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“The reason there is an abundance movement at all is to address the same challenges facing union members: working families and marginalized communities are being crushed under the weight of a status quo that serves the super-rich.”
It’s been a year since Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “Abundance” landed like a grenade in the political discourse. The authors charged that Democrats had forgotten how to solve problems, confusing passing laws and writing checks with delivering for Americans. That failure was driving dissatisfaction with institutions and their defenders, and enabling populists like Donald Trump.
Over the last half-century, the left had learned to say no—to building highways, to razing neighborhoods, to burning fossil fuels—and assembled a thicket of legal and review protocols to slow things down. Now, we don’t have the muscle memory to say yes—to building new homes, to improving public transit, to siting solar farms and wind turbines—and our problem isn’t too much of what we don’t want, but too little of what we need.
I agreed. Indeed, almost a year earlier, I co-founded an abundance organization here after many years working on Democratic campaigns across the country. I realized that to make the case for Democratic governance nationwide, we needed to show blue city and states could deliver—and that required more homes to lower housing costs, more transit to speed commutes and reduce reliance on cars, more renewable power to lower utility bills and emissions, and more public sector capacity to deliver more public benefits more quickly.
Underappreciated in New York’s abundance story is a key constituency whose partnership will be essential to building a flourishing future: trade unions.
When the forces of “no” are adversarial to change, it’s our unions that organize to demand we get shovels in the ground. And when abundance boogeymen choke our progress, it’s union jobs that languish.
Take renewables. The Utility Thermal Energy Network and Jobs Act was signed in 2022 to enable geothermal energy creation. Four years later, 10 projects are sitting in Public Service Commission purgatory: lack of political will and capacity is keeping them on the drawing board, rather than in the ground. More broadly, the state Office of Renewable Energy Siting’s average application-to-permit timeline is 1,377 days—almost 3.7 years. Abundance New Yorkers who want to reduce costs and emissions are fully aligned with the union workers who will bring these projects to fruition.
The Gateway Tunnel is another perfect example of alignment between abundance and labor. As the Trump administration tries to pull the plug, it’s the New Yorkers who understand the climate and economic impacts of insufficient rail capacity who are angriest. They have the backs of union workers who are constructing the tunnel—on the streets and at the ballot box. Abundance-minded New Yorkers have also been at the forefront of pushing for congestion pricing to bring in new revenue for the MTA, and for innovations in design and procurement that would allow more building, more quickly.
On housing, outdated zoning has made it illegal to build in too many places. That’s why unions were aligned with pro-housing advocates in pushing for the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity to legalize new homes citywide, and why Building Trades Congress president Gary LaBarbera joined YIMBYs in praising plans for 12,000 new homes at Sunnyside Yards.
Most profoundly, the reason there is an abundance movement at all is to address the same challenges facing union members: working families and marginalized communities are being crushed under the weight of a status quo that serves the super-rich.
The 1.4 percent housing vacancy rate has led rents to rise seven times faster than wages, has pushed 100,000 New Yorkers into shelters, and driven 9 percent of the Black population out of New York. Families struggling with housing and childcare costs are being forced out. Climate change is battering New York, with rising sea levels harming coastal communities—and emissions from cars increase asthma rates in outer boroughs.
Unfortunately, proactive collaboration between the abundance movement and labor has not yet taken off. Sometimes the groups are on opposite sides of efforts to streamline new construction as unions legitimately fear a loss of negotiating leverage. More broadly, many in the labor movement are apprehensive that using union labor to build homes, transit, and climate infrastructures is part of the “everything bagel” seasoning that Ezra Klein assails as adding time and cost to infrastructure development.
But New Yorkers know their bagels, and union labor isn’t the problem. Abundance in action here looks like Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “pothole politics” and Council Member Chi Ossé’s “Why Shit Not Working” video series. Across issues, it’s red tape, lack of imagination, disinvestment from public sector capacity, and entrenched power for those already served by the status quo that cause New York’s ills—not hardworking New Yorkers themselves.
Not only are abundance and unions critical allies in New York, but “Labor Abundance” must be part of the movement’s agenda. As the New York Times recently wrote, artificial intelligence is scrambling New York’s labor market, but apprenticeships in the trades are in high demand.
A recent Cornell report argued that New York must do much more to build towards sustainability, and that the work must be done on the foundation of new union jobs. These jobs are vital for assuring New York’s economic future and for producing more than enough of everything New Yorkers’ need to thrive—to create demand for goods that drives growth and to create the supply that will lower their cost.
It’s time to build more bridges between abundance and labor in New York. It should be easy: building is just what both groups like best.
Ryder Kessler is a Democratic candidate for State Assembly in District 66. He is the co-founder of Abundance New York. Opinions expressed in this op-ed are his own.