For over a decade, a housing catastrophe has been unfolding in cities across the wealthy world. Rents have skyrocketed. Home ownership has become a fantasy for an entire generation. The crisis is now so severe it threatens the social and economic fabric of nations.
Enter the much-hyped solution: the “Abundance Agenda.”
Championed by a new book and lavishly funded by billionaires, this movement pins the blame for the housing shortage on one convenient villain: red tape.
Its proponents argue that cumbersome zoning laws, slow permitting, and bureaucratic inefficiency are the primary obstacles to building our way out of this mess.
They are not entirely wrong. But they are dangerously incomplete.
This focus on deregulation is a Trojan horse. While the authors may be sincere, their narrative is being weaponized by the very ultra-wealthy class that benefits from the status quo.
Why are plutocrats like the Koch brothers suddenly funding a left-leaning idea? Because it’s a perfect smokescreen.
The “Abundance” argument expertly redirects public anger away from the true architects of the crisis—wealthy investors and corporate monopolies—and onto local homeowners, municipal councils, and well-intentioned safety regulations.
It’s a divide-and-conquer strategy that pits the middle class against the working class, ensuring no unified coalition can challenge the powerful.
“Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson identify red tape as the villain in the housing crisis. They’re not entirely wrong, but they are dangerously incomplete because they ignore the influence of institutional investors like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street,” said anti-establishment progressive Democrat Lisa McCormick. “These giant institutional investors contribute to the crisis and exacerbate affordability issues as much as the long-term shortage of housing supply and restrictive building policies.”
“Institutional investors like BlackRock are predators, if not the root cause,” said McCormick. “They are feasting on a housing crisis created by decades of restrictive zoning that choked supply. When banks were bailed out and lending tightened after 2008, these cash-rich giants swooped in to buy up what working families could no longer afford. They didn’t create the shortage—they’re just profiting from our misery.”
“They are the vultures circling a disaster created by bad zoning and worse policies that bailed out banks and locked out working families,” said McCormick. “They profit from the scarcity that crushes the rest of us.”
The reality is that a significant driver of unaffordability is the deliberate constriction of supply by mega-developers who hold monopolistic control over markets.
They slow-walk construction to keep prices astronomically high. Meanwhile, institutional investors like BlackRock swoop in with cash to buy up available stock, pricing out ordinary families.
The “Abundance” agenda ignores this entirely. It refuses to name the vampire in the room.
Worse, we are already seeing this philosophy twisted in practice. In California, politicians touting “abundance” are pushing a bill that would add crippling red tape to proposed taxes on luxury property sales—taxes that would directly fund affordable housing and tenant protections. It is deregulation for the powerful, and more bureaucracy for everyone else.
The solution to this crisis is not to hand more power and fewer rules to the corporate interests that created it. The solution is to break their stranglehold.
We need a true abundance agenda—one that includes:
- A massive public investment in social and affordable housing.
- Wealth taxes and mansion taxes to fund construction and tenant aid.
- Antitrust action to break up the corporate monopolies controlling development.
- Strong tenant protections and labor standards to ensure new housing is safe and dignified, not built on exploited labor.
Don’t be fooled by a well-funded PR campaign. The “Abundance” being sold to us is designed to create an abundance of profit for the wealthy, while the rest of us are left with the scraps. The real path to affordable housing requires taking on the billionaires, not doing their bidding.