Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, is riding high on the bestseller lists. The authors argue that something has gone very wrong in our nation: “Over the course of the 20th century, America developed a right that fought government and a left that hobbled it.” They focus on a set of changes—relaxing zoning restrictions, reducing or ending review by local government and environmental agencies, among others—that would make some impact on the current crisis. At the same time, those on the left often propose a massive new investment in what is called social housing. But both sets of proposed solutions miss the mark. And neither addresses an underlying reality that both impedes housing production and explains the growing equity gap between the housing haves and the housing have-nots: the lack of a robust strategy for affordable home building.

The two celebrated political analysts admit to being liberals and confess that their primary audience is the Democratic Party. I wish them luck. I worry, however, that they and those on the left are underestimating the power of the current culture they seek to transform.

My colleagues and I know how powerful this culture is because we have been fighting it for 40 years. When we proposed building housing on vast tracts of vacant and abandoned New York City land—first in East Brooklyn, then in the South Bronx—we met with a top civic official, who listened impatiently before replying, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomachs.”

As it turned out, our stomachs were big. We ultimately built thousands of affordable houses, called Nehemiah homes, in East Brooklyn and the South Bronx that working people could buy and maintain.

We didn’t call it “abundance.” We called it critical mass: building at scale, with speed. This ran against the then-conventional wisdom that the way to rebuild cities was by sprinkling a few new units here and a few new units there.

Building at scale replaced all the negative chain reactions—abandonment, business flight, crime, despair, nihilism—with a constructive chain reaction of ownership, wealth creation, retail growth, upgraded parks, improved health and education indicators, hope and more. We succeeded. Though it took longer than it should have.

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The problem was not primarily hobbling from the left that the authors describe, nor resistance from the right—not that there was much of a right in New York. The issue was that the Nehemiah effort’s proven success—the transformation of entire blocks—was not adopted in other cities without enormous pressure from our local leaders and institutions.

Here’s why.

First, a consensus developed that the best way to build affordable housing is through tax credits—which favor renting over owning. This does nothing to close the terrible equity gap throughout our country. A coalition of developers, nonprofits, consultants, housing intermediaries, elected and appointed officials, and financial institutions—all of which benefit from the reliance on tax credits—has dominated the discussion of building affordable housing in recent decades. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program unlocks private investment in low-income housing efforts. The New Market Tax Credit approach does the same for those interested in financing businesses, daycare centers, charter schools, and other community amenities. Neither provides a path to ownership and equity for those on the economic margins. These approaches are constructive and create some impact. But they have become comfortable monopolies, blandly accepted by many as the only way to rebuild communities.

Second, institutions charged with producing this housing—including the Federal Home Loan Banks, the billion-dollar intermediaries like Enterprise and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, the multibillion-dollar foundations that funnel through these intermediaries—have amassed fortunes, paid their executives handsomely, and opted for safe and predictable housing strategies. Meanwhile, they have done little to address the housing production crisis—even as millions of Americans remain plagued by housing scarcity.

Third, lack of leadership. Klein and Thompson rightly decry a policy universe filled with lawyers:

In the Democratic Party, every presidential and vice-presidential nominee from Walter Mondale to Kamala Harris (Tim Walz, in this respect, was an almost radical break with tradition) attended law school. [W]hen you make legal training the default training for a political career, you make legal thinking the default thinking in politics. And legal thinking centers around statutory language and commitment to process, not results and outcomes.

Amen.

Fourth, what Klein and Thompson mostly miss is the role of third-sector organizations in the robust effort to transform our political culture. At the Industrial Areas Foundation, we understood from day one that our ability to succeed had nothing to do with the quality of our plans or the design of our homes or, as Klein and Thompson describe it, “a new theory of supply.”

Instead, it had everything to do with whether we had the power to make mayors and governors respond to our demands, and enough persistence to keep them responding over years and decades. When we began the rebuilding of East Brooklyn and the South Bronx, we didn’t begin with an attempt to alter zoning regulations or to wait for what one deputy mayor recommended when we said that the Koch administration lacked a housing strategy. He said, “Yes, we do. It’s called federal money.”

If we had taken him seriously, we would still be waiting; thousands of minority homebuyers would still be stuck in substandard rental and public housing, and nearly $2 billion in equity would never have been created. Instead, we began with a power analysis of the city at the time. We raised our own no-interest construction financing—something the left never does. And we persuaded Koch to make an unprecedented investment of city funds in our effort and the efforts of others. Then, policy changed—in response to the power of the organization and our growing track record of success. No matter what new theory or consensus emerges, the fundamental role that power, and powerful organizations, play will still be key.

Forty years after we began building in East Brooklyn, 20 years after its success was obvious to just about anyone who looked, our affiliates in Chicago, United Power for Action and Justice, and in Baltimore, BUILD, have finally begun to build at the pace and scale needed to reclaim the depopulated stretches of those cities. Apparently, there is still an appetite for a major push toward new and even bigger critical masses of affordable ownership housing.

Our New York Metro Industrial Areas Foundation affiliates will increase the pressure until that appetite grows. But mayors and governors and others need to match or exceed the kinds of commitments that an initially reluctant Ed Koch made. We know from experience that this combination of organized citizen power and responsive local leadership can make all the difference—and actually get affordable housing built.