Fair criticisms, and similar to many I've seen before both in the formal critic space and online. For me this is meant to be a shock to knock left-orthodoxy thinkers off their stance of "well we just need to vote blue and things will be better". The very clear message to me is that those who claim to believe in progress or change need to radically update their thinking from process oriented to results oriented. The endless committees, the fireside chats from elite academics and socialist-flirting leftists, the symbolic stances that get conflated with policy. These are not just neutral banal byproducts of current left-of-center thinking, but indeed obstacles to the claimed progress that is supposed to be at the end of this all.
I've obviously been on this board since before the book came out, but I chose this screen name because I was getting sick of the artists and activists and yard-sign liberals who claim they want oh-so-much change, only to become the most rabid obstructionist capitalists who block any ACTUAL change because it conflicts with their aesthetics and might dent their artificially inflated home prices (neighborhood character, industrial neighborhood water views, cheap free parking).
Given the state of the left in this country and the general failure to make cities affordable AND high demand, I welcome the tip toe back towards market-oriented solutions to material problems that Abundance talks about. Zoning and energy infrastructure are the two biggest things I talk about when I discuss urbanism, and so I hope the book is able to influence the conversations policymakers are having around the country.
Final anecdote, but Gavin Newsom shouted out Abundance when he signed the CEQA walk-back the other week and also had Ezra Klein on his podcast recently. There has been a ton of work from California YIMBYs as well, but when the governor of the largest state name-checks you at the biggest YIMBY bill signing in a generation, something is making it through.
