Since Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance was published, the policy world has debated the causes of our current housing supply drought. Abundance argued that zoning laws are the culprit, as part of its broader thesis calling for liberals to embrace a policy vision oriented around building more of what we need (i.e., “abundance”) primarily through targeted deregulation of private industry and de-proceduralization of government. Other analysts believe that it is consolidation in the housing market that slows development. But both camps aim to expand housing supply, and solutions are not always derived from the causes of the problem. Cancer isn’t caused by the absence of chemo drugs or radiation, but that is often the treatment. Instead of debating causes, focusing on what policy solutions work best might be a better approach.
At the highest level, there are two competing policy perspectives. On the one hand, the YIMBY approach to increasing housing construction is essentially a passive one: Government should get out of the way of private development by passing zoning reform, making it easier to get permits, eliminating minimum lot size requirements, and reducing or eliminating parking mandates. This group advocates mostly for “upzoning” reform, a version of deregulation that allows landowners to build multiple housing units on property previously zoned for single-family homes.
An emerging “post-neoliberal” approach, on the other hand, calls for government to take a more active role: an increase in public funding, city planning to build more densely, tax incentives for development, and even public ownership. These tactics can include government spending, but they can also be structured to break even or even generate revenue. A version of this approach, promoted by the nonprofit New Consensus, argues that the best way to build is to set big goals, provide high-level leadership, and mobilize both private industry and government toward those goals (who then find myriad ways to overcome obstacles project by project). A city can use both approaches at the same time, of course. But they differ fundamentally in approach—one involves getting government out of the way, and the other involves more government attention.
So which method produces more housing? To answer that question, we can look at Washington, D.C., which offers an excellent example of a city that took the post-neoliberal approach. Since before the coronavirus pandemic, D.C. has been in a prolonged housing boom. Between 2019 and 2024, the city sustained an average of nearly 6,700 new units every year. That is a lot for an area containing about 370,000 total housing units and puts Washington consistently on par with the states building the most homes, such as Idaho, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, Arizona, and Texas. (And there are greater challenges in D.C., including limited space and bureaucratic obstacles from the unique federal government overlay on city governance.) In fact, Washington performed better in the first part of 2025 than Houston, which ConsumerAffairs recently declared the leading city in new construction. Houston permitted and sold more houses by volume, but it is three times bigger than Washington; controlling for population, D.C. did more. As a result of the housing construction boom, rents in D.C. have been rising more moderately than in its surrounding suburbs, where homebuilding has not kept pace.
Washington was not always a housing boomtown. The current period of housing growth is a result of a policy change at the city level. In 2019, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser announced a housing initiative to use all tools available to the city to promote building. Importantly, Washington announced a benchmark to which it could be held accountable: 36,000 new housing units (12,000 affordable units) by 2025. Washington had built 36,000 units in the prior nine years (4,000 annually), so this was a promise to make a substantial increase. It worked. D.C. overshot and built more than 40,000 units by 2025.
To increase construction, including affordable housing, the city performed a number of analyses, held town halls, convened teams of experts, and engaged in a significant amount of community engagement. The top-down commitment to housing created an environment in the city government that encouraged and supported new construction. The housing initiative was a miniature version of the agenda that New Consensus advocates. Washington started not with discrete policy proposals, but by setting a bold and measurable goal and mobilizing government and industry toward that goal, assuming that the tone at the top would push everyone to figure out how to break through obstacles to drive individual projects.
The D.C. government used the $1.3 billion Housing Production Trust Fund to provide cheap loans for affordable housing projects. It rezoned underused industrial or commercial land near transit hubs into high-density residential neighborhoods (a strategy this magazine has advocated for a decade and a half). It built transportation infrastructure to create new neighborhoods in areas that warehouses once dominated. It used the Tax Increment Financing program to borrow against future tax revenue from developments to pay for infrastructure. It entered into Planned Unit Development (PUD) agreements with developers to create zoning exceptions in exchange for various public benefits, like building grocery stores in food deserts or affordable housing (a tactic abundance pundits disparage as “everything-bagel liberalism” that puts a drag on development projects but that actually has a good track record, as Joel Dodge has argued in these pages). The city even purchased land to be bundled and leased to developers, resulting, for example, in the massive new waterfront development on the Potomac. Just this year, Washington took control of the vacant RFK Stadium and a surrounding lot to into a new stadium, commercial space, and 6,000 new housing units (1,800 of which are slated for affordable housing). Perhaps surprisingly, the wide-ranging effort didn’t include uniform city-wide dezoning, upzoning, or permitting reform.
To be clear, some of these efforts started before 2019, and housing in D.C. is far from perfect. There is a long history of housing discrimination. Not enough affordable housing is built in wealthy neighborhoods, contributing to segregation. Housing costs are still very high—partly because the metro area outside the district is much less effective at building—and the government could be doing more to provide housing assistance to low-income residents. Developers sometimes fail to live up to promises made in a PUD agreement. The costs of building affordable housing are too high. And there are reasonable questions about whether D.C. is getting enough out of its deals with private developers.
But if we just judge what is most effective at building new housing units, D.C.’s post-neoliberal approach was a success. During the past six years, while most of the country’s new construction was dragging, Washington made a conscious policy change that increased construction from an average of about 4,000 units to about 6,700 units per year. That is a 68 percent increase on average, meaning this is sustained growth, not a short-term surge.
And D.C.’s stats easily outmatch other cities’ efforts. For example, Portland, Oregon, has a similar population and passed typical YIMBY upzoning reform around the same time. Portland’s initiative allowed landowners to build up to four units on properties previously zoned for single-family homes. The city recently assessed the impact of its reforms and concluded that it was a success because it produced, on average, 467 extra units a year, even though the city’s overall housing construction declined to an average of about 3,172 from 2018 to 2023.
In fact, I cannot find a single example of a city that used the YIMBY playbook and came even close to the numbers produced by D.C.’s housing initiative. The upzoning initiative in Austin, Texas, allowed only 300 permit applications that could result in new units in the first year. Spokane, Washington’s upzoning reform produced about 80 new units. Minneapolis’s well-known upzoning efforts produced just 1,000 new units in two and a half years. (Plans that resembled D.C.’s approach—rezoning commercial space to create dense apartment housing—have done much better, as the Monthly’s Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg previously reported.) An Urban Institute study found that upzoning reforms across the country produced, on average, a 0.8 percent increase in housing supply after three to nine years. For comparison, D.C.’s initiative built 16,000 more units in six years than it would have in its prior average construction rate, which is a 4 to 5 percent increase in housing supply. Of course, every city is unique; there are often other countervailing trends, policies, or limitations, and these are not entirely apples-to-apples comparisons. But the numbers still don’t compete with D.C.’s rapid increase in construction.
The broader policy lesson here is simple. Abundance-minded policymakers should recognize that there is a ceiling on how much private-sector deregulation can achieve, and there are serious trade-offs. The thesis of Abundance is that “we need to build and invent more of what we need.” In certain circumstances, passive deregulation can produce slow and marginal gains, but to satisfy a bold promise to increase supply quickly, we need more than that. Direct public investment, government planning, public options, and mobilization are required to accomplish a bold abundance agenda.
There are political lessons, too. We often hear that cities in red states are better at building. But D.C. is on par with the best and is the bluest jurisdiction in the country. Perhaps liberal cities wanting to build should first look to successful cities with similar political landscapes for options, rather than conservative jurisdictions dealing with entirely different political considerations. It might surprise many that the champion of post-neoliberal housing in D.C. is the moderate Mayor Bowser, who endorsed Michael Bloomberg for president in 2020. That Bowser, not just Zohran Mamdani, is pursuing this approach to housing policy should show us that an abundance agenda focused on public options and government planning to push major projects—rather than just deregulation—is not a radical vision in 2025.
The post Cities Can Have Abundant Housing—if They’re Willing To Work for It appeared first on Washington Monthly.
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