Making Abundance real in San Francisco

What is required to turn the ideas of Abundance into policy outcomes in reality.

Abundance offers an intellectual framework to refill the well of ideas powering American politics and align institutions around a new political order. But books are books. A successful political movement requires strategy, organization, financing, and a ton of hard work to produce ‘outcomes in reality.’

So how are we going to make the ideas of Abundance real?

The YIMBY movement offers a precursor to study. To zoom in further, San Francisco is the proving ground of both the YIMBY and Abundance movements. With Ezra and Derek in town for their national book launch, this is a read out of what we’re learning on the ground via Abundant San Francisco.

It’s no accident that the Abundance movement is forming here. San Francisco is the epicenter of the global technology industry. The industry transforming the world has collided with reality on the ground; a 49 square mile city of 827,000 residents governed by the elected leaders of the City and County of San Francisco. Our local government is a 175-year-old institution with 35,000+ employees across a tangle of 50+ divisions, and layers and layers of complexity, rules, and cruft—in urgent need of reform and renewal.

Photo credit mingz chong

This collision of forces—a powerful and disruptive economic force v.s. a local government designed to protect the status quo—is a hospitable environment for incubating political movements. It echoes the role Manhattan played in forming the Progressive movement 100 years ago when New York City was at the center of America’s industrial economy.

Abundance Network has been operating in San Francisco for a few years now. As a political startup, we’re ‘figuring it out as we go along’, learning a ton, and making measurable progress towards our goals, with plenty of mistakes and setbacks along the way. Our approach has been to be curious, humble, and outcome-focused.

Here is a summary of what we have learned—key decisions we made, why we made them, what has surprised us, and what we feel is most important for the nascent Abundance movement to get right.

What is required to change how a city government operates

San Francisco politics plays for keeps. Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Gavin Newsom all came up through our local political institutions. These same institutions presided over a city government that grew from $4B to $16B but without much to show for it.

Democrats do not have a marketing or campaign problem, we Democrats have a ‘product’ problem. Governing is the product, and blue cities and blue states are failing at the basics: shelter, safety, and city services.

Why?

A surprising learning: it’s not that narrow interests such as NIMBYs are themselves that powerful in blue cities, it’s that the general interest is unorganized and weak. So weak that a single well placed crank can jam up the entire city. Other than scrappy DSA chapters, nobody is really setting up shop in municipal governments. So in most cities, the narrow interests of status quo easily dominate.

Conversely, actually changing how a city government operates is brutally difficult. Driving outcomes requires aligning the gears of government; bedeviling complex and difficult work. This work is distinct from the ‘necessary but insufficient’ work of advocacy.

The most important line from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book was: “to pursue Abundance is to pursue institutional renewal.” Blue cities will thrive when their civic institutions are rehabilitated.

Our civic leaders training program is one of our most important investments.

We have learned over and over again that this is the role of civic leaders. Civic leaders govern institutions, fundraise, and lead commissions. Some run for office. Civic leaders are responsible for developing a shared vision, detailing plans, and carrying through the work of government reform. This is why organizing civic leaders is so central to the work of making Abundance real.

Getting the gears of government reform moving v.s. the inertia of the status quo requires substantial and sustained political power. Political power is generated by political coalitions. If you go it alone, you fail.

Political coalitions capable of permanently changing government are ones where multiple parties can reasonably claim ‘if not for me, this would not have happened.’ In San Francisco, all of our wins have multiple partners who can claim victory. That’s how coalitional politics works.

But political coalitions get stuck in the status-quo trap of performative politics for good reason. Changing the outcomes of government means confronting difficult tradeoffs inside your coalition. The status quo really does not like it when someone ‘gores their ox.’ The most likely failure mode for Abundance in cities would be politicians running on Abundance, but then nothing really changes. This happens when the hidden, difficult, and critically important work of re-aligning power coalitions fails.

In San Francisco mid-century, the dominant political coalition was employers, labor, and civic reformers—e.g. the growth machine. They built infrastructure such as BART that still powers the region. They also did terrible things with their power, including destroying the Fillmore district via redevelopment, and attempted to transect the city with highways.

The Abundance movement will only succeed in blue cities by re-forming and organizing the political coalition of employers, labor, and civic institutions behind a just, positive-sum vision of growth. The nascent abundance-aligned coalition that helped flip the San Francisco Democratic Party and the Board of Supervisors was composed of Carpenters, Laborers, Operating Engineers, business leaders, YIMBYs, and civic reformers.

Organizing the abundance faction

An inordinate amount of effort goes into building, sustaining, and growing our coalition. Getting a heterogenous political faction to align >90% of the time on ballot endorsements requires constant organizing.

But ‘work works.’ The abundance aligned coalition in San Francisco went from 2 of 11 votes on the Board of Supervisors in 2022, to taking control of 18 of 24 seats governing the San Francisco Democratic Party and building to a 6 to 5 majority on the Board of Supervisors in 2024.

When we started operating, our analysis of the upcoming Supervisor races showed a difficult path to flip the board by 2026, so we set our target for 2028. But we accomplished our main political goals in two years versus the six we had budgeted.

How?

Early factional organizing prepared our coalition to capture a swing in voter sentiment away from performative left politics and towards the basics of governing: safety, housing, and city services.

Our coalition got together right after the November 2022 races and did a work back of everything that would need to happen to pick up seats in 2024. This workback became a de-facto operating plan for the coalition. Everyone fulfilled their commitments to the team. So when voters became increasingly frustrated by a lack of outcomes on the basics and demanded change from our government, our coalition was ready, and our candidates won.

We were surprised by how little connective tissue there was in the coalition at the outset. We had a hunch ‘on the ground organizing’ would be important, but in the end, it may be the most important thing we help do.

Working backwards from ‘outcomes in reality’

The goals of Abundance go far beyond remaking our political parties around a new set of ideas. The multi-decade goal is to renovate the whole of American government.

The vast scale of what’s required to make the Abundance movement real is daunting. Success requires embedding a flywheel: where policy wins unlock additional resources and demand, and the movement cascades throughout political geographies and governments across the United States on its own, growing power. That’s how transformative political movements propagate.

Right now the Abundance movement has to rely far too much on intellectual arguments. When we have a litany of ‘outcomes in reality’ we can point to as evidence that Abundance delivers the goods, then we can really start scaling.

The atomic unit of these ‘outcomes in reality’ will be in municipal governments such as San Francisco. Why? Policy exits the world of intellectual abstraction and becomes ‘outcomes in reality’ almost entirely at the level of municipal government. We personally experience the policy outcomes of housing, transportation, energy, education, public safety services in the communities where we choose to build our lives. For whatever efficiency DOGE is after, Federal government only employs 15% of the total U.S. government workforce, including the military.

This is why for the first few years of our work, our overriding strategy in San Francisco was to focus on outcomes that ‘exist in reality’ and meaningfully change peoples lives. We knew that after years of effort, millions of dollars invested, and so much political risk taken—we needed to be able to walk around San Francisco and point and say ‘we helped build that’.

These were the policy outcomes we focused on first:

Ministerial Approval & Rezoning—’Cranes in the sky’

Housing is unsurprisingly the lodestar for Abundance policies in San Francisco. We have been focused on establishing ‘by-right’ housing approvals and upzoning the city for 80,000+ more units of housing.

With the passage of San Francisco State Senator Wiener’s SB-423 last year, accountability for San Francisco’s worst-in-nation housing policies is now finally arriving. This was our second go at this after the narrow defeat of Prop D in 2022 by 4,651 votes.

SB-423 established a ministerial or ‘by-right’ approval for housing based on objective standards. This means no more CEQA, discretionary review, neighborhood appeals, design review negotiations, zoning-required parking requirements, case-by-case interpretations of the city’s planning code, or planning commission oversight. There are 33+ SB-423 projects in process, including a 1000+ unit project over the Honda dealership in the Mission.

By-right housing approvals fundamentally change the political role of San Francisco Supervisors regarding housing development. The discretionary review process up until now has put City Supervisors in a position of personally negotiating between developers and the neighbors. Many Supervisors used this position of power to exact concessions from developers for their politically aligned neighborhood groups. Supervisors are now cut out of the approval process.

The elimination of review meetings removed the most powerful tool NIMBYs groups have leveraged to organize themselves. This frees up city staff to do their jobs instead of managing neighborhood groups and our convoluted housing approval process. SF Planning expects to recoup 20-40% of expert staff bandwidth for actual planning work.

The coalition is midstream on the rezoning work, which we are optimistic will deliver the most substantial upzoning to San Francisco in generations. This has been a multi-year process spanning the Mayor’s office, Supervisors’ offices, Governor's office, the state legislature, HCD, and advocates. This orchestration provides a template for what coalitional politics, well-executed, looks like. The city is benefiting from all of the organizing groundwork laid by YIMBYs over the past decade.

The rezoning, combined with ministerial approvals, will bring about a new era for housing in San Francisco. Within a year, we will be able to give a walking tour of new apartment buildings built for San Francisco families, enabled by these policy outcomes.

Public space—JFK Promenade & Ocean Beach Park

Ocean Beach Park at Sunset—Photo credit KidSafeSF

Most working class families in San Francisco by necessity will live in small apartments. The trade is access to world-class public spaces, and economic opportunity. Taking a family of four to a Warriors game will cost you hundreds of dollars. A walk down JFK Promenade or a sunset at Ocean Beach Park is free. Great cities reserve their most sacred space for the public.

Ocean Beach Park is the largest pedestrianization project in California’s history. JFK Promenade turned one of the most dangerous streets in San Francisco into the crown jewel of Golden Gate Park. These changes have meaningfully improved the experience of living in San Francisco.

As we begin to build housing in San Francisco again, residents will see the cranes in the sky and cement trucks roll by. The disruption must come with improvements that everyone in San Francisco can experience; experiences so good they remind you why you choose to build your life in San Francisco.

The next phase

We now have an early but demonstrable track-record of Abundance outcomes in San Francisco. These outcomes were enabled by our abundant-aligned political coalition, which flipped the San Francisco Democratic Party (DCCC) and the Board of Supervisors in ‘24.

With an aligned Mayor and majority on the Board of Supervisors, the aperture of policies we can take on has expanded substantially. At the moment, we are bottlenecked on the bandwidth to design and execute the reform of government, which is heavy-weight work.

We only take on policy areas if we can check three boxes:

✅ We have conviction we understand the policy levers to pull to get the outcome.
✅ We have the political power necessary to pull the levers.
✅ We have the resources—talent and money—required to pull the levers over the required period of time.

While the politics of land-use are very difficult, the policy remedies are simple. Either JFK is a park or a dangerous road. Either housing is legal to build or it’s not. In the next phase of work, we will be venturing into the far more difficult terrain of government agency design and execution. We are approaching this work with humility, and are not yet able to check these boxes for critical government reform efforts such as in public safety and education.

But as it happens, now that the politics of San Francisco government reform has improved, more and more civic institutions with deep expertise are showing up to join forces and help. Enabled by political victories and policy outcomes, the abundance aligned power coalition—one capable of renovating government and dedicated to a just, positive sum view of growth—is expanding.