The United States is one of the wealthiest countries in human history, yet for tens of millions of its people, everyday life is defined by scarcity. Affordable housing and childcare are in short supply. Healthy, inexpensive food is difficult to find in some areas, while in others medical care is lacking.
Amy E. Lerman directs UC Berkeley's policy-focused Possibility Lab, and she sees a challenge: People often assume that scarcity is an inevitable condition of life, and that's sometimes reflected in government policy. But Lerman is committed to the idea that, even in a time of economic insecurity and political division, practical changes to policy and politics could help unleash the abundance that is possible in California and the nation.
Those ideas and values are at the heart of the Abundance Accelerator, the lab's rapidly growing two-year-old initiative that is exploring how policy can expand supplies of essential goods and services, from housing and transportation to childcare, health care and eldercare. In recent months, the initiative has recorded remarkable progress, issuing new reports and resources, holding high-powered events and building out a robust network of allies. Now California Gov. Gavin Newsom seems to have embraced the abundance agenda - and its sometimes surprising political orientation.
"It's a pragmatic approach to thinking beyond the left-right divide," said Lerman, a professor at Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and in the Department of Political Science. "We're really thinking about how liberals can do a better job investing in supply-side politics, and how conservatives can do a better job investing in workers and communities, and how we together can think about solving these problems that we all want to solve."
"Things are hard right now," added Lindsay Maple, director of the Abundance Accelerator. "The affordability crisis, the lack of access to basic goods - these are real problems affecting millions of Californians and millions of Americans. People want their local and city governments to solve problems. They want their county governments to solve problems. Regardless of ideology, people are tired of waiting for government to deliver."
The Possibility Lab, founded in 2022, uses data, research and robust community engagement to innovate policy that serves the public good. Its Abundance Accelerator initiative defies ideological categories, but for such a new program, it is attracting a network of influential partners and allies. The abundance movement has attracted critics, too. But in this moment of high political tension, when you hold that liberals should be willing to ease regulations and that conservatives should see government as a problem-solver, critics are inevitable.
'We need to build and create more'
This idea of abundance-focused policy is working its way into national political discourse, with help from supporters like prominent journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and their bestselling book Abundance, released earlier this year.
Lerman, Maple and their colleagues have been developing their initiative for several years. Its DNA is drawn in part from recent Possibility Lab projects that feature community-based decision-making, one focusing on public safety in Oakland and another on farmworker health in the Inland Empire. It's drawn also from California 100, an initiative from 2021-2023 that focused holistically on the state's future. The project was based at UC Berkeley and Stanford, and both Lerman and Maple were influential in its work.
The Abundance Accelerator came together in the summer of 2023, and was formally launched 18 months ago. Its core idea is deceptively simple: In areas such as housing or childcare, shortages are not inherent or inevitable, but rather, often result from ill-conceived or patchwork policy.
"To serve people better, we need to build and create more," says one of its recent reports. "Solving our biggest challenges, from housing to clean energy to affordable childcare, requires removing the regulatory barriers, local veto points, and institutional bottlenecks that make it too hard to produce the things people need."
Lerman and Maple have also argued for expanded education and other investment in people - architects, planners and construction workers who work in housing, for example, or the medical workers, teachers and home health workers who support childcare and eldercare.
A huge number of Californians are struggling to access basic resources like housing, eldercare, childcare and healthy foods.
Amy E. Lerman
"If we truly want to realize abundance, we need policies that make these jobs attractive and achievable: offering better wages, improving working conditions and building career pathways that recognize their vital contributions to a thriving society," they wrote earlier this year in CalMatters.
Most broadly, they are pressing for policy that's reoriented to sustainably expanding supplies of essential goods and services.
Policymakers set out to do good, they argue, but policy sometimes fails because it tries to do too much. For example, if policymakers use housing policy to also address labor and environmental issues, and if they set an inefficient process of public input, then housing shortages are a predictable result. If you want to increase supply, they say, you need policy that focuses tightly on the goal.
The Abundance Accelerator distills its goals into a basic maxim: "Build fast. Build fair." To achieve both growth and equity, the Abundance Accelerator advocates new values and new ways of looking at the world. Small-d community democracy is central to its approach. And data is essential, both for defining problems and developing solutions.
"We call ourselves data-driven idealists," Lerman said.
Millions struggle with daily needs
One of the project's first initiatives was a poll of more than 8,000 Californians to explore how they encounter scarcity in their lives. Conducted in January 2024 with the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, the survey's core finding was remarkable: More than half of Californians found it difficult to access some essential goods and services.
"Our poll shows that a huge number of Californians are struggling to access basic resources like housing, eldercare, childcare and healthy foods," Lerman said at the time. "We need policy solutions that tackle these gaps in a meaningful way, so that all Californians can live full, dignified lives with access to the essentials they need. By leveraging innovation to redesign systems of production and distribution, we can unlock abundance and mitigate scarcity."
Mx. Granger via Wikimedia Commons
California's chronic housing crisis offers a prime example of the Abundance Accelerator's approach.
"Our housing crisis has only been getting worse since the '70s," Maple said. "It's not new. This is a result of 60-plus years of the decisions that we've made around policy."
Because California lacks reliable data, UC Berkeley's abundance project has been working with the California Department of Housing and Community Development and local planners to collect it.
"It's not simply that we need housing," Maple said. "If we could be much more accurate about the income levels where we need more housing, and in what parts of the state, and know that with certainty, the conversation starts to shift. … Then we can start talking about affordable housing in a more data-driven way, in the areas where it's needed the most."
Underlying the project's pragmatic approach is the belief that conventional politics have become ineffective at solving human problems. Project leaders are not shy about crossing barriers that usually divide the left and right.
"It's not as simple as two clear sides," Maple explained. "There are human emotions at play that show a more nuanced conflict as we try to build more in California. Sometimes NIMBYs align more with developers than workers, and sometimes it's the opposite. Our goal at the Accelerator is to find ways to move us all toward building more housing, which our state really needs both to address the affordability issue as well as to combat increasing levels of homelessness."
"Reducing homelessness is not a liberal or conservative idea," Lerman argued. "It's a central need that we all recognize. We need to move forward with solutions as a society, and we haven't been able to do it by fighting it out on the left and the right."
An embrace and other successes
To expedite housing construction, the Abundance Accelerator had advocated reform of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a measure passed a half-century ago. At the time it was a milestone for the environmental movement, but critics - including key Republican and Democratic leaders - argued that CEQA became a platform for lawsuits that throttled housing and infrastructure development.
In June, those critics notched a major success: At a low-key budget-signing ceremony, Newsom celebrated the CEQA reforms contained in the bill as the gateway to a new era of reduced obstacles to development of housing and infrastructure.
"This isn't just a budget," said the Democratic governor. "This is a budget that builds. It proves what's possible when we govern with urgency, with clarity, and with a belief in abundance over scarcity."
The Abundance Accelerator didn't have a direct role in Newsom's budget, but his embrace was a breakthrough for the broader abundance movement. And the Berkeley project has had a series of substantive successes in recent months.
In March, it convened a day-long summit that featured top policymakers, community groups and scholars who discussed how an abundance orientation could shape policy in areas such as education, health, energy, childcare and eldercare. A new report, "People Centered Abundance," assessed broad criticisms of the abundance movement and offered measured responses. Lerman and Maple have been working closely with the California Strategic Growth Council and the Governor's Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation on a series of regional meetings that convene state and local leaders and community groups to shape climate change policy.
California … is a place where we've been able to think beyond limited paradigms to imagine a future that is really different."
Amy Lerman
Last month, the Possibility Lab and the influential CalMatters news site launched a "knowledge hub" that aims to connect lawmakers, advocates and the public with policy insights from California researchers. The abundance agenda will be prominent in that effort.
Beyond publications and events, though, Lerman and Maple see a growing enthusiasm for the agenda, especially among younger lawmakers and political activists. This fall, they'll lead a training session for local officials from across the nation.
"There's a ton of interest in this," Lerman said. "We're hoping to both educate them and learn from them as we increase this conversation, not just in California, but around the country."
Seeking an elusive middle ground
Perhaps people are hard-wired to focus on scarcity; certainly material insecurity has been a powerful force in human evolution dating back eons. Lerman and Maple say that many people see resources as finite, and believe that if one family or one community gains, another will inevitably lose. They don't see that there's enough for everyone.
Can that mindset change?
"California, in particular, is a place that historically has been known for innovation," Lerman said. "It's a place where we've been able to think beyond limited paradigms to imagine a future that is really different."
The leaders of Berkeley's Abundance Accelerator know that much work lies ahead. They sense growing support, but the abundance movement has critics on the right and left. They know that public awareness won't change without a sustained campaign.
A key challenge: The abundance agenda requires people to recognize tradeoffs that shape our communities - environment vs. development, for example, or the value of union labor vs. the potential lower cost of housing built without it.
Later this fall, the Abundance Accelerator will release a study looking at how Californians feel about such tradeoffs, across a range of issues. A preliminary read of the data suggests that people often want both housing and environmental protection. They want government to solve problems, but they are uneasy about expanding its powers. Ultimately, Maple said, the report will focus on how public consensus is elusive.
Still, Lerman is optimistic that policymakers and the public can engage in productive deliberation and a focused exchange on the ideas of abundance, eventually allowing government to serve more of the people, more of the time.
"There's a wide swath of Americans who aren't on the hardcore ideological ends of the political spectrum," she said. "They can be brought together to really think about these issues and ideas in productive ways, if we can figure out how to communicate the benefits of this approach for their communities and their families."
