Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

Yeah, some local standards are reasonable and necessary, but most are just about "character", not actual building standards to adopt to local geography or anything like that.

> As the neighborhood becomes denser, rents might go down, but land values will go up, since a given piece of land can now be used to build a more profitable apartment building.

You're taking about the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods, as they are, to be replaced with something else. The land value might go up, but the existing house value goes down, especially halfway through such a project. It's one thing if you're replacing low density multitenant buildings with higher-density ones, but it's a totally different story if you're replacing detached, single family homes. Usually the latter only happens after a decade or 3 of neglected, low value homes.

Higher density brings pluses and minuses.. more businesses, transit and other services, but also more traffic, crime, noise, etc.

I've grown a little bit more skeptical of what can realistically be achieved by the passive nature of YIMBY-ism.

In Portland, they passed some radical new zoning laws a few years ago that allowed anyone, anywhere the ability to zone ADUs on their property. And the cost to get permits is almost nothing.

I have lots of friends and family in the area with property. But not a single one has added an ADU. It seems like it should be a no-brainer, so I'll bring up and ask why not? And there are basically two reasons:

- There's a general fear of being a landlord. Tenants have a lot of legal rights, and the risk of inviting someone onto your property who could start squatting or doing drugs and not being able to evict them is beyond the pale for most families.

- They don't need the money. If you can afford a home in the area, you're already pretty well off. Even though adding a rental could be pretty lucrative, there's just not enough motivation to go through with it.

To me it has little to do with incumbent politicians and everything to do with the incumbent middle class. I'm all for removing red tape and restrictions, but we also need to come up with incentives to light a fire under the butts of individual actors in our economy to actually go out and make things.

It's in the article but I want to elevate it to the thread for folks who don't read the article. The new book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is an interesting book in the context of modern American Politics and inflation and worth a read.

We all know adding money to a system without adding more stuff creates inflation. Abundance is an interesting evolution that in my view is a step forward to what has been remanded as "tax and spend" politics of both US political parties.

When the Democrats had a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate when Obama was elected, they couldn't even get a public option included in the Affordable Care Act, and the right so successfully demagogued "Obamacare" (their name for it) that the Democrats lost an incredible number of seats in the 2010 midterms. Bernie Sanders campaigned on Medicare for All (essentially what you're suggesting) in 2016 and 2020, and he didn't even win the Democratic primary.

Despite how big a problem healthcare is in the US, most voters fear any change that may put their current health coverage at risk. Most people under 65 have (or feel like they have) decent-to-good health insurance through an employer-sponsored plan and don't necessarily see a big benefit to throwing that away. People over 65 are fiercely protective of their Medicare benefits and tend to worry that Medicare for All is going to make their healthcare worse. (Judging by the amount of "shocked Pikachu face" we see lately from Trump voters who expected him to fix the economy, there's a critical group of swing voters who seem unwilling or unable to accurately judge candidates based on their policies vs. their vibes.)

I don't agree with those people. I'd love to see our healthcare system dramatically overhauled. But between the polarization and risk aversion of American voters, "a quality National Health Service" has not proven to be a winning platform so far and is unlikely to be in the future.