How to fix blue cities

0:00So, picture this. You open your eyes at dawn and turn in the cool bedsheets. You live in the cocoon of energy that barely leaves a carbon trace. You walk into the kitchen and turn on the sink, and water from the ocean pours out the faucet. The air is clean and humming with the purr of electric machines all around you. The year is 2050, and everything is perfect? That's The Dream of Abundance, the best-selling book by authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Abundance argues that Democrats have gotten in their own way, and on issues like clean energy, housing, and technology, the party's instincts should be one of yes.

0:38But as Klein's view has gained more and more popularity, especially in Washington, D.C., it's come under increasing criticism from the left. Coming up on Today Explained from Box, we hear from Ezra on abundance in theory, and we talk to the newly elected mayor of Seattle on the challenges of putting abundance into practice.

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1:42I'm so excited we're doing this. We have Ezra Klein, former and forever Mr. Vox, current Mr. NYT. Thank you so much for joining us. Such a pleasure to be on text. You know, Yui wanted to talk to you, especially because we've been thinking through the political themes of the year. And Abundance obviously really stands out. Your book, Abundance, was published on March 18th and has instantly become one of the defining political topics of this year. For those who have somehow been living under a rock, can you tell us and just quickly define the abundance agenda for us? So abundance comes out of a series of pieces that me and my co-author Derek Thompson wrote.

2:19And we were struggling with the reality that in places where Democrats governed, you were not seeing enough of the things people need get built or produced. So in places like California, New York, Massachusetts, just not enough housing. New data shows how far behind the Golden State is when it comes to building new homes. New York City lags far behind other large cities when it comes to housing inventory. And it's contributing to skyrocketing rents. And that's compared, by the way, to red states like Florida or Texas, which have an easier time producing it. A popular West Campus bar will turn into a housing high-rise.

2:55It's just another example of more apartments coming to Austin. Realtors are saying now is the time to buy in South Florida, calling it a buyer's market. Under the Biden administration, we were seeing this huge push to decarbonization. I set a goal of having our country produce 100 percent carbon pollution-free power by 2035. We can do that. But there was a lot standing in the way of building the transmission lines, electrical vehicle charger networks, the solar panels, the wind turbines. And so this question of how can you have a liberalism that builds fast enough to achieve liberalism's goals became certainly for me somewhat obsessing question.

3:37How do you have government, you know, particularly when Democrats are running it, the party that believes in government, that when they say we're going to build high speed rail or we're going to build the Second Avenue subway, they get that done on time, on budget, quickly. And so people begin to see what government can do for them. So the Abundance Agenda is the set of questions around how, when government is trying to build something, particularly in the real world, what do you need to have be true about the laws, rules, regulations, government capacity in order for government to deliver the thing it has promised?

4:11The book talks through several examples where democratic governance have hindered innovation and progress, kind of like you're mentioning. But we wanted to particularly focus on housing, which is, of course, a big part of this. You recently wrote a column saying America's housing problem is, quote, too much money chasing too few homes. What is it you think about this issue specifically, housing costs, housing supply, that demonstrates the core argument of the abundance agenda? So the thing where this issue, I think, causes particular heartache for Democrats is that there is no bigger part of a working family's budget or a middle class family's budget than housing.

4:49And in the places where Democrats govern, housing costs have gone completely out of control. And that is honestly distinct from places where Republicans govern. So I always say that there is this huge difference between what happens when people move to Austin or Houston and what happens when they move to San Francisco or Los Angeles. And it said Austin and Houston build more homes for them. And to a first approximation, SF and LA don't. And that means it is much more affordable for many people to live in these red states. In the period where we're writing the book, you were seeing big exodus migration out of California, out of New York, out of Illinois, because it has become so unaffordable.

5:30So to me, that is a real, on the part of Democrats, betrayal of the people they say they are standing for. I mean, I wrote a lot of the book when I was living in San Francisco, and I would say that you have these yard signs where it says, like, no human being is illegal and kindness is everything. And, like, everything is zoned for single-family housing and the homes cost more than a million dollars to buy. So, yeah, it's great to say no human being is illegal and kindness is everything. But if the human beings can't afford to live there, then something's gone really wrong. And so the other thing, though, that I would say that makes housing kind of interesting and complicated is it's actually very hard to solve.

6:06I mean, Democrats do want to solve it. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, he promised to build 3.5 million new homes over his tenure when he took office. Let's talk about housing affordability. Today, many Californians are benefiting from our sky high economy. And housing and homelessness embody this inequity. I'll tackle them head on, spearheading three and a half million new housing units by 2025. He's nowhere near on track for that. But it's not like he hasn't been trying. He's suing local cities and has signed dozens of housing bills. It's actually really, really hard when you have ended up in a government equilibrium, which is about creating a lot of opportunities to say no, to then unwind that.

6:50if you need to create the space to say yes to a lot of things rapidly, which is also, of course, a case in green energy. It feels intuitively true also because, you know, I've seen this play out in life. I remember growing up in Chicago where folks were moving that to Georgia, Atlanta, that big way, particularly of black middle class professionals. When we go to places like Arizona and you feel the kind of California refugees of it all. I mean, what has been the barrier to kind of getting, let's say, taking these homes built? You know, who is actually to blame for the fact that this stuff has not happened?

7:20Because to your point, it has been recognized as a problem. It's been recognized as a problem. The who is to blame is particularly on this very complicated because what you have is, oh, my God, like these endless like overlapping jurisdictions and cities and planning commissions. And what it reflects, I think, is a extended period in progressivism and in progressive governance is why this is worse in blue states where there was a backlash to the overuse of government and private power after the New Deal. And there was a correct recognition that we were being heedless with the environment, that there weren't the opportunities for people in communities to make their voices heard.

8:02And so it was a series of accomplishments by Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson and many others, laws and opportunities that were supposed to create more citizen voice, supposed to create the opportunity to sue the government if the government was doing something wrong, supposed to make sure the government had to think about the consequences of its actions. And that was great. They were the correct solutions to the problems they faced. And then, like everything, you let a particular structure sit around for 30 or 40 or 50 years, and the special interests begin to wind their way around it. But all of a sudden, you know, it becomes very hard to build in any place where like rich homeowners in Georgetown know how to hire the lobbyists and the planners and the lawyers to make sure nothing can move through.

8:50And so then you have to go through another period of institutional renewal to solve the problems you have now. But there isn't – this is a thing people don't always like about abundance. There isn't one villain. It changes also issue to issue, though. What makes it hard to build housing in San Francisco is not the same thing that makes it hard to lay down interstate transmission lines. Those are different problems. Another thing I say about the abundance agenda broadly, because it is other dimensions of it, right, science and technology and things like that, is it is an effort to say we should have a goal-oriented, not a process-oriented liberalism.

9:20Yeah. And to say that liberalism should be very committed to its goals and the process should serve those goals, not so committed to its process that it cannot achieve its promised goals. You know, since the book has come out, we have seen kind of abundant civics groups pop up, particularly in big cities that were mentioned in the book, places like New York City and out in California. I saw an inclusive abundance group in my inbox the other week. There's college groups. Did you expect this? Was this the point? Did you think this was a political platform for Democrats? We knew that there was electricity around this set of ideas because we'd seen it in the pieces that I started writing in 2021 and Derek in the initial piece naming sort of – I had the much less good term supply-side progressivism.

10:02There's no – that doesn't fit on the side. Yeah, you can see why Abundance won that one. So we knew – and some of this was happening, like some of the inclusive Abundance groups were already there. I mean, people began picking this up. So we knew that we were writing to a movement and a tendency that was already gaining force. And prior to sort of us wrapping a series of ideas in a stream of abundance, the ideas themselves, right, Yimbyism, for instance, or, you know, that we need to build fast for decarbonization. So we are standing on the shoulders of giants, of activists, of policy intellectuals and also of a past, right, like the New Deal, where they did a lot of things very, very fast.

10:40Yeah. I also wanted to ask how you see your role. I mean, I mean, the impact of this year has certainly been, you know, you've always been a big voice in terms of medium politics, you know, all that good stuff. But the primacy in terms of Democrats seems to have grown as well. I wonder what you think of it. Like, do you see your job as helping Democrats win? I see my job as trying to create good ideas built on an honest assessment of the world that will lead to things being better. I would love it. I would love it if that, at this moment, did not seem quite so partisan. I would love to say that believing in a bunch of things I believe in.

11:17There are other countries where, say, thinking we should decarbonize is not a right-left issue. Got it. Yeah. Affordable housing, by the way, there's a lot in abundance that is not right-left. You know, Vivek Ramaswamy just had a piece in the New York Times saying that he thinks abundance, you know, if we didn't have all these left-coated aesthetics and ideas could actually be very helpful for Republicans. So I don't think every single idea is Democratic versus Republican. What I will say is that I do think the Trump administration is uniquely lethal to liberal democracy. I think it is almost explicitly trying to create some kind of successor or I might say predecessor structure to it, a regime of dealmaking and transaction and, you know, masked ICE agents.

12:05And so right now I do believe that for people who believe in not just a set of ideals that are in abundance, but in a broader set of ideals about how we live here together and how we have a free and fair political system and country, creating movements that allow liberal democracy to deliver and be an effective counterweight to right-wing populism is part of how I see my work. That leads me to candidates like Zohar Mamdani or Katie Wilson, the mayor-elect in Seattle. Like, when you see the kind of populist embraced of some abundance lanes, do you look at those candidates and think those are abundance Democrats?

12:40Or, you know, should I be thinking more folks a little closer to the center? The abundance Democrats are the Democrats who deliver abundance. So I am thrilled by the way I've seen Democrats of many different stripes and even a couple Republicans pick up some of the ideas and arguments of abundance. But the thing that is going to separate who's real in this and who is not is whether they deliver. So I am hopeful about Mamdani, but he's going to come in governing New York City is famously very, very difficult. And there's a lot of interest moving in all different directions. And so, you know, building a lot more housing is going to be harder to do than implementing a rent freeze.

13:19I am very hopeful he can do it. But the question of I want to be very cautious myself, having watched a lot of politicians promise on this and fail. Right. As I said, Gavin Newsom talks about abundance a lot. He's actually signed some incredible bills in my perspective in the last year or two. But he was not able to deliver the housing change he promised in California. And abundance is, in the end, not about what you say it is about what you deliver. It is an argument that the Democratic Party should be—that all government should be judged by whether or not it is able to create, either directly or through creating the conditions for the private market to create it, the things people need.

14:05Ezra Klein, formerly of Vox, currently co-author of the book Abundance, and host of The Ezra Klein Show, a New York Times podcast. So how do you actually deliver abundance? Seattle's next mayor has some thoughts. That's coming up.

14:40I am Katie Wilson, mayor-elect of Seattle, Washington. Congratulations on your historic victory. And we wanted to talk to you about kind of how you made it happen and what the affordability agenda looks like in practice. To start, can you just give us a summary about how this race came to be? How you won? Sure. Well, I mean, it's been a wild ride this year. One year ago today, I had absolutely no thought of running for any elected office, let alone mayor. So it's a lot has happened in the last year. You know, I've spent the last 14 years as a community organizer and coalition builder running an organization called the Transit Riders Union.

15:21And, you know, I jumped into this race in March. Basically, in February, we had a special election on approving a funding source for our new social housing developer. So we had this social housing developer in Seattle, which was approved by voters last year. And this year, there was a citizens initiative to basically enact a tax on wealthy corporations to fund that social housing developer. And our current mayor was kind of the face of the opposition campaign to that measure, which passed by a landslide in February. And so to me, that kind of showed that our current mayor was very out of touch with the challenges that Seattle residents are facing around affordability and specifically housing affordability.

16:11And so I realized there was a lean there and jumped in and quickly realized that, you know, I was part of a larger moment with Mamdani in New York City and, you know, kind of the affordability crisis that people around the country and especially in high cost cities like Seattle are facing today. Yeah. I mean, should we see your win? You mentioned the kind of Mamdani comparison, which I know has happened frequently. Should we see this as a kind of win for Democrats seeking ideological change, generational change, or is it both? I think there's a lot of aspects to it. You know, I think I think that the affordability crisis really is a big part of this.

16:52Right. Coming out of the pandemic, we saw these high rates of inflation and it's gotten to the point where in cities like Seattle. Right. It's not just the lowest income households that are feeling the pinch. Right. People who have decent jobs, who consider themselves to be middle class are just looking around and saying, I don't know how much longer I can hold on in this city. Right. Housing costs, child care costs, you know, grocery costs, restaurant costs. Like everything is so expensive. And so I think that's a really important part of the moment that we're in. I mean, there's also local factors.

17:19And, you know, here in Seattle, we have an escalating homelessness crisis. Our rates of unsheltered homelessness are just off the charts, even compared to our pure cities. And so that was also a factor here. And then, you know, I mean, obviously there's generational there's a kind of a generational aspect to this. And there's and there's to some extent, you know, a reaction against Trump's election. Right. Where I think that and this is maybe related to the generational shift where people are looking for a kind of a new bolder kind of leadership that can meet the moment. And there's a certain kind of transactional establishment Democratic Party politics that obviously failed to meet the moment last year and that people are kind of reacting against and looking for something new.

17:59Yeah, I think that's interesting. You mentioned the focus on the substance, that you think this doesn't happen without the kind of focus that you and some others have put on the question of affordability itself. You know, I wanted to go back to your history in community organizing. You know, it seems as if you've been living in these issues for a long time. How will we define the affordability issue in general? Are we just are we talking housing costs? Are we talking health care costs? Like, what do you think is under the umbrella that is really pinching people right now? I mean, it's really all of the above, but I think in cities like Seattle, housing is really at the core.

18:33And it's also at the core in terms of the levers that the government can pull to make things better. you know we've had I mean I moved to Seattle over 20 years ago and you know my husband and I you know rode the Amtrak with our stuff in boxes and found a apartment and or just a room in someone's basement that we could rent for four hundred dollars a month and you know got part-time jobs and kind of found our feet and that kind of story is just not possible today it's this kind of pressure cooker environment yeah I was thinking four hundred dollars a break I mean this was back Back in 2004. But yeah, I mean, it's just there's a sense of just immense pressure where you're just hustling 24-7 just to pay your basic bills.

19:13And I think that the housing crisis is really kind of at the core of that, again, in cities like Seattle, where housing costs have risen much faster than inflation, much faster than wages. I also want to ask how you translate that into a campaign, though, because activating this coalition of renters, focusing on the issues like affordability, doesn't always translate into bringing people to the ballot box. One of the things we saw was an ad you ran on social media that was all about the high cost of pizza. This is my neighborhood, and I just bought this slice of pizza. It cost me$8. Can you tell me, like, how you took your focus as a community organizer and translated it into the mayoral race and specifically about that ad?

19:53Yeah, I mean, it's funny because I'm like totally not a social media person in my personal life at all. And so then having to become like a social media person and be in videos was a little bit of a thing for me. But I did it. And, you know, with some success. We're all YouTubers now, you know, get used to it. But yeah, I mean, I think for me, the kind of pizza ad, like, I think it's so important. And this is really something that I hope to carry into the mayor's office is that we're able to really have an honest conversation with the public where we're educating people about policy. And it's not just about slogans.

20:31It's actually about like, okay, why is the cost of pizza so high? How is this related to housing costs? And we have to like, treat voters like adults and believe that they can actually understand things. And, you know, yeah, you need to, like, make things simple enough that you can explain it in a few minute video. But, like, you can actually communicate quite a lot in a few minute video. If you are paying 40 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent of your income every month on your rent, you don't have that much money to go out to eat. And so I really think that that kind of, like, public education and having a real conversation with the public about the challenges that we're facing and why, you know, why they exist and what the solutions are.

21:07I think that's super important. And I think that that's something that, yeah, that I really want to continue for the mayor's office. We talked earlier to Ezra Klein about his book Abundance, and it made a argument that kind of rings true to some of our conversation. You know, one of its core points is that blue cities have not kind of delivered for its constituents and have prioritized things like process or red tape over that kind of delivering that you're talking about. I wanted to know like whether what you thought of that argument and he specifically makes one in relationship to housing saying how, you know, people need to embrace kind of the supply side or the role of real estate markets in terms of building new housing supply.

21:45Is that a transition that you had to come to or was that something that was natural to you to see? I'm just curious of what you thought of his argument. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. And, you know, fortuitously, I'm actually just nearing the end of the audiobook version of Abundance. Great. I feel like I spent the whole campaign, you know, when people asked me whether I'd read it, being like, no, I haven't read it, but I really feel like I've read it. And not just because everyone's talking about it on podcasts, but, you know, I really I feel like the, you know, some of the book's themes are not at all new in Seattle, right?

22:20For some years, we've had kind of an urbanist left in Seattle that's basically on board with the abundance agenda when it comes to housing, right? That really recognizes the role that zoning and land use laws have played in slowing housing production. And that is like 100 percent there on changing those laws and on permit reform and on kind of all the things that are necessary to— That's not a transition. That's not a transition. That's something that has been in the air here for some time. And I do think that there are some limitations like in the kind of desire to have this narrative around like our problems are all because well-meaning, you know, liberals, progressives put all these rules and regulations in place.

23:01I think there's a lot of other big factors, too, that are also important that are that are maybe not. I would love to hear you draw out what you think are some of the things that go beyond that and the ways you try to shape your politics around other forces, too. You know, they begin the book with this description of life in 2050, right? Like once the abundance agenda has been achieved. And, you know, it sounds great. And one of the things that they mentioned is that, you know, we have a lot more leisure time now because the work week has been shortened because, you know, productivity is so much higher.

23:32And when I got to that, I just like immediately began thinking of the like level of social upheaval and like, frankly, class struggle that would have to take place in the next quarter century in order for major productivity gains to actually result in a shorter work week. So I think there's just kind of like a kind of a power analysis maybe that is a little bit missing from from their narrative, which is like fine if they're just aiming to be like, here are a few things that we should do. But if they're pitching it as more of like a story that explains everything, right, then I think that there's definitely some things that are missing.

24:03According to the Democratic Party fights that are happening currently as a question of diagnosis, you know, kind of what went wrong and what should we take from even Democratic successes this year? I wanted to put that to you directly. Like, why do you think National Democrats were at such distance from their own voters in the last year? And what do you think they should take from campaigns like yours? Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to a lot of the things that we've been talking about, right? Which is, I mean, just to use our, you know, this mayoral election as that capsule, right? The incumbent mayor had kind of built all the interest groups around him who were going to support his reelection.

24:36But, like, he didn't realize that his constituents were worried about paying the rent or paying for their child care. And he wasn't speaking to that effectively. um and and so i really think it's about um it you know it's it's it's about really like just understanding where people are at and speaking in a way that resonates with them and also just um painting a picture of a future that we want and that we can build together and there needs to be this sense that you actually believe in it this is not just like message tested focus group tested you know consultant speak or whatever that you're putting out into the world but it's actually something that you believe in and that you feel yourself.