Derek Thompson

But if you have the misfortune of going to, say, Fred, the St.

Louis data website, and looking up housing starts in California between, say, 2021 and 2026, you do not see the publication of the book, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, in those statistics.

And that's pretty concerning.

We said in our book, judge political movements by their outcomes.

The bright side is maybe you could say it's too early to count our outcome successes, but the very fair criticism of our movement right now is where are the outcomes, especially in states like California, where the volume of abundance has been the loudest?

That's why this year we did the most significant housing reforms in our state's history.

We did something that hadn't been done in decades.

We've tried to address land use reforms, what we call secret reforms.

We have to deliver on big and bold things.

Trump breaks things.

Democrats need to build things, but we have to actually deliver on that promise.

I definitely don't want to give the same answer to every question, but I hear the governor of California describing a legislative victory in terms that literally, quote our book, a liberalism that builds abundance.

He's being asked questions by a late night host that are basically like LLM summaries of our book.

But then you look at the outcomes, and California still hasn't actually increased housing starts in the, what is it now, six months since that bill was signed, nine months after the debate over that bill really began.

That's not the fault of...

That legislation necessarily, you could think of it a couple ways.

You could think one, that there's a set of problems that have accumulated in California over the last 50 years that have made it harder to build housing.

And this is one important step to un-gunk that process.

Maybe that's an optimistic way to frame it.

Another way to frame it is that, you know, legislation is not the only ingredient when it comes to housing construction.