In the Democrats’ ongoing identity crisis, no proposed “path forward” has generated as much internal debate as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. Regarded by its proponents as the solution to ineffective Democratic governance and by its opponents as rehashed neoliberalism, the controversy over this book has been rather abstract so far, with debate largely centered on the root causes of “scarcity” (progressive bureaucracy or corporate power?). While the forum for this discourse may be the wonky terrain of zoning reform, financialization, and corporate consolidation, the underlying, fundamental question is far more political: Should the Democrats be the party of economic populism, or the party of center-left technocracy?
At the macro level of national political messaging, the economic populists appear to be winning. According to a recent memo from top Democratic operatives, about two-thirds of Democrats said that the government protecting billionaires and corporations was a bigger problem than government inefficiency, while voters preferred anti-price-gouging measures over cutting red tape as the solution to the affordability crisis by a similar margin.
But at the micro level of regional public policy, Abundance proponents are poised to secure a huge victory with the passage of California’s Senate Bill 79, a transit-oriented development bill that could upzone a significant amount of land in the state. It has already passed the Senate, and on Thursday it passed the California State Assembly with some revisions. On Friday, it went back to the Senate for concurrence and advanced to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk for his signature.
So what does the bill do? SB 79’s key provision is the establishment of state zoning standards within a half-mile of major transit stops in California. The bill does this by drawing concentric circles of a quarter-mile and a half-mile around a transit stop, and then determining the height limits for residential development depending on a parcel’s distance from the stop and the quality of the stop itself. These height limits range from four to nine stories tall, a far cry from the single-family units that currently populate much of the landscape around California transit stops.
SB 79’s proponents argue that the status quo—where current zoning regulations largely prevent the development of dense residential housing near most public transit stations—is nonsensical. “If you go anywhere else in the world, there’s very few countries and cities that are crazy enough to invest as much as we have in public transit, but still ban housing near those transit stations,” Matthew Lewis, the director of communications for California YIMBY, told the Prospect. By restricting housing development near public transit hubs, Lewis argues that the status quo not only increases the price of housing, but also generates suburban sprawl that harms the environment, increases greenhouse gas emissions, and prevents public transit from becoming a viable alternative to driving.
While Lewis is careful to say that “no one bill can solve California’s housing crisis,” he considers SB 79 to be a “critical” part of the ongoing fight for more affordable housing in the state. Stressing that “there’s been so many barriers put up to housing growth,” Lewis mentioned other policies—such as environmental permitting reform and single-stair reforms—that he sees as integral in solving the state’s housing shortage. But, he stressed, “you don’t get to build anything if the zoning doesn’t let you build it.” With zoning reform being the prerequisite for housing construction, “we have to do something like SB 79.”
The evidence is nearly unanimous that more housing supply—even when it’s market-rate housing—leads to more affordable housing.
Housing experts agree, seeing SB 79 as one of the most significant housing bills to come before the California legislature in years. Housing has long been a top concern for state officials, but previous reforms have “mostly danced around a solution,” Paul Williams, the executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, told the Prospect. SB 79, on the other hand, “cuts directly to the heart of the issue by requiring cities to toss out their exclusionary zoning and legalize potentially millions of new homes around transit and bus lines.”
Support for the bill, however, is not at all unanimous. The usual NIMBY suspects, from the corruption-plagued Los Angeles City Council, to many smaller California cities, to legions of local neighborhood organizations, have come out against it. And reflecting the progressive suspicion of Abundance’s calls for deregulation, some tenant advocacy and affordable-housing organizations are opposing the bill as well. In Los Angeles’s case, city leaders maintain that they put in place transit-oriented development incentives a decade ago, and already passed a state-approved housing plan that envisions 255,000 new units.
Joseph Smooke, a policy and organizing strategist for the Race & Equity in all Planning Coalition San Francisco (REP-SF), says that REP-SF is deeply concerned about SB 79’s impact on affordability and potential for displacement. Smooke told the Prospect that “there is no way that we could support [SB 79] or even go neutral, because at this point at least, it appears as though this bill would cause additional impacts on communities that have already been impacted” by gentrification and the affordability crisis. “The question is, who are we building this housing for?” Smooke asks. It’s certainly not the low-income renters currently living in affordable housing around public transit. SB 79 is “handing developers and landowners extraordinary value by forcing upzoning to happen.”
In response to these concerns, lawmakers amended SB 79 to strengthen the affordability and anti-displacement safeguards. On top of pre-existing affordable-housing requirements, lawmakers created additional incentives for developers to build affordable housing and protected any building with more than two rent-controlled units from demolition as long as it’s been occupied by a tenant in the last seven years. After these amendments, some tenant advocacy and affordable-housing organizations decided this was enough to push their position on the bill from opposition to neutrality.
For Smooke, however, these amendments are far from enough to ensure that the legislation is equitable. He sees the anti-displacement measures as “loopholes,” and does not trust that developers will not find a way around them if the bill passes. Arguing that SB 79 “should not displace existing residents,” Smooke asks, “Why not just have a blanket provision on demolishing any existing [affordable] housing?” And more generally, Smooke is not persuaded by the Abundance perspective that market-rate construction makes housing more affordable. “Developers aren’t building in order for the market to depress itself,” he says. “It doesn’t work that way.”
But Michael Lens, a professor of urban planning and public policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, told the Prospect that the evidence is nearly unanimous that more housing supply—even when it’s market-rate housing—leads to more affordable housing, including for low-income renters. “The evidence that supply is necessary to keep regional or even neighborhood housing costs less high is just consistently found in the data,” Lens says.
Lens described what economists call the “chains of moves” phenomenon to explain how market-rate housing construction makes housing more affordable for everyone. “New housing induces people to make moves, and those moves end up creating chains of moves,” Lens explained. The chain works like this: When a new, market-rate apartment building opens, higher-income renters trade up into these new apartments, leaving their previous place vacated. With this new vacancy, another resident lower on the economic ladder will see an opportunity to trade up themselves, and the chain continues with each move loosening the market for the next level of housing down the chain. The opposite phenomenon can be seen in supply-constrained markets, where developers or wealthier people buy up aging affordable units and remodel them into luxury ones—sometimes combining several smaller apartments into a large one. Real-world evidence supports the accuracy of this analysis: One Pew study, in fact, found that new housing construction “slows rent growth most for older, more affordable units.”
Nevertheless, Lens agrees with Smooke that California needs to provide more support for low-income renters. “There are a lot of people that just can’t afford housing at any price,” Lens says, “and we know the housing market is going to fall short for those people.” In fact, while nearly every other facet of the SB 79 debate is contentious, there was unanimous agreement across California YIMBY, REP-SF, and the academic experts that state action is needed to build more affordable housing and provide increased rental support for low-income renters—actions that SB 79 does not include. With the housing crisis far from over, perhaps there is room for future overlap among the Democratic Party’s feuding factions.
For now, however, the YIMBYs are ascendent in California. While some organizations involved in the negotiations over SB 79 say that the movement received a boost in recent months because of the publication of Abundance, longtime experts like Williams says that “the steady drumbeat, year after year, from pro-housing organizations has allowed the coalition to grow and make systemic change like this possible.” And it’s not just the bill’s proponents who credit the YIMBYs’ political acumen with getting SB 79 near the finish line—Smooke also credited the YIMBY movement with becoming “more strategic and savvy” in their political advocacy compared to previous attempts at zoning reform.
It should also be noted that there is not necessarily a contradiction between national economic populism and smaller-bore local reforms. Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, for instance, who looks likely to win the New York City mayoralty through an outspokenly populist campaign, has spoken favorably about YIMBY-style reforms. New York, of course, is desperately short of housing.
So though Abundance may get the credit for pushing SB 79 across the finish line, the importance of the book and the bill to each other may be the reverse. “A lot of Abundance is actually an outgrowth of California’s YIMBY movement,” Lewis says. “Abundance is now trying to build the next perimeter out.” That could make the success of SB 79 an important bellwether for the Abundance movement’s strength in other areas of policy. After all, Lewis wonders excitedly, “if we can solve housing with an Abundance mindset, what other things can we do?”