Abundance, Eh? Well, Here’s what that Means

The new political bestseller, Abundance, is a book addressed to Democrats. The message of this new book by reporters Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, can be made to sound very Republican, but they are Democrats talking to Democrats.

The book’s central argument is that modern government, federal, state, and local — government created largely by Democrats — has made it hard to build anything, including the things Democrats want. The authors’ prime example is California’s high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Set aside whether investing in railroads is a good idea in the 21^st century, and assume it is good. The line was supposed to be open by 2020. By 2025, it had fallen so far behind that the state of California had shrunk the project to a useless segment near Bakersfield which is still not done.

The problem hasn’t been construction, and for the most part they haven’t got that far. The years have been spent, the authors say, “negotiating with courts, with funders, with business owners, with homeowners, with farm owners.” Each one can file a lawsuit claiming that the environmental impact statement is “inadequate.” In each case, a judge can order a do-over.

Each of these steps exists for a reason. People didn’t like the way something was built, so they added rules and requirements so it would never happen again. When projects reach construction, they wrestle with a whole other set of rules, each of them also for a reason that sounds good — and not only in California, but all over the country. Various places demand that projects use materials that are “green,” or have been sourced a certain way; that they employ minority and women contractors; that they use union labor; that they mitigate various impacts and so on. The authors of Abundance are not opposed to any one of these things. It’s the cumulative pile-on, which the authors call “everything-bagel liberalism.”

 Some people like everything-bagels. “There is one school of thought,” write Klein and Thompson, “that says it is worth taking the time to do these projects right.” But when doing it “right” means doing it in excruciating slow motion, you have to ask: Is this what you want?

Republicans smirk, “That’s government.” Not necessarily. Government can build things. In Seattle a century ago, government built the Ballard Locks and lowered Lake Washington. Government sluiced Denny Hill into Elliott Bay. Government built the floating bridges and Interstate 5. Government put three dams on the Skagit River, which now provide our electric power. In other countries, governments build lots of stuff. In China, government has built 25,000 miles of high-speed rail — enough to circle the Earth. And yeah, we don’t want China’s government. But do we want our government? All of it?

Klein and Thompson are saying to fellow Democrats: It’s your projects that are being stymied by the federal, state, and local regulatory regimes you defend. Now your progressive wing demands a “Green New Deal,” an economy powered by solar and wind. But to make that happen, you’ll need to allow mining corporations (run by Republicans, no doubt) to blast copper, iron ore, and exotic minerals earths out of big pits in the Earth, and for other corporations to run the ore through smelters. You’ll have to allow wind turbines, giant solar spreads and maybe even nuclear plants. And you’ll have allow the construction of high-power transmission lines that slash through farmland, forests, and towns.

You want it done in a hurry, fearing the rapid onset of climate change. But with a few exceptions — recovering from natural disasters, mainly — the government you defend no longer allows anything to be built in a hurry. You can forget your Green Economy by 2030, or 2040, or maybe even 2050.

Government’s pile-on of rules and requirements also has a powerful effect on the price of private housing. The most direct effect is through growth management, which draws a boundary around the urban area. Outside of the boundary, development is limited to huge lots, typically at least five acres. The aim is to stop suburban “sprawl,” though sometimes what you get is mini-mansions. The effect inside the growth boundary is to drive up the cost of building lots for ordinary houses, which tends to raise the cost of housing for all new buyers, and for renters.

Democrats get very sore if you accuse them of not caring about low-income people. But under the flag of “the environment” — an elastic term that covers things that matter and things that don’t — they have created a housing regime that increases the distance between the haves and the have-nots.

I remember arguing about this years ago with my colleagues on the Seattle Times editorial board. Housing prices were unnecessarily high, I said, mainly because of the growth-management law that restricted the supply of developable land. My colleagues denied it. “It’s demand,” they said. “Prices are going up because of demand.” Well, sure. Demand is half the equation. But do you want to reduce demand? Chase Amazon away? Bring back the Boeing Bust? (No.) The alternative is to change the other side of the equation by making it easier to create new supply.

Back then, my colleagues asked me, “Do you want growth to go all the way to the Cascades?” My answer was, “Maybe I do, if the alternative is the $500,000 house.” To them, that was a right-wing answer. But as good liberals, did they really want to accelerate the rise in housing prices? My old boss asked me, “Do you want the price of your house to go down?” My reply was, “I don’t base my political ideas on how they affect my personal net worth.”

That debate was 20 years ago. Now the median price of a house in Seattle is pushing $900,000, and in many neighborhoods the median is well past $1 million. If you own one, this is fine news. Defenders of growth management will reply that it’s not only their law that raises the cost of building houses and apartments. Zoning and building codes impose rules for what you can’t build, what you must build, how you have to do it, and who has the power to make you stop.

We have rules to protect trees and other native plants, creeks, ponds, slopes, and riparian zones — rules that call for public hearings and give neighbors a “say” in what is built, and requirements for all sorts of permits. Each one of these must-do’s is designed to solve a problem — a social problem, an environmental problem, an aesthetic problem, some kind of problem. In retrospect, some of these problems we should have just lived with. Each remedy imposes delays and costs. Piled on as “everything-bagel liberalism,” they have brought a housing affordability problem that’s huge.

How does our ruling party address this problem? They pass a state law allowing four-plexes in single-family zones. Give them credit, for that will help, a little. Their left wing has a much more dramatic program: to dry up the wellsprings of investment in the private rental market by imposing rent control and laws that prevent the eviction of unruly tenants. The left aims to create a parallel system of “social housing” — which is housing that cannot become private wealth.

Seattle has already voted for this dose of socialism, though we haven’t tasted much of it yet. It is not a program of abundance, and it’s not an idea that will sell in places where Democrats need to be competitive. What the party needs to stand for nationally, Klein and Thompson say, is “a liberalism that builds.” They conclude, “We want more homes and more energy, more cures and more construction.” Abundance.

Our political parties can argue about how much of each should be built: rail versus roads; solar and wind power versus nuclear; detached houses versus townhouses or apartment blocks. The right answer cannot continue to be to build less and less of everything, and take longer and longer to do it.