What exactly do we mean when we talk about Abundance for New York City?
Having a shared vision is the first step.
Imagine waking up in your Brooklyn apartment to the gentle hum of the city outside.
The air inside is crisp and clean, filtered by advanced air purification systems that were once the privilege of luxury high-rises, but are now standard everywhere thanks to the offshore wind turbines dotting the Rockaway Beach horizon.
Beyond your window, sunlight glints off solar-paneled rooftops blanketing every building — from Harlem brownstones to Queens apartment complexes — in a resilient energy grid that’s made blackouts a distant memory.
Stepping outside, you pass vibrant community gardens flourishing on formerly vacant lots, lush with tomatoes and greens grown vertically and tended by neighbors and robots alike.
Your phone buzzes — it’s a notification from NYC.gov’s AI-powered portal that says your request to add a water fountain to your pedestrian-friendly shared street has been automatically approved.
Automatically.
Gone are the days of bureaucratic inertia; AI-assisted permitting means projects that once took years now take days, bringing benches, trees and open spaces to every neighborhood in the five boroughs.
On your walk to the subway — which by the way is clean, quiet and punctual thanks to a city-wide upgrade to automated electric trains — you see crews using modular construction to swiftly assemble affordable housing units in vacant commercial lots.
High-tech, prefabricated components, shipped overnight via electric trucks from factories along the Hudson Valley, slot together seamlessly, ensuring everyone has a comfortable, energy-efficient place to call home.
Homelessness, once considered inevitable, is now extinct.
None of this is the stuff of utopian science fiction. In fact, every single element already exists somewhere in the world today.
You arrive at Central Park, which is greener and larger than you remember, having reclaimed car lanes as verdant pedestrian thoroughfares buzzing with cafes and playgrounds. All along the East River, waterfront parks are alive with food stalls, art installations and swimming areas — something once unimaginable in the murky waters. Drones quietly buzz overhead, rapidly delivering goods without clogging sidewalks or streets.
It’s a nice day, so you decide to hop onto a Citi Bike at one of the docking stations that seem to appear wherever you need one. Your ride is protected by seamless networks of wide bike lanes stretching safely across the city, and traffic is minimal since driverless electric buses and taxis synchronize perfectly with smart signals, eliminating congestion — even on the BQE.
That evening you join friends for a show at a revitalized Broadway theater. Tickets are affordable, subsidized by the abundance dividend from AI productivity, ensuring culture thrives in every borough, accessible to all.
Walking home beneath streetlights that glow warmly without contributing to light pollution, you reflect on how New York City, once defined by struggle and scarcity, has transformed into a beacon of possibility — a living testament to what happens when we finally build for abundance.
That’s the city I believe in. And I don’t say “believe” in the fairy-tale sense. None of the above is the stuff of utopian science fiction. In fact, every single element already exists somewhere in the world today. The question isn’t whether we can build an abundant New York — it’s whether we will.
Last week gave me reason to believe we can. When Yoni Rechtman, the team at NY Abundance, Company Ventures and I started talking about hosting a “Tech for Abundance” event, our thesis was simple: let’s find the New Yorkers who work in tech and believe our city’s superpowers are growth and change. We thought we’d test the waters and gauge interest. Perhaps we could get a core group of a couple dozen supporters and generate interest from there.
Then over 700 people asked to come.
We had space for only 100 — and they filled Company’s sleek midtown venue with the kind of restless, optimistic energy you rarely feel in New York politics. As Business Insider put it in their excellent coverage of the event, NYC’s tech workers are finding a political home in the abundance agenda, and they showed up in force.
But is this coalition real or a beautiful mirage? After all, abundance is a squishy term that sounds great (who doesn’t want more stuff?). Will everyone still be on board once we get down to defining our terms? Just yesterday, for example, friend of the newsletter Santi Ruiz got into a debate on X with anti-monopolist Basel Musharbash over the term “state capacity”: was improving state capacity about the state’s ability to build toilets or to build a toilet industry?
That’s why, I suspect, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson open their book Abundance with a national version of the thought exercise I shared above and at the event: we’re trying to get really specific and concrete about what we’re after. Our panelists went on to fill out this vision even further. Andrew Staniforth (Assembly OSM) discussed how modular housing can turn vacant lots into homes in weeks, not years. Shaina Horowitz (Climate Exchange) laid out the renewable energy infrastructure already being deployed across the city. And Zachary Long (ConductorAI, part of the Lux family) talked through how AI-assisted permitting can rip through decades of bureaucratic red tape.
If you build it, they will come. Especially when what you’re building is the capacity to build more.
The conversation, moderated by Abundance NY co-founders Ryder Kessler and Catherine Vaughan (recent guests on the Riskgaming podcast), kept returning to a simple truth: the technology exists. What’s been missing is the political will and the coalition to demand better.
Part of the reason the coalition has traditionally been hard to pull together is that it doesn’t fit neatly on the left wing–right wing spectrum. Our audience consisted of everyone from DSA members to Manhattan Institute fellows. Instead, as James Pethokoukis told us on the Riskgaming podcast, the real divide now is between “down-wing” pessimists and “up-wing” optimists. Do you believe change is more likely to make life worse, or better? I think lots of people, especially in tech, are in the up-wing camp. We just have to galvanize them.
What I learned from the first Tech for Abundance event is that if you build it, they will come. Especially when what you’re building is the capacity to build more. In a high rise in midtown last week, a bunch of engineers, operators, activists, builders and investors — New Yorkers — came together with the shared belief that our city is functioning at a fraction of its potential. And despite being a city of nearly nine million people, it turns out it only takes a couple thousand dedicated New Yorkers to change things. Abundance New Yorkers are organizing on WhatsApp groups, writing op-eds, joining Community Boards, running for office, targeting their donations and educating politicians.
Based on what I saw last week, and from everyone who’s raised their hand to join the abundance movement since, I’m betting we’ll succeed. I’m betting New York will look like my vision before long. Although maybe that’s because I’m up-wing, too.
