California
How California’s excesses inspired the ‘abundance’ craze
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.”
A prominent California farmer was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of murder in the shooting death of his estranged wife in a remote mountain community in Arizona, the Navajo County Sheriff’s Office said.
Michael Abatti, 63, was arrested in El Centro and booked into jail on a first-degree murder charge. He is awaiting extradition to Arizona.
Authorities say they believe he drove to Arizona on Nov. 20 and fatally shot Kerri Ann Abatti, 59, before returning home to California. She was found dead in her family’s tree-shrouded vacation home in Pinetop, Arizona, where she moved after splitting with her husband.
An attorney for Michael Abatti didn’t immediately respond to an email and text message seeking comment.
Authorities searched his home in far Southern California on Dec. 2 as part of the investigation into his wife’s death.
El Centro is a city of 44,000 people just minutes from the Mexican border in the crop-rich Imperial Valley, which is the biggest user of Colorado River water and known for growing leafy greens, melons and forage crops.
Michael Abatti comes from a long line of farmers in the region bordering Arizona, and his grandfather, an Italian immigrant, was among the region’s early settlers. His father, Ben, helped start the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association, and the Abatti name is known throughout the region and tied to farming enterprises, scholarship funds and leadership in local boards and groups.
Water sits in a ditch Friday, Dec. 12, 2025, in El Centro, Calif. Credit: AP/Gregory Bull
Michael Abatti has grown onions, broccoli, cantaloupes and other crops in the Imperial Valley and served on the board of the powerful Imperial Irrigation District from 2006 to 2010.
Michael and Kerri Abatti were married in 1992 and had three children.
Kerri Abatti is a descendant of one of the first Latter-day Saints families to settle Pinetop in the 1880s. The community, located 190 miles (305 kilometers) northeast of Phoenix in the White Mountains, was briefly called Penrodville after Kerri’s forbearers before adopting the Pinetop name.
The couple split in 2023 and Kerri Abatti filed for divorce in proceedings that were pending in California at the time of her death.
Water droplets from sprinklers cover an irrigated field Friday, Dec. 12, 2025, in El Centro, Calif. Credit: AP/Gregory Bull
The Abattis were sparring over finances with Kerri telling the court the couple had lived an upper-class lifestyle during more than three decades of marriage. They owned a large home in California, a vacation home in Pinetop and ranch land in Wyoming and vacationed in Switzerland, Italy and Hawaii while sending their children to private school, she said.
After the split, Kerri was granted $5,000 a month in temporary spousal support but last year asked for an increase to $30,000, saying she couldn’t maintain her standard of living as she quit her job as a bookkeeper and office manager for the family farm in 1999 to stay home with the couple’s three children. Kerri, who previously held a real estate license in Arizona, also asked for an additional $100,000 in attorney’s fees, court filings show.
“I am barely scraping by each month, am handling all of the manual labor on our large property in Arizona and continuing its upkeep,” she wrote in court filings earlier this year, adding she was living near her elderly parents. Kerri said she also needed to buy a newer car because her 2011 vehicle had more than 280,000 miles (450,600 kilometers) on it and sorely needed repairs.
Michael Abatti said in a legal filing that he couldn’t afford the increase after two bad farming years took a toll on his monthly income. He said European shifts in crop-buying to support war-plagued Ukrainian farmers and rising shipping costs were to blame along with an unusually cold and wet winter.
He said in mid-2024 it cost $1,000 to grow an acre of wheat that he could sell for $700, and that he was receiving about $22,000 a month to run the farm as the business struggled to pay its creditors in full.
“The income available at this time does not warrant any increase in the amount to which the parties stipulated, let alone an increase to $30,000 per month,” Lee Hejmanowski, Michael Abatti’s family law attorney, wrote in court papers.
Days later, Michael Abatti agreed to increase temporary spousal support payments to $6,400 a month, court filings show.
He studied in the agricultural business management program at Colorado State University in Fort Collins before returning to California, according to a 2023 book about water issues written by his college friend, Craig Morgan, titled “The Morality of Deceit.”
In 2009, Michael Abatti almost died from an infection caused by a flesh-eating bacteria and was hospitalized and placed in a medically induced coma for treatment, Morgan wrote in the book.
Melodee Buzzard, the 9-year-old whose disappearance was reported by Santa Barbara County educators in October, has been found dead, a relative confirmed to The Times on Tuesday.
Melodee vanished during an unusual road trip with her mother earlier this year, sparking a months-long investigation.
Her disappearance captivated and confounded true crime watchers around the nation as FBI investigators and armchair detectives alike tried to solve the puzzle of what happened.
On Tuesday, Melodee’s paternal grandmother confirmed to The Times that her body has been found by investigators.
“The detective called me this morning to let me know that they found the baby and the baby is with her dad,” said Melodee’s grandmother Lilly Denes. “I knew he was telling me that the baby is dead.”
Melodee’s father, Rubiell “Pinoy” Meza, died in a motorcycle accident in 2016.
Local TV news station KSBY captured video of Melodee’s mother Ashlee Buzzard being taken into custody shortly before 7:45 a.m. Tuesday. During the road trip earlier this year, Buzzard changed out the license plates on her rental car and wore wigs in what detectives described as possible attempts to avoid detection, according to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office.
The Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but has planned a 2 p.m. news conference to provide updates on the case. Here is what we know about the events that led up to Tuesday’s tragic discovery.
Ashlee Buzzard’s ‘hard knock’ childhood
When Ashlee Buzzard was just 9 years old — the same age as her daughter Melodee when she went missing — she and her mother, Lori Miranda, became homeless after fleeing Buzzard’s abusive father, Miranda told the Santa Maria Times in 1995.
The article, titled “Lessons From the School of Hard Knocks,” describes how Miranda and her daughter arrived on the streets of Santa Maria with no job, home or car and only $40 to support them.
They had previously moved from place to place to get away from Miranda’s husband, who she said struggled with substance use and episodes of violence. In June 1994, Miranda decided to take her daughter from Orange County to the Central Coast to be farther away from him, and they briefly lived at the Good Samaritan Shelter in Santa Maria before moving into an apartment.
“I was so scared,” Ashlee told the paper, describing her early days in Santa Maria. “I knew no one [here]. I felt very uncomfortable.”
According to Melodee’s paternal relatives, Buzzard had a contentious relationship with her mother.
When Buzzard was in the 11th grade at Santa Maria High School, she filed a petition to be emancipated from Miranda, according to court records. The judge rejected the petition, noting that Buzzard was still living with her mother and had not submitted adequate information pertaining to her income and expenses.
A birth and a sudden death
Melodee was born Feb. 10, 2016, to Buzzard and Meza. Six months later, Meza died.
In Melodee’s early years, Meza’s family continued to have a relationship with the girl, according to Denes. She was a lovable child, always smiling and well-behaved, Denes said.
Lilly Denes, the paternal grandmother of missing California girl Melodee Buzzard, in her home in Orcutt on Nov. 6.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
In 2021, another of Denes’ sons took care of Melodee while Buzzard was hospitalized for several weeks, she said.
During this period, Denes said she was working with social services to gain custody of Melodee as she was concerned about Buzzard’s ability to care for the child. But before Denes had finished the background check process, Buzzard was discharged from the hospital, picked up her daughter from school and left Santa Maria, Denes said.
After that, Buzzard relocated to the nearby neighborhood of Vandenberg Village and refused to let the girl’s paternal relatives see her. She did, however, occasionally visit Denes to ask for money over the years, Denes said.
Federal court records show that Buzzard filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2017. She’s also had five collections and one small claims lawsuit for alleged unpaid debts filed against her in Santa Barbara County Superior Court, the most recent of which was filed by Capital One Bank in May.
In August, Buzzard enrolled Melodee in an independent study program at the Lompoc Unified School District. Sheriff’s detectives believe that she had previously been homeschooling the girl for several years, but the California Department of Education has no record of her submitting the required paperwork to do so, according to a department spokesperson.
A strange cross-country road trip
Melodee Buzzard was captured on surveillance camera apparently wearing a wig at a car rental location in Lompoc on Oct. 7.
(Santa Barbara County Sheriff)
On Oct. 7, Buzzard and Melodee left their Vandenberg Village home and traveled to Nebraska, according to the Sheriff’s Office. During the trip, Buzzard switched out the California license plates (9MNG101) on the car with New York plates (HCG9677). When she returned home Oct. 10, the original plates were reaffixed, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
Both Melodee and Buzzard were apparently wearing wigs during the journey and the mother reportedly changed wigs throughout, according to the Sheriff’s Office. The last confirmed sighting of Melodee was on Oct. 9, when she was seen on surveillance video near the Utah-Colorado border.
The investigation
On Oct. 14, school administrators reported Melodee’s prolonged absence from her independent study program to the Sheriff’s Office.
Investigators then visited Buzzard’s home, where the mother refused to answer questions about her daughter’s whereabouts, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
On Oct. 30, the FBI joined the case and assisted the Sheriff’s Office in serving search warrants for Buzzard’s home, the rental car and a storage locker.
Detectives then mapped out Buzzard’s road trip route and focused on the return route, from where Melodee was last seen in Utah to Vandenberg Village.
Investigators believe that Buzzard traveled through the following areas on or around Oct. 9: Green River, Utah; Panguitch, Utah; Northwest Arizona; Primm, Nev.; Rancho Cucamonga.
(Santa Barbara County Sheriff)
During October, relatives and concerned community members often gathered around Buzzard’s home, chanting, “Where is Melodee” and leaving posters with messages such as “Bring her home.” The investigation became a national sensation, with videos produced by true crime sleuths racking up thousands of views on TikTok and Instagram.
Buzzard arrested following accusations of false imprisonment
Buzzard was arrested Nov. 7 in an incident unrelated to the investigation into her daughters disappearance, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
She was accused of unlawfully violating the personal liberty of Tyler S. Brewer after disclosing sensitive information to him.
Brewer, a paralegal and acquaintance of Buzzard, said in a statement that he visited Buzzard at her home to offer assistance in the search for the missing girl, and that the situation quickly escalated.
But at a hearing in November, a Santa Barbara County Superior Court judge dismissed the case after new evidence came to light that called his version of events into question.
“After the initial report to law enforcement and the filing of the complaint, further investigation yielded additional evidence that was contradictory to the information that was initially provided to detectives,” said Amber Frost, a spokesperson for the Santa Barbara district attorney’s office.
“That evidence was brought out at the hearing and inconsistencies were examined by both sides. Ultimately, it was determined that the evidence was not sufficient to move this case forward to trial,” Frost said.
Times staff writer Terry Castleman contributed to this report.
PLACER COUNTY, Calif. (KGO) — Heavy rain and flooding impacted Northern California over the weekend, leading to rescues and evacuations throughout the region.
In Placer County, emergency crews carefully and slowly rescued a baby in a carrier, sliding it on a ladder over a rushing river.
The raging South Yuba River overtook the home, where nine people were rescued by the Truckee Fire Protection District.
As of Monday morning, the Placer County Sheriff’s Office said an evacuation warning continues to be in effect for areas along the South Yuba River between Donner Pass Road and Cisco Road.
The storm is also swamping parts of Humboldt County, where the sheriff’s office shared pictures of goats stranded on someone’s doorstep.
This is near the Freshwater area – near Arcata, where high water forced several evacuations.
Crews arrived in jet skis to assist residents.
In Redding, one person died after major flooding.
Water took over streets and entire neighborhoods.
Several people had to be rescued, and Interstate 5 was also flooded, impacting holiday drivers.
LIVE UPDATES: Storms flood parts of NorCal with heavy rain as alerts expand to entire Bay Area
In Mendocino County, Willits received more than 6 inches of rain in 48 hours, flooding parks in the area.
With more rain in the forecast, rescue crews are prepared and people are reminded not to ever drive through standing water.
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