The Abundance Agenda goes Trans-Atlantic
In an age of environmental crisis, war-ridden global hotspots, and massively corrosive inequality it is surely surprising that perhaps the best-known policies of both the new Labour government in the UK and the Harris/Walz campaign in the USA, is a desire to build new housing on a massive scale. Housing has rarely been the first thing on political agendas and sometimes it has been absent completely. Now we have the Harris/Walz campaign promising to build (or, more precisely, facilitate the building of) three million new homes. The new Labour government, meanwhile, promised 1.5 million news homes within five years of coming to power – including in a series of “new towns.”
The massive production of housing appears to address a simple and elemental need – the need for shelter. The simplest version of the argument is that housing has become too expensive for many, in both the USA and the UK, because it has become scarce. When demand is high and supply is limited, then prices increase. Housing becomes unaffordable. The solution, therefore, is to increase supply.
The promises to produce more houses can be seen as part of what has been called “The Abundance Agenda”. This policy programme was promoted by Derek Thompson in an article in The Atlantic in January 2022, in the dark days of COVID lockdowns. He noted the United States seemed to have been short of lots of things – particularly vaccines and protective masks during COVID but also semi-conductors and skilled immigrants. He argued that life in America was characterized by “manufactured scarcity”. The reason for this, he suggested, was often that well-meaning policy got in the way. Everyone would like more doctors, he argued, but federal policy deliberately restricted supply. Similarly, it seemed obvious that there was a need for ambitious clean-energy infrastructure projects but environmental policy, most often in “blue” Democrat states where such projects were most popular, made it impossible to build them. He made a similar argument for housing:
“Homes have become famously unaffordable in many coastal cities. Since 1980, average house prices in the New York City metro area have risen about 700 percent; in San Francisco they have increased by more than 900 percent. Simply redistributing cash or slashing taxes along won’t do much to fix this problem, The culprits are largely regulations that prevent the destruction of taller apartment buildings that can hold more units.”
Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, January 12, 2022.
Since then, the abundance agenda has itself become abundant – encouraged and promoted by, among others, the New York Times opinion writer and podcaster Ezra Klein. Building lots of houses (and other stuff), it seems, can unite Conservatives and Liberals like few things can. The famously anti-government scholars at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University like it – only if it means reducing government involvement. A Senior Research Fellow at the Center, Michael Farren, writes in The Hill that “Much of the reduction in economic growth seems connected to the accumulation of regulations.” Liberals have also embraced abundance in various forms – going back to the rise of the YIMBYs (yes, in my back yard) in California who argued that restrictive zoning laws designed to protect wealthy families in big single-family homes were unfair and often racist – impeding the provision of housing to those who really needed it. Abundance has also been taken up by the Center for New Liberalism (CNL) – a new form of the Clintonesque global (neo)liberalism of the 1980s and 1990s. One way of looking at the Abundance Agenda is to see if as a sexy rebranding of “moderates”. Moderation has never been sexy, but abundance has and is, perhaps easier to sell to both ends of the political spectrum.
It seems clear from the headline Harris/Walz policy of more houses that the abundance agenda has jumped into the mainstream. It also seems clear that it has jumped the Atlantic and found fertile ground in the UK. While the Abundance Agenda thought leaders have been largely North American, and there is very little discussion of the agenda in the UK, it is notable that the Conservative Party has a panel on the Abundance Agenda at its recent Party Conference, perhaps seeking to combat the association between the party and the seeming opposite of abundance – austerity. Most notable, though, is the Labour government’s promise of new houses – a much more ambitious promise that that being made by Harris/Walz given the size of the UK population.
Problems with Abundance – Landlordism
Increasing the supply of houses seems like a pleasingly common-sense response to a perceived shortage of housing. This is basically mainstream economics 101 in action. However, such a strategy does have its critics. Take the arguments of Nick Bano, a barrister (lawyer) specializing in housing law and homelessness rights. To Beno, the problem in the UK is not the lack of housing, but the cost of housing.
“In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. It is impossible to make a case for unique levels of housing scarcity in Britain, in comparative international or historical terms. What has changed for the worse is not the amount of housing per household, but its cost. And cost, in turn, has a great deal to do with the landlordism that is at the heart of the present crisis.”
Nick Beno, The Guardian, 19 March, 2024
Beno notes how Thatcher’s government following 1979, both decimated the provision of social housing through its “right to buy” scheme and made conditions much more favourable for private landlords to buy-up property and make a profit from renting it out. “We now find ourselves in a situation where one in every 21 adults in the UK is a landlord”, Beno notes. “[w]e have four times as many landlords as teachers. As a consequence, virtually everyone struggles to afford a home that meets their needs despite a net gain in housing stock.” Remarkably, Beno notes, the US currently has more houses per capita than at any time in its history. The UK is even better off.
Looking at increasing supply without addressing “landlordism”, then, seems a little backwards. The remarkable unaffordability of houses in San Francisco reflects the ability of landlords to buy up properties for short term rentals such as through Airbnb as much as it does a shortage. And then, in the US and UK there are vacant properties owned by the very rich but only lived in for short periods of the year, or simply left empty as an investment. Building millions of new houses, absent reforms in the market to address Landlordism, is likely to result in speculators buying up much of the new stock in the same way as they have been doing between 1979 and the present day.
Problems with Abundance – Thinking about Place
There are other problems with the simplicity of abundance thinking. There are plenty of examples of mass house building around the UK. Around Edinburgh, where I live, there are a seemingly endless supply of new homes built by mass housing producers. Some are on the edge of the city, and some are outside the city built on green fields. These housing developments are often simply houses with very little infrastructure to support them creating traffic problems in what used to be small rural villages as well as increased pressures on local schools and health care provision. In North America we have seen massive amounts of urban sprawl as automobile based (anti)planning continues an obsession with large lots and single-family homes with double or triple garages – often built completely without sidewalks and with no thought of public transport provision. Driving out of a city like Calgary, Alberta it is hard to avoid the seemingly endless creep of lookalike homes into the prairie. Similar scenes can be seen in many cities in the South of the United States.
Urban Sprawl in Calgary, Alberta.
Abundance suggest quantity and we can see that it has been expressed in terms of millions of homes. This says very little about what these places will be like to live in. Of course, it is possible that affordable and livable places will emerge from a house building frenzy. In the UK there is a history of semi-utopian new town building going back to the garden-cities of early Twentieth Century that attempted to combine the benefits of the city with the benefits of the country. This spawned the new town movement after World War II leading to places such as Welwyn Garden City in the 1940s, Redditch in the early 1960s, and, most famously, Milton Keynes at the end of the 1960s, Despite being the butt of many jokes, the site of interminable roundabouts, and concrete cows, Milton Keynes is often voted one of the best and happiest places to live in the UK. Other places were not so successful and became sites of high levels of crime and unemployment. It is only recently, perhaps, that new towns have acquired a certain cache as they have become “lived in” and pleasingly (to some) retro. This has taken at least fifty years. Perhaps that is what any place needs.
Finally, there has been another notable success story in mass house building. After World War I, Prime Minister Lloyd George promised that servicemen would return to “homes fit for heroes”. The Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919 put local government at the center of providing these houses – with support from the central government though housing bonds and other mechanisms. The Beacontree Estate in Dagenham, the east of London housed more than 100,000 people by the 1930s. New houses had modern services and bathrooms and were generally thought to be a massive step up from pre-war living conditions. A programme such as this now seems unthinkable thanks to our remarkably stunted political imaginations. These homes were not built for profit and were never meant to be investments. They were places to live that provided shelter, warmth, hygiene and security. They could not be bought up by landlords until the Thatcher government on the 1980s.
Problems with Abundance – Environmental Impacts
The final problem with the Abundance Agenda is that by addressing a perceived problem of housing supply, it seeks to get rid of regulations that were put there in the first place for good reason. In Derek Thompson’sAtlantic piece, he tells the story of the proposal to build the biggest solar plant in the US – a proposal that was apparently stymied by the presence of an endangered desert tortoise. The story is told, no doubt, because Thompson imagined it would seem ridiculous that regulation designed to protect the environment was getting in the way of a technology that is part of the solution to increasing carbon emissions. To Thompson this seems straightforward while to me, this requires more nuance. While the shortage of housing is, at least, contestable, the rapid rate of species extinction is not. We are currently going through an extinction event that is largely our own fault. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that we are currently going through an extinction rate which is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than natural extinction rates. Among the reasons for this are what we might think of as “abundance” practices – most notably, the use of land to increase food and biofuel production. It would be supremely ironic if conversion of land to alternative energy production added to this extinction rate. The earth is not just a place for humans to live but a place for us to share with other species. I am a supporter, even a fan, of alternative energy production. I believe, like those who promote the abundance agenda, that we need to build more alternative energy infrastructure. But there was always a point to environmental regulation that emerged in the 1970s. It was designed to protect both our fellow earth inhabitants and ourselves. Simply getting rid of it, in order to build more stuff, does not seem a level-headed way forward. So, when the new UK government says that it wants to cut regulations so that its 1.5 million new homes can be built, I do wonder about the environmental impacts not to mention issues of human health and safety that regulations are designed to protect.