Agenda grew out of the perception that we as a society have made it very hard lately to get big things done – build new green energy facilities, including wind farms, solar farms, and new-generation nuclear power plants, and the needed transmission lines for them; gear up quickly during a pandemic to produce masks, tests, and vaccines; high-speed rail lines; and so on. We built Hoover Dam, a hugely massive project, in 5 years. We went from starting a space program to landing men on the moon in about a decade. Much of the interstate highway system was built in about 15 years, but then things slowed down, often for very good reasons – to prevent avoidable environmental and social impacts. But then those “slow-down” measures became more important than the projects themselves, and now it takes forever to get anything of any significance done. Rebuilding a freeway overpass nowadays usually takes years, from the planning and designing to final opening. And yet, when an I-95 bridge in Philadelphia collapsed after a tanker truck fire in 2023, the Pennsylvania governor suspended all the normal rules under emergency measures, and the bridge was reopened to traffic in 12 days, and a well-constructed replacement bridge was completed in about 6 months. It can still be done!
Here’s a good summary of where The Abundance Agenda came from and what it is today, but I want to focus on an aspect of it that is key to those of us in the land use planning world, and that is this: virtually every discussion of the problems that led to the formulation of this new political philosophy includes as a key factor the increasing lack of affordable housing. And the key reason cited for this lack? Local land use regulations and practices.
Here are just a few samples of how the housing issue is portrayed in the Abundance literature. In one of my very first encounters with the Abundance Agenda, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic and co-author of the book Abundance, wrote a January 2022 column about the issues in a number of areas like energy, health care, and transportation. And about housing, where he said:
Altogether, America has too much venting and not enough inventing. … We say that housing is a human right—but our richest cities have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new houses, infrastructure, or megaprojects. … Homes have become famously unaffordable in many … cities. The culprits are largely regulations that prevent the construction of taller apartment buildings that can hold more units.
In housing, more states and cities should follow the example of California in banning single-family zoning, or follow the example of Houston and basically do away with zoning entirely.
Marc Dunkelman in his book Why Nothing Works characterizes how local land use processes now work this way (and there’s so much more he has to say throughout the book):
The results (of all the land use regulation and restrictions and hearings) were dreadful. As the median home price across the state grew to $700,000, Governor Gavin Newsom promised in 2018 to build 3.5 million new units by 2025 – well more than 400,000 in an average year. But as of early 2021, the state had yet even to crack 100,000 in any given year. And that wasn’t for lack of trying – it was simply too easy for opponents to block development. In 2018, a bill to clear away barriers to developers who wanted to build five-story buildings near bus and subway stops went down in defeat at the hands of Democrats in the state legislature. They astutely feared backlash from progressive voters who would complain that the increased density would damage the environment, or worsen traffic, or overtax the electricity grid, or undermine historic preservation. Everyone wanted more housing, it seemed – but they wanted it built somewhere else.
In September 2021, the California legislature finally eked out a bill allowing homeowners to construct duplexes on single-family plots and empowering cities to rezone small parcels without having to endure CEQA review. But if it took this long to address even this small element of the problem in a progressive state burdened by some of the most extravagant housing prices, many worried about how the fight might unfold elsewhere.
In Stuck, author Yoni Appelbaum characterizes zoning this way:
At the beginning of the 20th century, reformers sought to apply the fruits of science and reason to manage growth, reimposing order and control on a jumbled and chaotic landscape that mixed shops and apartments in among the houses, and occupants of varied ethnicities and incomes. Their chosen tools were building codes and restrictive covenants and zoning ordinances, designed to segregate land by use and class and race. New Deal bureaucrats next took up the cause, requiring local jurisdictions to apply these tools to the communities and putting new construction firmly under the purview of government. Then, in the postwar decades, skepticism of big business and big government led a new generation of activists to empower individuals and groups to challenge decisions made by bureaucrats. … Taken together, the reforms that they have enacted have created a peculiarly dysfunctional system. Almost all new construction in the United States now requires government approval, and anyone with sufficient time and resources and education can effectively veto that approval, or at least impose great expense and delay. The result is that in the very places that need it most desperately, housing has become prohibitively difficult to build.
And finally this from the book Abundance (sorry about the length, but there is so much more – you just gotta read the books):
In the ’70s, rising inflation and slowing home building turned the homes people did own into the center of their wealth. But how do you protect the value of that asset? You can insure a home against fire, but you can’t insure it against rising crime rates or local schools slipping in quality or a public housing complex being built down the block. To manage those risks, you need to control what happens around your home. You do that through zoning and organizing. You do it through restricting how many homes and what kinds of homes can be built near you. You do it by making the minimum allowable lot sizes bigger and the parking requirements more expansive because both those rules ensure that only wealthier people will be able to buy into your community. You do it through organizing at planning meetings to defeat proposals for apartment buildings—they’ll change the character of the neighborhood, and think of the traffic!—and refusing to expand sewer systems to areas where developers might want to build new homes.
If the nail, the source of housing shortage and lack of affordability, is, as these writers perceive, the land use processes that exist, then the hammer to pound in that nail becomes zoning and land use reform. Continued from Abundance:
On housing, for example, cities should reform their zoning laws to make it easier to build homes and apartments of all sizes, legalize the construction of accessory dwelling units, reduce parking requirements, and pass new laws to create maximum permitting wait times. Stopping individuals or developers from building places for people to live on land they own should require unusual cause. Building homes, at a time when housing is scarce, should not. The political economy of those ideas is fraught. It requires passing law after law in city after city. Today’s housing rules are exquisitely local, which would be appropriate if housing policy was bound by city limits. But the consequences of housing policy reverberate across states, and even across the nation. Gate the great cities of California and families flee to Texas and Arizona. When you allow housing to become scarce where the wages are highest, you shut down a powerful engine that long kept social mobility in America high. So what level of government—and of society—is appropriate for housing policy? Should it be run by states? By the federal government? This is where the shortcomings of a list of policy proposals become clear. It is easy to unfurl a policy wish list. But what is ultimately at stake here are our values. How do we weigh the role that the current inhabitants of a community should have in who enters that community next? How do we balance the interests of a town against the interests of a country? Changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard now requires confrontations with whether the systems liberals have built really reflect the ends they’ve sought. Much that was designed to foster grassroots participation has been captured by incumbents and special interests. It can be difficult, in a raucous town meeting, to look around and remember who is not there: the mother working two jobs, the young family who couldn’t afford the apartment they so badly wanted to move into. “This is what democracy looks like” is a common chant at protests, but what democracy should look like is a devilishly hard question to answer. What we are proposing is less a set of policy solutions than a new set of questions around which our politics should revolve. What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy?
I raise all this in writing this post, not so much to say that I agree or disagree with it (though I will say I agree with some of it, and I disagree with some), but to put forth what appears to be the increasing “perception” of the cause of the housing affordability problem. This is the narrative that is increasingly prevalent, and will likely drive what political solutions are put forward.
I’ve written plenty over the last couple of years about how Utah’s approach to the housing affordability crisis has mostly been one of collaboration at the local and state levels, whereas other states have mostly followed a state-led top-down model (that’s not true everywhere – in some places, local officials have directly taken the bull by the horns and are crafting their own solutions, such as in Minneapolis, Austin, Milwaukee, Columbus and even to some degree Salt Lake City). As I’ve also noted in previous posts, despite all the actions taken to this point at our state level which our locals are having a hard time keeping up with, the sentiment of at least some state leaders appears to be, not enough is happening, we have to consider doing what we see happening in other states.
The sentiment of the gurus of The Abundance Agenda seems to be that this needs to be a consistent, state- or even national-level policy (just take a look at the excerpts I’ve portrayed above), not just left to the locals to make happen. As the opening of the DesNews story I referenced earlier points out, Derek Thompson cites Gov. Spencer Cox as being the epitome of the Republican side of The Abundance Agenda, and indeed, Gov. Cox was a keynote speaker at a policy forum at Stanford University yesterday titled The Abundance Agenda – Bridging Research and Policy to Build More in America. Among the comments made by Gov. Cox at that forum?
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said Thursday he is preparing to have “uncomfortable, hard” conversations with cities this year about building more high-density housing. “We tried to do it the nice way, and if you want us to do it the heavy way we’ll do that too,” Cox said. “I’m okay being the bad guy on this one.”
All this, along with other indicators I’ve posted about previously, makes me pretty sure that we are likely to see more measures coming from the state-level to be implemented by the locals, likely to be similar to those seen in other states.
Do I think this is a good idea? Personally, I’ve thought that the collaborative approach has been the best way to see things implemented. As I’ve posted previously, in states where the mandates have been top-down, locals seem to find ways to slow-walk or just plain not carry them out, even obstruct them through actions like lawsuits. But I’ve also said that if the locals want to keep a primary role in this, they must be more proactive on their own. A few communities have been, and more are doing so. But probably not enough. We still hear about plenty of instances where communities refuse to allow for alternatives to large-lot single-family developments, and places that are seeking to incorporate as their own communities so that they can “keep things as they are.” I’ve always felt that a primary role of planning is to help communities lay out futures that will be pleasant and functional. Growth is coming, it’s our job to make it happen in a good way, not freeze things as they are. I plan to call some of that out in future posts.
But bottom line, it appears there’s going to be lots more happening at the state level coming up. Locals, want to keep things local? You need to do more. But again, it’s all about perception. League executive director Cam Diehl points out that there has been plenty done by local officials to attempt to address the housing crisis, but it’s not all up to them.
On Thursday, Diehl pointed out, the Wasatch Front Regional Council considered five station area plans in Draper, Taylorsville and West Jordan around transit stops, looking to accommodate 15,000 housing units.
“Cities want to see more affordable home ownership opportunities,” Diehl said. “But we plan for housing, we don’t build the housing, and we can’t control the market forces.”
As we’ve all learned through long experience, perception is often more influential than reality.