Gavin Newsom hasn’t exactly hidden his presidential ambitions over the past half decade, but only now has the California governor finally conceded that his state has become a political punchline rather than a model, demonstrating the consequences of progressive governance. In a de facto admission of policy failure, Newsom signed two rare bipartisan bills dramatically rolling back much of the state’s 50-year-old California Environmental Quality Act, allowing new housing and property developments to move forward without facing the full force of the environmental leviathan’s regulatory rage.
“To the [‘Not In My Backyard’] movement that’s now being replaced by the [‘Yes In My Backyard’] movement, go YIMBYs,” Newsom said when announcing the CEQA rollback. “Thank you for your abundant mindset — that’s a plug for Ezra Klein.”
Newsom was referencing the 4-month-old policy book Abundance, by Klein and Derek Thompson. Both are vociferous and lifelong liberals, and, theoretically, the book’s thesis is squarely left of center. The core assumption at the heart of it is that climate change is an existential threat to humanity that requires a whole-of-government approach to transition away from fossil fuels.
In practice, the book has been interpreted by much of the Left as an indictment of Democratic governance. And that’s because, despite the Democratic optimists who view Abundance as a deus ex machina and policy pathway out of the party’s current despair, Abundance is absolutely antithetical to the core beliefs and practices of the most indigo cities and states.
California lost a net 588,000 residents from 2020 to 2023, with more than a 1% population decline since before the pandemic. A third of Californians polled by the Public Policy Institute of California in 2023 said they were considering leaving due to housing costs, and for more than a decade, the state has seen annual losses of tens of thousands of low-income residents, who have consistently left at higher numbers than the middle class.
Abundance posits the correct reason for this wave of emigration that has inflated red state populations (and thus, in compounding measure, the political power of red states): California has simply made it too hard to build housing. And to its immense credit, Abundance pinpoints the direct reason why this problem really started in the 1970s.
“Real wages stagnated over these decades, but they didn’t fall,” write Klein and Thompson. “The action was in housing prices, which rose and rose. This was something new. Prior to 1970, housing wasn’t a prime asset. You bought a home to live in it. But that changed in the 1970s. Inflation was part of the reason. One of the main aims of federal housing policy has been to make possible the thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage, a peculiar financial device that wouldn’t survive a day in the economic wild. What lender in their right mind would hand out thirty-year loans on fixed terms to virtually anybody with a job?”
The answer, of course, is no lender on Earth. But the 30-year fixed mortgage was backstopped by the federal government and, thus, mainstreamed by the end of World War II. So why did the 30-year fixed rate become a tool to invest in an asset class? Klein and Thompson indeed highlight inflation, which was a byproduct of President Lyndon Johnson’s creation of the “War on Poverty” and President Richard Nixon’s pathetic refusal to rescind the federal spending spree. In turn, the notion of wealth safeguarded in the homes while wages stagnated in real value was a feature, not a bug, of post-New Deal leftism.
“In the ’70s, rising inflation and slowing home building turned the homes people did own into the center of their wealth,” Klein and Thompson concede. “But how do you protect the value of that asset? You can insure a home against fire, but you can’t insure it against rising crime rates or local schools slipping in quality or a public housing complex being built down the block. To manage those risks, you need to control what happens around your home. You do that through zoning and reorganizing.”
But states that President Donald Trump won decisively are approving new building permits per capita at twice the rate of the states that former Vice President Kamala Harris won. While Abundance does explore the fact that other states don’t have this problem because they lack California’s ostensible “environmental” regulations, Klein and Thompson don’t dig deeper into the ugly reason why California has created these sorts of building barriers while Florida and Texas haven’t.
The climax of Abundance details the sordid, decadeslong saga of California’s attempt to build a high-speed rail connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco. While the state’s failure, which has thus far resulted in a potential train connecting the minor city of Bakersfield to the relative hovel of Merced, is indeed a $100 billion laughing stock, I think another, even longer and less ambitious fiasco of a railroad reverie exemplifies the progressive problem with more honesty.
Contrary to popular consensus, Los Angeles does have a subway system — one that, as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, I frequented nearly every day, either to go to my office downtown or to go out in Santa Monica. One of the busiest lines, the D line, is also one of the shortest, but it wasn’t supposed to be.
A plan to connect Downtown with the LA Westside along the main thoroughfare of Wilshire Boulevard was in the works as early as the 1960s, but it wasn’t until 1980 that voters authorized a special sales tax to fund the construction of a rail to span the county. Henry Waxman, the dominant Democrat who represented WeHo, Santa Monica, and Beverly Hills in the House of Representatives, got local liberals to reject the subway under the guise of — you guessed it — environmental concerns. Declaring a portion of Mid-Wilshire a “methane zone” after a freak methane explosion, Waxman used federal force in 1985 to ban a subway tunnel from being built in this crucial crux of central LA.
In the 1990s, a subway connecting Downtown to Koreatown opened, but it stopped short of the Westside.
A full two decades after his initial opposition, Waxman finally reversed course to allow the subway to extend from Mid-Wilshire, and with Congress finally overturning Waxman’s effective veto, the Metro board went forward with the intent to fulfill the original plan modeled more than 40 years prior. Then followed another decade of legal challenges on the basis of bogus environmental concerns. The Beverly Hills Unified School District, which encouraged students to stage a walkout in protest of the 9-mile extension, spent $13 million in local taxpayer-funded bonds to try to stop the extension.
Later this year, an extra 4 miles of subway connecting the previous end of the Wilshire line to La Cienega will finally open.
Unlike environmental regulations used as a pretense to preserve home values by preventing an influx of supply, a subway line does not dilute the concentration of homes in a neighborhood or obstruct the skyline. So why did the power brokers of Beverly Hills and the Westside rail so hard against the subway extension? Because the Westside is wealthy, and Downtown is the gateway to the city’s working class. In other words, the patrician class simply did not want the plebeians to gain easy access to how the other half lives.
Klein and Thompson do make mention of zoning’s historical weaponization against racial minorities, but they stop short of exploring the psychology of the liberal penchant for excluding the have-nots. An easy answer would be that law and order does for Republican localities what zoning does for Democrats: eliminate the unfavorable. But there’s also the fundamental elitism that imbues the leftism of Klein and Thompson’s critics.
Blue state progressive Democrats fought tooth and nail to close their public schools because they’re the residents most likely to have their children in private education. Some 1 in 5 students of the blue bastions of Hawaii and Washington, D.C., attend private schools, compared to 5% or fewer in Oklahoma, West Virginia, Alaska, Utah, and Wyoming.
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Zohran Mamdani narrowly won the Democratic mayoral primary by promising New York City’s residents he would make the bus free, which, of course, necessitates reducing service frequency. Mamdani naturally lost the lower-income voters who actually rely on public transit, presumably to make it to jobs that are much more likely to be less flexible shift work — rather than Mamdani’s ill-fated career as a rapper, which was bankrolled by his Oscar-nominated mother and Columbia University professor father.
For the sake of my former state, I do wish Newsom well. But both he and the Abundance caucus may be surprised if they learn that the feudal lords of California actually don’t mind the exodus of the discarded serfs fleeing for redder lands.