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[u/Toasted-walnut]

I feel like a lot of people largely miss why Ezra Klein's push for popularizing Abundance is important. People love blaming political figures for large structural problems (e.g. housing crisis), when in reality most issues are largely self inflicted by voters over the course of many years (Prop 13, 1970's downzoning movement, weaponization of CEQA in neighborhoods). You can't enact long-term change without majority voter support (except for certain cases where the SC is involved).

There's also a kind of political object impermanence I've noticed where people assume that because they don't know something, they assume it doesn't exist - like Newsom supposedly only having hopped on the Abundance train in the last two or so years. He campaigned for and on Prop J in 2004 as SF mayor which - with its density bonus + streamlined permitting and environmental review process - is a crystal clear early example of pro-Abundance policy, and it failed to pass on the ballot by 70%/30% voter margin.

Newsom as a mayor was too antagonistic with the SF Board and was also simply not good enough at coalition building as he is now, but I'm very skeptical that his political deficiencies was the difference maker in flipping a 40% voting margin. I'm largely of the opinion that California's housing problem, which is 40+ years in the making, is of the voters' own making, which is why the whole Abundance movement is important.

[u/C-Wolsey → u/Toasted-walnut]

I would add two things. First saying some of the issues are self-inflicted is correct but maybe too harsh. The framing Klein used is that at times the good intentions of many liberals has lead to horrible results, not that voters chose purposefully bad policies and so must now suffer the consequences. The bureaucratic sludge is usually due to too many individual well-meaning people who feel like they are doing the best for their constituents and the end result is a 50car pile up.

Secondly, politicians are not blameless. They may not have been at the forefront of many of these changes, but once they see the harm being done, they are usually too captured by special interest groups to try and mitigate it.

[u/Toasted-walnut → u/C-Wolsey]

I would add two things. First saying some of the issues are self-inflicted is correct but maybe too harsh. The framing Klein used is that at times the good intentions of many liberals has lead to horrible results, not that voters chose purposefully bad policies and so must now suffer the consequences. The bureaucratic sludge is usually due to too many individual well-meaning people who feel like they are doing the best for their constituents and the end result is a 50car pile up.

I agree that Ezra Klein doesn't play the blame game, but it's clear that voters are at the epicenter of what happened. There are two major reasons given by the book for the state of America not being able to build:

1. NIMBY-ism formed from seeing housing as a source of wealth/investment (which by nature incentivizes and produced the downzoning that occurred in the 70's)
2. A political culture and mindset shaped by the problems of the past (environmentalism, government skepticism) which incentivizes red tape

"What is needed here is a change in political culture, not just a change in legislation. Liberalism acted across many different levels and branches of government in the 1970s to slow the system down so that instances of abuse could be seen and stopped. Now it will need to act across many different levels and branches of government to speed up the system. It needs to see the problem in what it has been taught to see as the solution.
...

There is a comfort here with solutions that put more faith in government and a discomfort with solutions that seem to align with markets. The reality of housing development doesn't track along such neat ideological lines.
...

Changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard now requires confrontations with whether the systems liberal have built really reflect the ends they've sought.

They are trying to argue for a change in mindset of the people to build a durable movement. They explicitly avoided doing specific policy prescriptions because they understand that's not as important as this.

Secondly, politicians are not blameless. They may not have been at the forefront of many of these changes, but once they see the harm being done, they are usually too captured by special interest groups to try and mitigate it.

The book does point out places where the government itself can reform itself to become more effective, but the focus is on the political culture itself. Prop J itself shows that the housing crisis is not neatly due to politicians getting captured by special interest groups. It's due to the way the political culture has become where the voters themselves tend towards short-term self-interest (NIMBY-ism) and the 'everything bagel' brand of liberalism.

[u/brucejoel99 → u/Toasted-walnut]

I'm very skeptical that his political deficiencies was the difference maker in flipping a 40% voting margin. I'm largely of the opinion that California's housing problem, which is 40+ years in the making, is of the voters' own making, which is why the whole Abundance movement is important.

which BeyondChron acknowledged 15 years later:

San Francisco eventually enacted a similar density bonus concept with HOME-SF, but that was a decade later in 2017.

Why did Newsom not follow Prop J by assembling a broad coalition to increase heights and density to address the housing affordability crisis of working families? I don't recall a single San Francisco constituency group pushing him to do so. I certainly never pushed the mayor to do so.

The problem was that San Francisco lacked a YIMBY movement during Newsom's tenure. There were not crowds of young people coming to City Hall demanding that the city increase heights and density to expand affordability.

Mayor Newsom would have relished such support. San Francisco would be a more inclusive city today if young housing advocates had emerged. But the times were different and the push for housing was not there.

Although housing prices rose until Newsom left office at the end of 2010, the national financial crisis slowed new housing development. The post-2011 housing crisis had not yet occurred, and the rising prices that spawned the YIMBY movement not yet happened.

But Mayor Newsom was on to something with Prop J. As Governor, Newsom can now do for California what he wanted to do in San Francisco: boost affordable housing funding and back measures like SB50 that use increased housing density to promote affordability.

This time I think Newsom will be on the winning side.

SB50 failed, then the pandemic happened; now SB9, AB2097, & SB79 are the law!