SAN FRANCISCO — A high-speed rail project that goes nowhere with a price tag that has ballooned by around $80 billion. A worst-in-the-nation housing crisis in America’s wealthiest metropolis. A public toilet infamous for its $1.7 million estimated cost.

The so-called Abundance movement has become all the rage on the left as a means to diagnose the ways in which ineffectual liberal governance and overregulation has wrought political disaster for the Democrats — a conversation thrust into the national spotlight as journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson tour the country to promote their best-selling book of the same title.

But as much as Klein and Thompson have popularized the Abundance argument nationwide, especially in Washington, its origin story is one rooted in California’s distinctive political culture and policy experiences.

Now some of the state’s most ambitious emerging politicians are hoping to use the book’s success to push California’s Democratic leadership to heed its lessons. Klein will privately gather in San Francisco on Thursday with a select group of lawmakers, including the leaders of the state’s Democratic legislative supermajorities, in a kind of revival meeting called by those hoping he can help spread the gospel to Sacramento.

Abundance is California’s latest ideological export, part of the state’s long tradition of incubating modern political movements before releasing them nationwide. Local political conditions in the Bay Area, on the Central Coast and across Orange County birthed the gay-rights, environmental and anti-tax movements that went on to shape national politics in the late twentieth century.

Abundance reflects a uniquely 21st century California zeitgeist. Today the state’s political dynamics are shaped by deep frustration over Democratic leaders’ inability to build enough housing, provide clean streets, lower the cost of living and instill a sense of safety amid a drug addiction epidemic. Efforts to address those problems haven’t met voters’ demand for results.

“There’s nothing progressive about deep blue cities, the way they’re governed,” said Zack Rosen, who founded Abundant SF, the movement’s first chapter that was started during the depths of the pandemic. “For San Francisco and blue cities to succeed, they have to grow. If a city isn’t growing, it’s dying.”

It is, like much in California, a debate that plays out among Democrats, who have had unrivaled control of state government for the past decade and a half, and now control all of its major cities. Part of that intraparty soul-searching is the Abundance movement’s push to redefine what constitutes liberal values — and sell it to the persuadable center without too deeply alienating the Democrats’ progressive base.

The broader success of the Abundance movement could hinge on its momentum in California, as Democratic officeholders who share its vision of “supply-side progressivism” find their ideas tested in practice.

“This is one of the most important books Democrats can read — wake up,” Gov. Gavin Newsom told Klein during an interview on the governor’s podcast this week. “I mean, we’re being judged here at a different level.’”

It came from California

Klein, an Orange County native, moved back to his home state from Washington shortly before coronavirus hit. It was a contrarian trajectory: at the time, California was bleeding population, as hundreds of thousands of residents loaded moving trucks in search of cheaper housing in Texas, Florida and Idaho.

From his new home in Oakland, and then San Francisco, Klein quickly noticed the ways in which the Bay Area’s cities sputtered despite being home to tremendous wealth. The local press was filled with examples of them, like the time San Francisco set out to build a public toilet in a small park that would cost taxpayers $1.7 million. (The final cost was reduced to around $300,000 after a public uproar.) At the same time, it was unable to provide enough housing for the people who needed to work, live and study there.

“I looked around and it just wasn’t doing well,” Klein told Newsom on his podcast. “People were unhappy, people were leaving … We could see the housing crisis had metastasized into something that was genuinely now a crisis.”

Klein was hardly the first to draw a direct line between the state’s most pressing problems and its failure to build housing. Those concerns had already emerged in San Francisco as activists with the decade-old YIMBY (or Yes in My Back Yard) movement pushed to challenge local barriers to housing construction. At first they were political outliers, but the pro-housing movement has notched win after win in recent years, electing dozens of its candidates to the Legislature and local offices and passing bills that force cities to approve new housing construction.

As a columnist and podcaster for the New York Times, Klein began exploring these ideas, and the ways in which his fellow liberals were responsible. Castigating the failures of what he called “everything bagel liberalism,” he focused on the idea that well-meaning progressives pile on too many good things — environmental reviews, labor standards, community engagement, preferences for minority contractors — that ultimately undermine their noble ambitions.

“We have not made enough of the things that we need,” Klein said in a recent interview on MSNBC. “And that’s because we have run government badly in the places where we actually can’t blame it on Republicans.”

A writer-podcaster friend, Thompson, was playing with similar ideas in The Atlantic, where he is often credited with coining the popular use of the term “abundance” in a 2022 essay about the inability of American government and liberal institutions to do big things quickly. Together, he and Klein began to cohere around a common argument: that Democrats need to approach problems by planning for an “abundance” of the things people need, rather than regulating from a “scarcity” mindset.

Abundant SF launched the same year, joining forces with the YIMBYs and other factions of the “moderate” coalition in San Francisco. The groups convinced voters to close off a major thoroughfare in Golden Gate Park for pedestrian use; helped elect a new moderate majority to the city’s Board of Supervisors; and took control of the county Democratic Party last year, sweeping 18 out of 24 seats.

Klein came to know a small group of left-leaning elected officials in the Bay Area who are the most vocal champions of that style of politics, including state Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks of Oakland and Congressman Ro Khanna from Silicon Valley.

“It all just made so much sense to me, thinking about it in a way that’s much broader than housing,” Wiener recalled of his first meeting with Klein, in 2022. The two shared coffee at Progressive Grounds, a funky cafe in the Bernal Heights neighborhood, one of the city’s most progressive enclaves known for its hilly streets lined with Craftsman bungalows and Victorians that are home to more dog owners than parents with children.

“San Francisco,” said Wiener, a former city supervisor, “is like the poster child for things taking longer than they need to take.”

Movement building power

Klein and Thompson’s book Abundance was published on March 18. Since then, it has become a focal point of attention across the American left, driving podcast, op-ed and television conversations. Democratic elected officials have rush to associate themselves with the book’s argument, helping to further boost its profile. “A liberalism that builds,” Khanna recently wrote in an endorsement. “Reimagining government instead of slashing it.”

Abundance arrived at a moment when many Democrats are eager to rethink their approach to governance, as they search for ways to rebuild after a disastrous loss to President Donald Trump in 2024.

Klein’s San Francisco homecoming this week has become far more than another occasion to sell books. California leaders aligned with the Abundance effort are hoping to use his presence to make their pro-growth brand of liberalism a stronger force at the state Capitol in Sacramento.

On Thursday, Wiener and Wicks will host a private roundtable with Klein and at least a dozen of their lawmaking colleagues, including some currently carrying legislation designed to cut local and state regulations they argue make it overly difficult to build housing. Among those expected to participate are Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, already an ally of the movement, and Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, who’s more wary of easing environmental rules.

“I sent it to the two leaders of my California Assembly and Senate,” Newsom said of Abundance in his interview of Klein. “I said, ‘Guys this is it.’”

But the movement faces strong critics. On the left, the Abundance effort has been pilloried as coastal-effete liberal thinking that may address the concerns of young professionals in big cities but won’t help Democrats regain support among working-class voters elsewhere. On the right, Republicans are skeptical that Democrats can deliver on the movement’s promises when two powerful constituencies — labor unions and environmentalists — are reluctant to peel back hard-fought regulations.

Steve Hilton, the former Fox News host and a potential Republican contender for California governor in 2026, said many of the movement’s ideas align with his own, though he doubts Democrats can make the hard choices when it comes to alienating powerful interests within their party. Hilton released his own book this week: Califailure: Reversing the Ruin of America’s Worst-Run State, a rival argument of sorts from the right.

“I think it’s difficult to imagine the Democratic Party, as it’s currently oriented, actually delivering the Abundance agenda,” he said. “They’re so tied to many of the structural and ideological factors that have created scarcity.”

In California, the biggest resistance to enacting an Abundance agenda comes from pillars of the progressive coalition that keeps Democrats in power.

Wiener has proposed legislation this year that would overhaul parts of California’s Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, the landmark protection enacted in the 1970s that is often blamed for stymieing the construction of housing by opening developers up to endless threats of litigation from neighbors, environmentalists and labor unions.

Unions are gearing up to fight the bill, which would exempt many types of urban infill housing projects from CEQA review. The debate is expected to be a slugfest and a crucial test of the Abundance mantra’s resonance.

Rudy Gonzalez, head of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents 7,500 unionized workers in the Bay Area, called the movement an effort to scapegoat labor and environmental protections for a housing shortage that’s strongly shaped by factors like high interest rates and soaring construction material costs. He called it the latest effort to rebrand “neoliberalism” that will alienate blue-collar workers.

“They’re perpetuating their insular, circular firing squad of Dem-on-Dem violence when they should be leading the resistance,” to Trump’s policies, Gonzalez said.

Even some players aligned with the Abundance movement in San Francisco have been uncertain how to quantify what it means beyond an expansion of changes to land-use and transportation policy. Klein and Thompson outline, in their book, how overregulation has undermined progressive goals in other areas, such as scientific research and climate change and clean energy.

“It gets very complicated very quickly when you add multiple issues. But I don’t know, it could work,” said Laura Foote, executive director of YIMBY Action, a national advocacy group, and an early organizer of the city’s pro-housing activists.

On Wednesday night, at their first sold-out appearance in San Francisco, Klein and Thompson were hosted by Manny Yekutiel, a local Democratic organizer who owns a popular political watering hole in the Mission District. He said their message is landing well with those who live face to face with the city’s contemporary paradox: an ultra-progressive beacon of inclusiveness and innovation where working-class people can’t afford to live.

“There’s a national conversation happening right now. The left is lost,” Yekutiel said. “Maybe this is one way through this, painting a completely different vision.”