Building Solutions

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. You might call what we're about to hear tough love for liberalism from two people who care about it. Journalist Ezra Klein from The New York Times and Derek Thompson from The Atlantic have co-authored a new book called Abundance. Derek and Ezra suggest that Donald Trump won the election last year not because of his vision for America, but because of the failures of present-day liberalism.

They say those failures have produced some political ironies. Red states are actually producing more clean energy than blue states. Big blue cities have the worst housing shortages. They call some of this the problem with everything bagel liberalism. Not that they're fans of Republicans. They say both parties have embraced a wrong-headed politics based on the idea of scarcity, hence the title of the book, Abundance. Let's hear more.

Ezra Klein is a columnist and podcast host for The New York Times. His latest book was the bestseller, Why We're Polarized from 2022. Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic and host of their podcast Plain English. He's also an NPR News analyst and a CBS contributor. He wrote a national bestseller too, called Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. Ezra and Derek, thanks for making us think with your original framing here, and welcome back, both of you to WNYC.

Ezra Klein: Thank you for having us.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with your idea of scarcity. Derek, I see in The Atlantic in an article based on the book you wrote, Trump offers fear, retribution, and scarcity, but then you wrote, in many places run by Democrats, the solution on offer is another variety of scarcity. Maybe start by describing the Democratic and Republican versions of scarcity as you see them. Where would you start?

Derek Thompson: Well, there's a tremendous irony that Donald Trump has promised a golden age in America because when you look at his actual policies, what I see is a very shrunken and pinched vision of the present. Throughout the first weeks of his administration, Trump and his team, I see, consistently pointing to shortages that exist in order to demand new sacrifices. Trump will say, "Look, we can't afford our debt and therefore we can't afford Medicaid. The US doesn't have enough manufacturing and therefore we need less trade. The US doesn't have enough housing, so therefore we need fewer immigrants."

Over and over, it seems to me, Americans are being fed this line that everything we don't have requires the elimination of something that we need. Now, this is where I would hope Democrats would be able to stand up and offer a compelling counter message, but as you just indicated, I think in a lot of the places where Democrats hold the most power, in cities and states across the country, in fact, Democrats often practice a different kind of scarcity.

In many cities governed by Democrats, you have enormous housing shortages. In fact, homeless rates are highest in five states, Washington, Oregon, California, and beyond, that are governed by Democrats. These are not problems that we can place at the foot of Donald Trump, despite many other problems we can place at his feet. This is a problem often of liberalism itself. What our book is trying to do is not only define abundance in counter to the kind of scarcity politics of the illiberal right but also do a little bit of tough love by indicating to liberals themselves how our politics has also become a politics of scarcity.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to your idea of a liberalism based on abundance and what that would look like, but Ezra, do you want to talk first about the idea that Trump won not because of his vision of or for America, but because of the failures of present-day liberalism? I guess Derek started to get at it, but before we get to some specifics having to do with climate, having to do with housing, what's your basic thesis there?

Ezra Klein: Every election is multi-causal. I would never say that Donald Trump won just because of the failures of political liberalism or American liberalism, but I would say a couple of things. One, I just had a podcast come out today with the Democratic data analyst David Shor. His Firm did like 28 million survey interviews over the course of the election. They're sitting on top of more data than anybody else. The story they tell is a story we all know, which is that this was a cost-of-living election.

When it came down to it, voters did not trust Democrats on the cost of living and the biggest swings in the electorate, this really goes to the point of your question, Brian. The single biggest swings in the electorate were in blue states and blue cities where Democrats governed. If you look at the overall shift towards Trump, it was smaller in the battleground where the campaign was more contested, but in the places where it was a mood, where it wasn't, as you know, on the knife's edge, places like New York, California, Illinois, it shifted quite far. You were talking about 9, 10, 11 point shifts to the right.

I think that had two reasons. One was disorder, which is not mainly the point of our book, but the other is that in these places they have just become extraordinarily expensive. People are very angry about prices. That wasn't all Democrat's fault in the news narrow short term, inflation was a global phenomenon after the pandemic and incumbents all over the world, left and right, suffered for it. In a bunch of these big blue states and big blue cities, Democrats have for a long time allowed an affordability crisis to build affordability crisis in housing, in health care, in child care, in elder care, in higher education.

You see this sometimes in red states, but it's worse in blue states. It's worse in blue states because, in many blue states, liberals have made it very, very difficult to create enough supply the things people need. Voting is honestly not even the most costly form of anger that residents of democratically run states are exhibiting. Voting is cheap. What is very expensive is moving your entire family somewhere else, but that's happening too.

New York, Illinois, and California losing hundreds of thousands of people every year in a way, by the way, that after the 2030 census, if these trends continue, red states are going to gain so much population that even if a Democrat after that won all the states Kamala Harris won and won Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, they still wouldn't have enough electoral votes to win the presidency. These are big shifts driven by the cost of living. Democrats have to figure out not just a better message on cost of living, but a better reality in the places where they are building models that they want to sell to the American people.

Brian Lehrer: I mentioned the concept in your book that you call the problem with everything bagel liberalism. Ezra, we'll stay with you. What's everything bagel liberalism and does it relate to what you were just saying?

Ezra Klein: Everything bagel liberalism is a tendency of liberals and we are liberals, I am a liberal. To pile a lot of well-meaning standards and projects and goals into a single initiative. The two examples that I look at pretty in depth in that section are one, the National CHIPs and Science Act which the Biden administration passed, and is this effort to reshore advanced semiconductor manufacturing in America and then an affordable housing development called Tahanan in Northern California.

The reason I want to look at something that's both city level and national level is that it shows you this is a culture of the way liberals build when they govern. In both of these things, on the semiconductor side, when you actually looked at the notice of funding opportunity for different semiconductor companies to apply for these grants, it was demanding they came up with plans to diversify their subcontractor chains, how to provide on-site childcare, how they would incentivize more women to come into the local construction industry, environmental rental plans for the local community, community investments.

These are all worthy goals, but if you are doing the unbelievably difficult thing of trying to rebuild the American semiconductor manufacturing industry, maybe you don't want to pile them all there. Then on the affordable housing side, we look at a bunch of cases, but in this case in San Francisco, where in trying to build affordable housing, you end up with these crazy projects where the costs are $700,000, or recently in Chicago, $1.1 million per affordable housing unit.

When you look into why, it's because they've made the labor more expensive. It's because they have all these different layers of review and community feedback. It's because they're forcing higher green standards. All these different things that individually, again, worthy goals, many of them, but is making it so you cannot achieve the goal you said you were trying to achieve, which is building affordable housing quickly, affordably, and on time in order to address a housing crisis. Abundance has this quality. It sounds like all good things, who's not for abundance? On a very fundamental level, this is a book about the necessity of making trade-offs.

Brian Lehrer: Derek, you want to pick that up on the title of the book, Abundance, because it is an interesting title for an era when middle-class economic comfort seems to have been in decline as a percentage of the population for decades. Why a politics of abundance?

Derek Thompson: I think liberalism over the last half century has become too obsessed with process and not focused enough on outcomes. That's how you get a world where environmental reviews block public housing projects in downtown cities, even though building more housing in downtown areas would be one of the best possible things that we can do for the environment. This really speaks, I think, to a generational shift within environmentalism.

If you go back to the 1960s, 1970s, it was incredibly important for us to pass the Clean Air and Water Act and other acts that help migratory bird species and endangered species, because the world was absolutely filthy. The air and the water needed to be cleaned up. We did need to pass rules to limit emissions coming from tailpipes. The environmental revolution of the 1960s and 1970s did a lot of good, but it also created some laws like NEPA that made it easier to have environmental reviews slow down construction projects. That leads to a world like 2021 in San Francisco where a couple of developers were trying to create a new apartment building, with 500 units, 100 of which were below market rent.

This is just a fantastic thing for a city like San Francisco that has been so famously housing-starved. In fact, the Board of Supervisors ended up voting down this enormous apartment project because they said that the developers didn't fill out the proper paperwork for environmental review. Here we see very clearly, I think, that the medicine of the 20th century to solve the problem of environmental degradation has become the disease of the 21st century in getting in the way of building things that would actually be good for the environment.

You can make the exact same case for all the various ways that environmental rules have stood in the way of adding solar power in California and other blue states, or slowing down the construction of wind, or complicating geothermal, or shutting down all progress in nuclear power, which is basically zero emissions. What we see really is that there was this paradigm shift, the 1960s, 1970s, within liberalism that served its own time, but progressivism should be about institutional renewal in our own time.

That's what this book is trying to do, we're trying to usher in a paradigm shift for the 2020s and solve the problems of today. The problems of today, I really think, and I think Ezra agrees, are problems that demand much more building in the physical world.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I see some of you are calling in already and texting. Who has a question or a comment or a story for Derek Thompson from The Atlantic, Ezra Klein from The New York Times on these ideas from their new book, Abundance? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text.

When we come back from a break, we're going to take an even deeper dive than where Derek just took us into the issue of climate and the politics of abundance versus scarcity and do other things as well. They have a really great stat on immigration in the book that I wish everybody knew as immigrants are being demonized as part of the core of the Trump administration. We'll get to that and much more in your calls and texts. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Ezra Klein from The New York Times and Derek Thompson from The Atlantic and their new book, Abundance. Let's stay on climate and energy for a little while, Ezra, Derek started on this. Red states are producing clean energy faster than blue states. You're right. Where, for example, and why?

Ezra Klein: Texas is the big example here. Texas is placing down wind and solar at an astonishing rate. They really lead the nation in this, though, if you're looking at advanced manufacturing, which is something that the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act really incentivized. Georgia has also been a leader here. What's interesting about this is, particularly in Texas, the politics are no longer friendly to renewable energy. Year after year, key members of the Texas legislature put forward all kinds of bills to make building renewables harder.

They haven't really passed in any large number, but they're there. It's not a state that is happy, excited about renewable energy, not a state where the politics are concerned about climate change. Yet the fundamental truth about Texas is that the default is that it is easy to build. It is easy to build all kinds of things. Clean energy, dirty energy, housing, commercial buildings. When there's demand for something and a number of bills passed by liberals at the national level created a lot of demand for wind and solar investment, it's been profitable to put it there, and you can.

One of the lessons we take from that is that it is very, very important what the policy default you create is. If you make it default hard to build, it will be hard to build bad things and it will be hard to build good things. If you make the policy default easy to build, it will easier to build bad things and easier to build good things. Now, we also think you can be discerning. The environmental legislation we would like to see is different than what naturally exists now because much of what exists now doesn't make a distinction between good and bad. It just knows what is changing the status quo.

If you look at, say, congestion pricing in Manhattan, that was held up for more than three years in environmental assessment. Now, we know congestion pricing is a very pro-environmental policy. The whole point of doing it is that it's good for the environment. We've seen it in many other countries, but it's held up for years because you have to do all this analysis of any change from the status quo. What we would like to see is legislation that allows the government to move very fast on things that are good for the environment and creates a higher level of scrutiny for things like fossil fuel construction that we know is bad for it.

Brian Lehrer: Ezra, I'll stay with you on this unless you want to pass it off to Derek. You also cite European countries like France and the UK as lowering their carbon emissions faster and earlier than the United States. The UK has no coal-fired power stations left as of last year, for example, which you can't say about this country. I think many progressives here assume that difference is simply a matter of political will and how much they care in Europe. The US Also has a stronger fossil fuel lobby and more addiction to what you might call high-octane consumerism. Those are the reasons we're usually here. Are you arguing that American liberalism is actually somewhat to blame for that difference?

Ezra Klein: The American style of government is somewhat to blame for it. Yes, liberals bear much of the much though not all of the blame for that. One of the big differences between how government works in many European countries and how government works in America is in America, government is contained by lawsuit. We have passed bill after bill. It's how most of our environmental regulation works, but it's how a lot of other kinds of regulation and laws work too, where we allow people, groups, and institutions to jump in front of government and sue it.

Sue it not just for dut doing something that is harmful, but sue it because it is not correctly followed process. There are a lot of books on this. One of the very famous ones is called Adversarial Legalism, the name of what people call the American process. That's not really how things work in most European countries. In most European countries, government servants and public servants, they have a lot more latitude. When the agency makes a decision, it can sometimes be pushed into review, but then the agency reviews a decision and then moves forward.

That's why not just on things like how fast some of these countries have decarbonized or at least lowered their carbon footprint, but if you look at the speed and the affordability at which France, at which Spain, at which a number of these countries are able to build things like rail and high-speed rail and public infrastructure, it way exceeds the US. You'll often hear conservatives here say, "Oh, of course, you can't build anything fast. Of course you can't make the Second Avenue subway work," because government is slow and laborious and cumbersome and we have all these unions in America.

Well, you know what? You got government in European countries too, and you have higher union density there than you do here. The issue here, the issue between these is how we make government work, which is distinctive in America, and actually how we stop government from working, not whether government and unions exist at all.

Brian Lehrer: Derek, when Trump's Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a fracking executive, we should remind people until he got appointed, said last week, "Not that man-made climate change isn't real, but that the cure is worse than the disease." To most liberals and progressives, that seems really dangerous for humanity, given what anyone can see climate change already causing. Are you saying that somewhere in that idea there might be a legitimate conversation to be had because climate regulations are costing regular-income Americans money and lifestyle options, so they experience the cure as more pain than gain, at least so far?

I know you don't address Chris Wright directly or that comment, which is new in the book, but you criticize the Democrats as trying to fight climate change through a policy of degrowth. Can you put that in the context of what people are experiencing and what Chris Wright, the Energy Secretary, might be tapping into?

Derek Thompson: Yes. It's a nuanced question, and let me try to offer a nuanced answer here. Some people will ask me and Ezra, "If you're just interested in turning the pro-build politics of Texas into the politics of America, then why aren't you and Ezra just de facto Republicans?" The answer goes right back to what you just said, we're not de facto Republicans because at the national level, the Republican Party does not think that climate change is a priority at all, and we do. We think climate change is an absolutely critical priority for people in the modern world to take care of future generations and to protect the biosphere.

That said, I think that the energy transition is going to require that liberals understand the politics of energy transitions. One aspect of the politics of energy transitions that I think you're already beginning to see happen in Europe is that if you transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to a renewable-based economy and energy prices skyrocket, your coalition is dust. It's over.

Look at what's happening in Germany, for example. Germany very famously has been trying to move from the old energy systems of burning fossil fuels to new energy systems of renewables, but since the Ukraine war, energy prices in Germany nearly tripled, and the ruling party had its greatest electoral loss in approximately 200 years.

Brian Lehrer: They were importing so much fossil fuel energy from Russia, right?

Derek Thompson: Precisely. They couldn't make it themselves. Exactly. They got way ahead of themselves in terms of shutting down the energy of the past and ramping up the energy of the future. I think it's very important that as we think about planning for the energy transition, we recognize that it's not important just that we electrify everything and that we power electric vehicles and electric materials and electric machines with clean energy, but also that we be very, very interested in keeping energy cheap and keeping energy abundant.

That, I think, is an approach that cuts a little bit of a difference between the way we think about our environmental responsibility to the planet and the way maybe some environmentalists think about our responsibility to the planet. We are focused on building, we're focused on abundance. We're focused not just on building clean energy in order to defend the amount of electricity we happen to use years ago, we imagine a future of cheap electricity that can power machines that we're just beginning to understand and invent.

Mass desalination to turn ocean water into drinkable water, maybe even technologies to make cellular meat that is meat that's grown in breweries rather than cut out of dead animals, something that people can eat at scale. We are very different both, I think, from the older politics of environmentalism that I think have been very clearly punished in some European countries, and the anti-climate change politics of the current Republican regime.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting. To put a pin in that politically, Derek, when Trump runs on drill baby drill, that sounds like an argument for abundance. You write in the book that he campaigned on his version of scarcity. Drill baby drill sounds like an argument for abundance, abundant energy supplies if only we're willing to drill for them. The idea of the cure being worse than the disease is certainly a Democrats are forcing us into scarcity argument. Did Trump run on abundance in the way you mean it, and win the argument, at least for the moment, via the election?

Derek Thompson: He clearly won an argument in as much as he won the election. There's no way of proving that he didn't win the election. However, I think it's a wonderful question, but I would go back against the idea that he-

Brian Lehrer: The question is whether this was a main reason that he won the-- It was one of the two biggest things he ran on, that and mass deportation.

Derek Thompson: I think that if you compare the energy policies of the Biden administration to the Trump administration, in fact, it's the Trump administration that is more the scarcity administration. Joe Biden was drilling a lot of oil, and he was opening a lot of natural gas or opening up a lot of markets to natural gas or natural gas exports were incredibly healthy throughout the Biden regime. Biden was also very interested in accelerating clean energy.

The IRA lavished tens of billions of dollars of subsidies on solar and wind and next-generation geothermal and even nuclear. Trump is shutting a lot of that down. He's trying to gut clean energy. He's trying to pull back the subsidies for solar and wind and enhanced geothermal, despite the fact that I think these are the technologies that are going to power, if not the economy of 2024, then certainly the economy of 2044. From my standpoint, it is more the Democratic Party than the Republican Party right now that believes in an across-the-board Strategy on energy.

Ezra Klein: You mind if I jump in on this one, Brian?

Brian Lehrer: Ezra, go ahead.

Ezra Klein: I think it's very important to be able to make distinctions when we talk about things like growth or for us, abundance. We define abundance as-- The first sentence of the book really says, to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of the things we need. The things we need is really important there. It's something we spend a lot of time in the book defining and talking about, but pull it out of the abundance frame for a minute. Let's just talk about the politics of growth.

In general, in America, we are happy when GDP is growing faster and unhappy when it's growing slower, but there are all kinds of destructive ways to juice GDP. We were talking about coal-fired power plants a minute ago. You could just build dozens and dozens and dozens of coal-fired power plants all across the country. It would increase GDP, it would bring down energy prices. It would create, I would say, a scarcity of livable climate, which is meaningful to me. I have children, I want them to breathe the air. You could do it.

You have to be able to say what kind of growth you want. You have to, for our politics, be able to say what kind of abundance you want. Yes, there are things Donald Trump wants to make abundant, particularly fossil fuels. He does not, in general, want to make energy abundant. He doesn't even have, as Derek was pointing out in all of the above, energy policy. He's not in the Venn diagram between the two. He's trying to destroy the wind and solar industries and super fuel industry.

He also wants to close the borders and cut manufacturing. You have to, I think, be able to say, is this the kind of future you want? The book is very much not just about arguing for an omnidirectional more, but saying that we should, as progressives, as liberals, have a vision of the future we want. That vision should be built on abundance of certain things that we need, inventions that allow us to solve problems we cannot yet solve, like how to make cement in a way that is environmentally sustainable and makes possible solutions that we do not yet have possible.

How much universal healthcare is worth to you really depends on whether or not there's a treatment invented yet for the diseases that you have. Being serious, as we try to be in the book about what future you're aiming towards, and working backwards from there is a really critical part of this project.

Brian Lehrer: Ezra Klein from The New York Times, Derek Thompson from The Atlantic with their new book, Abundance. Ashwani in West Orange, you're on WNYC. Hello, Ashwani.

Ashwani: Hello Brian. Just to clarify, I am Ashwani Vasishth. I'm a professor of sustainability at Ramapo College, and I've been dancing around the idea of sustainability since the '70s. I've been doing this a long time. I've thought about it a lot. The first thing I want to point out to you, we are stuck in an unsustainable place for one reason and one reason only, we insist on doing binary thinking. The argument has always been abundance versus scarcity.

Brian Lehrer: That's their argument in the book, abundance versus scarcity. You're critical of that framing, Ashwani?

Ashwani: No, no. The word 'or' is the error that we're making. We've been making this for decades. What if we had lived in a reality what used to be called wicked problems? Most people know it. I won't go into a lecture on this. Think of this, what if we live yin and yang? Close this thing.

Brian Lehrer: What's a better way to frame it in your opinion?

Ashwani: The error is forcing me to choose between abundance and scarcity. Both are true. Now I have to decide where I use which thing, and where I'd use the other thing. To pose it as a binary-- You said yourself, non-binary. What does non-binary mean? Forced to choose between yes and no. What I'm saying is there is abundance, and we need to think in that way. There is scarcity, we have to think in that way. If you can't reconcile those two thoughts, you will always be doomed to fail.

Brian Lehrer: Ashwani, thank you very much. Ezra, you want to take that on a little bit? We've been hearing your arguments for politics of abundance pertaining to climate and other things, but there is also scarcity. We have this ballooning national debt and you could point to other examples.

Ezra Klein: I don't disagree with the professor. When I said earlier that abundance can sound like more of everything, but this is actually a book about making trade-offs, about choosing what is going to be abundant and then making that happen. I think I'm saying something quite similar to him. Let's take housing. There is no technological impediment to making housing abundant. We know we can do it. We know how to build skyscrapers, we know how to build elevators.

What's going on in San Francisco is not that they have forgotten, they have lost the knowledge of how to make an apartment building. They have decided that what they want to be abundant in many neighborhoods is high housing prices because that is a value to the people who currently own housing. People want abundant parking. That is often a thing that comes up at these community meetings. They want control over the kinds of communities they live in and who's going to live in that community. They want certainty about the kind of strain on public services or lack thereof. You are always making trade-offs.

What we are saying is that there are certain things that are not abundant that need to be, that we have problems of supply. Yes, in solving those problems of supply you will change other things. One of the very difficult things for the environmental movement is for decades, it was built around blocking the construction of things in general, but certainly bad things. That was correct. In mid-century America, the really big problem was we were building too much and too recklessly. Now our only path to any kind of plausibly non-catastrophic climate outcome comes from building green energy infrastructure at a genuinely torrid rate.

We have to build faster than we build the interstate highway system. Yes, that will mean laying down solar panels in places that are currently untouched by solar panels. You are taking one thing and making it into another. The politics of abundance is about choosing. It is about choosing what we need to be abundant, about saying we have problems that can only be solved through more supply, but we are not trying to hide the ball on the fact that when you decide to do something big, that is going to create trade-offs and in some cases create scarcities of something else that people care about.

In fact, a huge amount of our book is about pointing out how often that is true and how seriously we need to take those trade-offs because right now we often pretend that we're not making them even as we are.

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad you touched on housing right now because that's what I want to focus on a little bit more when we come back from the break. Also, there are so many people calling and texting who want to talk to you, who are reacting to various things that you're bringing up, or with their own ideas. Housing in the context of New York in particular, which you really go to in the book, why New York and some other major cities have as many problems as they do.

We're going to get into that next with Derek Thompson from The Atlantic and Ezra Klein from The New York Times, and the book that they have now co-authored called Abundance. Yes, I will get to that mind-blowing stat on immigration that I keep saying I'm going to get to when we come back in a minute

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Ezra Klein from The New York Times, Derek Thompson from The Atlantic, and their new book, Abundance. I'm going to let Virginia in the West Village take us into the New York City homeless and housing shortage issue in your book. Virginia, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Virginia: Hi. Thanks so much. Hi, Ezra. I'm a huge fan. I listen to you all the time. My comment is in regards to affordable housing in New York specifically. As we know, what happens in New York in real estate spreads across the country, but in New York, so much focus has been building more abundant affordable housing in the past couple of years, but there hasn't been enough on protecting the existing affordable housing that we already have.

Just from my experience here in the West Village, the investor who bought my building, I know that they invest-- their primary business is not to be landlords, but actually to unhouse the tenants in the affordable units that are already in their building. What I've experienced is that living through the construction activity in my building has exposed me and my tenant, my other neighbors to asbestos and lead. We don't even have the protections that we would have if we were construction workers. We don't have OSHA protection. After renovations, many of these apartments have been converted to market-rate apartments or Airbnb rentals. My-

Brian Lehrer: You're saying if there's a housing shortage in New York City, don't oversimplify it by blaming it on zoning regulations and not in my backyard. Look at the greedy landlords and New York City capitalism, right?

Virginia: Yes. They're not really landlords, they're investors. The same investors are provided with abundant affordable housing development funds and tax breaks in some properties and in others, they are actually invested in scarcity and decreasing affordability and getting more attention paid earlier in the process before they're afforded these abundant funds.

Brian Lehrer: Virginia, thank you. Derek, want to take that on?

Derek Thompson: Sure. I'll start. Housing is complicated and sometimes there are different bottlenecks and blockages to abundant affordable housing in different places. Sometimes a part of an abundance agenda for housing means protecting tenants from landlords that are straightforwardly breaking the law. I do think it's also the case that an enormous amount of the housing problem in New York City is, in fact, about the fact that we aren't building enough housing to begin with because of zoning, because of historic districts, because of parking requirements, because of lengthy and costly approval processes.

This is all summing up to create high construction costs, high land costs, and it has created a situation where fewer people now live-- the caller's living in the West Village. Fewer people live in Manhattan today than did in the 1960s. A part of that is the fact that we just aren't adding housing fast enough to keep up with demand. It's accentuating the crisis of landlords who are breaking the law because there's nowhere else for people to move if they happen to be stuck with a landlord that is breaking the law or not protecting tenants.

I don't want the arguments for housing abundance to be represented as the only problem to solve for is supply. There are never bad actors that are taking advantage of capitalism. That absolutely exists, but also I think sometimes those bad actors are taking advantage of a system in which the fundamental problem is there's nowhere else for the people to move if they happen to be stuck with someone who's breaking the law.

Brian Lehrer: Ezra, you take on the question of homelessness in New York City, which is very salient street homelessness for people who are not that, and of course homelessness in general for people who are that. You take on the argument of whether homelessness in New York and other major cities is caused by a housing shortage per se or other social and economic conditions that I think we talk about a lot these days that make people more drug addicted or seriously mentally ill and that's why they can't keep a roof over their heads. I think that dominates the conversation now. You come down squarely on the side of housing shortage per se. Comparing West Virginia as an example you use to someplace like New York. Briefly, why that comparison?

Ezra Klein: Mass homelessness is a housing problem, full stop. It's not even where I come down. It's just what it is. West Virginia is a good example here. In West Virginia, you have a higher rate of poverty, you have a high rate of unemployment, you have a higher rate of drug addiction, and you have a far, far, far lower rate of homelessness. Why? There's a great book called Homelessness is a Housing Problem. We talk about it at some length in our book.

It has this great metaphor in it, and it says, look, imagine a game of musical chairs. You got 10 chairs, you got 10 players, and one of those players has a broken leg. In that game, everybody's going to get a chair, even though one of those players is having trouble walking. Now, you take away a chair, you take away two chairs, and all of a sudden that broken leg really matters because that person is not going to get a chair.

What changed is there aren't enough chairs, and when there aren't enough chairs, when there aren't enough homes, all of a sudden, yes, it really matters the individual circumstances people are in. It really matters if you have a drug problem, it really matters if you just lost your job, it really matters if you don't have family in the area. There are other things we have to think about with those kinds of problems, that kind of disorder. Housing is not the answer for everything.

Having a drug problem and being schizophrenic is going to be a terrible problem for your life, even if you do have a cheap place to live. In terms of what leads to large amounts of homelessness, both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness, it has to do with the quantity of available housing. The regional story is extremely clear on this.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe we don't see it in West Virginia as publicly as in New York for other reasons. Here's a text that says, "Question for your abundance guests. Wondering how much attention income inequality plays into the current problems and how much does solving income inequality play into the solution as you see them." Another related text from another listener, "Your guests completely ignore the obvious, unlimited population growth and belief in infinite consumption within a planet framework of finiteness that overwhelms everything they're claiming."

Are conditions really so much better in New York than Appalachia? If there are 8 million people in the city and inequality is as rampant here as I think you'll agree it is, and increasingly so, then there would be a noticeable increase in street homelessness in a way that maybe doesn't show up in Appalachia or get in other people's face in the same way. What do you think?

Ezra Klein: No, I think both of those are just actually-- I want to be generous to it, but empirically wrong. I'll take the second first, which is that first just America, which has had a worsening homelessness problem in recent years, is seeing declining fertility. We are not in infinite population growth in this country right now. We are having fewer children. We are below replacement rate. We have immigration happening, so that does increase population, but we're not in some incredibly torrid period of American growth. It's not like the early or mid-20th century right now. I don't think population growth fits as a question or as a reason for any of this.

Income inequality is a huge problem. I have spent a lot of my career working on the question of income inequality, but again, it's not this problem. The tendency to make one problem into the monocausal explanation for everything is, I think, often a mistake. Imagine just as a thought experiment that we passed some kind of very large universal basic income and wealth transfer scheme in New York City which dramatically shifted the structure of income in the city. Imagine nobody left, but we cut the incomes of the top 5% by half and redistributed that wealth down the income ladder.

There are still the same number of people here and the same number of homes. You didn't build anything. The fact that you have a very low vacancy rate and it's very hard for people to get into anything first isn't going to help. Second, all of a sudden most people have more money, which is going to push up the amount of money that landlords can charge for the median home. Again, when you have more demand for something that is supply constricted, what you have is price increases.

That was what inflation was in the post-pandemic period. People had more and supply chains were snarled and choked up and so we had price increases. We should solve or at least we should ameliorate income inequality, but we should do that because income inequality itself is bad. We could do that. If we still keep housing constricted, you're not going to solve the affordable housing problem. In many cases, you might even make it worse.

Brian Lehrer: One more housing-related call. It's Nandua in Astoria, you're on WNYC. Hello, Nandua.

Nandua: I think part of the problem with the housing, and I've seen a lot of housing being built in Manhattan along Brooklyn and Atlantic Avenue and now in Queens along Northern Boulevard, is the type of housing. Even though it's considered affordable, some of the units is not really affordable. It's luxury-based housing instead of maybe building more simple housing which doesn't cost as much to build.

Brian Lehrer: Derek?

Derek Thompson: I want to go back to the fundamental statistic that it's not the case that Manhattan is adding people, but all those people happen to be living in penthouse apartments. What's happening instead is that Manhattan has a population smaller than it was 60 years ago. The reason that's the case is that we have a very low vacancy rate in Manhattan. While we are adding units, we just aren't adding units nearly at the pace that we need to.

We've created a situation where decades of blockages and laws that are designed to freeze in place air rights and freeze in place historical preservation areas have made it difficult for the city to keep up with the demand to live here. That's why rents have gone through the roof throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn and many of the other boroughs. I do think it's absolutely the case that if you look at the little pencil skyscrapers, you can see, "Oh, well, they're clearly adding housing units there," but they are named after pencils for a reason. There are very few units that are going up there, even though the thing is very, very tall.

Sometimes I think that can be a little bit of a red herring, and you want to look at the bigger picture. How much housing are we building overall? How does it compare to the overall population and the needs for this city to continue to grow? One thing that Ezra is pointing to that I think is really important is that there's been a really clear paradigm shift in income convergence and divergence in this country. That is to say, decades ago, before the 1960s, it used to be the case that people found a cause to move to a place like New York City and San Francisco if they were in the lower middle class and get ahead.

It wasn't just the lawyers who could move to Manhattan and San Francisco and feel like they were getting ahead. It was also the janitors, but because of the way that we've gated these cities, San Francisco, Los Angeles, D.C. Boston, and New York, gated them with laws and red tape. We've created a situation where housing costs here have gone up so high that it no longer makes sense for the middle and lower class to live in Manhattan. They might as well just move to some other state. As a result, places governed by liberals, places governed by the Democrats, are losing population, and places governed by Republicans are gaining it.

The income divergence has gone away and all of the benefits that people have from moving to a high-productivity city like Manhattan, those are being unwound. People aren't able to access their proximity to great ideas and great companies, and instead, they're moving to places that are lower productivity and their children are growing up in cities where their expected mobility rate, their ability to earn more than their parents is diminished.

The fact we've gated the city, I think, is incredibly important, not only for the first-order reason that it's critical for people to have housing but also for precisely the second-order reason the last caller was talking about, that housing policy, in many ways, can be an income inequality policy over the generations.

Brian Lehrer: We have two minutes left in the segment. Ezra Klein from The New York Times, Derek Thompson from The Atlantic. Their new book, Abundance. We have so many callers, texters, so many things that I read in the book that we haven't even gotten to. We could go on all day. I do want to touch on this great stat on immigration that it seems to me people are horrified by Trump nativism should be shouting from the rooftops, but I don't hear it.

From 1990 until Trump's election in 2016, immigrants made up 14% of the US population, but 23% of the patents and more than half the billion-dollar US startups in the last 20 years. In other words, immigrants are disproportionately creators and innovators in the United States. Other stats that we get from other places, including the government, show immigrants commit less crime on average than native-born people. The anti-immigration forces are winning the argument. Ezra, does abundance versus scarcity politics have to do with it?

Ezra Klein: I absolutely think it does. The core of the scarcity politics of the populist has to do with immigration. Everything becomes every kind of scarcity that we either have or they can invent becomes a reason to keep people out. One thing I worry about with Democrats and we're trying to argue them out of doing is responding to that by becoming the Diet Coke of immigration restriction. Immigration is one of the things that makes this country strong. It creates an abundance of ideas, of patents, of jobs, of entrepreneurs.

Yes, we need order at the border. We need an immigration system that serves our national interest, but the idea that we would turn on the people who want to bring their genius and their work ethic and their families here, just as many of us are here because people brought their families here decades or generations ago, it's wrong. It will not create a better future for this country. It will create a worse one.

Brian Lehrer: That is the last word, at least for today. Ezra Klein from The New York Times. Maybe you know his podcast. Derek Thompson from The Atlantic, maybe you know his podcast, Plain English. You made a lot of people think, you made a lot of people angry, you made a lot of people want to praise you, and you made a lot of people want to continue the conversation. Thank you so much for this.

Derek Thompson: Thank you.

Ezra Klein: You too.

 

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