he president of San Francisco’s Residential Builders Association saying, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary, “San Francisco does not have a zoning problem.”) That is because developers tend to specialize: Land-use reforms that encourage the creation of more infill apartment buildings do little to help the builders of sprawling single-family subdivisions, and may in fact hurt their bottom line by creating a release valve for pent-up housing demand.

some advocacy groups will fight pro-housing reforms because, they argue, the production of dense, market-rate housing spurs gentrification and displacement. They remain committed to this position despite the large and growing body of evidence that multifamily construction actually reduces rents in the surrounding area.

Madden and Marcuse (who died in 2022) sketch out a bipolar class system, in which “real estate owners” are pitted against “communities.” This is a common device in anti-YIMBY writing, but it is wildly out of step with the reality that most American families—nearly two-thirds, to be a little more precise—are homeowners.

Their pro-housing advocacy is not an attempt to avoid questions of power but to confront them head-on

abundance liberalism “writes America’s central scarcity problem—corporate power—out of the economic story.”

abundance is, at best, a list of policy ideas without a theory of power—a dry, technocratic exercise with no political core.

Heminger estimated that it would take “over a million” new housing units “to make a dent in the shortfall.” The real challenge, he said, is “to fit that growth in the communities we cherish,” adding, in a non sequitur: “We need to change what the Bay Area looks like.”