California Democrats basked in a huge win this summer when they passed two sweeping reforms that will likely speed up housing production in the state — and a New York Times bestseller just might have been the reason why.
“Abundance,” written by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, was published in March and examines divisions in American politics. It specifically puts a magnifying glass on liberal policy and overregulation, which the authors argue have led to a severe housing shortage and a high cost of living.
Perhaps surprisingly, the book was a massive hit among state Democrats, including Gov. Gavin Newsom. This spring, the governor praised the book on his podcast for taking “a very critical look at Democratic governance.” He said the book offered a path toward making strides in housing policy, not to mention toward the Democratic Party possibly earning back voters’ confidence.
On that episode, which was released March 25, Newsom had Klein on as a guest. Klein, who grew up in Irvine, said that while he was living and working in Washington, D.C., he was accustomed to writing about “a political system where the problem was Republicans were bad,” but when he moved to the Bay Area in 2018, he noticed how the region was struggling and he began to look inward.
“It just wasn’t doing well. People weren’t happy. People were leaving,” Klein said. His biggest question was: “How do we make it possible to build more?” He added that liberals “don’t even realize how often we are getting in the way of it, how often we are the problem.”
Newsom and Klein rarely disagreed with each other during that hour-and-a-half episode, and the governor lightheartedly nodded in agreement that the California government can be lethargic in its execution. Newsom then admitted that he had bought physical copies of “Abundance” for the Democratic Senate and Assembly leaders in Sacramento for them to study the work.
“I sent it to the two leaders of my California Assembly and Senate,” Newsom told Klein. “I said, ‘Guys, this is it.’”
Abundance, reborn
Klein and Thompson’s book did not introduce the “abundance” movement; rather, the authors built on an existing intellectual framework that emerged in California, and the U.S. at large, in the mid-2010s. The philosophy boils down to a belief that Americans can live more abundantly with less regulation and less government involvement in building homes. It emerged around the same time as the boom of the pro-housing YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) movement.
What the book did do — particularly after Newsom’s buy-in — was spark real momentum among policymakers.
“Before the book came out, abundance was not necessarily part of our vocabulary or on the tip of our tongue,” Azeen Khanmalek, the executive director of Abundant Housing LA, a nonprofit organization that promotes affordable housing in Los Angeles County, told SFGATE. The book “launched the word and the concept” into the mainstream, Khanmalek said.
Consider how earlier this summer, Newsom finally got major housing reforms to the finish line, including historic changes to the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, a 1970 law aimed at ensuring government officials consider the environmental impact of any public or private development projects. The law was meant to bring a more conscientious approach to building but has instead routinely been blamed for stunting development projects in the name of climate concerns. High-density housing units, such as condominiums in urban infill areas, have been the target of numerous lawsuits, consistently resulting in their failure to be built time and time again. There’s also the sluggish progress on California’s long-awaited high-speed rail project, which is years behind its estimated timeline and grossly over its originally estimated budget. Republicans have repeatedly used these failures as political ammunition, most notably when President Donald Trump announced he was withholding billions of dollars in federal funding as punishment for the railway’s shortcomings.
“What has taken so long on high-speed rail is not hammering nails or pouring concrete. It’s negotiating,” Klein and Thompson wrote in “Abundance” in a chapter titled, simply, “Build.” The two said those conversations, often with stakeholders, community members, contractors and politicians, are a waste of money and time, and “time is a killer” on any project.
The authors wrote that Newsom, who has served California as mayor of San Francisco, lieutenant governor and now governor, has witnessed the phases of high-speed rail and “knows how bad this looks. Knows how bad this is.” They quote the governor, who at one point admitted that the railway’s failures mean “people are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things.”
So, in June, lawmakers, with a massive push from Newsom, reformed CEQA via two bills that will allow developers to avoid the historically tedious climate review process and get homes and other developments built faster. The authors of the bills, Sen. Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco, and Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who represents much of the East Bay, in part credited the rise in popularity of “Abundance” for their bipartisan success, as did Khanmalek, who called the book “a clarion call” to Democrats “for winning back the country.”
Matthew Lewis, the director of communications for California YIMBY, an organization that has campaigned for eight years to reform CEQA, told SFGATE that the publication of the book made “a big splash” and also “had a big role in convincing Newsom” to get on board with CEQA reforms.
“The book had the most impact with Gov. Newsom,” Lewis said. “I also think the fact the governor has a lot of respect for Ezra Klein as a writer and thinker.”
Paving the way
“I’ve been involved in abundance long before it was called Abundance,” Wiener, a progressive and longtime lawmaker from San Francisco, told SFGATE. Wiener has been in the California Senate since 2016, and before that, he was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He has another bill, Senate Bill 79, that is likely to head to the governor’s desk for his signature, which would allow for the construction of more housing units and taller buildings near major public transit stations.
Abundance, Wiener continued, is “a very straightforward” idea that politicians should make it easier and faster to “build the things that make people’s lives better and more affordable.” He added that Klein and Thompson’s book has “had a lot of momentum and got a lot of people to think about this issue, and it puts into words and paper what a lot of people have been thinking.”
Other writers have also tackled the big question about why liberal government doesn’t work, notably Jennifer Pahlka in the 2023 book “Recoding America,” as well as Yoni Applebaum in “Stuck” and Marc J. Dunkelman in “Why Nothing Works,” which were both published at the start of this year. But none of those books made its way into everyday conversation in California political circles the way “Abundance” has.
California has consistently fallen short of its housing goals. In 2022, the Newsom administration set an end-of-decade target to build 2.5 million more housing units, or 315,000 per year, but the governor admitted to Klein during their podcast interview that California was “not even close” to meeting the target.
Wicks, whose Assembly Bill 130 reformed parts of CEQA by making infill housing easier to build in cities, told SFGATE that many of the ideas brought forward in Klein and Thompson’s book were already being discussed but said the book’s popularity was “serendipitous timing.”
The lawmaker also said that the November election results contributed to the success of the two housing bills: “It showed me that voters were mad. They want the government to work. They don’t want the government to be an impediment to housing.”
In a March interview with former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, Derek Thompson, a staffer for the Atlantic-turned-Substack newsletter writer, described his first conversation with Ezra Klein, a New York Times writer, about “the future of liberalism.” At the time, both journalists had already been chewing on big, intellectual ideas about the ways liberals have gotten things right — and how they got things very wrong. For Klein, those thoughts were flushed out in a 2021 essay he wrote for the Times, and Thompson in one he published in 2022 for the Atlantic. Both quickly came to the idea that rather than compete, they should write a book together that could become a new framework for how Democrats can govern.
Some Republicans, however, argue that if California Democrats are taking Klein and Thompson’s lead, what they’re really doing is poaching from conservatives.
“I laughed when he named it ‘Abundance,’ because this has been the Republican philosophy for as long as I can remember,” state Sen. Josh Hoover told SFGATE regarding the book’s title, saying that reducing regulation and building more housing have long been cornerstones of Republican policymaking. “I really feel like Republicans have been on the abundance train, and now it’s some Democrats who are starting to wake up and realize.”
There are still some skeptics: Justice advocates question whether undoing climate laws through the CEQA reforms could harm workers by taking power away from them and removing any environmental accountability for developers, said Asha Sharma, a policy analyst with the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability.
Yet it’s clear the 304-page book has made waves.
“It shows there’s a certain part of the Democratic Party that’s at least attempting to acknowledge where they have failed,” Hoover said.
