To most people, the word “abundance” means something everyone should want: to have “more than enough,” to be free from fear. But, like a lot of words picked up by Washington operators, “abundance” is being twisted for political ends. The picker-uppers are Democrats: a corporate-backed party that its most thoughtful critics regularly argue has lost touch with its base. True to form, Democrats’ new twist on abundance makes the word into the opposite of its meaning: benefiting corporate backers by pushing citizens to accept less than they have or deserve.

The movers are Ezra Klein, at 41 probably the most prominent younger writer on the op-ed beat of the New York Times, the country’s most powerful newspaper; and Derek Thompson, at 38 probably the most prominent younger writer at The Atlantic, Washington’s most powerful magazine. The jacket of the book Klein and Thompson have co-written, Abundance, calls them “journalistic titans,” and, though they might not seem to deserve it, powerful people listen to what they say.

In keeping with their connections, Klein’s and Thompson’s audience isn’t really the public; it’s the influential journalists blurbing their book. This might seem like a circular and in fact a pointless process—writing a book for the public that the public isn’t meant to read. But the aim of Abundance is to reassure the book’s blurbers, and the people they represent—finance and tech donors who switched their allegiance in 2024 from Democrat to Republican—that, as Bill Clinton and his handlers said at a similar moment in 1992, it was “safe to come home” to a Democratic party that “doesn’t threaten big donors.”

Abundance does this by showing tech and finance donors that what the abundance plan will provide is the same as the more than 30 year old Democratic plan devised by Clinton and his handlers to bring the Democrats back to political power after twelve years of Republican dominance beginning with Ronald Reagan. This plan was based on courting a class of fickle corporate donors by promising that government would enact policies that helped them become “too big to fail.” It created much of the fallout Americans are dealing with today, from tech monopolies infringing on speech to mass labor outsourcing—the very problems they elected President Trump to solve.

This old Democratic plan, now repackaged as abundance, is threefold: promoting “free markets” and free trade powered by government-backed corporate conglomeration; underwriting the top-down growth of the cities where the conglomerates are based; and using environmentalism as a “progressive” goal to distract from the grifts at play. Digging into the contours and outcomes of this plan, and then tracing it further to its origins, shows how it comes at the explicit expense of the American worker and citizen.

(READ MORE: HUD’S Mixed-Income Housing and Dubious Tax Incentives Need to Go)

The Tenets of the Agenda…

The backers of Abundance, like Clinton and his backers in 1992, loudly advertise themselves as post-identity politics and tough on crime—despite the fact that, as Restoration News has reported in the past, corporate operators spent much of the past three decades driving the push for identity politics to distract from their consolidation of government-backed corporate power.

Like Clinton in the Nineties, Klein and Thompson instead focus on economic growth and an absence of red tape. But, again like Clinton, their red tape is not the red tape most people think of when they hear the word: an onerous environmental regulation or a mis-applied labor requirement. Instead, Klein’s and Thompson’s red tape is the kind that gets in the way of large projects by government-backed corporations—e.g., “red tape” as zoning rules, public hearing requirements, and other laws that allow citizens to have a voice in their communities; that, in other words, ensure that government is actually accountable to voters not special interests.

Abundance’s specific targets are regulations that stop conglomerates from remaking cities, which it sees as the engines of future American growth, in the name of preventing housing scarcity and combating climate change. According to the authors:

Democratic governors across the nation have passed bill after bill trying to make it easier to build homes. In the 2024 election, one of Kamala Harris’s first policy proposals was to build 3 million new homes . . . (p. 212)

Additionally,

The climate movement…helped persuade the Biden administration to pass a slew of bills intended to expand the supply of clean energy and pull forward needed innovations like green hydrogen [ with] . . . a strategy that married the life Americans want with the clean energy the planet could tolerate. Investments in solar and wind installation, in electric vehicle plants and factories to manufacture next-generation batteries, have rocketed upward since.

The only problems with these plans are regulations:

In California broadly, and San Francisco specifically, dozens of pro-housing bills have not led to the construction of more homes, in part because those bills are layered with additional requirements and standards that builders must meet in order to take advantage of the newly streamlined processes . . . [Additionally] the breakneck deployment of wind and solar infrastructure and battery manufacturing has been slowed by outdated permitting and procurement rules that split the Democratic coalition. A difficulty that Biden and Harris had in trying to run on their record in 2024 was that few communities were yet seeing benefit from all this construction their policies were meant to spark.

…and what it Ignores

What’s missing in this analysis is everything that’s been missing from the Democratic platform for over thirty years. There’s no reference to changing supply chains to help the American worker; no reference to stopping free trade’s and finance’s entwinement with climate investment which hurts the American worker; and no real focus on helping communities away from those few coastal cities (San Francisco, New York, Miami, Los Angeles) which house the elites to whom “no red tape” is meant to appeal.

These absences, in fact, are so clear that they were raised in a largely complimentary review of the book in The New York Times, where Klein works. The Times criticizes the book for seeming to be aimed at only “a few elite finance and tech bros in two or three coastal cities who are mainly upset by clogged transit and red tape.” Klein and Thompson, the review says in support of this criticism, “have no answers for how to get [working Americans] back their mojo”; [do not] seriously confront…globalization”; and “are focused” on “coastal cities” where “innovators work and live.”

These are not fall-by-the-side-of-the-road criticisms. If a proposal for abundance in America doesn’t include (1.) helping workers (2.) addressing globalization and (3.) most of the country, it’s very literally the last thirty years of Democratic policy on repeat. Not only has this thirty years of policy left out and hurt much of the country via outsourcing, private sector labor decline, and the erosion of communities, even as it empowers a narrow corporate class of donors. It’s also hurt the places it’s meant to help: the “coastal cities” that are home to the “finance and tech bros” who run the Democratic Party.

What Abundance Will Look Like… 

The most telling example is Miami, which is currently America’s tech-and-finance boomtown, the center of its housing crisis, and uniquely exposed to the environment since it sits between a mangrove swamp and a barrier reef. Since 2009, its leaders have cleared out the red tape (public oversight hearings, zoning laws) in favor of administrators and developers and in favor of housing expansion and eco-friendly growth. This was a project explicitly meant to make Miami competitive with New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, which had already embraced the corporate-backed growth that came from Democratic-backed conglomeration and (often) tech-based free trade. Like in these other cities, the brunt of the regulator-developer cooperation was born by working- and middle-class Miamians.

The seeds in Miami were planted in 2009 with a city development plan called Miami 21, a concrete version of Abundance’s anti-red-tape agenda. Miami 21 changed the zoning code, “the rules that govern what can be built, and where, and how big it can be.” In the words of The Miami Herald, Miami 21 “brought Miami the intensely urban, work-play lifestyle and animated sidewalks and cafes of Brickell,” the financial district, as well as city-wide changes: “street-embracing retail centers to what had been a shopping desert” and “new public green spaces and waterfront promenades….”

This shift was managed through Special Area Plan projects (SAPs). SAPs were intended “to sensitively guide large-scale development on at least nine acres through negotiations between developers and city planners.” In other words: To empower “decisionmakers” in corporations and government; cut out public oversight, e.g. red tape. These moves have brought growth which has brought new arrivals, creating a housing crisis which is in turn bringing more money into the city, this time from government.

Specifically, Miami-Dade County has received $80 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development for two “affordable housing” projects to cope with the dearth of housing and to promote “densification”—vertical development—to cope with what it calls the climate threat posed by new building. This is on top of smaller amounts of federal funding flowing for the city for the same projects, as well as tax credits for building affordable housing on low-income land.

The result of all of these moves on the ground have, almost exclusively, been fallout for Miami’s working and middle class.

…Its Fallout…

Recently, Restoration News has reported on some of the tangible results.

In lower and lower-middle income minority neighborhoods, “rampant land speculation” and “rising residential rents and small-business evictions” gave way to out-and-out bait-and-switches. One of these was the Magic City Innovation District in lower income Little Haiti, whose developers initially promised to invest in affordable and workforce housing on the development. Then they scrapped the idea and opted to make all of the units market rate. In exchange they gave two lump payments of $3 million each to improve the neighborhood, a trivial concession for a development whose projected valuation is $1.4 billion.

In other instances, residents were the obvious collateral of development. In Sweetwater in November, a neighborhood of 3,000 people who rented their land, many of whom were retired social security recipients who had lived there for thirty or forty years, were given six months and $14,000 each to relocate. In Overtown in March, residents who had worked on the construction for a multi-year development which received tax credits for being “affordable” reported that they couldn’t afford to apply to live in the “affordable” buildings they themselves had built.

Yet another version of this move occurred in October in Coral Gables, an upper-middle income area of residential single home neighborhoods. There, one developer successfully pushed through a proposal to build three eight-story buildings with 995 apartments and 55 rental townhouses on eight acres at the heart of the neighborhood, including 44,000 square feet of office and retail space and two garages with about 2,000 parking spots. Members of the community aren’t happy—they’re worried especially about the traffic and its effects on their kids—but these residents don’t have a say, since the development not only escapes zoning restrictions but also “all public hearing requirements.”

…and the Cities it Creates

City and county leaders, both centrist Republicans and Democrats, are embracing Miami’s growth into what they call a “world-class” city—gilded with the lily of technological enhancements like delivery drones and self-driving cars. But most of Miami’s residents aren’t catching their leaders’ fervor.

According to one politically connected Miami resident who spoke to Restoration News:

Everything actually green is gone because of growth and then they complain about climate change. Of course, there are 20-30 story apartment buildings, and then 20 more cranes for building more, for building on top of building. There’s no infrastructure; so where’s the water in the floods going to go other than in the street? That’s not climate change, that’s bad government. But all Levine Cava talks about is the Green New Deal and electric cars and new climate regulations…Meantime a 20-minute drive to work now takes fifty. And our seniors have to wait to get picked up by the bus for an hour at stops that don’t have covering from the sun.

And, even though the beneficiaries of this “growth” are, in theory, the upper-income corporate operators who follow the conglomerates that Miami’s building boom attracts, they’re not happy, either. Brickell, the financial district where many of these people live, has been described by current residents, writing on online neighborhood rating websites, in disillusioned terms. One of many comments says that Brickell is

just a cluster of tall business buildings (really scary if you think in strong hurricane season), flooding streets (reason why all buildings are built high), over expensive and over rated…homeless population is growing on its streets and in main Brickell Avenue!

Crime, too, is on the rise in Brickell. So is homelessness among seniors across Miami, and so are other even more concerning developments like human trafficking. This is the fallout of rapid growth which displaces low-income people to the streets and brings into communities an influx of unknown operators with new agendas. And though, like Abundance pushers, the public figures endorsing Miami’s growth are loudly anti-crime, it’s their policies that are creating the conditions where crime flourishes.

It’s not a coincidence that America’s boomtown is also losing disgruntled residents.

What’s at the Root of Abundance-style growth?

The beneficiaries of this agenda in Miami-Dade are extremely telling. One of them is the Democratic mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, who has used the growth in property values—and the ensuing growth in revenue for government—to expand her budget by $3 billion in five years. Not all of the initiatives undertaken with this money redound directly on voters, or even on the bigger causes they’re supposed to support: one phases out plastic straws and another creates a Chief Heat Officer, even as unregulated growth paired with basic infrastructure failures leads areas of the city to regularly flood. But these initiatives do give government more to do, and make government bigger.

The other beneficiaries off this growth are the County commissioners, who are receiving donations from developers whom government-backed growth is keeping in clover. Of the sixteen top donors to the majority Democratic county commissioners in the election year of 2024, thirteen were tied indirectly or directly to real estate. One of them was the recipient of one of the two HUD grants to the county: $39 million for a redevelopment in the lower-income Overtown neighborhood, a project that is, true to form for Abundance-style growth, bypassing local oversight to the chagrin of local community members who see themselves as almost surely about to be priced out. Another has just proposed the largest development project in Miami-Dade’s history in Overtown, despite having a history of pricing out the locals.

These players are not anomalies. Indeed, Miami today is not only ground zero of Abundance-style growth’s collateral. It is also a microcosm of the pushers and beneficiaries of this growth. These are the big money interests with ties to government whom, as this report noted earlier, Klein and Thompson are trying to mobilize behind Democrats today. As a coming Restoration News report will show, these corporate players and their media spokespeople are the drivers and beneficiaries of both Abundance and the thirty-year run of failed Democratic policies Abundance is trying to recreate.