How Abundance Has Failed and Succeeded

In the following excerpt, Derek and Representative Josh Harder (D-California) discuss growth in America and the 21st Century Road to Housing Act.

Derek Thompson: You are the cochair of the Build America Caucus. Your cochair, Celeste Maloy, is a Republican from Utah. You’re a Democrat from California. You’ve got members from red states and blue states who, outside of the context of this caucus, seemed to me to disagree about all sorts of things in a period where political polarization is infamously high. What is it that your caucus seems to agree on?

Josh Harder: Yeah, you’re right. We’re trying to swim upstream at a moment when Congress is unbelievably polarized and deeply unproductive. We’re trying to do the opposite on both of those things and actually create a coherent governing agenda that has to be bipartisan. Especially in this era, especially with the Senate rules, the only way to pass meaningful bills is with bipartisan support. I think we really agree on a pro-growth agenda at a time when it feels like both parties have really stepped away from any sort of positive ideals of what American growth can mean in terms of concrete benefits to folks. I think there’s a couple things that we really agree on, but the most important thing is that America can do better and that starts with trying to build more of what we need, whether that’s housing, energy, health care, or education.

Thompson: I can understand the Reagan conservative argument that says that growth is an inherent good. But I do want to slow down here to allow you to make the liberal, 21st-century liberal argument that says that growth is good. Because I think someone outside of this caucus or outside of this coalition might hear that answer and say, “We’ve got growth in the 2020s. What we don’t have is affordability. What we don’t have is equality. What we don’t have is a sense of belonging and fairness in an economy that is growing, yes, but all the gains are going to the top 1 and 0.1 percent.” So how do you and other Democrats in this caucus see growth as a liberal goal?

Harder: I agree that we need to do more to make sure that the gains from growth are better appreciated, but I’d actually challenge the assumption that we have that growth. Because if you look at our housing supply, we don’t have the growth that we need, we’re five million homes short of where we need to get to. We don’t have the construction of transmission lines and generation on energy that could lower the prices that folks are paying every single month. I’ve got seniors paying $1,000 a month on their electricity bills. That’s not affordable. We don’t have the growth and success there. And not because it’s not equally shared, but because we haven’t built enough. And if you look at our health-care system, the situation is the same.

So I would posit that we actually don’t have the right type of growth in the exact type of materials that folks actually value. There’s three things that our caucus really agrees on when we’re looking at particular issues. One is that there’s just huge bottlenecks in the supply of some of the most important pieces of American life, whether that’s energy or health care or education. Two, that we can solve a lot of those bottlenecks without spending more money. There’s ways to get better results even with the dollars we have, if we use and spend them better. And third, that a focus on outcomes over process can actually bring people together across party lines. And I think you can see that in a lot of different parts of American life.

Thompson: So what I’d like to do for the rest of this conversation is talk about several areas where you think that growing the supply side is the answer to what ails America. I want to start with housing, where we got some legislation, the 21st Century Road to Housing Act. I want to move on to energy and permitting, where there’s a new huge landmark permitting-reform bill that’s before Congress. And then, finally, I want to talk about this agenda that you’ve just put out, this build more agenda. Which is not yet a bill, but it’s a recipe for what might be future bills to come on down the line in the next few years. We’re going to move from laws to bills, to ideas for bills. Starting with the law, the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, what is it, what does it do, and why does it matter?

Harder: It’s the first major federal housing legislation to pass in over 50 years, since 1974, when we put out Section 8 and community development block grants. And it is the most exciting pro–housing supply thing we’ve seen in a long, long time. It’s going to do a lot of good, but it’s not going to fix every housing problem we have. It’s got a lot of different bills jammed in together, because the only way Congress legislates these days is these omnibuses that make a little bit of a Frankenstein monster out of legislation. But it can be boiled down to trying to make it easier to cut red tape out of bottlenecks to building housing—more categorical exemptions for infill housing, for instance. Two, rewarding communities that are building more. We should be giving more dollars to the communities that are actually building the homes that our country needs.

And then third, a whole bunch of reforms for how we do manufactured housing. If you go to many places of Southeast Asia and across Europe, you will often see housing built in a factory, not out in the field. That doesn’t exist in the United States, in large part because of policy decisions that we have mistakenly made over the last several decades, including things like the Chassis Act, which require essentially a massive, very expensive chassis on the bottom of every single manufactured house. Imagine a five-story building where every single floor has a huge chassis underneath it. It just doesn’t work economically. But that was what Congress was mandating until this year, when we were able to pass this landmark bill.

There’s a lot that it does. There’s a couple things that it doesn’t do. It doesn’t address some of the financing considerations. Because you can legalize housing everywhere. If interest rates are 5 or even 6 percent, if developers are paying even higher, you’re not going to get the housing that our country needs. And so that’s something that I have a couple ideas for what we need to be doing more on. And also on construction. We have seen material construction really exploding costs over the last several years, especially with some of these tariffs from the Trump administration, taxing things like lumber coming from Canada. And so we have to do more to bring down the cost of construction materials if we want to close some of that five-million home gap that we need to build across the country.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Josh Harder
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman