The relevant axis of political conflict is change versus stasis

Danny Crichton:
Catherine, Ryder, thank you so much for joining us.

Ryder Kessler:
Thanks for having us.

Catherine Vaughn:
Thank you.

Danny Crichton:
So you run this organization called Abundance in New York City. You've launched a monthly meetup, I guess last year in 2024 of June. There's this growing wave of people really excited about this idea of abundance, which to me is completely unsurprising. People generally like more things, more house, more car, more whatever the case may be. More public transit, more health, human services. Anything you want, we generally want more of it if it's good. Why, all of a sudden though, it seems like abundance is everywhere. Now, why are you building this? What got you into this? And we'll go from there.

Ryder Kessler:
Well, that's a lot, that could take up the whole conversation, but very excited to dig in. I guess I'll start by saying New York is facing a moment of crisis, and I think this inspired us as New Yorkers who care about the present and future of the city and state. We are facing skyrocketing rents that are rising seven times faster than wages. We have record homelessness, we have streets where we're witnessing social disorder, we have weather emergencies that used to be once in a century and now are happening every few weeks. So we're facing some real urgent and acute crises, and it seems that our elected leaders are not up to the task of solving them, and that our politics generally here in New York City and state have not been up to the task of solving them.
I think we, as folks who have been working in politics for many years, mostly nationally oriented, both came to this realization that we need to be doing better right here in our own backyard, and we need new ideas and a new political class to solve them. Specifically, we recognize that a lot of these problems are results of scarcity. We have a 1.4% vacancy rate in our housing because of decades of underbuilding. We have scarcity of a lot of things, connected to insufficient government capacity to solve problems. That is a reflection of political incentives that policymakers are following because of many things that we can dig into, but essentially we amongst many New Yorkers have found that we want a politics that is more focused on growth and change and dynamism, which were New York superpowers. We used to build skyscrapers and subway lines really quickly in the time that it now takes to talk about one bike lane at a community board meeting. And so starting Abundance New York-

Catherine Vaughn:
Or at a series of community board meetings.

Ryder Kessler:
Yes, yes, exactly, yes. One four-hour community board meeting, which can feel like months, but actually yes, you'd need multiple meetings to build a skyscraper.
But that's all to say, we realize that folks like us didn't have a political home in New York to express those big ideas and to build power for an agenda that would unleash the growth that New York needs, and that would uplift the elected officials and policymakers who were pushing that. So we started Abundance New York to create a home for abundance-minded New Yorkers so that we could come together, find like-minded people and uplift abundance policies and abundance politicians.

Catherine Vaughn:
And maybe just to take a step back in terms of, obviously abundance sounds great and it sounds very idealist and, "More of everything, great!" I think what we're trying to emphasize for people, and I think what folks like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are as well, is that scarcity is a policy choice. That we do have a choice, we do have an option to build more homes, to invest in mass transit, to invest in abundant cheap and green energy. But because of often state and local processes and institutions and norms, we have made it far easier...
And we, I would say, often as folks on the left, which, both Ryder and I have been professional Democrats, and we can get into our careers in a moment, but often blue states and cities have made it far easier to say no than to say yes to parts of the built environment infrastructure policies that would enable abundance, that would enable growth and dynamism. So we're trying to build this community that is trying to counter those policies or those processes that are getting in the way.

Laurence Pevsner:
Yeah, let's actually dive into your backgrounds, because I think they're really interesting, and are really quite relevant to our listeners too. One of you started in finance, one of you started in startup world, which is... We are Lux, we do combination of finance and startup. So would love to hear about how you guys started your careers and then became professional Democrats, as you say, and then how that ended up landing you in abundance land.

Catherine Vaughn:
I didn't start in finance. I think actually Ryder started in both, but I actually started in nonprofit strategy, and I started my career as a consultant and got really excited about the idea of effective altruism, really just maximizing the social return on investment of your money or time in the social sector, the nonprofit sector. So I ended up spending time in Rwanda, in Ethiopia, working on global health and international development and agriculture issues, thinking about if I want to spend my money on saving the most lives possible, I should spend my time on that as well. And I took a very winding path. I ended up going to business school and decided that I would spend a little bit of time at McKinsey to sharpen the private sector toolkit before going back into international development. Took a leave of absence from McKinsey, joined the Hillary campaign in 2016, thought, "I'll probably go back to McKinsey for a few years and then continue on this path," And then the 2016 elections happened.
And I started an organization called Flippable after that, and the goal of Flippable was to flip state legislative seats in purple states from red to blue because of the role that state legislators play in things like voting rights and redistricting, and because of the influence of state government on all the policies we care about. And critically, thinking about the connection to effective altruism or just the idea of really maximizing your return on investment, state legislative seats were incredibly cheap relative to, obviously, a multibillion dollar presidential campaign or a senate campaign or a governor or House campaign. So we were really thinking about, "How do we take this ethos of maximizing your ROI and bring it to the political space," where a lot of people were engaged in these extremely expensive and not necessarily strategic fights because they really hate Mitch McConnell and want to fund his opponent, even if there's no chance that that will win.
We emerged with an organization called Swing Left, and I was a co-executive director of Swing Left in the 2020 cycle, and throughout all this time, really honed my skills in terms of thinking about tactics to help Democrats win elections, to help turn out more votes, to help organize volunteers, to organize donors. After I left Swing Left in 2021, I started thinking a lot more about... I'd been working a lot on the sales and marketing of the Democratic Party, but the underlying product was something that I'd spent less time on, and I was really seeing the fruits of Democratic majorities in New York in both New York City and state, and I was not seeing the best results of living in a blue city and blue state. Whether that was my rent going up year after year, the summer of hell in the MTA, and thinking about just how hard it was to get around, how hard it is now I'm a parent of two young girls to get my kids around, and to live in this city growing a family.
And so I started thinking a lot more about, how could I get involved in some of the policy fights? And in places, not really thinking about flipping a state from red to blue, but really thinking about, "Who am I electing? Who am I voting for? Who am I supporting in New York City and state who's really fighting for a more affordable, a more vibrant, safer, more dynamic city?" So that's what brought me to Abundance, and I'll let Ryder talk about his path too.

Ryder Kessler:
Yeah, so I grew up just down the street from where we are right now, so I'm deeply rooted in Lower Manhattan. We passed my childhood home on the walk from my current apartment to this office. And so I've always loved New York and had a great experience growing up here, and I didn't think about local politics very much at all for most of my life. Before I worked in tech, I was in English literature, academia, thinking I would be a professor of 19th century novels. That was after college, where Catherine and I met, and then I had an idea for a startup that was essentially a tip jar for credit cards. This was before iPads, and I had a conversation with a barista about how her cash tips had gone down by basically five dollars an hour because of people shifting from paying with cash to plastic.
And that really shocked me, because her real wage had declined by probably 40% because of those lost tips. It was an invisible pay cut that was not just bad for her and her colleagues, but bad for business, and it would lead to more employee turnover and a worse customer experience if there was no upside to providing really high quality service. So I thought, "I want to buy my coffee with my Visa, and then I want to give a tip really quickly." So I built this company DipJar, which was a credit card tip jar, and then iPads were released and then we pivoted fully to the non-profit sector and DipJars were used by charities to raise money in person. I tell this story because that was much of my pre-political career, and also it was a point where I thought, "Tech can help solve these large-scale social problems."
These low-wage service workers would say, "Wow, my DipJar tips helped me pay my rent this month," or, "This is how I bought my groceries." And at first that was quite gratifying, and then eventually it was like, "Well, actually their rents should just be affordable, and they should just be able to buy groceries because of their wage." And I was getting a little bit disenchanted with tech as a solution to problems that were essentially policy problems, which is not to say there isn't a role for tech. I know we're sitting in a VC office that I probably came to pitch at once and was rejected, but in terms of thinking about the problems I was really engaged in, I saw that they were policy problems that needed policy solutions, and that happened to coincide with the 2016 presidential election, which really was personally a wake-up call about where my personal passion was, and I was very drawn to the idea of the Resistance, capital R, in this moment where it felt like democracy was maybe under a once in a lifetime threat.
So I transitioned out of my job as CEO of that company, passed the reins, and started working on campaigns at the federal level, thinking that "The thing I can do to help is help Democrats beat Republicans." So very similar to what Catherine was doing, I was working as a campaign manager on a congressional race, and then I started doing voter protection work on other federal elections. But at the same time I thought, "Okay, well, I live down the street from where I was born. I should probably see what's happening in my own backyard." And that's where my abundance radicalization began. I joined my community board, which is the-

Danny Crichton:
God Help You.

Ryder Kessler:
Yeah. It is the entity for folks who are listening to this who don't know community boards. They are a Robert Moses era relic where they are meant to provide communities a role in shaping policy decisions. So there are 59 boards across the city, each has 50 people on it, and this is part of the city government. We're appointed volunteers, but we have a big voice in discussions about land use. Whether we're going to build a new apartment building or allow a homeless shelter, whether we're going to introduce a new bike lane or resiliency infrastructure. And while coming from a good perspective at the beginning to prevent razing of neighborhoods with no feedback from marginalized communities, community boards now are a big veto point. We say no to everything. The people on the boards are more likely to be homeowners, car owners, older, wealthier, whiter. And joining my community board and seeing the vociferous opposition to things like housing and bike lanes and so forth really woke me up to the idea that the relevant axis of political conflict here in New York City and state is not as much red versus blue, but it is change versus stasis.
And especially coming out of Covid, looking around and seeing these skyrocketing rents and homelessness and all of these problems on our streets and in our subways, I thought, "We are not up to the task." So I ran for the state legislature against a 30-plus year incumbent who to me exemplified a lot of these old-fashioned politics, and that was a very energizing experience, but I lost the election, and what I saw was a lot of people who were politically homeless, who did not fit into the center-left Democratic club community board establishment, and who also didn't really feel at home in the organized left, Working Families Party, Democratic Socialists camp, which is the other big power center in New York. Both of those power centers, which produce candidates and support them and organize people, were quite status quo oriented in their own ways. And so Catherine and I started talking after that election about, "How can we help New York? How can we bring our political experiences and expertise to making life better for our neighbors, and also creating a future where Democrats in power are doing good, and where the product of the Democratic Party is one that is compelling to voters even outside the city?"

Danny Crichton:
So one of the things I hear in this is you're talking about this difference between change versus stasis. And I think last year we had James Pethokoukis, author of The Conservative Futurist, obviously right wing, at AI, and what's interesting to me is to see his dovetailing. He describes it as upwing versus downwing, you described it as change versus stasis. This kind of realignment in American politics where we're going from left to right to some other forms, and you can have different words, but it's interesting to see the narrative come on both right and on the left, but there's still not, at least from my perspective, a lot of collaboration.
I'm curious. We live in a very Democratic city. Obviously with the Democratic primaries coming up in just a couple of weeks, couple of months, that is generally determined, and we were just discussing in the pre-show, whether that may be a little bit of an exception with Eric Adams recently announcing he's leaving the Democratic Party to run as an independent. But nonetheless, generally speaking the Democratic primary is the determinative election for the leadership of our city. How much does collaboration cross-partisan matter to Abundance, versus bringing Abundance to the core of both parties independently?

Catherine Vaughn:
I think nationally speaking, it matters. And you see policy wins in states like Montana where you have the opposite problem, where they probably did get the Democrats on board, but they didn't need Democratic votes to upzone and build radical amounts of new housing in Montana. In a lot of states, you need folks on both sides of the aisle.
I think here, as you mentioned, we have Democratic supermajorities, typically all the action electorally is in the primary. And in New York City, and to a large extent in New York state, the Republicans are not necessarily the kind of upwing, pro-abundance Republicans that I think we would be looking to work with, were we trying to forge some of those cross-partisan alliances.
But I invite New York Republicans, and we would love the abundance strands in the Republican Party to really converge on, statewide we need a housing compact. Statewide we need investments in nuclear energy. So much happens at the state legislative level, and we need suburban Democrats, we need city Democrats, and we'd love to have Republicans on board as well.

Ryder Kessler:
To expand on that a little bit, I think there is a kind of "bipartisan..." And I'm using air quotes to folks who can't see me right now. A "bipartisan" nature to abundance in New York, but where the two "parties," air quotes, are the left and the center-left. Because given the Democratic supermajorities and the action in the Democratic primaries, generally these elections are seen as competitive between the person who's the more center-left moderate person and the person who's the farther left progressive person. And what we have seen is that abundance, support for YIMBYism on housing or support for radical investments in public transit or deployment of renewable energy, is not a point on that spectrum. It is not the people in the middle or on the right or on the left. There are folks who are abundance-minded across. Not really in the Republican party in New York, but there are progressive, further left Democrats in New York who are very abundance-minded, but who might be lonely amongst a set of political allies who don't share those attitudes, and there are also people in the center-left who are abundance-minded.
And so we really see... Maybe this is connected to the national picture or the earlier conversation you had. We do see that this is a different axis of conflict. And until we started Abundance New York, and I think part of the reason we did, is because we saw those people as quite isolated in their political ecosystems, and because they were quite diffuse, they were disempowered and they were kind of invisible, because the politics of the broader ecosystem from which they emerged were dominant, and were either opposed to change because of concerns about preserving neighborhood character, or opposed to growth because of concerns about private entities making money to solve social problems. So we do think that to unlock progress in New York, we are going to need this to become something that is on the agenda of the whole Democratic coalition and not one part of it.

Laurence Pevsner:
Yeah. I've noticed that in that challenge that you just described, you're trying to combine all these disparate groups, and you also have these different axes. I really see two fundamental communications challenges that you have. One is that you have to explain this whole new axis to people that maybe is not the normal legible politics that people ascribe to. They're like, "Oh, I know the types people I tend to vote for," be like, "Okay, but I'm introducing a whole new category of set of policies and way of thinking to you."
And then second, because you're Abundance New York, you then also have to care about the perennial problem, how do you get people to even care about local issues to begin with? You both started your careers in politics working on the much sexier national issues, and then now you're like, "Wait, actually the problem is locally." So my question is, how are you thinking about those two fundamental communication challenges? How are you convincing people to both understand this totally different new way of thinking, and then also, "And you should be working on this locally."

Catherine Vaughn:
I'll maybe start with the second piece. I think generally people care more about what happens in their backyard than they do nationally, which has been a challenge, because we'll see people who have the sign in their brownstone window about Black Lives Matter and "Everyone's welcome here" and all that stuff, and then they're voting against the development next door that would actually house people to make everyone welcome in their community. So that's been a challenge, but I also think that it's an opportunity to plug people into immediate policy decisions that will affect their lives.
New York also has the interesting challenge of off-year elections, which means our turnout is abysmal, but it also means that even small efforts to raise awareness and to get out the vote can really be dispositive in an election. I think on the second piece, alerting people to the policy areas that will really affect their lives, that have recently become national news as well. So thinking about everything that happened with Eric Adams and immigration enforcement and the case being dropped in congestion pricing and Trump threatening to shut it down, actually, this has become the sexy national news of the moment.

Ryder Kessler:
So I think your question gets at two things. One is that the community of people who have power in New York and who dictate what happens in New York politics is actually very small. And there's a lot of people who are not paying attention to local politics, they're not going to community board meetings, they're not even voting in local primaries. And so there's kind of two approaches. One is, within that small group of people, fewer than 3000 who are on the community boards and in some elections single digits in terms of voter turnout, how do we build power for abundance? Because those people, they already appreciate that local policy really matters, they already know how to exert their power, but they are not necessarily abundance-aligned. And what we found by offering Abundance New York as a program, we have seen that through the supply of this programming, there actually is a lot of demand.
A lot of people in that community have been waiting for this, aching for this. And so people who already are plugged into New York politics, we can organize and deploy. So we do monthly happy hours, but we also help people join community boards. We train people to run for office. We help people connect with candidates who are aligned and uplift them and relationally organize and volunteer. We help people do more effective advocacy around housing and transit and climate issues. So within the small group of people who are already politically active, we are providing a platform for them to enact their abundance-mindedness, and in doing so make legible that axis of conflict. A lot of these people came to us having read Ezra Klein and Jen Pahlka and Jerusalem Demsas, or they came to us having gone to a community board meeting and gotten radicalized. So we're providing an ecosystem for them to do that, and in so doing, make that axis of conflict more legible.
But to the second point of course, a lot of people are not paying attention. They're not reading Ezra Klein, they're not voting in primaries, and that is a bigger lift in terms of how to take the awareness that what happens on their own street really does matter to them, they really care about their rent, they care about their commute, and help them understand that those things are a reflection of which city council candidate they vote for in a primary that they might not have on their radar. And so we do have to do some education there, but we benefit from the fact that these local fights are so salient when we can connect the dots to local policymaking.

Laurence Pevsner:
New York City of course, one of the big challenges of New York itself is it's not like, say... Danny used live in San Francisco, much smaller city, a less complicated city you might say. You know-

Danny Crichton:
You clearly have never lived in San Francisco, my friend.

Laurence Pevsner:
No, not I have not.

Danny Crichton:
Our producer who's in Oakland is literally clapping his hands of like, "Rim shot." You have no idea.

Laurence Pevsner:
Oh listen, I'll slander-

Danny Crichton:
Six people can turn more politics than eight million [inaudible 00:21:07]

Laurence Pevsner:
I'm a New Yorker, I'll slander SF all day. No, but listen, this is one of the most diverse cities in the country. You have really different regions, five different boroughs, tons of different types of people in this city, all with different special interest groups backing them. How do you work with these different special interest groups? Are there some that are really on board with abundance? Are there some that you see as clear opponents? As you mentioned, you have the Working Families Party, you have other different interest groups. How do these fit into the abundance framework? Are they friends, are they foes, are they partners? How does that all work?

Catherine Vaughn:
Yeah. Well, we can start with some of our friends. Some of the proto-abundance groups, the groups that have been here all along, are fighting specifically for the issues that we care most about. Whether it's building more housing, groups like Open New York that are really joining that policy fight, Open Plans and Transportation Alternatives and Riders Alliance, all of which work on public space and public transit, increasing investments in public transit, making our streets safer, making our streets more joyful, making New York as New York-y as it can be.
And then groups like New York League of Conservation Voters are working on environmental issues that are related to the abundance agenda. So we have been working with the leaders of a lot of those groups to really understand their priorities, put some of their legislative fights and advocacy efforts in front of our members, who might have joined more because they believe in this bigger vision but aren't as plugged into what for 421-a versus 485-x is, or specifically what legislation they should be thinking about and fighting for when it comes to safer streets.
So those are some of our friends in the ecosystem, and I think one thing that we noticed was that the streets people and the housing people and the environmental people were not always talking to each other, and so first building alliances and coalitions among those groups would make the whole effort around abundance, urbanism, whatever you want to call it, would make that effort stronger and would ensure that our electeds felt accountable to a sum that was larger, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. So those are some of the special interest groups or advocacy groups that are doing really, really great work in the space.
I think we're seeing a kind of a scrambling of alliances, or we're seeing some groups that might have traditionally been in favor of less housing changing their tune. So thinking about various unions, labor is split on housing, because on the one hand, lots of different unions are involved in the construction of housing. Some union members are really suffering from the housing crisis in New York, and so unions are really thinking about, "How do we actually ensure that our members are benefiting from these policies?"
I think on the left too, we're seeing a lot of traditional leftist groups might have been anti-housing because they felt like developers would benefit, and maybe for anti-capitalism reasons were less interested in building more. And now we're seeing cleavages on the left as people really acknowledge that a more progressive policy is building more housing so that people can afford to live here. So I think that we're seeing a new territory that we're navigating as people are really wrestling with the impacts of these policies in the city, and maybe changing course.

Ryder Kessler:
I think that's exactly right in terms of the landscape in New York and the different players and how they're part of different ecosystems and that there are cleavages, and part of our work is assembling the folks who are advancing abundance ideas under one umbrella that can help crowd in new supporters who are not quite wonky enough to be in the individual advocacy groups. The one thing I'll say is, just to emphasize your point about New York's size and complexity vis-à-vis San Francisco and other places, it is bigger and more complex. We went to California to talk to some people who had been doing abundance work there before we launched, and wanted to get advice about how we could unlock policy success here by building an abundance community. And one question we asked was, "How do you get all these people to work together?" And they're like, "Well, Scott Wiener is behind us, so find your Scott Wiener."
Scott Wiener is a state senator who represents all of San Francisco. There are many, many state senators who represent Manhattan. There is no one elected official whose support generates any falling in line at a mass scale. You could have the governor, you could have the mayor. There still would be so many different power bases that you have to navigate. And so it means having to really authentically build support from regular New Yorkers all across the city, and we have been proud of our ability to do that. We don't have members in every city council district yet, but in the majority of them, and the more we can show that abundance energy is homegrown across the city, the more influence we can exert over the council members and state legislators and other policymakers who represent those New Yorkers.

Danny Crichton:
Yeah, earlier this year we had the 50th anniversary of The Power Broker, and we've already mentioned Robert Moses, who always is like the shadow in the corners every time you talk about growth in New York. And Robert Caro obviously wrote a great book. There's been a huge number of retrospectives. There was a play, Straight Line Crazy, over at the Shed last year or maybe a year and a half ago. All time is a time warp these days. But nonetheless, one of the reasons we have such diffuse authorities to build in New York was a response to the Robert Moses era. So we developed rules and processes, we developed the community board meetings. The environmental movement kind of came out at the exact same time, so we're talking about the seventies here as Robert Moses declined. So we have all those environmental regulations coming into the state and local levels as well, transportation to go on down the list.
We talked about the strategizing of bringing back the community together and organizing here. When it comes to actual tactics, when you think about where are the leverage points, maybe it's not as easy as finding a Scott Wiener, but California also deals with the fact that they have CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, all the San Francisco neighborhood associations are called... they're not community boards. They're actually crazier there, so I disagree with Laurence, you have no idea what you're talking about. But nonetheless.
I'm curious. One of the arguments that's been made on the good governance, and I feel like that world has closed down quite a bit over the years, but 15, 20 years ago it was like, "We need to reform the port authority. We need to reform the way that schools are organized in New York City." Our subway is owned by New York City, administered by the state, has this very weird ownership structure where there's not a direct correlation between, "I'm a voter, I'm a transit rider, I get to vote on what happens here." How much is it about changing those bureaucracies versus alternative tactics, like mobilizing voters at the polls, or intricately federalist style, society style, putting people on every community board, every council? Which of these are the most productive for you from an abundance perspective?

Catherine Vaughn:
I mean, we're doing both. So community boards exist. They are a part of the ULURP process to vote on new land use decisions, or to at least advise on them, but they obviously play a really outsized role and often really influence the electeds who are in those districts. So as long as they exist, we need to put people on them. We need more YIMBYs, more abundance minded folks on these community boards. Based on our programming and Ryder's recommendation, I joined my community board as well, a potentially regrettable move, but my board is actually great. But you know, I am one, I'm participating in this process and seeing firsthand how it is, both some of the benefits of being on it... Our board was one of the only boards to vote unanimously in favor of City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, so really seeing that when you change the composition of a board, really good things can happen. But also seeing some of the drawbacks of having to be in these long, drawn out meetings, seeing how seriously community board input is taken by electeds, and feeling like maybe these unelected and not super representative boards shouldn't play this role in this process.
So while we're doing that, we're also thinking about structurally, how do these decision making processes have to change? And to your point, a lot of these structures were put in place around the time of or after the Robert Moses era, when we faced a completely different set of problems in New York. People were fleeing the city, we didn't have a housing crisis. Neighborhoods were being razed to put in highways, and this had especially pernicious impacts on communities of color. Environmental review processes probably were needed to stop some of the ravages of building dirty energy and developing over green spaces. We're now in a place of going from the green environmentalism to gray environmentalism, and thinking about how actually we're in a housing crisis, and housing density is a way for us to reduce emissions and be a cleaner and greener city. So we need to change the structures, we need to change the processes to actually meet the challenges of the moment.
And so the Charter Revision Commission, for example, is an opportunity for us to rethink how the ULURP process works. And we got community members, including myself, to testify and to really bring up some of these issues around how community boards probably aren't the right structures where these decisions should be deliberated and made. So I think we need to fight within the system we have, but also think about changing the system.

Danny Crichton:
Let me just ask a practical question, because I don't think we've ever had such local officials on the podcast before. You are both on community boards. What is the work like here? I assume it's just a community meeting in a rec center or school gymnasium. You said there are about, and I know nothing about the structure of these, 50 people per board. That's a lot of people on a board. We try to, in the venture capital world, keep boards down to a size of three or four, because that generally facilitates fast decision making. So how much time do you put into this? How often are the meetings? How long are they? Are there better boards, worse boards, how heterogeneous are they? I'm just very curious. Just pure logistics, how does this lifestyle work?

Ryder Kessler:
Board service is intense and onerous, which in itself is a selection mechanism that often means it's harder for younger folks, people who travel for work or who are parents of young kids, to participate. So unlike legislative districts, the community districts never change. So community board two in Manhattan, where I serve, is from Canal Street to 14th Street, and always will be. And the 50 people on that board have to participate three nights a month. So we have a full board meeting once a month where all 50 of us are in a room, often a school auditorium, and we are hearing the reports and the resolutions that the committees of the board have prepared and passed, and then we as a full board are voting to approve or reject those resolutions from the committees.
Board members on my board, and this is generally the rule, although there's a little variance, have to serve on two committees. So two other nights a month, you might meet with the other dozen people on your committee to talk about specific applications or questions. So there's a state liquor authority committee on every board that is hearing liquor license applications from operators in the neighborhood. There's a committee, generally, about transportation that's hearing proposals from the DOT about a bike lane. There's a land use committee that's considering the ULURP application, the land use review applications, about legalizing some more housing in the neighborhood. And those committees will hear those applications or topics, talk, pass a resolution that will then go to the full board.
The committees are often... I'll speak to my board, but I'll note here, because I'll get in trouble if I don't, that I'm speaking just representing myself, not representing the board at all. The rules about that are very strict. Our board is quite status quo oriented, and is generally opposed to new housing, or to even a hundred percent affordable housing that might be built in the neighborhood. And that's a reflection of the fact that the board, though meant to be a representation of the people in the community, does not actually reflect the demographics fully in terms of who's renting and who's taking public transit versus owning a car, and what ages people are.
And so the abundance-minded borough presidents, including Mark Levine here in Manhattan, who plays the biggest role in appointing the members, has been thinking about that representation more. And so he's added to the application questions about, "When considering new housing, what do you prioritize? More homes, or neighborhood character? When getting around the city, do you drive, or do you walk or take the bus?" And so there's been some movement towards having the members of the community boards be more representative of the constituencies that they are meant to speak for.
But the reality is that the people who have time to devote three nights a month, the committee meetings can be three hours, the full board meeting can be four hours. The people who have time for 10 hours a month of meetings, plus the time to read and write resolutions, are likely to be people for whom the status quo is working. People who already live in the neighborhood, not people who want to move there. People who own their home, not people who are struggling to pay rent and moving from neighborhood to neighborhood. If you can be on the community board, that likely means you have roots in the district, which means that things are probably working better for you.

Catherine Vaughn:
Yeah, I would say I think Ryder's board is more challenging than mine. As I mentioned, I think Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn Borough President, has also done a really great job trying to appoint more abundance-aligned folks to boards, and I think mine has made more progress. That being said, I'm on the Land Use Committee, and a lot of my district is historically landmarked. And so I am often reviewing applications for someone changing the door on their building. You know?

Ryder Kessler:
Yes, yes, yes.

Catherine Vaughn:
I'm like, "Why am spending my time doing this?" This is what really makes me think about how we need to change the structures. Like, why is anyone spending their time on this? Is it in character with the brownstones in the neighborhood? I don't care. And should as much of my neighborhood be landmarked as is? Absolutely not. We are in an incredibly transit-rich area near Barclay Center, the best place to be in Brooklyn if you need to be near a subway, and we should be building. We should be building more, we should be building higher buildings. We shouldn't be stuck in amber. It's really given me a lot of exposure to some of the intricacies of how these ULURP decisions are made in landmark districts and made me more radicalized about abundance, even as I'm surrounded by like-minded people who are rolling their eyes like I am.

Laurence Pevsner:
Yeah, it just seems like it's so fundamentally un-American in some senses, because shouldn't you be free to put whatever you want on your door, and I don't care, and that's what freedom and prosperity is all about? I noticed, and both of you cited the local electeds who actually have been supportive of the abundance movement. And even though there is no one Scott Wiener that can raise a magic wand and really be at your behest and really help the cause, obviously you have been talking to lots of electeds, both local, city, state, and then of course we've even seen many federal electeds as well talking about abundance and saying they're abundance-pilled and whatnot.
So I wanted to ask you, you recently put out a slate of candidates that you endorsed. How do you go about evaluating and talking to these candidates? How do you meet with them? What are their criteria that you're using to judge whether they're worthy of Abundance New York's endorsement? Because again, as we've been discussing, this is a new political category in some ways that these electeds are probably not even that used to. So how do they go about talking to you and approaching you, and have you found them to be conducive, have you found them to be aggressive, like, "Oh, this is a new movement, screw you guys"? How has that process been?

Catherine Vaughn:
No, I think people are abundance-curious if not abundance-pilled, and we're hoping to get them further in that direction. We have been really pleasantly surprised with how many people want to talk to us. We thought at first we were going to really specialize in city council, because again, with the kind of moneyball approach to electoral politics, we wanted to really focus on the races where maybe more folks' time and energy would go further. But we found that people up and down the ballot, all the way up to mayor, want to talk to us about the abundance agenda, and, "What is it, and who are these people, and how can I tap into this?" And that's in part because of us, and it's because of the book, and it's because of this feeling, I think, that so many Democrats have, that we need to have a real direction and we need to have a real vision for our party across the country, and in places like New York especially.
So we talk to as many people as will talk to us about abundance. As we think about whom to endorse, we review what folks have said publicly and what's in their policy positions, what they have said to us, and also we really lean on some of the other organizations and folks in the ecosystem that have specific vertical policy expertise in housing, in transit, in energy, et cetera. So we really want to think about how some of our allied organizations are thinking about these electives and candidates as well, to the extent that they can. So just thinking broadly about what we're looking for, we want folks running for office in New York to admit that there is a supply shortage of housing, that we need to build more, that we need to build more of all types of housing, so not just capital A, capital H, Affordable Jousing, but really market rate units as well.
A candidate like Zellnor Myrie put out a plan to build and preserve a million units of housing in New York, and that is the order of magnitude that we need. So when we see someone coming out with a plan for 20,000 homes, that's not impressive. That's not what we're looking for over the next decade. On public space and public transit, we're thinking about support for policies like congestion pricing, making the city accessible for people not just in cars, but for pedestrians and commuters who are using our public transit systems.
Essentially we've given away three million free parking spaces in the city, so really thinking about how do we reallocate land, or reallocate our streets, for people and not cars? And then thinking about the environment and energy, how are we both making our city more resilient to the climate crises that we're seeing that we used to say once in a decade or once in a lifetime, that are now happening every year? So flooding and heat waves and that sort of thing. And then how are folks really interested in investing in renewable energy, and ensuring that New York remains a leader in driving the energy transition?

Ryder Kessler:
One thing I'll say about the ease of meeting with elected officials that has been somewhat surprising, I'll tell a quick story that I had coffee once with someone I had volunteered on a congressional race with, and he said, "I really care about local politics, but I think I might go into tech, because I don't know. Can one person really make a difference in politics?" I was like, "In New York, politics locally, one person can make all the difference. There are so few people here who are making all the decisions. There are so few people here who are in these conversations and influencing them that even getting a few people together to show support for an elected official, or to call their office to say you're unhappy with something, will get their attention." And so I should have known, because that conversation was before starting Abundance New York, that even assembling the 2000 people that we now have as members of our community is plenty to get elected officials to pay attention, because you rarely have 2000 New Yorkers organized around a political vision.
And that's enough for people to say, "Oh, these people could come out and carry my petitions to get me on the ballot. These people could tell their friends to vote for me. These people could vote and be the margin in a borough or citywide election." And so that has been really gratifying in terms of how quickly people, even up to mayoral candidates, wanted to engage with our community. And I would say also, there is a generational shift in terms of younger elected officials. And by young, that's a very capacious description. People who are a little bit more forward-thinking in the policies they want to see happen in New York. And sometimes they need political cover to be brave. They need to know that it won't just be the NIMBYs at the community board screaming about the tunnel under the city who they're going to hear from if they take a stand on supporting a new housing development or a new bike lane in their neighborhood or an open street or outdoor dining.
If they know that actually, there will be a few dozen people in their district who will have their back, then they can do what they maybe really want to do, and feel less political exigency to preserve the status quo. So I think that's also why people are excited to meet with us who are already true believers in abundance, or have already gotten more abundance-minded themselves, to know that there's a political constituency behind them.

Danny Crichton:
Let me summarize a little bit. We've talked about left and right. So on the left we've got Derek Thompson, Ezra Klein going on with their abundance book. On the right, James Pethokoukis, The Conservative Futurist, and others. So there's this growing movement of upwing, downwing, stasis versus change. On top of this, you mentioned that you had gone to California, and obviously there's been a long movement in California around NIMBYism, particularly in the Bay Area, of growing and going from that. At the same time, we're sitting here in New York City, a city famed for a view of the world from Ninth Avenue, where we have a little bubble around Manhattan, a bubble around the city. Everything that happens here is more important, the media focuses on it. We don't pay attention to everything else going on.
To what degree are you borrowing strategies and tactics from other places? Whether that's other places in New York, other states, other cities, maybe even globally cities like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris, London, Tokyo, et cetera. How do those inform? Do they inform, or are we sort of a sui generis city that there's just really nothing you can apply elsewhere that comes here to New York City?

Ryder Kessler:
New York is the greatest city in the world, and so we should be able to have all the nice things that other cities have. And I think we do look around and see the radical transformation that Paris has undergone with its streetscape, or the way that Barcelona handles its trash and doesn't pile garbage bags on the sidewalk, and we do wonder, "Why not here?" One thing I'll say about the distinction of the New York fight and the emergence of Abundance nationally is, when I was running for the state legislature, I was endorsed by a group called Run for Something, which helps uplift younger candidates. And they said, "Do you want a mentor? We have another candidate who has a similar profile. He also is young, he's also gay, he also ran against an incumbent, and he's also in a city. He's a city council member in Raleigh, North Carolina."
And I thought, "What is someone in Raleigh, North Carolina going to have to tell me, a New Yorker running for the state legislature in downtown Manhattan?" But I said, "You know what? It won't hurt to learn." So I talked to him and I said, "So what made you decide to run against an incumbent on the city council in North Carolina?" He said, "Well, there was this Democrat representing me. He said he was a progressive, but he was opposed to all change. He was opposed to building new housing, he was opposed to our public transit system. He just wanted everything to stay the same." And I thought, "Oh, actually we are fighting the same fight everywhere." And that was before abundance and the book and this idea sprouted up nationally. But you're right, we think of New York as distinctly suffering from this overcorrection to the Robert Moses era and having to grapple with our community boards. But it is a national phenomenon. It's a national phenomenon reflecting shift in how liberals thought about stopping things rather than making things, and developing processes of community feedback and environmental review to forestall the change that now we are suffering from having foregone.
So I say that just to note that abundance as a policy agenda and a power building effort is quite distinct jurisdiction to jurisdiction, because it has to be responsive to the political dynamics and the challenges of any given place, but that we are all in this together in terms of wanting to grow and provide more than enough of everything we need to thrive, and we are looking to each other across states, across cities, to see what lessons we can learn, even if it's lessons about the distinctness of the local fights. And we're looking to cities internationally to show that there are great solutions out there to our problems that we could implement ourselves if we just found the political will to do so.

Catherine Vaughn:
Yeah, I'll just add, this is less about geographic inspiration, but having worked in Democratic politics, running an organization that was supporting Democrats across the country and thinking about, "How do we get money to these candidates and how do we get volunteers to show up for these candidates," I think there are a lot of tactics that we can borrow from other places and that are scalable across the country. So thinking about what the folks in San Francisco did to build an abundance movement there, part of what they did was a donor circle, and we started a donor circle too. And so we're kind of thinking about, "Functionally, what are some of the things that you're doing that can help really motivate and energize this community?"
But then to Ryder's point, the work that I did at Swing Left, we weren't saying, "This is the Democrat you should run in this place," because that is a really local question, and AOC is really different from the folks in Texas, right? So we have to think about, similarly, the fights that we're having here are going to be different from in Raleigh, North Carolina, the candidates that we put up, the alliances that we're forming, the groups that are supporting candidates. And so that has to be really distinctively local. So building connections with other abundance movements is really valuable to talk tactics, but we're our own political beast here and have to really build those local relationships to figure out the strategy here.

Danny Crichton:
Well, and talking about local relationships, I mean Catherine, Ryder, you're building a movement, you're building a community. What are the best ways to connect into this? We have a lot of listeners, many of whom are in tech and are the exact people you're describing, generally young people, generally people on planes who probably can't do [inaudible 00:45:55] nights a month. But what are the best ways to connect into the abundance movement that you're building here in New York City?

Ryder Kessler:
Come to our monthly happy hours, subscribe to our Substack, go to abundanceny.org and sign up. You'll get our periodic information about what's happening in New York politics and policy. You'll have opportunities to come together, socialize with other abundance-minded New Yorkers, engage with your elected officials, learn about policy if you're interested. But we understand people don't have a ton of time, and so we want to give them a lot of different entry points and find the ways that are most optimal for them to participate.

Danny Crichton:
Well, Catherine, Ryder, thank you so much for joining us.

Catherine Vaughn:
Thank you.

Ryder Kessler:
Thank you.

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