Derek Thompson Talks “Abundance” with Raleigh, Durham Mayors

A new book titled Abundance from national journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson has been a topic du jour around water coolers, local coffee shops, and even city halls` since its release last month. The authors’ proposed remedy for issues like America’s housing scarcity and stalled scientific breakthroughs has captivated a wide swath of the electorate from Democrats and progressives, to moderate Republicans and Libertarians alike.

On Thursday, an audience gathered at the historic Hayti Heritage Center to hear Thompson, who currently lives in Chapel Hill, in conversation with two of the Triangle’s most important decision-makers: Mayor Janet Cowell of Raleigh and her Durham counterpart, Mayor Leonardo Williams. The conversation was moderated by Blair Reeves of Carolina Forward, a left-leaning advocacy group based in Carrboro.

As INDY writers who cover growth, development and local government, we were curious what our mayors, who rarely make appearances together, thought of Abundance and how they might take inspiration from it to run their respective cities. We wanted to hear them wrestle with some of the more challenging questions Klein and Thompson pose in their book: Why is it so hard to get housing built here? How much community engagement is too much? What would it take to make our local government truly efficient, and not in a Musk-y way? Instead, the mayors’ contributions to the discussion were fairly surface-level, barring a few moments of candor.

For adherents to an “abundance” mindset, Klein and Thompson’s book delivers good news and bad news about local government. The good news is that, in Thomspon’s words, “local politics is where we have the biggest opportunity to make a difference.” 

The bad news, according to the authors, is that many Democrat-run cities are so bogged down by layers of cumbersome bureaucracy that they’ve failed to build housing and mass transit—key ingredients to urban life that help working people thrive—and are becoming increasingly expensive and unequal as a result. The book encourages Democrats to respond to the Trump administration’s “politics of scarcity” with a more positive, expansive “politics of abundance”: more housing, more public transportation, more clean energy—and less of the procedural clutter that gets in the way of achieving those goals. 

In his opening spiel, Thompson laid out what he sees as the motivating issue for a majority of American voters: unaffordability. He said leaders across the country needed to counter the dearth of housing stock in the US by reversing policy decisions made throughout the 20th century and eliminating barriers to production, thus creating a more affordable market.

“When I think about abundance at the local level, I think it’s really important for me to think about the courage to pursue the goals that we find most important,” Thompson said. “And to me, when I look across the country, housing is just the most important goal.”

Residents of the Triangle are no strangers to the housing crunch. City council meetings are packed, sometimes overrun, with folks sounding off to their local representatives about how to manage growth responsibly. Many residents want more affordable housing, but not necessarily in their backyard, and more public services, preferably without the corresponding tax increase. They’ve spent years advocating for more citizen input in government, not less. This flavor of resident, Thompson said, has a penchant for drawing too narrow a “circle of care” around themselves and neglecting what’s going on outside of it.  

“Sometimes you’ll see people say, ‘I’m against that development within the city, because if you build a house there, you’re going to have to chop down these 10 trees,’” Thompson explained. “That’s compelling if all you can see are those 10 trees … that seems, on its face, to be anti-environmental. What that person can’t see are the 1,000 trees that have to be cut down when the 50 units that would otherwise be built as a dense apartment building are instead built in some exurban development.”

This type of convoluted logic, Klein and Thompson argue, is primarily a feature of Democrat-run cities. In America’s biggest metros—San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles—the decline of housing construction has made life for middle and lower-class Americans all but impossible.

“I think too many people in the working class have just felt like they can’t make a life in many of America’s most productive and richest cities, which tend to be governed by Democrats,” Thompson said.

Cowell and Williams’ cities fit the mold. Raleigh has a housing shortage of some 37,000 units, by Cowell’s estimate. Durham, too, is growing faster than it can build. Both places are becoming increasingly unaffordable for longtime residents.

“That’s where the pain points come in,” Williams said. “But you know, either the people who live here already will pay for [growth], or we expand the tax base and we share that wealth. That is what I spend most of my time doing, trying to communicate how growth is necessary, and how we can also give pain pills for the growth as well.”

Amid the dire need for increased housing and more robust services to support a growing population, the mayors acknowledged that all the red tape they have to navigate to get things done in their respective cities can be maddening.

“I love just making decisions, and the amount of process at all levels of government drives me nuts,” Cowell confided to Thompson. “Your book was like therapy for me.”

Williams was even more candid in his assessment of the City of Durham’s bureaucracy, describing the typical progression as “get yelled at, do community engagement, and die in the process.”

Reeves, the moderator, asked the mayors about the biggest challenges they face in managing their growth, but they mostly touted their successes instead.  

Cowell acknowledged Raleigh’s critical housing shortage but pointed out that the city council has approved 3,000 new units for construction since she was sworn in as mayor in December. “I think we have tilted more towards results than process in this area,” she said. Oh, and a prestigious nonprofit just named Raleigh the best-performing metro area in the country.

Williams noted that Durham is one of the “best-run cities in America” (an accolade awarded by WalletHub) and boasted vaguely that “we are on the cusp of our next renaissance.” He elevated the development of the Discover Durham nonprofit off-shoot, Durham Next, as a success story for cutting through red tape in service of building future capital assets like Williams’s envisioned  “innovation” center, a project estimated at roughly half-a-billion dollars.

At one point in the conversation, Reeves quipped to the mayors, “we’re not going to bring up the light rail today?” 

“Please don’t,” Williams replied, eliciting a burst of strained laughter from the audience. And so the panelists did not discuss how the Triangle’s transit agency has tried and failed three times to deliver on a large-scale rail project for the region—the type of project that nests right in the intersection of economic growth, science and technology that Klein and Thompson lift up in their book.

The present dismantling of the federal bureaucracy in pursuit of so-called “efficiency” looms large in the background of any conversation about Abundance. Funding for many of the projects centered in the Abundance agenda—mass transit, scientific discovery, clean energy—require serious federal investment to build at-scale, investment that runs counter to the current administration’s vision of the future. As we walked away from the discussion at Hayti, the utopia that Abundance hopes to create felt like a parallel universe.

But the panelists remained optimistic about the influence local government has over its own destiny.  Both Raleigh and Durham can make strides at the local level toward building more housing and connecting the communities through public transit, and have.

“[Trump is] trying to execute a kind of ideological purge of government, and science and global health are getting caught in the crossfire,” Thompson said. “I think that there are governors and mayors and city councils that have an extraordinary amount of power to determine their housing policies and their growth policies, their transit policies and how they build and manage growth. And while Donald Trump is doing a lot of incredibly chaotic things on a day-to-day basis, I don’t think those chaotic things eclipse the power that a lot of local governments have.”

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Chloe Courtney Bohl is a corps member for Report for America. Reach her at [email protected]. Follow Reporter Justin Laidlaw on X or send an email to [email protected].

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