Kudos to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson for pointing out that states and cities ruled by Democrats continue to demonstrate their failure to get anything built—even as they continue to insist that they are dead set on solving the “housing crisis” and the “climate crisis.”
In their new book, Abundance, California comes in for an outsized—and deserved—share of the blame. The state has expended over $20 billion on a train to nowhere with nary a mile of track completed. The city’s budget to build one public toilet on a pre-plumbed pad in an existing San Francisco city park topped $1.7 million. Government fees to build a single apartment in San Francisco top $150,000. And the cost of building one small apartment for a low income household in Silicon Valley and the westside of Los Angeles routinely exceeds $1 million (more than $900 per square feet).
Business as usual in California means delays measured in decades (including lawsuits that can be filed by anyone against anything for any reason), and an “Everything Bagel” regulatory regime that denies, then delays, and then adds multiple millions in fees and mandates to every housing, energy, infrastructure, and industrial project that endures the indefinite torture and actually gets approved. As a result, California had no “shovel ready” clean energy, infrastructure, or advanced manufacturing and chip facilities ready to begin construction when the Biden administration was doling out billions to the mostly red states that actually got their act together and issued permits to build.
Meanwhile between 2019 and 2024, California tax collections rose by 58% from $140B to $222B, and the state’s employee roster expanded by 58,000 – even though the state’s population decreased by more than half a million people. State employees do not teach school, or provide health care outside prisons. They don’t build housing or factories or solar farms. But they can look forward to a pension that pays 90% of their salary and guaranteed deluxe health care for the multiple decades between retirement and life expectancy.
In their defense, California’s ruling progressives have achieved “abundance” in a few categories. We have the nation’s highest poverty rate, the highest homeless rate, and a million people without safe drinking water in their home. This is the deep dysfunction that Abundance argues must be corrected by Democrats (and the socialist left) to regain any semblance of voter trust in deep blue states like California if they wish to build a lasting governing majority nationally.
So thank you Klein and Thompson for pointing out that the Democrats’ policy choices, fetishization of regulatory proceduralism, and failure to make housing, energy and the cost of living affordable to working households, has been a governance catastrophe—and for urging Democrats to actually prove the party is still committed to the working class by getting stuff done (and built).
But the ugly elitist underbelly of Abundance, in what I hope is just version 1.0, is that it only seems to apply to those of us who live in cities, can afford renewable electricity and electric vehicles, or are content to get around by bike or bus. Klein and Thompson, like many YIMBYs, swoon about the joys of city life as the launching pads of upward mobility, as capitals of arts and culture, as pantheons for smart people who dine, drink, and complain about daycare costs, schooling costs, public safety, and the need for deeper income redistribution. I get it: been there, done that.
Read the rest of this piece at: The Breakthrough Journal.
Jennifer Hernandez is a land-use and environmental lawyer and Breakthrough Institute Board Member.
Photo: courtesy Breakthrough Institute.
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