Like many of you, I spent the end of last week refreshing my news feed to see whether President Trump would sign, veto, or quietly let the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act become law without his signature. He ultimately chose the last option. It was a frustrating wait – the bill certainly deserved a signature, and it went beyond all political reason and logic for him not to promote a massive affordability win during an election year. But I’m not celebrating any less. Because not only is the biggest housing bill in a generation now law, it also proves the power of abundance – the political force that made the bill possible in the first place.
My colleague Baillee has already written about the substance of the bill and the fight over it – how it reshaped the housing conversation, and what the Senate needed to do to get it over the line. But to recap: past housing proposals largely subsidized demand – first-time homebuyer tax credits, down payment assistance, vouchers. This one unleashes supply. The law exempts new housing construction in cities from long environmental reviews, redirects federal funding toward cities that actually build, and ends the absurd rule that manufactured homes must keep a chassis they don’t need. (Among other things.)
There was a scary moment when a Senate provision forcing builders of single-family rentals to sell within seven years instantly froze $3.4 billion in investment and threatened 72,000 homes a year. More than 100 pro-housing groups (including us!), a 76-member bipartisan letter from the Build America Caucus, and Senator Brian Schatz calling the provision “positively Soviet” helped get it fixed. If you want that story in full, read Baillee’s pieces. But what I want to talk about here are my major takeaways from this whole journey.
First, bipartisan doesn’t have to mean small-ball
One common knock on abundance is that the only reason why it can occasionally bring together Republicans and Democrats is that it’s boring and small, focused only on technocratic fixes nobody cares to fight over. That bipartisanship means you have to shrink your ambitions until there’s nothing of significance left.
This bill proves that theory wrong. Instead of whittling down to the lowest common denominator, ROAD pulled the biggest ideas from legislators across both parties and both chambers and won over their sponsors one by one. Take the Build Now Act, the provision that tells high-cost cities they’ll get more federal money if they build more homes, and less if they don’t. Senator Warren co-wrote that bill with Senator John Kennedy, the Louisiana Republican. Then, once Build Now was included in the larger package, he became one of its biggest champions within the Republican caucus.
Essentially, the coalition was built by getting people bought in on the best ideas rather than the safest ones – resulting in the legislation becoming like a snowball rolling downhill, picking up mass as it goes. The ambition kept compounding.
That’s the model abundance should lean into.
Second, almost everyone agrees that building more lowers prices
The fight for ROAD also showed just how completely one idea has taken hold in Congress and beyond: that rents are so high because we don’t build enough housing. A few years ago that was a fringe view, mostly confined to YIMBY meetups and a handful of wonky blogs. Today it’s close to conventional wisdom in both parties.
Senator Kennedy put it plainly: “If we had more housing, the price would go down.” And he was joined by everyone from Senator Tim Scott to Rep. Maxine Waters, people who agree on almost nothing else. When an argument reaches that far across the spectrum, it’s more or less settled.
The most notable holdout was President Trump. The White House intermittently supported housing negotiations, but Trump’s real thoughts shined through: he said he wanted “to drive housing prices up, not down” and waved the bill off as a “yawn.” But on this he was nearly alone: his own party disagreed strongly enough that House GOP leadership privately warned the White House they were prepared to override a veto. Republicans who never cross Trump were apparently ready to do so on housing supply. The idea that “no one gives a shit about housing” – or that high prices are good – was, in effect, condemned as a massive political loser. (Or, given I’ve been watching a lot of the World Cup, “own goal.”) That is a huge shift, and abundance helped drive it.
And third, abundance isn’t dead
Put those two things together – a big, bipartisan bill where everyone agrees more supply is the answer – and that brings me to the worst take I’ve read all summer. A few weeks ago, Vox published “How ‘abundance’ lost the Democratic war of ideas.” Its argument was that inside the Democratic Party, abundance had fizzled – that the energy had moved to the socialist left, and the centrists who championed it were “left unmoored, without a clear cause to mobilize around.”
I think that gets the story backward. It fundamentally misreads the purpose of abundance, which was never supposed to be a rallying flag for centrist Democrats. Abundance proponents want it to become a framework that can be used by anyone, not a weapon one intraparty faction uses against the other.
And by that measure, we are winning. Abundance ideas are clearly spreading through the Democratic coalition, including among progressives. This may seem small, but every House Democrat, including the most progressive members of the caucus, voted for the build-to-rent fix we spent months fighting for. On a larger note, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose win commentators cite most as the moment centrists were defeated, literally said he wants to deliver “safety, affordability, and abundance.” Since then, Mayor Mamdani has partnered with Gov. Hochul to speed up buses and to unlock more housing by overhauling New York’s environmental review law, and is working to improve the city’s permitting and technology. (Even though, for the record, we aren’t fans of his rent freeze.) Abundance is the one place the party’s newest star on the left and its establishment are finding common ground – that’s not what losing looks like.
Those are the lessons for abundance I’m taking from ROAD. On housing, abundance has won the case for building more – across the Democratic Party and beyond it. That’s worth pausing to appreciate. But it’s also only the first fight. The same case still has to be made everywhere else Americans are getting squeezed by high prices because of a lack of supply: energy, child care, health care. Inclusive Abundance is prepared to make that argument, again and again, and we look forward to celebrating legislative wins on all these issues in years to come.
This newsletter is a product of Inclusive Abundance Action, our 501(c)(4).