Do Democrats Need to Learn How to Build?

I grew up in the late eighties and early nineties in a pair of functional redbrick postwar apartments on the fringes of New York City—first in a two-bedroom in an eight-story building in Inwood, on the northern tip of Manhattan, and then in a three-bedroom in a twelve-story building in Riverdale, in the West Bronx. Each had a coin-operated laundry in the basement. The Gordons, friends of my parents, lived on the nineteenth floor of a taller building a few blocks away in Riverdale, and from their little balcony you could look east across the borough and see low-rise brick buildings much like mine, in which hundreds of thousands of people lived, little yellow windows against the gray Bronx sky. “They were basic,” Samuel J. LeFrak, who built hundreds of such structures in Brooklyn and Queens, said of these apartments. “The windows opened and closed. You opened them in the summer and you closed them in the winter.”

At the time, the city’s population wasn’t quite eight million, but to my mother it was an article of faith that this was an undercount—that census-takers were too nervous to fully explore the poorest neighborhoods, that illegal immigrants hid from the survey, that the true figure must be at least nine. She taught in public schools in Washington Heights and East Harlem, and each fall immigrants from new countries enrolled in her class: Cuba, then the Dominican Republic, then Ecuador. The world was vast, and we had so many affordable apartment buildings. Surely New York City would grow.

What has happened since then has been a sort of rupture in the laws of supply and demand. First, New York got safe, in the nineties, and then it got almost unfathomably rich. I still remember a conversation in the mid-aughts in which my friend Will, who had gone into real estate, told me confidently that Russian oligarchs were now buying property not just in lower Manhattan but in Brooklyn. This seemed impossible in the moment but within a few months was very clearly true. In a way that hadn’t been the case in my childhood, the city had become an obviously desirable place to live. And yet it didn’t get any bigger. Newcomers continued to arrive—according to official statistics, the city has become considerably less white—but they were balanced by departures. The view from the Gordons’ balcony has not changed very much. In 2000, New York City’s population was 8,008,278. In 2023, the Census Bureau estimated that it was 8,258,035. In a safe and prosperous quarter century, the most important city in the country has scarcely grown at all.

For some liberal journalists and researchers of my generation, the stagnation of American cities has become a fixation. The progressive metropolises we love the most, and where the highest-paying jobs are increasingly found, seem to be having the most trouble growing, perhaps because they have the most trouble building. In 2023, seventy thousand housing permits were issued in red-state metro Houston, and just forty thousand in metro New York, which has three times as many people. (In the San Francisco and Boston metro areas, there were even fewer.) When urbanists looked into why that was, they tended to find not a single cause but a constellation. The idealistic progressive laws of the seventies—those mandating environmental review, safety and anti-corruption standards, historic preservation, prevailing wages, and, most important, local power over zoning—had meant to protect small communities against moneyed interests. But they had been manipulated by homeowners and businesses, and used to block all kinds of new construction. Good intentions had paved the way to what the political scientist Francis Fukuyama termed a “vetocracy.” As the Times’ Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson write of this regulatory pattern in their book “Abundance” (Avid Reader), “Each individual decision is rational. The collective consequences are maddening.”

Sometimes even the individual decisions are maddening. In San Francisco, anti-abortion activists stopped a clinic from being built by arguing that it would violate local standards for noise and traffic—because of the protests they themselves intended to organize. Residents also managed to obtain historic-preservation status for a laundromat in an effort to prevent its demolition. (Twenty-seven per cent of Manhattan is shielded from developers because of various preservation covenants.) A Los Angeles project to convert a polluted aircraft factory into apartments and shops was sued twenty times in twenty years, under the same law. In Maryland, homeowners organized a petition to stall construction on an apartment building in order to develop a parking lot.

Even public projects tend to get snarled in the same vetocracy. Adding a kilometre of subway track in the United States now costs twice what it does in Japan or Canada, and six times what it does in Portugal; in the past fifty years, the inflation-adjusted cost of a mile of interstate highway has tripled. A forthcoming academic paper detailing the long-arc history of urban development and its opponents, by the law professors Roderick M. Hills, Jr., of N.Y.U., and David Schleicher, of Yale, is titled “How the Gentry Won.”

These urbanists have been inching toward the political center, seeing the logic in development and turning against some progressive icons. In “Stuck” (Random House), by Yoni Appelbaum, of The Atlantic, a chief villain is Jane Jacobs, the standard-bearer of Greenwich Village and a left-wing theorist of neighborhood living. But the need to build remained a niche obsession until the Biden Administration, when some of the same intellectuals noticed that efforts to construct a green-energy infrastructure were foundering on the same opposition. Three years after Congress authorized $7.5 billion to create a nationwide E.V. charging network, only two hundred and fourteen individual chargers were ready. In the mid-aughts, an entrepreneur named Michael Skelly conceived a plan to build a vast wind farm in the barren Oklahoma panhandle and sell the energy to the federal government’s Tennessee Valley Authority. Skelly secured the Obama Administration’s commitment to buy his energy, but in the course of a decade the project slowly collapsed, as state powers dawdled and eventually refused to issue the necessary permits. Anyone who had been politically invested in the attempts to build high-rises in West Harlem would have noticed a familiar pattern. “We are at a moment of history,” Skelly is quoted as saying in “Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back” (Public Affairs), by Marc J. Dunkelman, a research fellow at Brown. “Robert Moses could come back from the dead and he wouldn’t be able to do shit.”

These three new books explore such decelerations, and seek to move from urbanism toward a more general political philosophy. Klein and Thompson are perhaps the most ambitious. “For decades, American liberalism has measured its success in how close it could come to the social welfare system of Denmark,” they write, but those efforts have been complicated by the difficulty of supplying enough housing, enough solar panels, enough of what people need. They’re aiming for a “change in political culture” through which liberalism, which has long acted to pump the brakes on building things, now works to “speed up the system.” Klein and Thompson want a “liberalism that builds,” not just in housing and green energy but in artificial intelligence and in drug development, too, areas where they see similar patterns of stagnation. Their goals are broad. This group of policies, which they call the abundance agenda, offers, Klein and Thompson believe, “a path out of the morass we’re in. A new political order.”

It is an interesting time for so many prominent liberal thinkers to focus on dynamism, since the Republicans who hold power in Washington are in an accelerationist mood, too. In many ways, the conservative argument is more straightforward. Abundance liberals might hope to turn the federal government into a weapon against local vetocracies; Trump’s Republicans simply want to destroy it, so business can flourish. The DOGE blitz of the past month has already led to mass and scattershot layoffs and threatened agency closures at U.S.A.I.D., the F.A.A., the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Department of Education, and, though some of these efforts are being contested in court, more are in the offing. Even people within Trump’s orbit who had been skeptical of Big Tech when he was out of power now see a future in it. In Paris this February, just a few weeks after being sworn in, Vice-President J. D. Vance addressed a summit on artificial intelligence. “I’m not here this morning to talk about A.I. safety,” Vance said. “I’m here to talk about A.I. opportunity.” America’s response, he went on, could no longer be “self-conscious” or “risk-averse.”

Abundance, for elected Democrats who have embraced it, has offered a politics of growth, and perhaps even risk, that they can get behind, since it centers on an energetic hands-on government rather than an unfettered free market. These causes have moved quickly toward the core of the Party’s self-conception, and its plans. The top item on the Harris campaign’s policy agenda was an expansion of housing. Ritchie Torres, a centrist Democratic congressman from the Bronx and a likely candidate for New York governor in 2026, said in January that “the abundance agenda is the best framework that I’ve heard for reimagining Democratic governance.” In California, Governor Gavin Newsom struck a similar theme. “People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build new things,” he said. It isn’t just the urbanists who blame liberals for the problems with building; some leading Democrats do, too. According to John Podesta, the White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton and a senior adviser to both Barack Obama and Joe Biden, “We got so good at stopping projects that we forgot how to build things in America.”

These Democrats might, like Appelbaum, be thinking about the consequences for working people of being stuck in place. Appelbaum is a lovely storyteller, and in this gentle book he emphasizes how much the historical ability of Americans to change their circumstances has depended on moving somewhere else, from John Winthrop to Hang Kie, the immigrant small businessman who fought the efforts of the citizens of Modesto to confine his laundry to the Chinese part of town through zoning. Appelbaum reserves a special animus for the conservative sentimentality over the small town, and he is disturbed by how many progressives, like Jacobs, sought to re-create it in the middle of cities. He thinks that Americans were once such great belongers—to the Tocquevillian bouquet of churches, civic leagues, bowling clubs—because we were newcomers, seeking to ingratiate ourselves, and that, as we’ve stopped moving, “these structures have atrophied, leaving Americans alienated and alone.” Appelbaum is clear about where the fault lies: one study he notes found that, as a city’s voters grew ten per cent more liberal, it issued thirty per cent fewer housing permits.

Dunkelman supplies the political theory behind this phenomenon—“Why Nothing Works” is effectively a history of twentieth-century progressive policymaking. The high point, he thinks, was the ambitious conception of governance inscribed in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second Inaugural Address: “We are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world.” Dunkelman celebrates the creation of the Social Security Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (what a run!), and he sees the same “Hamiltonian” spirit in Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate-highway system. Cracks appeared in the sixties, Dunkelman thinks, as liberalism started to reflect the baby boomers’ distrust of the establishment. He deftly maps how anti-poverty and then environmental policy were designed to empower local communities to resist outside forces, putting liberalism at the service of stymieing grand plans. (He also castigates Robert Caro’s classic, critical book on Robert Moses for giving a generation of readers the misapprehension that aggressive building was a political vice rather than a virtue.) “Why Nothing Works” is blunt and exhortative—the word “Hamiltonian” appears on a hundred and twenty-five pages—but Dunkelman is making a subtle point about the interplay between cultural emotion and social design. He writes, “Progressivism’s cultural aversion to power has turned the Democratic Party—purportedly the ‘party of government’—into an institution drawn almost instinctively to cut government down.”