
What we are doing
This month, we worked with Robin Hood to host a housing Abundance convening featuring Open New York, California YIMBY, and other key New York City stakeholders. We discussed the relationship between housing and homelessness, the differences between the East Coast and West Coast pro-housing playbooks, and ways to get business leaders focused on the importance of housing supply for their employees and their customers. We ended the day by hosting a NYC Abundance happy hour that helped forge new relationships in this vibrant community.
We have recently added Abundance champions, new Institutional Partners, and a growing research library to our website.
What we are thinking
Many people who are unfamiliar with the term “Abundance” ask us what it means. In this new overview of the Inclusive Abundance Initiative, we explain it as an anti-scarcity approach to unlock America’s true potential:
"We viscerally experienced scarcity during the pandemic, when fragile supply chains made it difficult to buy everything from toilet paper to computer chips. Housing shortages led to skyrocketing rents, and enrollment systems for social safety net programs collapsed under a crush of applications.
Much of this scarcity is self-imposed and driven by antiquated government systems that can’t handle modern demands, misguided narratives that suggest economic growth is incompatible with sustainability, political divisiveness that fuels distrust and civic disengagement, and red tape that makes it challenging and costly to innovate and build. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The Inclusive Abundance Initiative envisions a different approach. We represent a dynamic community of doers who want to fight against scarcity and get back to accomplishing big things. By identifying shared priorities, supporting impactful ideas, and collaborating across ideological divides, we can realize data-driven solutions that create a more vibrant future with broadly shared prosperity."
What we are reading
Robert Saldin and Steven Teles recently came out with a timely and insightful piece, The Rise of the Abundance Faction. In addition to the part where they mention our work at the Inclusive Abundance Initiative, this section also caught our attention:
"Connecting all of these areas of public policy is a conviction that we need to focus more on supply rather than adopting an exclusive emphasis on distribution. Rather than reflexively calling for 'deregulation' in a way that invites backlash, it calls for unleashing both the private sector and government, to targeted ends. These are the combined agendas of 'abundance' and 'state capacity,' which converge on the conclusion that the scale and speed of building that is needed to address our challenges requires dramatic changes in our systems of governance that reduce veto points, increase the authority and competence of government, and make it possible to produce public value at much lower unit costs and with greater speed. This agenda also cuts across traditional ideological lines because it combines a desire to expand the scope of public action with a skeptical view of existing interest groups and producer interests in government."
What we are hearing
Two Abundance all-stars spoke about a $1.7 Million Toilet and Liberalism’s Failure to Build on an episode of the Ezra Klein Show. His guest, Jerusalem Demsas, has her own excellent new podcast, Good on Paper — check it out!