Policymakers from across the political spectrum are endorsing the abundance agenda, with voices ranging from Jared Polis to Zohran Mamdani embracing the framing and even the policies. No wonder, since even progressive stalwarts who have worked inside government can identify with the fundamental problem identified by the pro-abundance crowd: Our governments (federal, state, and local alike) should build and provide more and faster, whether that’s housing, transportation, or even “soft” infrastructure like care. It’s important not just for delivering good policy but also to make the best case for preserving democracy.

Too often, progressives and proponents of abundance have struggled to find common ground, and some advocates of organized labor have been particularly skeptical of the abundance movement. Progressives worry about aspects of the pro-abundance policy agenda, starting with deregulation. That’s because government regulation has been a key tool for achieving progressive policy goals, from ensuring safe drinking water to protecting retirement savings from scams. And how much regulation is “too much” is very much in the eye of the beholder. While abundance proponents worry that public engagement can be exploited to give NIMBY neighbors limitless opportunities to preserve parochial interests, progressives have a long history of fighting for engagement mechanisms that help advance people-centered policy that is both more responsive to concerns and more resilient in the face of attacks.

But community and worker empowerment doesn’t have to be at odds with abundance. Especially when it comes to building housing and other physical infrastructure, the act of giving community organizations, labor unions, and other impacted groups more power, not less, may hold the key to speeding up development and unlocking a progressive abundance agenda. We need innovative strategies to empower communities to shape both what and how we build. That requires policies that can strengthen and sufficiently resource community-based organizations, creating real public engagement at the front end of development. In exchange, once communities, developers, and governments enter into an enforceable plan, other regulations can be streamlined and further challenges set aside. This type of arrangement can allow private industry or even the government to build more and build faster than before.

Why the Caution on Abundance

Taking a step back, it’s understandable that some progressives have eyed the abundance frame with varying levels of skepticism. But progressives themselves have advanced several policy ideas in recent years that align with a pro-abundance agenda. President Biden’s signature Investing in America agenda—a key tentpole of Bidenomics—reflected a well-orchestrated push for a progressive industrial policy aimed at reshoring critical industries for economic growth and national security. The Biden White House’s drive for agencies to reduce burdens to accessing government services drew from an influential book explaining how red tape gets in the way of services for individuals, not just for businesses. Others have identified expanding and reimagining state capacity as a fundamental building block of achieving a progressive vision for a “just, inclusive democracy and economy,” and that was before the Trump Administration took a shredder to the fabric of the federal government. Even the new economic populist movement has some decidedly pro-abundance undertones—for example, one pro-competition advocate’s argument that antitrust enforcement, public options, and even bars on coercive contract terms can make our markets more responsive to consumer demand.

Progressives should embrace the goals of abundance. We need to build government institutions that can deliver services quickly, efficiently, and accurately, and that can do so at scale. This is all the more important because the power and reach of the government give it a unique role. Too often, if the government falls through, there’s no competitor to turn to. We need institutions that are nimble enough to serve everyone, not just those who are easiest to reach.

But many progressives get stuck on the abundance goal of streamlining regulations. Ever since the New Deal, private-sector regulations have been a frontline tool for progressives to promote a range of important policies, including civil rights, workplace safety, environmental protection, and consumer protection. Meanwhile, deregulation has been a libertarian cause for decades, but especially in the age of Elon Musk’s pronouncement that “Regulations, basically, should be default gone.”

We can’t expect, and wouldn’t want, progressives to embrace Musk’s libertarian worldview. If we just rip away the rules, our communities would feel the impacts—from dirtier air and water to more dangerous jobs. What’s worse, the free market doesn’t always provide what’s needed due to, for example, anticompetitive practices and other forms of market failure.

Take housing. Building more housing can address very real needs in the market. Abundance advocates are correct that too many high-density developments are hindered by regulations ranging from restrictions on multifamily buildings to parking requirements, all of which can reduce density and increase housing costs. This has significant implications for out-migration from blue states and blue cities. In response, one strategy has been to subsidize affordable housing development, but often with strings attached—for example, labor and environmental regulations, small business set-asides, and accessibility standards. Critics have likened these additional requirements to adding too many toppings to an everything bagel—the so-called “everything-bagel liberalism”—which can make matters worse by making development costlier and slower.

For decades, libertarian housing activists have advocated for deregulation as the most straightforward answer. To them, if we could just knock out “red tape” like zoning and even building codes, everyone would have a home they could afford, even if some of those homes may not seem desirable or even habitable by current  standards.

But most of today’s abundance proponents aren’t calling to Make New York City Texas Again, let alone to restore the tenements of the Lower East Side. Most are balancing how to safeguard important values while streamlining rules that do more harm than good. Put into bagel terms, they’re proposing we make a lot more ovens (with subsidies or incentives for development, and public resources to process permits more quickly) and maybe scale back to fewer flavors (by choosing fewer policy goals, which may mean fewer regulations and required permits).

Community Input Done Right

So which bagel toppings should stick around—i.e., which rules (and policy goals) should stay, and which should go? Yes to more Halal carts, but no to eliminating food safety standards? Abundance proponents don’t have a ready answer for where to draw the line, though they do speak approvingly of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s retention of labor standards in quickly rebuilding that section of I-95 after its collapse. That shows that the answer can’t simply be to defer to well-resourced developers, let alone to empower unelected bureaucrats, however well-meaning, given that they could favor their own priorities rather than those of impacted communities.

Indeed, the communities that are impacted by development are in the best position to help governments and developers draw the right lines. As progressives, we should prioritize building people-centered policies and take power into account—not only because doing so can lead to better policy, but also because it’s better for building more successful coalitions and more durable policy, even tapping into policy feedback loops that make advances more resilient in the face of unrelenting attacks. Beyond that, building more and faster is also a win for communities, and especially those who can’t afford housing now.

Some proponents of abundance view community input as a problem, at least in the way it can often play out. Sure, community meetings offer opportunities for NIMBY neighbors to protest development for any number of reasons. Well-resourced communities can launch challenges that delay development for years, if not block it completely—often leveraging litigation to enforce well-meaning regulations.

But instead of minimizing engagement, a more effective approach to tackling this problem is to improve engagement. Too often, today’s community engagement mechanisms spotlight the loudest voices (or those with the most resources), not a cross-section of the community—and certainly not from people who can’t afford to live there because there’s not enough housing. We should establish upfront mechanisms that give communities—including community organizations, labor unions, and other affected groups—a real seat at the table, rather than grudgingly conceding multiple disjointed opportunities to challenge a proposal throughout its life cycle or through litigation. We must also find new ways to engage people who don’t scan public hearing notices, let alone have the resources to litigate and stall development.

It’s worth testing reforms to strengthen engagement and empower impacted communities so that they can articulate their priorities based on local needs and local concerns—whether they want poppy, sesame, or even blueberry bagels. That’s better than letting developers or unelected bureaucrats make the call. When appropriate, negotiated policies can even be enshrined in agreements that are enforceable in court. In return, once these agreements with impacted groups have been signed, other requirements can be streamlined—essentially, deregulated—and further veto points can be eliminated.

For example, cities and states can pass laws that streamline construction requirements only after developers enter into community benefits agreements, which are enforceable contracts between community and worker organizations and developers. In these agreements, community organizations can negotiate for their priorities, whether that be affordable housing, community spaces, local hiring targets, or something else. Labor unions can seek to embed key terms from project labor agreements, which are pre-hire collective bargaining agreements that ensure fair wages and benefits for all workers involved in the development. Negotiations over community benefits agreements result in signed agreements that are enforceable—i.e., the union or community group can bring legal action if the developer fails to uphold its side of the bargain. Community benefits agreements could also be structured to keep community and labor groups at the table after construction ends, thereby promoting strong relationships with any subsequent community managers or the city.

The 2022 community benefits agreement signed between New Flyer, Jobs to Move America, and the Alabama Coalition of Community Benefits provides a prime example of what such agreements can offer in terms of higher wages, employment opportunities, training opportunities, and even environmental commitments. Broad community coalitions in Alabama and California targeted the bus manufacturer New Flyer upon its expansion to Anniston Alabama, for which the company received a total of nearly $1.4 million in public subsidies. By the end of a multiyear campaign, New Flyer agreed to a series of critical good jobs provisions for its bus manufacturing plans in both Aniston, Alabama, and Ontario, California. Those provisions include building inclusive training programs, selecting 45 percent of new hires and 20 percent of promotions from historically disadvantaged groups, and adopting a “ban the box” policy to give workers with criminal records a fair chance to compete, in addition to creating a pathway for an eventual neutrality and card-check agreement to recognize labor unions.

Workers and the community clearly benefit from such agreements, but they also provide a vehicle for greater efficiency. Cities and states could pass new laws providing that developers entering into community benefits agreements would be exempt from certain regulations not addressed in the final agreement—for example, zoning requirements. This isn’t a stretch from current practices: Unions regularly support fast-track permitting for development, or testify before public utility commissions, in places where they have negotiated collective bargaining agreements to ensure good jobs. Indeed, developers today know how to cut deals with cities to secure tax relief for building factories or stadiums; they just rarely bring workers or community groups to the table.

Another idea touted by some of the most creative labor experts involves deploying principles from sectoral bargaining to develop multi-stakeholder, representative panels that can hammer out enforceable agreements. In the labor context, sectoral bargaining involves having employers and workers (usually through unions) each select representatives for a board that recommends sector-wide wage and benefit guarantees. Government entities are also generally involved, either directly on the panel or reviewing the panel’s recommendations to determine whether to enforce them and extend them to cover workers throughout the sector, regardless of whether they are members of the union.

Similarly, state or local governments could establish representative panels to expedite the development application process. For example, they could appoint representatives with an eye toward addressing environmental, labor, and housing concerns; this panel would then be empowered to negotiate streamlined and enforceable agreements. A one-stop negotiation at the panel could approve a development application and eliminate subsequent regulations and later reviews. These panels would become more efficient over time, developing a library of template agreements that could provide a starting point for each development.

An Abundance That Works for All

Community benefits agreements and representative panels aren’t the only two options for empowering communities to draw the line on where to streamline regulations. In another large-scale example, postwar Japan employed a massive land readjustment scheme based on supermajority votes to fundamentally reshape not only zoning but also the very ownership of private property, without resorting to the use of eminent domain. Under this approach, upon a two-thirds supermajority vote of affected homeowners, they collectively gave up their individual homes and even their land in exchange for a share of a larger building constructed on the site. The resulting building’s value could be significantly enhanced by additional infrastructure and density surrounding it, compensating for the loss of land and some control. Marshalling this sort of public approval—not to mention the political will to support the policy—likely requires both time and buy-in from various affected stakeholders. However, the payoff can be massive both in terms of abundance and democratic legitimacy, especially when compared to top-down processes like eminent domain.

To be sure, certain regulations shouldn’t be on the table for elimination—for example, civil rights laws and accessibility standards. Some such laws are clearly ineligible under current statutory text or case law. Beyond that, states and cities could pass enabling legislation that outlines which existing rules are off-limits for agreements, and lawmakers could declare in new legislation whether their laws fall on one side or the other of that line. In fact, a city may even decide to set stringent new standards that, in effect, encourage private parties to contract around them rather than stick with the default, which was how some early citywide living-wage laws worked, in that they required benefits payments but provided opt-outs through collective bargaining agreements.

It’s also true that people with the resources to oppose development can always attempt to launch various creative legal challenges. However, sign-offs from community organizations and labor unions—through community benefits agreements, representative panels, and even amicus briefs—can strengthen defenses and limit abusive litigation strategies intended to delay a project indefinitely.

Finally, while labor unions are often well positioned to represent workers, we need more organizations that can represent other key interests in communities around the country. And we need some kind of bar for what constitutes a legitimate community organization as opposed to a “grasstops” organization that exists only to make deals—perhaps building on the example of the U.S. Department of Labor’s longstanding oversight of labor unions. For this and other “bargaining for the common good” strategies, we simply need more resources for independent community organizing like tenants unions. Philanthropy has a vital role to play in improving the ecosystem of community organizations, and many foundations have stepped up to support organizing. However, cities that embrace abundance should deploy their own policy levers to empower communities, ranging from proactive outreach programs to recognizing and even directly resourcing key organizations. Community benefits agreements could be structured to provide fixed-term or ongoing funding to community partners, ensuring they can continue to represent their members.

In the end, a vision of abundance that empowers communities holds so much promise—not only for choosing which regulations are actually necessary (akin to selecting the right flavor of bagel), but also for assembling the right coalitions to build more and build faster. By empowering communities and generating buy-in, we can use abundance to build sufficient political capital for these strategies to endure into the future.