595 | Ned Resnikoff: One Year In - Taking Abundance Back to Its Fundamentals

What It Covers

Marshall Kosloff and Roosevelt Institute fellow Ned Resnikoff examine the one-year arc of the abundance agenda, tracing its roots from San Francisco's 2014 YIMBY movement through its expansion into a broader left-liberal policy framework, while diagnosing why its bipartisan framing has created strategic incoherence.

Key Questions Answered

• •Abundance Factionalism: The abundance umbrella contains mutually exclusive factions — from "red plenty" left to "dark abundance" nationalist right — that cannot form a coherent coalition. Resnikoff argues the policy tools of abundance are ideologically neutral, but the goals they serve are not. Practitioners should identify which faction they belong to before claiming shared movement membership.
• •YIMBY-to-Abundance Pipeline: The abundance framework emerged directly from YIMBY organizing, which began in San Francisco circa 2014 with SF BARF, then evolved through litigation via CARLA, then state-level legislation via California YIMBY. This progression — from public meetings to lawsuits to legislation — offers a replicable model for other supply-constrained policy domains beyond housing.
• •Bipartisanship as Outcome, Not Starting Point: The US-China policy consensus shift illustrates how durable bipartisan agreement forms: hawks won the Republican Party first, demonstrated results under Trump, then converted Biden-era Democrats. Abundance advocates should consolidate a center-left coalition first, prove results in cities like Austin and New York, then allow the right to adopt the framework on its own terms.
• •Cost Disease Socialism Framework: A 2020 Niskanen paper argues that demand-side subsidies alone — Pell grants, Medicare for All — create feedback loops where prices rise to absorb new funding. The actionable alternative combines demand subsidies with supply expansion mandates, such as conditioning federal university funding on increased enrollment capacity, to break the subsidy-price inflation cycle.
• •Regulatory Reform Reframe: Rather than debating regulation versus deregulation in Reagan-era terms, Resnikoff frames all market structures as state-designed systems. The practical implication: affordable housing public investment produces significantly more units when paired with permissive multifamily zoning, while zero-income populations still require direct public subsidy that no market design can eliminate.