Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on the abundance agenda and liberals - Housing 🏠, Energy ⚡️, Infrastructure 🚊, Transportation 🛣️, etc
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
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He’s an effective politician who delivers results to his constituents
ExodusNirvana
Change is inevitable...
Abundance means he's trying to gentrify his constituents out of the Bronx period
he hasnt delivered a thing, its still the poorest district in the US
he is an aipac, neoliberal puppet
An abundance agenda for antitrust policy
Promoting competition is good; arbitrary preferences for smallness not so much
www.slowboring.com
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Centrist Democrats want a fight with the left
To speakers in the basement of the Hamilton Hotel on Wednesday, the message of the 2024 election was clear: Voters are sick of left-wing ideas.
www.semafor.com
Centrist Democrats want a fight with the left
David Weigel
Jun 4, 2025, 9:25pm EDT
Centrist Democrats picked a fight with their party’s left wing on Wednesday. And the left was happy to punch back.
“Places like City Hall and Albany and even Washington, DC, are more responsive to the groups than to the people on the ground,” New York Rep. Ritchie Torres said at WelcomeFest, held at a downtown Washington hotel and billed as a forum to help the party find more electable candidates and messages.
Seconds after Torres’ shot at “the groups” that have become intra-Democratic shorthand for excessive left-wing influence, protesters from … the group Climate Defiance charged on stage with signs reading “GAYS AGAINST GENOCIDE” and “GENOCIDE RITCHIE,” attacking his support for Israel’s war in Gaza.
As the activists were yanked out of the room, conference organizers played Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain on the loudspeakers in the room.
The mockery was part of the point. Welcome PAC, the main organizer of the conference and one of several outfits that have emerged in recent months to try to reverse the party’s post-Obama losses, was happy to be accused of embracing a pro-growth “Abundance” agenda or attacking progressive urban policies.
“Any time someone is against something like ‘abundance,’ it means that they’re afraid of something. They’re afraid of losing power,” said Welcome PAC’s Lauren Harper Pope, a former Beto O’Rourke adviser. “If the left feels threatened by what we’re doing, then I say: ‘You’re still welcome in our coalition.’”
To speakers in the basement of the Hamilton Hotel on Wednesday, the message of the 2024 election was clear: Voters were sick of left-wing ideas. Candidates and members of Congress described struggles to overcome what they described as their party’s toxic brand or to deal with protesters angry at their occasional votes with Republicans.
“If you can financially afford to go to a protest every day, you are a different person than most people in my community,” said Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, defending her vote for House GOP legislation that would require proof of citizenship from every voter.
Asked about recent polling from the progressive group Demand Progress that found pro-business “abundance” ideas faring worse than anti-corporate “populism,” WelcomeFest speakers scoffed.
“It’s what happens when you test an economic textbook for the Democratic Party against a romance novel,” said Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass. “It’s such a bad poll.”
WelcomeFest, which had grown exponentially since its first in-person conference last year, put a conversation that has been unfolding in exclusive donor retreats in front of a public audience — selling tickets that topped out at $25. (The protesters did not pay.)
Attendees saw polling on voters’ dim view of the party and heard advice for Democrats to move on from topics where they lacked credibility. Torres took aim at his party for stretching “right to shelter” laws too thin in his home state and for being insufficiently tough on crime.
After sharing a set of data on Democratic vulnerabilities, pollster David Shor told Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., that her vote for a repeal of California’s electric vehicle mandate had been savvy.
“People don’t like ‘defund the police,’ but voters really hate electric cars,” said Shor.
“They don’t hate electric vehicles,” replied Slotkin. “They just don’t want to be told that they have to drive an electric vehicle, particularly when the infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with need.”
DC did not lack for center-left Democratic groups before Welcome PAC or its eponymous conference. Many grew from the ashes of the Democratic Leadership Council, founded after Ronald Reagan’s two landslide wins to find viable center-left candidates and ideas.
Shuttered in 2011, the DLC survives in its spinoff think tank PPI and in centrist groups that have taken up part of its past mission.
Andrew Rotherham, a fellow at PPI, told WelcomeFest that Florida Democrats had erred in fighting the state’s GOP “parental rights” bill — what opponents called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — instead of fighting for inclusiveness from a stronger position. It was “actually supported by a majority of Democrats,” he said.
Other sponsors of WelcomeFest included the Blue Dog Democrats, the 30-year-old caucus for the party’s centrist members of Congress; the New Democrat Coalition, founded two years later to build on Bill Clinton’s mixed success; Third Way, founded 20 years ago after Democrats lost the popular vote to George W. Bush; and NewDEAL, founded 14 years ago to elevate “pro-growth progressives.”
Their shared goal now is simpler: win at least some arguments inside the party.
“The backlash that happens online is a sign that you’re doing something right,” said Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa. He recently founded a new think tank and messaging group that urges candidates to weather the Trump-era “sh*tstorm” and come out with more defensible, popular positions.
ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT
WelcomeFest’s less single-issue enemies have highlighted the Republican and pharmaceutical-industry pasts of some of the conference’s donors, arguing that it’s naive to think billionaire donors could save the Democrats.
The Revolving Door Project, which has campaigned to keep Democrats with corporate ties out of powerful positions, called the whole project a “self-serving crusade” against popular politics.
“A billionaire-funded movement to keep billionaires happy with Democrats by wielding only poll-tested language that billionaires are okay with is a sure path toward a President Vance,” said the project’s executive director, Jeff Hauser.
Dan Cohen, the strategist who conducted Demand Progress’ abundance-or-populism poll, said that the party wasn’t facing a binary choice and could incorporate some more pro-growth “abundance” ideas into a successful populist campaign.
“That kind of conflict is unhelpful because it’s just wrong,” Cohen said, calling for a broader focus on “strengthening a Democratic Party that’s trying to get its sh*t together again.”
Title iconDAVID’S VIEW
To oversimplify things, politics is basically about conflict. And Welcome PAC’s theory of politics — expand the tent and let Democrats run on heterodox agendas in tough seats — is not that controversial inside the party.
So WelcomeFest leaned on the self-generated tension created by the appearance of a zero-sum centrist fight against progressive purity tests. It’s proving to be a godsend for media attention.
You could see this unfold on social media on Wednesday, as the Revolving Door Project and other progressive groups posted from the conference to portray it as one big surrender, trading away liberal values in the hope of winning over a couple of Republicans.
That wasn’t really the theme in the room, though.
Democrats who spoke at the event about their failure to break through on the trail said that they were close to a winning formula. It just required a mixture of distance from the least popular causes of the left, and the credibility that any campaigner gets by spending two years talking to voters.
Implicit in every argument was this view: It would not be enough for Democrats to wait for President Donald Trump to fail, then take advantage of that failure, a notion propagated by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and others in the party.
That’s because, as much as they may not like it, centrists and progressive Democrats are confronting a much more popular Trump than they did eight years ago.
In Blue Cities, Abundance Will Require Fighting Labor Unions
Some of "The Groups" are unions, and Democrats need to be better at saying no to them, too.
www.joshbarro.com
My neighbors stood up to ICE. What they did next shows why California politics makes no sense
I just had a front row seat to the often-infuriating incoherence of California progressive politics over housing and immigration
Sara LibbyJune 4, 2025
Anti-ICE messages cover a pole on Monday at a popular Italian restaurant in San Diego that immigration agents recently raided.
Gregory Bull/Associated Press
When ICE agents in full tactical gear descended on a beloved restaurant in my San Diego neighborhood last Friday evening and seized one of the workers, my neighbors did exactly what I would have expected: They raised holy hell.
A huge crowd gathered, booing. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents retreated as neighborhood residents screamed “Shame!” in unison. Videos of the scene quickly went viral.
“God bless the often mostly middle-aged and elderly, women confronting and shaming and sometimes even stopping ICE atrocities,” journalist Clara Jeffery wrote on Bluesky.
This triumphant moment of resistance is now being hailed by lawyers and activists across the country as a blueprint for how to push back against these brazen encroachments into communities.
Meanwhile, just days later and a few blocks away, an even larger crowd gathered in the neighborhood to target another potential enemy intrusion. Rather than winning social justice kudos, however, this protest demonstrated the often-infuriating incoherence of California progressive politics.
Two proposed housing projects: One is a handful of large single-family homes abutting one of the canyons that snake through the neighborhood; the other is an eight-story, 180-unit apartment building located across the street from a charter school.
What unfolded at this second protest was a perfect distillation of how wealthy, largely white neighborhood groups across California that profess to value inclusion too often use their sway to ensure that their neighborhoods remain unattainable to anyone who doesn’t already live there.
Organizers ginned up support for the event using language laden with progressive phrases — encouraging participants to “take up space” and “show up for each other.”
Never mind that restoring local control over housing decisions — and with it, the ability to keep out newcomers — is an actual page in the conservative Project 2025 playbook, the same one that lays out an aggressive plan to remove immigrants.
When I dropped by the gathering, most residents cited typical complaints like traffic as their rationale for opposing the new developments. Others suggested that the location of the apartment complex was disturbing: People living there would be able to see children on the school playground.
Are people who live in apartment buildings inherently dangerous? Are they perverts who prey on children?
I asked Jennifer James, one of the organizers.
“Yeah, I think that one’s a little far-fetched,” she said. James was more worried about traffic.
She’s correct that the intersection where the complex would be located is already overrun during school drop-off and pick-up times. But wouldn’t adding housing across the street mean people living there would have an opportunity to walk their kids to school, instead of driving?
“I guess I just don’t get the argument,” James said. “Because you’re making an assumption that families would move in there, that they have small children. Who knows who’s going to move in there?”
Anyone who’s covered the housing crisis knows how residents at community meetings like these repeat the same misguided criticisms, sometimes almost word for word, as people in faraway communities opposing different projects.
One opponent of the San Diego apartment project, a member of the neighborhood planning commission, repeated the line cited by virtually all opponents of new housing — that neighbors would support the project if it was “actually affordable.”
“I don’t know what kind of people they’re planning to bring in here, but this is just a money grab,” Richard Santini told the crowd.
Compare that with a recent story about opposition to a large new apartment complex in Manhattan.
“If this project were about building 100% affordable housing on the Chelsea campuses, we would all stand down,” one opponent said.
Yet history shows that housing opposition too often doesn’t stand down when buildings are 100% affordable. They simply find new excuses to protest, such as the fight against 2550 Irving St. in San Francisco’s Sunset neighborhood over shadows and alleged environmental toxins.
Many people in the San Diego crowd lamented recent state laws that have limited local residents’ ability to block new housing. Lawmakers in Sacramento are on the verge of even bigger reform that would exempt most infill projects from the California Environmental Quality Act, the state’s landmark environmental law that is often weaponized to stop new housing.
Assembly Member Chris Ward, who represents the San Diego neighborhood and has written several pro-housing bills, said he is sensitive to community concerns over individual projects and thinks there’s value in residents airing them.
But “leaving ourselves vulnerable to years of ongoing debate over singular projects can result in projects failing,” he said. “And then you get nothing.”
Some people in the San Diego meeting were genuinely trying to reconcile their opposition to the projects in light of the ICE raid.
Karen Lafferty, a 54-year-old resident who said she was part of “that last generation that could afford to buy a house and leapfrog up,” spoke up to encourage more outreach to Latino neighbors.
“Are they excited about there being more housing? Do they have perspectives that we haven’t even considered because we’re just looking at things from our point of view?” she wondered.
While Lafferty said she thought the rendering of the apartment building was “god awful,” she acknowledged there was “cognitive dissonance” in the room when it came to the reaction to the ICE raid and the opposition to new housing.
“I think it’s easy to talk about social justice and diversity when it is an abstract, or when you can just walk around with a sign,” she said.
She was not the only one to note the lack of Latinos or young people in the audience. Nonetheless, most of these well-educated, well-meaning residents seemed fundamentally incapable of connecting the dots: They might have “immigrants welcome here” signs dotting each lawn, but they are simultaneously fighting for policies ensuring that very few are actually welcome to live here.
Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.
I asked Lafferty whether she thought a kitchen worker who was detained during the ICE raid could afford to live in the neighborhood without new housing being built.
Reach Sara Libby: sara.libby@sfchronicle.com
In Blue Cities, Abundance Will Require Fighting Labor Unions
Some of "The Groups" are unions, and Democrats need to be better at saying no to them, too.
www.joshbarro.com
Some of "The Groups" are unions, and Democrats need to be better at saying no to them, too.
JOSH BARRO
JUN 05, 2025
Dear readers,
Yesterday, I interviewed Rep. Ritchie Torres at WelcomeFest, an annual conference for centrist Democrats in Washington, D.C.
Midway through our conversation, we were interrupted by protesters from Climate Defiance, who have apparently moved on to Gaza as their cause of the day. One of the protesters kept screaming that Rep. Torres should be sent to The Hague for his pro-Israel politics.
On Wednesday, Rep. Ritchie Torres and I were briefly interrupted by climate Gaza protestors during our discussion at the WelcomeFest conference in Washington D.C. (Photo: Ben Dreyfuss)
But I wasn’t there to talk with Torres about Israel. We were focused on the problems facing Democrats in deep blue jurisdictions like his Bronx congressional district — which voted for Kamala Harris by 48 points, down precipitously from the 71-point margin Joe Biden put up there in 2020. Torres said Democrats need to show urban voters that they can address their needs on crime, migration, and cost of living — and that Democrats need to embrace “abundance” as a policy vision.
One thing I asked him about was the conflict between abundance and labor politics. As I said to him:"When I look at policies in New York that stand in the way of abundance, very often if you look under the hood, you eventually find a labor union at the end that's the driver." This drew quite a bit of ire from the online progressives who were following this conference with, at least to me, a surprising level of interest.
Rep. Torres demurred a bit1, and was ready to blame politicians for folding to The Groups, but not to engage with my point about labor unions. Since I’m right, I want to lay out a few of the examples I gave Torres of labor2 standing in the way of abundance in New York:
At the behest of the Hotel Trades Council, New York City has prohibited the construction of new hotels citywide, except through the granting of highly scrutinized, case-by-case special permits. This law, passed in 2021, has had the intended effect of driving up hotel rates at existing hotels, which employ workers from the union. That’s good for the hotel unions — it makes the properties where their members work more profitable, which means there’s more money for them to haggle over with owners in contract negotiations. But it’s bad for workers in New York’s theater and restaurant industries, for New York businesses that need to put their employees up in hotels, and of course for tourists who would like to visit New York. And, it undercuts tax revenue from that lost tourism — an estimated $7 billion in revenue by 2035. The city council has also largely prohibited Airbnb in the city, again producing benefits for hotel owners and hotel unions but hurting the rest of the tourism industry.
New York’s MTA is perpetually hard up and unable to afford to expand service. In part, that’s because it’s hampered by costly and antiquated work practices demanded by the Transport Workers Union, like continuing to operate most subway trains with two-person crews — something few systems around the world still do. On the capital side, the MTA’s egregiously high construction costs have many authors, but one is massive overstaffing at the behest of the construction trades. As The New York Times reported in 2017: “Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show.”
One aspect of our housing production policy is tax abatements for certain new residential construction, especially when those projects contain income-restricted affordable units. But in recent years, this policy — now known as 485-x — has been reworked to add new favoritism for construction unions, imposing a wage floor on large projects unless they are 100% union or have a project-labor agreement. The unions like this policy because it creates jobs for their members, but for developers, it makes the program less financially attractive and therefore it is less effective at producing new housing.
Of course, there are a lot more examples I could have pointed to. The most obvious is the extended COVID closures in New York’s public schools: Teachers’ unions lobbied to keep their members at home, diminishing the quality of education services provided to New Yorkers. More recently, teachers’ unions successfully obtained a new state law mandating class-size reductions in city schools. Evidence of educational benefits from class size caps is weak, but smaller class sizes make teachers’ jobs more pleasant and force the city to hire more teachers who will be members of the union. The expense of complying with the cap is a major burden on the city’s budget, crowding out spending on other programs, and the city may also need to impose new enrollment caps on the most desired schools in order to comply with the law — the opposite of an abundance policy.
Zooming out, my broader point is obvious: the job of a union is to advocate for the interests of its members, and those interests are not necessarily the same as the interests of the broader public. This is particularly the case with public employee unions, since the public is represented on the management side of the table when public workers’ contracts are negotiated. Progressives understand this disconnect when the union at issue represents police, yet police aren’t the only public servants whose own interests diverge from the public’s interest in receiving the best possible services at the lowest cost.
Sometimes the conflict between abundance and the labor movement gets downplayed. If you look up “unions” in the index to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, it takes you to their discussion on pages 126-7 of how the use of union labor did not prevent Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro from using regulatory relief to speed the reconstruction of a destroyed interstate underpass. It does not take you to their discussion on page 104 of how local construction trade unions in San Francisco have sought to block the use of cost-saving modular construction in affordable housing projects.
So while I think the people complaining about my comments have bad ideas about policy and politics and should not get control of the government, I do think they are correct to identify “abundance” as a threat to their own (wrong) vision of what the Democratic Party should be for. One thing the abundance movement asks Democrats to do is to scrape the toppings off the “everything bagel”: that is, set specific policy goals and pursue them without weighing down every program with ancillary objectives demanded by every interest group in the coalition. Don’t assign climate goals to your rural broadband project, et cetera. Well, in a lot of cases, the toppings we need to scrape off those everything bagels were ordered by unions.
Very seriously,
Josh
In D.C., publicly funded homes can cost over $1 million per unit
Steve ThompsonWorkers gather outside Ontario Place, a 52-unit building under construction. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
In the heart of D.C., along a narrow street in the affluent Adams Morgan neighborhood, a scaffolding rises above the sidewalk near increasingly expensive homes.
The 52-unit building under construction will house people making far below the area’s median income. Half will be newly released from incarceration.
But the building’s development cost is enough to make the neighborhood’s wealthier residents blink: $1.2 million per apartment.
That tab will be picked up in large part by taxpayers, most of whom could not afford to live in such a place. It’s an example of a trend in expensive cities across the nation, including San Francisco and Chicago, where costs to house the poor are approaching and at times exceeding $1 million per unit — resulting in fewer affordable housing units being built at a time of urgent need, housing experts say.
The D.C. building, called Ontario Place, will include a rooftop aquaponics farm to produce fresh fruits and vegetables for its tenants, whose rents will be capped at well below market rates. Two nearby buildings by the same developer, D.C. nonprofit Jubilee Housing, have run up a development price tag of $1.3 million for each of 50 apartments, city records show. The pair of buildings, collectively dubbed EucKal (for their locations on Euclid Street and Kalorama Road), were funded largely by local and federal tax credits, the city’s Housing Production Trust Fund and the promise of future revenue from city-funded housing vouchers, records show.
Jim Knight, Jubilee’s president and CEO, declined to be interviewed about the buildings’ costs but said in a statement that they should be measured against their impact on the lives of the tenants.
“Placing deeply affordable housing in high opportunity neighborhoods with on site and nearby programs and services helps harness the power of zip code,” Jubilee said in the statement. The location promotes tenants’ success by connecting them to high-performing schools, transportation options, grocery stores and other advantages, the statement said.
D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) attended Ontario Place’s 2023 groundbreaking, and in remarks in March this year said Jubilee’s development efforts are “desperately needed in this city.” But after learning since then of such buildings’ costs, he said they are “ridiculous” and “really disturbing.”
D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), left, is pictured with council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (I-At Large) in early May. Mendelson says there's a need to be “efficient and effective” with the money used to build housing for the poor. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
“We don’t want cheap housing just because people are poor,” Mendelson said in an interview. “But we should be looking at being efficient and effective with our dollars, and spending $1.3 million per unit is not efficient or effective.”
Mendelson said he doesn’t think Jubilee did anything wrong, but “that the District is imposing requirements and difficulties that drive up the cost.”
Some inside D.C. government have been questioning the costs for years, though quietly. In 2021, when Jubilee applied for tax-exempt bonds for EucKal from the D.C. Housing Finance Agency, which helps finance affordable housing projects, an official there took issue with the project’s price tag, saying it would “create an unsustainable precedent for costs on a per unit basis.”
In a letter to a sister agency, the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development, the DCHFA official noted that the next highest cost development in its portfolio cost several hundred thousand dollars per unit less.
Still, DCHFA said it was “willing to work with” DHCD to make the transaction possible, according to its letter, which The Washington Post obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. In the end, the agency made the loan even as EucKal’s cost rose.
DCHFA executive director Christopher Donald declined an interview request and did not answer a written question about how the concerns were resolved, saying only that the concerns were relayed to DHCD. That agency’s director, Colleen Green, provided a statement saying that Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), whose office oversees her agency, is committed to the production of affordable housing across the city.
Christopher Donald, executive director for the D.C. Housing Finance Agency, is shown at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Asberry at Barry Farm with Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) in November. (Craig Hudson/For The Washington Post)
“Many affordable housing projects can be complex and require substantial public investment, particularly in higher-cost areas of the District,” Green said. “Despite this, it has been a longstanding goal of Mayor Bowser to have affordable housing units in all eight wards of DC, not only in lower-cost areas.”
Jubilee officials said they could not speak to how DCHFA’s concerns were resolved, but they stressed that more than half of EucKal’s units have multiple bedrooms — “to address one of the greatest needs in the District of Columbia — that is for deeply affordable housing for families.”
The portion of the project that sits on Kalorama Road had been an abandoned and boarded-up office building, Jubilee officials said. The one on Euclid Street was a severely dilapidated apartment building that had to be gutted and rebuilt. The development cost included the purchase price of the properties and the expenses to rehabilitate them.
The EucKal project in Northwest Washington. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
“We added two levels to the Kalorama building, and a new top level to the Euclid, requiring significant investments in building infrastructure as well,” a statement from Jubilee said.
While Ontario Place and EucKal appear to feature among the costliest affordable housing units in the country, a Post review of city documents showed half a dozen other buildings with development costs per unit between $700,000 and $1 million.
Meanwhile, the average D.C. home value is $616,567, according to Zillow.
New homes, particularly those in multifamily buildings, tend to cost more than average. But it has also become commonplace for government-subsidized housing to cost much more to build than that of the private market, housing experts say. In Chicago, a 43-unit building in East Garfield Park is projected to cost about $900,000 per apartment, city records show. In San Francisco, several buildings have exceeded the $1-million-per-unit mark, according to that city’s Citywide Affordable Housing Loan Committee.
Among key drivers of such high prices are the financing costs associated with using Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, which over the past few decades has become the low-income housing industry’s primary funding source — paid for with about $10.5 billion per year in foregone federal tax revenue, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
To make use of the credits, which lower a company’s tax liability dollar-for-dollar, developers typically partner with big companies, such as banks, that have tax liabilities big enough to benefit from them. While the credits are awarded in significant amounts — often tens of millions of dollars — developers typically have to augment them with various other funding sources. The resulting financing structures require small armies of lawyers and accountants to manage, driving up development costs.