Where Abundance Goes Next Under Trump 2.0

The 2024 Democratic National Convention was a moment of triumph for the fledgling abundance movement. While accepting the party’s nomination for president, Kamala Harris indicated her support for YIMBY policies by promising to “end America’s housing shortage.” Barack Obama was even more explicit in his speech: “We need to build more units, and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes for working people in this country.”

The abundance wing of the party had more than words to celebrate. Harris had already selected Tim Walz as her running mate, someone who, as governor of Minnesota, had signed a lot of YIMBY legislation into law, including a measure to protect Minneapolis’s recent upzoning from litigation. And she was running as the successor to an administration that had, with the Inflation Reduction Act as a vehicle, embraced an abundance-inflected approach to fighting climate change—one that focused primarily on growing the nation’s supply of renewable energy and green, climate-friendly technology.

While the YIMBY movement predates the Biden administration, “abundance” as a unifying concept that transcends housing policy is very much a product of the Biden era. Derek Thompson’s seminal Atlantic piece on abundance—which he defined as a vision that “aims for growth, not because growth is an end but because it is the best means to achieve the ends that we care about”—was published in 2022. Ezra Klein’s related piece about “supply-side progressivism” came out in 2021. (Klein and Thompson later co-wrote a book, appropriately called Abundance, that will be published this month.)

While Klein and Thompson’s pieces were primarily addressed to an audience of liberal policy elites, some thinkers on the right have also embraced a version of the abundance agenda; both the libertarian Mercatus Center and center-right American Enterprise Institute are hubs for abundance thought. This has led to some internal debate over the extent to which the abundance faction can transcend partisanship. On one hand, you have events like YIMBYtown 2024 in Austin, Texas, which counted Montana’s Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, among the speakers; on the other, you have pieces like this influential 2024 essay for the Niskanen Center, which argued that “the factional action on Abundance will be among the Democrats.”

Persuasive as that piece was, it was responding to a very different political context from the one we now live in. Housing the abundance movement within the Democratic Party is all well and good, provided Democrats kept their hands on the levers of federal policymaking. But that’s not what happened. Instead, Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris; Republicans flipped the Senate and retained a narrow majority in the House.

Viewed on its own, a Republican-controlled Congress wouldn’t necessarily spell disaster for the abundance agenda. Some elements of abundance policy enjoy a degree of bipartisan support, particularly when it comes to pro-housing policy: the Congressional YIMBY Caucus includes members of both parties, and the YIMBY Act has a bipartisan list of sponsors. But the Trump administration’s entire governing philosophy—to the extent that it has a coherent governing philosophy—is hostile to the positive-sum mentality that underlies abundance thought. The White House’s theory of the housing shortage is a case in point: Whereas YIMBYs and abundance-minded people would argue that we can fix the shortage and make everyone better off by building more homes, the Trump administration appears to be more focused on rationing a fixed housing supply by deporting immigrants en masse.

Despite this obvious conflict in values, some abundance-aligned intellectuals initially urged cooperation with the administration’s semiofficial Department of Government Efficiency. Better to be inside the tent than outside the tent, they reasoned. “We can wish that the government efficiency agenda were in the hands of someone else, but let’s not pretend that change was going to come from Democrats if they’d only had another term,” government reform advocate Jennifer Pahlka wrote in December, “and let’s not delude ourselves that change was ever going to happen politely, neatly, carefully.”

One month into the Trump administration, it should be clear that the give-DOGE-a-chance strategy was a failure. (Pahlka tacitly admitted as much in a recent piece for The New York Times, where she said Musk “seems to be trying to destroy” government capacity.) But abundance liberals have yet to reach consensus regarding an alternative approach.

Because the abundance movement is decentralized and ideologically diverse, that consensus might never emerge. But however various abundance-aligned groups and policymakers choose to approach their work under the second Trump administration, they should be mindful of the new facts on the ground. The movement’s future success—in fact, its very survival—depends on how well it adapts to the political economy of the second Trump era. The new facts on the ground are as follows.

1. Abundance policy is not going to be a high-priority issue in Washington for the foreseeable future.

Completing America’s energy transition and ending America’s housing shortage are both critical, even existential challenges. But the current administration isn’t particularly interested in either, and the White House sets much of the agenda for federal policymaking. Some Democrats may personally place a higher priority on these issues, but they lack the numbers in Congress to make abundance policy a legislative priority.

Besides, lawmakers are facing some more immediate crises that must necessarily take precedence. Government reform was already hard, but it will be virtually impossible until DOGE and Elon Musk’s rampage through the federal bureaucracy is brought to an end. Abundant health care access recedes further from reality if Republicans gut Medicaid. And even if Congress passed legislation intended to spur housing production or authorize high-speed rail construction, there is no reason to believe the executive branch would do anything to implement it. The Trump administration’s official position is that it can simply refuse to disburse funds or operate departments that were authorized by the legislative branch.

So at the federal level, at least, pro-abundance policymaking must necessarily take a backseat to stopping the assault on American democracy and existing state capacity. If your house is on fire, now may not be the best time to reinforce the foundation; you need to put the fire out first. Abundance liberals should be active participants in the fire brigade.

2. If and when the window of opportunity for federal policymaking reopens, it is impossible to know what will be politically feasible.

Whoever occupies the White House after President Trump will preside over a radically altered political environment and constitutional order. Certain policy options that seemed feasible under the Biden administration may be gone forever. Other policy proposals that were once dismissed as impossible may become politically achievable. And it isn’t just the politics of abundance that will change over the next few years: The country’s economy and even its physical environment may also change in radical ways, necessitating an even bigger and more radical policy response. With things in Washington evolving so drastically, no one can predict what the most politically palatable abundance agenda might look like in 2029.

That makes preparation more, not less, important. Now is the time to start refining a large menu of ambitious proposals; the more fleshed-out ideas that abundance advocates have on hand, the better equipped they will be for any opportunities that eventually come along. Long-term coalition building—through vehicles like the Congressional YIMBY Caucus—will allow abundance liberals to take maximum advantage of those future opportunities.

3. Given the dire condition of federal policymaking, state and local action is more important than ever.

Needless to say, the housing crisis and the climate crisis are not taking the next four years off. With the federal government paralyzed, it is imperative that cities and states take up the slack by enacting even more ambitious pro-abundance reforms.

Deep blue states have a particular obligation to build more housing, for a few reasons. First, many of these states (the coastal blue states and Hawaii in particular) already have the most severe housing shortages in the country. Second, anti-fascist state governments need to prove that liberal democracy remains superior to fascism in its ability to confront the cost of living crisis. The Roosevelt administration pulled a similar trick with the New Deal: As historian Ira Katznelson has documented, Roosevelt’s economic program was a “demonstration that liberal democracy, a political system with a legislature at its heart, could govern effectively in the face of great danger.” It is incumbent on blue states to repeat the demonstration by correcting their own housing shortages.

Third, high-cost blue states will need more housing to accommodate people fleeing authoritarianism elsewhere. California, for example, styles itself a “sanctuary state,” but it cannot offer much sanctuary to working-class immigrants or queer people who are priced out of the state’s housing market.

Cities and states must also take action to compensate for an impending drought of federal funds. This applies across virtually every policy area (including disaster relief), but let’s again take housing as an example. Despite the exhortations of many Democratic officials, the federal government will not expand access to Section 8 housing choice vouchers or provide more subsidies for affordable housing development any time soon. Even existing pots of money, such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, are likely at risk.

This means cities and states will need to make the best of their own limited resources. They can do this by developing novel sources of affordable housing funding, such as the revolving loan fund that sustains Montgomery County, Maryland’s social housing program. Similarly, state and local tax reforms—such as experiments with land value taxes—could generate more revenue. But cities and states will also need to upzone high-cost areas and reform local permitting rules to ensure that more unsubsidized housing gets built, cheaper and faster.

To understand why, it helps to consider the case of San Francisco, a city that has poured billions of dollars into affordable housing investments while tightly constricting the production of market-rate units. Because the city, and the surrounding region, has spent decades suppressing private housing construction, even some professional-class households need rental subsidies to get by; an individual making up to $83,900 annually can still qualify for a subsidized unit rented to households making no more than 80 percent of area median income.

In a housing market where the supply of market-rate units met or exceeded demand, those renters would not need subsidies at all. In fact, in some metropolitan areas, such as North Carolina’s greater Raleigh region, most new rental units are affordable to people making substantially less than the median income—even without subsidies. This suggests that, if  high-cost blue areas lift arbitrary restrictions on development, then over time the private market will likely provide enough housing for most working-class households to remain stably housed without the need for rental subsidies. Cities like San Francisco could then dedicate all of their finite affordable housing dollars to assisting lower-income households.

4. Bipartisanship is still valuable—with guardrails.

Some of the most successful experiments in abundance policy—and in particular pro-housing policy—have happened in red states, most notably Montana. Even in more progressive parts of the country, Republican support has sometimes proven critical; some important YIMBY bills would not have made it through the California legislature without a few “aye” votes from members of the minority party.

Abundance liberals should continue to welcome, and even actively court, bipartisan approval. But reaching across the aisle does not mean letting yourself become a mark. Any Democrat who inflated the legitimacy of DOGE, for instance, made an egregious error. Similarly, abundance liberals should be careful not to compromise core values—such as belief in democracy and the rule of law, or respect for the rights of queer and trans people—in exchange for short-term political advantage. Striking the balance between openness to left-right coalitions and unwavering commitment to progressive values will be difficult, and there are no clear rules on how to do it properly. But it is a necessity.

Conclusion

Frustrating as it is, nobody has the luxury of choosing their own political circumstances, and the circumstances that propelled the last phase of the abundance movement are now behind us. But that does not mean the work is over—far from it. We still face a historic housing crisis, an unprecedented climate crisis, an outdated and crumbling national transportation network, and a disease of sclerotic dysfunction that has penetrated every level of American government—all of which are being exacerbated by the corruption and fecklessness of the current presidential administration. The symptoms of these crises will probably become only more acute over the next several years.

We do not have the luxury of retreating from the work, but we do need to accommodate ourselves to changed conditions. Otherwise the moment for the abundance agenda really will pass—just when it is most needed.

If you ask Eleanor

“This new session of Congress will face a re-thinking on economic theory. Are we going to base both our economy at home and abroad on a theory of greater abundance, or are we going to continue the old theory of scarcity?“

– Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day  (January 5, 1950)

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