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Behind the outcome of the 2024 election  lies a deep fracture in the American dream: the choice between affordable places that stall mobility, and dynamic cities that lock people out with impossible prices.

DEREK THOMPSON: You know, there’s lots of ways to explain the 2024 election, but I think the most parsimonious explanation is that it was an affordability election. Many Americans felt like the last four years, and in many ways the last few decades, had just gotten too unaffordable when it came to the most important parts of their life, especially housing. And you look at this right now, you know, extremely high share of Americans are spending more than 30% of their income on rent or on mortgages. It was just recently reported a few weeks ago that the average age of the first-time home buyer has increased to an all-time high. It’s very, very difficult for many Americans to afford rent, but it’s particularly hard for young people to buy into this market. And so I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you saw young people, and in particular young men, move sharply away from the Democratic party, which has historically been the home of young voters toward the Republican party. It was a vote of protest. It was people saying the current status quo is absolutely inexcusable. And the truth is, it is inexcusable. I’m Derek Thompson. I’m a journalist and I’m the co-author of the book “Abundance” with Ezra Klein.

– [Narrator] The failure of liberal housing policy.

– You know, for a long time in this country, we did a very good job of adding houses in America’s most productive places. So a place like San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York would get richer and then housing supply would meet the demand of people who wanted to move to where the American dream was possible. But something very strange has happened to the American dream in the last few decades, which is that in many cases, Americans are moving to more affordable areas, but these affordable areas aren’t as good at social mobility and helping the lower class move into the middle class, move into the upper class. So on the one hand, you have these cheaper places where upper mobility is difficult, and on the other hand, upper mobility is often very high in places like Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles. These are productive places where people move and benefit in many ways from their proximity to innovation and productivity. But these places are so impossible to afford a home in that people are leaving rather than staying. And so if you think of the American dream as being this idea of you can choose where you live and wherever you live, you will also have the benefit of upward mobility, working your way into an affordable middle-class, the American dream in the last few decades has come apart. You can choose affordability, or you can choose upward mobility, but you can’t have them both together. That’s terrible. That’s the opposite of the American dream. That is, you have to choose between the two things that you want. And the reason this happened, I think is a really interesting and profound historical story. At some point in the last 50 to 60 years, something changed in the way these cities treated housing supply. You saw a proliferation of zoning, for example, single family zoning, but even more importantly, you had a revolution of laws and customs that allowed neighbors to decide what could and couldn’t be built around them. This is around the time that you have the rise of the so-called NIMBY movement, not in my backyard. But you know, the NIMBY instinct, this idea that we don’t want the places around us to change, that’s an ancient instinct, right? That’s a hominid instinct where we all have familiarity bias. We all have a little bit of fear about change. It was only the last 60 years that a revolution of legal norms outfitted neighbors with the tools to block new development, and so they did. And they blocked development in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and Boston. They found ways to essentially tie up new development projects in so much red tape that it made it impossible for developers, whether in the private sector or for public housing, to enter markets and say, “We’re excited about building affordably.” And as a result, you just had building slow down. If you look at the number of housing units permitted in California over the last, say, 40 years, it’s basically a staircase down. You have higher permitting in the 1980s, and in parts of the 1990s, higher permitting in the 1990s and parts of the 2000s, and then it eventually just peters away. This is a world in which we’ve essentially given ourselves the tools to stop the construction of the most important product in American lives in the places where Americans often most want to move. Another way of thinking about this is that, you know, power is more complicated than just the way that the rich have it and the poor don’t. Sometimes the way that power works is a little bit subtler. So for example, think about why it’s difficult to add apartments in housing-constrained areas. Often something that’ll happen is there’ll be a city council meeting and the city council will vote on some new development, and the people who show up to that meeting tend to be older, they tend to be richer, and they tend to own homes. And so, overwhelmingly what you’ll hear at that city council meeting is people saying, “Don’t build it. I have a good reason for you not to build it. I own a home and I’m concerned about the construction. I’m concerned about the parking. I’m concerned about the detours. I’m concerned about the possibility that this is going to interfere with my way of life or even reduce my housing values.” All valid concerns for those individuals, but who’s often not represented at these meetings are the poor and the unhoused and the housing insecure and the young who don’t own homes. And so in a way, you could think this is also an expression of power, not corporate power of rich companies having power over poorer consumers, but of the gentry, homeowners having power over non homeowners. And I think having a sophisticated understanding of how power works in America requires us to have a broader sense of when minority interests are taking over from majority interests. Right? The power that’s exercised by a company lobbying the federal government to give them a tax cut is a great example of that company using their might to rest a private profit out of a public system. But that is the exact same thing that happens when a group of homeowners stops a housing project from being built because it violates their private interest. I wanna be absolutely clear here. You know, some people read this project and say, “Derek, are you just trying to build 10,000 story skyscrapers in Los Angeles and fit the entire country into like a 10 square mile block in one part of Los Angeles?” No, absolutely not. If people wanna move to the suburbs, they should be able to move to the suburbs. But if people wanna move to cities, they should be able to move to cities. The concept of housing abundance, as I see it, is very much an argument about freedom. It’s about the freedom to live where you want to live. And if someone wants to live in the suburbs of Plano, Texas, they should live in Plano, Texas. But if someone wants to live in San Francisco, or maybe just as importantly, if someone’s born in the Bay Area and they want to stay, but they can’t afford to stay because they’re a teacher, they can’t afford to stay because they’re a firefighter, well, that’s not a world that I feel comfortable living in or co-creating. That’s a broken world where we’re forcing the middle-class to leave the places they were born. And that’s why I think we need a revolution of housing affordability and abundance in these places that have gotten so good at constricting housing supply in a thicket of rules. So typically, when I go on long enough complaining about liberal housing policy, it sounds to some people like I’m just making an argument to be, say, a Texas Republican, to simply say the entire country should just be like Texas. We should all be conservatives. Now, I do think, by the way, that states like California and Oregon could take a lesson from Texas, just the same way maybe they could take a lesson from say, Japan or Madrid when it comes to construction productivity. But fundamentally, what I want is good outcomes. The good outcome that I’m looking for is can we do a better job of adding housing in the places where people want to live? But there’s a deeper story to tell here, I think, which is a story about the tragedy of good intentions. When I look at the environmental movement in America, and I look at this story as an 80-year story, you know, you go back to the 1940s, 1950s, and the environmental laws that were created after this period were utterly necessary. Utterly. America was an ugly place to live in in the 1940s and 1950s. The air was disgusting, the rivers were disgusting. The amount of pollution that was coming out of our tailpipes was disgusting. In 1943, the residents of Los Angeles woke up to a smog so thick, they thought the Japanese had launched a chemical attack on the city. They hadn’t. We had launched a chemical attack on ourselves. The industrial revolution of the second half of the 19th century and first half the 20th century despoiled the environment. And so we responded to that despoliation by passing a set of laws and enacting a set of customs to stop government and business from building without reserve. We passed a series of environmental bills, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Protection Act. We passed laws to protect endangered species and migratory birds. We passed a set of laws that in many ways have made the world better without question. Today, if you are an environmental critic or even a critic of liberal housing policy like me, and you drink clean water and you breathe clean air, you are inhaling the benefits of the environmental revolution before you exhale your criticism of them. But what happens sometimes in American history is that the solutions to one generation become the problems of the next generation. We solved a set of problems in the middle of the 20th century, like pollution throughout the country, that have now made it harder to change the physical world. We created through NEPA a way for individuals to sue the state and to sue businesses to stop them from making any change to the physical environment around them. And what that’s done is make it harder to build dense housing, or add solar panels, or add wind turbines. And so ironically now, that dense housing is good for the environment and clean energy is good for the environment, the very environmental laws passed the 1960s and 1970s now make it difficult to be a real environmentalist in the 2020s. Every generation needs to consider the project of institutional renewal. That was the job environmentalists, the 1960s and 1970s, when they looked at the problems of their age and said, “Let’s develop a new set of laws and norms and customs to solve problems.” They did. But now we’re left with the after-wash. We’re left with the legacy of one generation’s solutions becoming this generation’s disease. The disease is the inability to build. The disease is the fact that liberalism, which used to be an ideology of building, has become an ideology of blocking. And that’s why we need a new age of institutional renewal today. We need a new set of laws and customs and rules that make it easier to build densely and to add clean energy and to allow government to do what government wants to do, build high-speed rail, build bridges, build infrastructure for a cost that isn’t eye-watering, but it’s us that have gotten in our own way. I think one really fair criticism of our project is that we’re too focused on rules and norms and laws, and we don’t talk enough about corporate power. We don’t talk enough about antitrust. We don’t talk enough about monopolies. We don’t talk enough about the ways that companies act in illegal ways to violate consumer interest. There’s something to that. These issues are not full chapters in our book, but one thing that we’re trying to do here is identify issues that maybe liberals aren’t paying close enough attention to yet. So just because we’re criticizing housing rules in cities governed by liberals, and just because we’re interested in procurement rules and government processes to make it easier to build rural broadband, doesn’t mean that we’re not interested in corporate power and inequality, and monopoly, and how these issues can be brought to bear in all sorts of ways that make American’s lives worse. Those issues all exist. But we also think that if what you wanna understand fundamentally is in housing, the most important product and most expensive product in most people’s lives, why is Texas building it and California isn’t? Why is Utah building it and Oregon isn’t? You can’t blame oligarchy. You can’t really blame monopoly. You can’t really explain this with just gesturing to income inequality. What you’re looking at fundamentally is different rules leading to different outcomes. And we want liberals, progressives, people who share our priorities to take a good long look in the mirror and say, “Yeah, there’s a lot of problems in the world that are worth caring about.” But sometimes the bottleneck between where we are and where we want to be are rules that ironically we’ve co-created. And in a way, that’s where we have the most power to change, because they were often rules that we wrote and instantiated and voted on and kept. And that’s why we focus on them.