What’s the future of abundance in NYC?

Following Zohan Mamdani’s stunning win in the mayoral primary, abundance is the new watchword of local politics

In his mayoral campaign, Zohran Mamdani embraced an “abundance agenda” (although not an abundance of billionaires). Given that “abundance” has become the word of the year in politics, led by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book and a slew of articles and podcasts trailing in its wake, that appears to have been a wise choice.

But what does abundance really mean, and how do we get there? What ultimately matters may be less the man who moves into Gracie Mansion and more local organizing. Building the future of America’s cities requires more than theses and exegeses, but a ground game focused on moving the levers of power through petitions, representation and votes. That’s the subject of today’s show.

Joining me and Laurence Pevsner are Ryder Kessler and Catherine Vaughn, the co-heads of Abundance New York. They’ve built up a decentralized network of several thousand locals looking to expand New York’s prosperity in the 21st century by organizing meetups, petition drives, political endorsements and more. Their success is in the milieu: the language of abundance was suffused throughout the campaign stops, press conferences and debate performances during New York City’s mayoral campaign.

Ryder was formerly a founder of a tech startup, and Catherine built an organization to elect state legislative candidates across America. We talk about the crisis facing New York City, why the status quo bias is so heavy, how Abundance New York is changing the narrative around prosperity, what it’s like to organize a community centered on local issues, what’s it like to serve in local politics, and what candidates Abundance NYC wanted to win — and why.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, subscribe to the podcast.

Danny Crichton:

People generally like more things — more houses, more cars, more public transit, more health and human services. But all of a sudden, it seems like abundance is everywhere. What got you into this and what are you building?

Ryder Kessler:

I'll start by saying New York is facing a moment of crisis, which inspired us as New Yorkers who care about the present and future of the city and state. We are facing skyrocketing rents that are rising seven times faster than wages. We have record homelessness, we have streets where we're witnessing social disorder, we have weather emergencies that used to be once in a century and are now happening every few weeks. So we're facing some real urgent crises, but our elected leaders and politicians have generally not been up to the task of solving them.

We, as folks who have been working mostly in nationally oriented politics for many years, came to the realization that we need to be doing better in our own backyard. We need new ideas and a new political class.

Specifically, we recognize that a lot of these problems are results of scarcity, connected to insufficient government capacity to solve problems. Many New Yorkers want a politics that is more focused on growth and change and dynamism — things that were once New York superpowers. We started Abundance New York to create a home for those abundance-minded New Yorkers.

Catherine Vaughn:

We’re also trying to emphasize — as are folks like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson — that scarcity is a policy choice. We do have the option to build more homes, to invest in mass transit, to invest in abundant cheap and green energy. But state and local processes and institutions have made it far easier not to.

Ryder and I have both been professional Democrats. Often blue states and cities have made it far easier to say “no” than “yes” to policies around the built environment that would enable abundance, that would enable growth and dynamism. So we're trying to build a community to counter the policies and processes that are getting in the way.

Danny Crichton:

One of the things I hear you talking about is the difference between change and stasis. Last year on the podcast, we had on James Pethokoukis, author of The Conservative Futurist. It is interesting to see how his ideas dovetail with yours. He describes it as upwing versus downwing; you described it as change versus stasis — a kind of realignment in American politics where we're going from left versus right to some other forms. You have different words, but it's interesting to see the same narrative come out of both the right and the left. There's still not, though, a lot of collaboration. How much does cross-partisan collaboration matter?

Catherine Vaughn:

Nationally speaking, it matters. And you see policy wins in states like Montana where you have the opposite problem, where they probably did get the Democrats on board, but they didn't need Democratic votes to upzone and build radical amounts of new housing. In a lot of states, you need folks on both sides of the aisle.

Here, as you mentioned, we have a Democratic supermajority. And in New York City, and to a large extent in New York state, the Republicans are not necessarily the kind of upwing, pro-abundance Republicans I think we would be looking to work with. But I invite New York Republicans.

Statewide, we need a housing compact. Statewide, we need investments in nuclear energy. So much happens at the state legislative level, and we need suburban Democrats, we need city Democrats, and we'd love to have Republicans on board as well.

Ryder Kessler:

To expand on that a little bit, there is a kind of "bipartisan" — and I'm using air quotes to folks who can't see me right now — nature to abundance in New York, but where the two "parties" — air quotes again — are the left and the center-left. Given the Democratic supermajority, the Democratic primaries are generally competitive between the person who's the more center-left moderate person and the person who's the farther left progressive person.

What we have seen is that abundance, support for YIMBYism on housing or support for radical investments in public transit or deployment of renewable energy, is not a point on that spectrum. There are progressive, further left Democrats in New York who are very abundance-minded, but who might be lonely amongst a set of political allies who don't share those attitudes, and there are also people in the center-left who are abundance-minded.

Part of the reason we started Abundance New York is because we saw those people as quite isolated in their political ecosystems. Because they were diffuse, they were disempowered. To unlock progress in New York, we are going to need this to become something that is on the agenda of the whole Democratic coalition, not just one part of it.

Laurence Pevsner:

I see two fundamental communications challenges that you have. One is that you have to explain this new axis to people. And then second, you have the perennial problem of how you get people to care about local issues to begin with. How are you thinking about those two challenges?

Ryder Kessler:

Your question gets at two things. One is that the community of people who have power in New York and who dictate what happens in New York politics is actually very small. And there are a lot of people who are not paying attention to local politics. They're not going to community board meetings, they're not even voting in local primaries.

And so there's two approaches. One is, within that small group of people — the fewer than 3,000 who are on the community boards and go to the elections that get single-digits in terms of voter turnout — how do we build power for abundance? Because those people, they already appreciate that local policy matters, they already know how to exert their power, but they are not necessarily abundance-aligned. By offering Abundance New York as a program, we have seen that there actually is a lot of demand. So we do monthly happy hours, but we also help people join community boards. We train people to run for office. We help people connect with candidates who are aligned. We help people do more effective advocacy.

But to the second point, a lot of people are not paying attention. They're not reading Ezra Klein, they're not voting in primaries. They are a bigger lift in terms of how to raise awareness that what happens on their own street really does matter to them. They really care about their rent, they care about their commute. We help them understand that those things are a reflection of which city council candidate they vote for in a primary that might not have been on their radar. And so we do have to do some education, but we benefit from the fact that these local fights are very salient when we can connect the dots to local policymaking.

Laurence Pevsner:

This is one of the most diverse cities in the country. You have really different regions, five different boroughs, tons of different types of people in this city, all with different special interest groups backing them. How do you work with these different groups? Are there some that are really on board with abundance?

Catherine Vaughn:

Some proto-abundance groups have been here all along, fighting for the issues that we care most about. Open New York, Open Plans and Transportation Alternatives, and Riders Alliance, are working on housing, public space and public transit, making our streets safer, making our streets more joyful, making New York as New York-y as it can be.

And then groups like New York League of Conservation Voters are working on environmental issues that are related to the abundance agenda. So we have been working with the leaders of a lot of those groups to understand their priorities and put some of those in front of our members, who might believe in the bigger vision but aren't as plugged into what 421-a versus 485-x is, or know specifically what legislation they should be thinking about and fighting for when it comes to safer streets.

One thing we noticed was that the streets people and the housing people and the environmental people were not always talking to each other. So first building alliances and coalitions among those groups would make the whole effort around abundance stronger and would ensure our elected officials feel accountable to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

On the left, a lot of traditional leftist groups that might have been anti-housing are now acknowledging that building more is a more progressive policy so that people can afford to live here.

We’re also seeing a kind of a scrambling of alliances. We're seeing some groups that might have traditionally been in favor of less housing change their tune. So thinking about various unions, labor is split on housing. On the one hand, lots of different unions are involved in the construction of housing. Some union members are really suffering from the housing crisis in New York, and so unions are really thinking about how they can ensure their members are benefiting from these policies.

On the left, too, a lot of traditional leftist groups that might have been anti-housing are now acknowledging that building more is a more progressive policy so that people can afford to live here.

Danny Crichton:

Earlier this year, we had the 50th anniversary of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. Robert Moses is like the shadow in the corner every time you talk about growth in New York. In fact, one of the reasons we have such diffuse authority to build in New York was a response to the Robert Moses era. We developed rules and processes; we developed the community board meetings. The environmental movement came about at the exact same time, in the 1970s as Robert Moses declined. So we have all those environmental regulations coming in at the state and local levels as well.

Let’s go from strategizing around bringing the community together and organizing to actual tactics and leverage points. How much is progress about changing New York’s complicated bureaucracies and procedures versus alternative tactics, like mobilizing voters at the polls or putting people on every community board, every council?

Catherine Vaughn:

We're doing both. Community boards exist. They are a part of the ULURP [Uniform Land Use Review Procedure] process to vote on new land-use decisions, or to at least advise on them, but they obviously play an outsized role and often really influence the electeds who are in those districts. As long as they exist, we need to put people on them.

While we're doing that, we're also thinking about how these decision-making processes have to structurally change. And to your point, a lot of them were put in place around the time of or right after the Robert Moses era, when we faced a completely different set of problems in New York. People were fleeing the city. We didn't have a housing crisis. Neighborhoods were being razed to put in highways, which had especially pernicious impacts on communities of color. Environmental review processes were needed to stop some of the ravages of building dirty energy and developing over green spaces.

But we're now in a place of going from green environmentalism to gray environmentalism, and we need to think about how we're in a housing crisis and housing density is a way for us to reduce emissions and be a cleaner and greener city. So we need to change the structures, we need to change the processes to actually meet the challenges of the moment.

Danny Crichton:

Let me just ask a practical question, because I don't think we've ever had local officials on the podcast before. You are both on community boards. What is the work like? How much time do you put into it? How often are the meetings? Are there better boards, worse boards, how heterogeneous are they?

Ryder Kessler:

Board service is intense and onerous, which in itself is a selection mechanism that often means it's harder for younger folks, people who travel for work or who are parents of young kids, to participate.

Community Board 2 in Manhattan, where I serve, is from Canal Street to 14th Street. The 50 people on that board have to participate three nights a month. We have a full board meeting once a month where all 50 of us are in a room, often a school auditorium, and we hear the reports and the resolutions that the committees of the board have prepared and passed. Then we vote to approve or reject those resolutions from the committees.

Speaking for myself, not representing the board at all, our board is quite status quo oriented and is generally opposed to new housing. And that's a reflection of the fact that the board, though meant to be a representation of the people in the community, does not fully reflect the community’s demographics.

The abundance-minded borough presidents, including Mark Levine here in Manhattan, have been thinking about representation more. He's added to the application questions like, "When considering new housing, what do you prioritize? More homes, or neighborhood character? When getting around the city, do you drive, or do you walk, or take the bus?"

But the reality is that the people who have time to devote three to four hours several nights a month, plus the time to read and write resolutions, are likely to be people for whom the status quo is working.

Catherine Vaughn:

I would say Ryder's board is more challenging than mine. I think Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn Borough president, has also done a really great job trying to appoint more abundance-aligned folks to boards. That being said, I'm on the Land Use Committee, and a lot of my district is historically landmarked. So I am often reviewing applications for someone changing the door on their building.

This is what really makes me think about how we need to change the structures. Like, why is anyone spending their time on this? Is it in character with the brownstones in the neighborhood? I don't care. And should as much of my neighborhood be landmarked as is? Absolutely not.

We are in an incredibly transit-rich area near Barclay Center, and we should be building. We should be building more, we should be building higher. We shouldn't be stuck in amber. It's made me more radicalized about abundance.

Laurence Pevsner:

You put out a slate of candidates you endorsed [before NYC’s city-wide primaries]. How do you go about evaluating and talking to these candidates?

Catherine Vaughn:

As we thought about whom to endorse, we reviewed what folks have said publicly, what's in their policy positions, what they have said to us. We also leaned on some of the other organizations and folks in the ecosystem that have specific vertical policy expertise in housing, in transit, in energy, et cetera. Thinking broadly about what we're looking for, we want folks running for office in New York to admit that there is a supply shortage of housing, that we need to build more, that we need to build more of all types of housing — not just capital A, capital H Affordable Housing, but market-rate units as well.

Zellnor Myrie put out a plan to build and preserve a million units of housing in New York, and that is the order of magnitude that we need. When we saw someone coming out with a plan for 20,000 homes, that was not impressive. That's not what we're looking for over the next decade.

On public space and public transit, we were thinking about support for policies like congestion pricing and making the city accessible for people not just in cars but for pedestrians and commuters using our public transit systems as well.

And then on the environment and energy, we looked at plans for making our city more resilient to the climate crises that are now happening every year and how interested were candidates in investing in renewable energy and ensuring that New York remains a leader in driving the energy transition.

Ryder Kessler:

It has been really gratifying in terms of how quickly people, even mayoral candidates, wanted to engage with our community. I would also say, there is a generational shift in terms of younger elected officials. Young is a very capacious description, but I mean people who are a little bit more forward-thinking in the policies they want to see happen in New York. Sometimes they need political cover to be brave. They need to know it won't just be the NIMBYs at the community board screaming about the tunnel under the city if they take a stand on supporting a new housing development or a new bike lane or an open street.

If they know there will be a few dozen people in their district who will have their back, then they can do what they maybe really want to do, and feel less political exigency to preserve the status quo.

Danny Crichton:

Talking about working together: Catherine and Ryder, you're building a movement, you're building a community. What are the best ways to connect? We have a lot of listeners, many of whom are the exact people you're describing — generally young people, generally people on planes, generally can't do so many nights a month. What are the best ways for them to join the abundance movement here in New York City?

Ryder Kessler:

Come to our monthly happy hours, subscribe to our Substack, go to abundanceny.org and sign up. You'll get our periodic information about what's happening in New York politics and policy. You'll have opportunities to come together, socialize with other abundance-minded New Yorkers, engage with your elected officials, learn about policy if you're interested.

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