PERSPECTIVE: The ‘Abundance Movement’ Needs to Help Distressed Places, Not Just Booming Ones
Date Posted: November 13, 2025
Posted In: Discussion,
From Brookings: A new, energetic push to tackle big problems is taking shape in progressive policy circles: the “abundance movement.” Its most notable priority is reforming zoning codes to make it easier to construct more housing, but the movement also calls for expanding the nation’s ability to build infrastructure, operate public services, and support scientific research.
The movement is making a bold claim: Focusing on abundance issues is the key to unlocking a future of broadly shared prosperity. However, a critique of the movement is that it ignores the needs of most people in America’s distressed places.
That’s because the abundance movement mistakenly assumes that most residents of distressed places can be helped by migration policies that make it easier for them to move to booming places by building housing there. In doing so, the movement ignores the alternative solution of “place-based jobs policies”: the strategy of creating job opportunities in distressed places. Given that, the abundance vision needs to be significantly broadened if it is to address some of the nation’s most serious social, labor market, and inclusion problems, which tend to be concentrated in distressed places.
Without this broadening, the movement’s effort to get the U.S. to develop “new things” will fail to grapple with some of our nation’s toughest challenges.
Why pay attention to the abundance movement? First, it has many prominent supporters, including journalists at The New York Times (Ezra Klein), The Atlantic (Derek Thompson, Jerusalem Demsas, Yoni Appelbaum), and Substack (Matthew Yglesias, Noah Smith). Second, the movement has attracted wide public attention, with a best-selling book (“Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson) and features in The American Prospect, Washington Monthly, The Nation, and Boston Review, to name a few.
Still, policy advocates with other priorities have pushed back against the abundance movement with critiques regarding anti-monopoly policies, stronger union power, expanded social welfare programs, stricter environmental regulations, and increased local community input. These critiques sometimes reject the abundance vision for failing to address how inequitable political power leads to inequality in economic outcomes.
This piece’s critique is different: The movement should be broadened in order to get more people in distressed places into good jobs, which should be a key part of any strategy labeled “abundance.”