Falls Church Mayor Letty Hardi and Council member Justine Underhill took a whirlwind trip to San Francisco last week to participate in an event featuring New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. It was about growing a new movement centered around themes in the new book Klein and Atlantic writer Derek Thompson authored entitled, “Abundance.”
The two Falls Church elected officials were invited by the organizers of the event who covered travel for a variety of office holders from across the U.S. The Abundance Agenda group, in its early stages of formation, was attracted to a documentary that Underhill has produced and aired on YouTube (and in a recent Falls Church showing) titled “Green Vs. Gray Environmentalism,” that led to the invitation.
In addition to the book event, there were roundtable discussions and a walking tour of the Tenderloin and other downtown areas of San Francisco.
Described as a new “center-left movement” by James Pethokoukis in a commentary in last Friday’s Washington Post headlined “Democrats’ Plan to Build Back Better – Better,” he calls it “Abundance-ism” that “championing deregulation and government efficiency, offers…an extraordinary political opportunity to solve big, persistent national problems.”
An important key, he wrote, lies in its ability to reach across the aisle to libertarian or center-right elements and advocate for policies that pro-development currents in both parties can agree on.
A Washington Post editorial this Wednesday picked up on the idea. Entitled, “America Needs an Abundance Mindset,” citing the Klein-Thompson book and concluding, “the only viable path is to give Americans what they need and deserve: more instead of less, an endless frontier instead of interminable partisan bickering.”
Klein, who was on stage before a packed house at the Sidney Goldstein Theater in downtown San Francisco last Thursday, said his book is dedicated to “a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.”
Mayor Hardi told the News-Press after the event,“ I am really heartened that there continues to be good people across the US who are all motivated to make government work better in a positive way – by holding each other accountable to the outcomes and getting stuff done, and not just voting for fancy words on paper. In my opinion, it requires a different breed of electeds.”
She added, “It was a really good learning and networking experience meeting fellow local electeds across the US, with similar values and priorities as we do. From small cities like Falls Church to really big ones like San Francisco, we have way more in common than not.
“Hearing and seeing the challenges in other jurisdictions was good affirmation of what we’ve been doing right in Falls Church and cautionary tales of what not to do with “over-proceduralizing”, burdening good policy with so many rules that we lose sight of the original goals,” Hafrdi said.
Underhill related to the News-Press, “It was great getting to meet elected officials from across the country, and see how their localities are similar to and different from Falls Church. We heard stories about everything from affordable housing projects, to the permitting process, to transportation to street murals.
“Seeing some of the struggles places like San Francisco face made me realize how good we have it here in many ways, but there’s always more we can do to improve our systems. I left feeling inspired and encouraged to reach out to other cities who are taking on topics like permitting— if another place is doing something well, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel here.”
A Washington Post editorial this Wednesday picked up on the idea. Entitled, “America Needs an Abundance Mindset,” citing the Klein-Thompson book and concluding, “the only viable path is to give Americans what they need and deserve: more instead of less, an endless frontier instead of interminable partisan bickering.”
The emerging movement is building on an earlier San Francisco-based so-called “YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) movement that organized to adopt the opposite tack to the well-known “NIMBY” (“Not in my backyard”) universal tendency to resist economic development, and especially housing.
In fact, advancing affordable housing is a very central component of this new current, coming none too soon, given the acute national housing shortage. Overall, solving housing, healthcare and transportation problems are among the key elements this new movement is focused on.
Klein and Thompson have made it clear that “Abundance” is not just a white paper of policy prescriptions. The book is described as “a political manifesto aimed at transforming the Democratic Party in the face of incipient authoritarianism.”
Thompson called Trump a “tragic dark foil” to “Abundance” arguments “that has a scarcity outlook that pits one disadvantaged group (like blue collar workers) against another (immigrants).
Last year, the YIMBY Abundance Network was credited with spearheading a pro-growth takeover of the San Francisco Democratic Party. It has similar efforts in Oakland and a chapter in Santa Monica. Zack Rosen, founder of the network, was in the audience last Thursday.”
Central to the cause is an optimistic vision of what the future can hold. It is its essential element and the core message of the Klein-Thompson book.
In it, the authors envision the time in the near future where “the world has changed. Not just the virtual world, that dance of pixels on our screens. The physical world, too: its houses, its energy, its infrastructure, its medicines, its hard tech. How different this era is from the opening decades of the twenty-first century, which unspooled a string of braided crises. A housing crisis. A financial crisis. A pandemic. A climate crisis. Political crises. For years, we accepted homelessness and poverty and untreated disease and declining life expectancy. For years, we knew what we needed to build to alleviate the scarcities so many faced and create the opportunities so many wanted, and we simply didn’t build it.”