The Last Abundance Agenda - The American Prospect

[justaprogressive]

I was content to sit out the Abundance™ deliberations. Two years ago, I wrote a long piece about the ways in which adherents to the new paradigm of “a liberalism that builds” neglected any analysis of power, or the need to build coalitions to counteract that power. Ezra Klein engaged with my argument in his New York Times column and I responded. As a journal on the left, we were, I believe, contractually obligated to review Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance book, and we did so. But I personally felt like I said what I wanted to say. (As an aside, I was amused that when the authors saw fit to mention the Prospect in Abundance, they didn’t discuss the aforementioned back-and-forth at all, but instead briefly referenced a Bob Kuttner blog post about the back-and-forth.)

However, I got a call last week from an NPR program called Open to Debate. They were having Derek Thompson on to talk about his book and wanted me to join. The show has an unusual format: There’s a 40-minute interview between the subject and a moderator, then a few panelists are brought on to ask one question. I’m not sure this constitutes debate, but I took advantage of the opportunity nonetheless.

Here was my one question: “In 2006, over 2 million units of housing were built, and after that we entered the biggest depression in modern homebuilding history. Single-family homes didn’t rebound in construction for more than a decade, and multifamily, which wasn’t really involved in the bubble, didn’t recover for five years. I know you don’t believe that there were no zoning rules in 2006, and after 2006 there was a swarm of them. What happened was we had a housing bubble collapse, brought on by deregulating housing finance, which was spurred by an abundance agenda known as George W. Bush’s ‘ownership society.’ How does that factor into your analysis? What lessons should we draw from what happened in the recent past when abundance was prioritized over regulatory slowness or regulatory safeguards, even ones that on the surface have little to do with building, and the results were disastrous?”

Thompson replied that the question was partially fair and partially unfair. He agreed that the housing market is more complicated than local building rules, which was a pretty wild concession given how that’s kind of the entire book. But, he said, he never called for lax lending standards, and he “would not characterize the trigger of the Great Recession as an abundance agenda as we would define it.”

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2025-04-01-last-abundance-agenda/

[roscoeroscoe]

1. Abundance only works

... If wages and opportunity for working class are growing. Naturally, being Republicans, they tax cuts they did in the Bush administration weren't aimed at helping the working class. So, homes were offered that were unjustified, houses were selling, building was booming... and it crashed.

I know, my wife bought a home with a no proof of income loan and would have lost it if we hadn't gotten together. The stories of people buying homes they couldn't afford were so awful.

I was surveying out in Lancaster/Palmdale in Southern California at the time. Builders just abandoned projects and walked away. Sad dusty subdivisions of framed up foundations.