Abundance

by Ezra Klein

In much of San Francisco, you can’t walk twenty feet without seeing a multicolored sign declaring that Black Lives Matter, Kindness Is Everything, and No Human Being Is Illegal. Those signs sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes that would bring those values closer to reality. San Francisco’s Black population has fallen in every Census count since 1970. Poorer families—disproportionately nonwhite and immigrant—are pushed into long commutes, overcrowded housing, and street homelessness. Texas has been the single largest beneficiary of California’s housing crisis. And that is, in part, because Texas is California’s mirror image on housing. The Austin metro area led the nation in housing permits in 2022, permitting 18 new homes for every 1,000 residents. Los Angeles’s and San Francisco’s metro areas permitted only 2.5 units per 1,000 residents.31 In our political typologies, it is liberals who embrace change and conservatives who cling to stasis. But that is not how things work when you compare red-state and blue-state housing policies.