Imagine a city where housing is plentiful and affordable, transit runs reliably and frequently, and the cost of living doesn’t drive working families away. This is the promise at the heart of the abundance agenda, which in recent years has moved from the margins into mainstream policy debates. 

As with any powerful idea, it’s worth pausing to ask: abundance for whom? Decided by whom?

Abundance argues that many serious problems facing cities — unaffordability, congestion, inequality, sluggish economic growth — stem not from too much development, but from too little. Scarcity, in other words, is manufactured: the result of restrictive zoning, lengthy permitting, and a culture that prioritizes the status quo over change. Simply remove the barriers, and market forces will fill the gaps. 

Unsurprisingly, abundance advocates are pushing hard for zoning reforms: allowing multifamily housing in more neighborhoods, permitting accessory dwelling units, eliminating parking minimums, and streamlining environmental reviews. States have responded by overriding or preempting local land use and zoning authority. The logic is that if more land can be used for housing, developers will build more housing, and prices will fall. 

Critics are more skeptical. They worry that new market-rate housing, even if it adds supply, primarily serves higher-income residents and gentrifies lower-income neighborhoods. For them, affordability requires more than just unleashing market forces; it requires direct intervention — public housing, deep subsidies, rent stabilization. 

In California, where an abundance of these “reforms” has become state law, the evidence suggests that new laws alone are not enough to get more housing (and more affordable housing) built. Despite these reforms, housing production across the state continuously falls far below the estimated need of 180,000 new homes annually. 

Ultimately, abundance theory is about quality of life. But quality of life is not only measured in square footage or commute times. It is also measured by whether people feel they have a stake in the city where they live. Whether their voices shape the neighborhoods they call home. Whether growth feels like it’s happening with them or to them.

Which brings me to what I think is the most important and often ignored aspect of this debate: the question of democratic participation.

Abundance theory has sometimes treated local public process as the enemy of progress. And it’s true that local hearings can be captured by narrow interests — homeowners protecting property values, neighbors resisting change. But the solution to a broken public process is not to eliminate public input. It is to reform and broaden it.

When local land use and zoning decisions are moved from city councils to state legislatures, who’s able to show up to those hearings? If environmental review is bypassed, who loses the ability to raise legitimate concerns about pollution or contamination? If planning decisions are streamlined to the point of ministerial review, is that efficiency — or is it a transfer of power away from communities and toward developers and special interest groups? These are not hypothetical concerns. They are real experiences for communities that have seen “progress” arrive without consultation.

Abundance and democracy don’t have to be opposites. We need faster, yes. We also need processes that are genuinely inclusive.    

The abundance agenda offers an important approach to building better communities. But a city is more than just an economic system. It is a community. And communities, at their best, shape their own futures through shared deliberation, not just through market forces or one-size-fits-all state policy. 

The cities of the future should be abundant in opportunity. But they should also be abundant in local voices and in participation.