As Progressive Elected Officials, We Choose Both Economic Populism and Abundance
The abundance agenda makes progressive populism more effective.
Construction continues on a mixed-use apartment complex that will hold more than 700 units of housing and 95,000 square feet of commercial space, on August 20, 2024, in Los Angeles, California.
(Mario Tama / Getty Images)It didn’t take long after the release of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance for the ensuing discourse to polarize itself into two camps. In the first camp were writers like Jonathan Chait, who wrote in The Atlantic that abundance is an “attack on the constellation of activist organizations…that control progressive politics and have significant influence over the Democratic Party.” In the second are people like Aaron Regunberg, who warned in The Nation that abundance “is being explicitly used to undermine the kind of populist rebrand” that the Democrats need. While Regunberg and Chait agree on little, they agree on one thing: Abundance and progressive populism are fundamentally at odds.
But while the abundance-vs.-economic-populism debate rages on social media and in Washington, DC, something very different is happening on the ground. In cities across the United States, progressives are the ones leading the way on abundance policy. How do we know? Because as progressive elected officials from four cities around the country, we are among those at the forefront of putting the abundance agenda into action. All four of us are both enthusiastic abundists and committed economic populists.
The abundance movement envisions the government enabling society’s greatest needs to be met with ample, easily available resources, while efficiently and effectively delivering on its promises. Through that lens, abundance and economic populism are ingredients that work better together. That’s because making essentials like healthcare, affordable housing, energy, and transportation easier to build—and thus cheaper—makes it even easier to pay for them through progressive taxation and allows us to serve our communities more equitably. Abundance makes economic populism more effective.
At the local level, housing is the policy where you can most clearly see how abundance policy and economic populism work together. According to the view that abundance and progressivism are in inherent conflict, local officials should have to choose between pro-housing regulatory reform and policies like displacement protections and affordable housing investments. But in Seattle, local official Teresa Mosqueda has done both: She supported a citywide upzoning and crafted the JumpStart Housing Community Self-Determination Fund, which steers money from a new progressive payroll tax into anti-displacement projects.
Similarly, council member Burhan Azeem led adoption of America’s most ambitious land-use reforms in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and pushed the city to deepen its investments in public housing. Austin’s Zo Qadri and Anchorage’s Anna Brawley have similarly led the charge on both YIMBY housing reforms and stronger local safety nets, through policies like comprehensive tenant protections (Qadri) and public investments in childcare (Brawley).
Both our abundance policies and our safety-net policies are part of the same comprehensive strategy and policy vision. First and foremost, we want to build a just, prosperous, and equitable future for all our constituents using whatever tools are available. That means making it easier to build market-rate housing, because a large body of evidence shows that market-rate housing production drives down rents for everyone. But it also means subsidizing childcare, another one of the major costs eating into working families’ paychecks. And it means instituting strong tenant protections, because more housing production need not come at the expense of displacing existing residents. And it means investing in subsidized affordable housing—including public and social housing—to guarantee that even people at the very lowest end of the income ladder have a decent place to stay, while collaborating with organized labor to ensure our investments also create good jobs.
Together, abundance and economic populism create positive feedback loops. Take childcare: When more homebuilding causes rents to fall, it means more childcare professionals can afford to live in our cities, which makes it easier to provide childcare for everyone. And when market-rate housing is affordable to middle-class and working-class people, that means we can more effectively target investments in public and subsidized housing toward very low-income people, and toward our unhoused neighbors. Each dollar we put into progressive policies goes further under abundance.
Of course, abundance is about far more than zoning reform. As local officials, that happens to be where we have focused much of our attention, because housing and land use are areas where local governments tend to wield a lot of power. But progressives also lead in expanding clean energy, public transit, green infrastructure, and social-housing options. Even policies like universal pre-K—which Azeem fought for in Cambridge—could be considered “abundance” policies, because they are about expanding the supply of an important social good.
Ultimately, that’s what this is all about. We are guided by a shared conviction that everyone deserves decent housing, safe and convenient transportation, high-quality healthcare, and all the other necessities that allow someone to live a life of freedom and dignity. Abundance is one tool for achieving that goal, and we’ve been able to use it without compromising our progressive, economic populist principles. In fact, abundance is one of the things that has made it possible for us to act on those principles.
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