Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and some other modern Democrats I follow have lately been touting something they call the "abundance agenda," which is the title of a forthcoming book from Klein and Derek Thompson. In this podcast, Klein lays out the basic argument. He starts out by asking why people are moving by the millions from Blue states to Red ones; the overwhelming answer people give is that housing is more affordable.
There is a policy failure haunting blue States: it has become too hard to build and too expensive to live in the places where Democrats govern. Our politics is split right now between a left that defends government even when it doesn't work and a right that wants to destroy government even when it is working. What we need is a political party that actually makes government work. Democrats can be that party. They should be that party. But it requires them to confront what they have done to make government fail.Klein then spends a few minutes on California's high speed rail disaster, noting that environmental review began in 2012 and is still not finished. Plus:
California has the worst housing problem in the country. In 2022 the state had 12% of the country's population, but it had 30% of the country's homeless population and 50% of its unsheltered homeless population. Has this unfathomable failure led to California building more homes than it was building a decade ago? No, it hasn't. . . .
In the last few decades Democrats took a wrong turn they became the party that believes in government, that defends government, not the party that forces government to work.
I refuse to accept that this is our choice, a Democratic party that will not make government work and a Republican party that wants to make government fail. What those two parties have created over decades is scarcity, scarcity of homes, of good infrastructure, of clean energy, of public goods.
I want to put myself down as being for this, in principle. But that is the problem; a lot of people will support this agenda in the abstract, but they will rebel when their own special interests are attacked.
I fully support reforming the NEPA process, even if it means less work for people like me; in fact I regularly agitate against doing archaeology in some situations. But there are things I very much want to preserve – historic buildings and neighborhoods, battlefields, archaeological sites where the record of the deep past is well preserved.
Let's think for a bit about housing in California. Sure, in the abstract I'm all for building more, but where? Fire experts have been warning for a century about the danger of building in the canyons above Los Angeles, but they were deemed annoying destractors from the abundance agenda and building went ahead. Water experts warned for decades about over-building in Phoenix, but they were ignored and now the Rio Grande dries up every winter and Phoenix has had to curtail development.
Where does Klein stand on building on barrier islands? on wetlands? on battlefields? in western forests?
Back when it was much easier to build stuff in the US, we constructed the Interstate highways system. Most people I know are glad we did. But building highways into urban areas did a lot of damage, and many cities are now trying to find money to demolish old highways they wish had never been built. In fact those highways did a lot to create the anti-building coalition in America.
The devil is in the details, as usual.
7 comments:
People aren't moving to "red states" - they're moving to "less crowded" states.
Framing it the other way makes it sound like Republicans have somehow behaved differently than Democrats when it comes to promoting / allowing construction, and that's simply not true.
It is always easier and cheaper to build in less populated places, everything else being the same or comparable. People aren't moving because of the politics - they're moving because of the geopolitics, and the reality that is created by geography and human distribution.
That said, this isn't a unique problem to America. Europe still has to build housing as it grows, despite having become "full up" long before us. And they manage it!
How? Well... they're far less averse to high density residential building, and when they engage in it they do a much better job of making it PLEASANT for people to live in. But that's a whole separate topic...
Floida is denser than New York or Pennsylvania. North Carolina and Georgia are both denser than Oregon or Washington. Texas is denser than Wisconsin.
Arizona is much denser than New Mexico.
Florida is also gigantic, and has much more "empty" space than New York or Pennsylvania, both of which have been inhabited for a far longer period of time and are more "full". I spent decades living in Florida, I can personally attest to just how much of it is basically empty - and just how many "housing developments" get started up every single year out in the boondocks, because they can buy up cheap land that is cow pastures or overgrown scrub, bulldoze it, pave over it, throw up a bunch of cheap identical houses for next to nothing, and erect a strip mall and shopping plaza a few miles away on similarly worthless land.
And then people like the northern Snowbirds descend in swarms to snatch those houses up because "it's a tropical paradise" and "it's cheaper than living in New York City". And this is a cycle that has been going on for a very long time - certainly it was going on back when Florida was still considered a "blue state".
Same thing with Texas compared to Wisconsin - there are miles and miles and miles and miles of more or less empty Texas land, offset by the sheer density of the major cities. Texas has MORE big cities, and those cities are simply bigger. But it also has lots of places outside those cities where housing is cheap, because they can buy unused land nobody wants, slap up a mini-mall and a housing development and an Interstate on-ramp, and that's apparently good enough for lots of people to want to live there, despite the lack of basic amenities or infrastructure. The expectation is that anything you need you'll just drive ten minutes on the highway to reach.
There's also the matter of comparing the relative density of the specific places within a state that people are moving FROM, and the equivalent in where they are moving TO. If someone lives in New York City, then moving to Orlando or Miami is a comparative savings in terms of cost, without having to sacrifice all the amenities of a major urban center.
Arizona is also much, much more inhabitable in terms of terrain.
New Mexico has a very, very large number of mountains that Arizona is not burdened by. In the same vein, Arizona also has many more rivers, and in particular has a massive one in the Colorado River. Arizona is notably greener, despite higher average temperatures - New Mexico's lower temperatures are a product of its MUCH higher elevation and more mountainous terrain.
Despite being neighboring states of similar size, one of them simply has a lot more places for people to easily and readily inhabit.
Speaking of neighbors, there's also the question of access to other places within each state. Arizona has easy access to California and Nevada, with straight shots from Phoenix to both Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
In contrast, New Mexico only has access to West Texas, which is empty farmland and nothing for hundreds of miles; and, if you make your way through the mountains to get there, Colorado, which is a state that prides itself on its relatively "undeveloped" status, intentionally seeking to appeal to the kind of people who might move to Alaska if it weren't so remote.
Geopolitics are so incredibly important to consider, and yet for some reason, they get ignored all the time in this country.
The irony of John talking about how "the devil is in the details", and then brushing aside my attempts to point out details which change the supposed narrative, dismissing them with generalized factoids that don't go into any detail or nuance whatsoever...
Honestly, I think the whole approach of this "abundance agenda" utterly fails to meet the urgency of the moment. Democrats don't need carefully-formulated policies; they need fire.
Post a Comment