 More building is not the same as more affordability, more fairness, or more livability. The question is not whether America should build. Of course it should. The more important question is: Build what, for whom, where, at whose expense, and under whose control? The Atlantic and the Silicon Valley origins of “abundance” The connection between housing deregulation, technology, energy, and infrastructure is not something critics of the YIMBY movement invented after the fact. It appears explicitly in the intellectual history of the abundance agenda. The phrase was popularized by Atlantic writer Derek Thompson in his January 2022 article, A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems. Thompson placed housing, energy, infrastructure, medicine, immigration, and technological innovation inside the same framework. America, he argued, had artificially created scarcity by becoming increasingly incapable of building enough of the things people need. [1] Housing was central to Thompson’s argument. He attributed much of the extraordinary rise in housing prices in cities such as San Francisco to regulations that prevented denser apartment construction. His proposed remedies included following California in eliminating single-family-only zoning or looking toward Houston and effectively doing without conventional zoning altogether. [1] But Thompson immediately connected housing to something larger. The same article called for regulatory reforms to accelerate solar and wind development, permit more nuclear construction, and overcome local opposition to energy infrastructure. Housing scarcity and energy scarcity, in this formulation, were variations on the same political problem: America had created too many obstacles to building things. [1] A later Atlantic essay, Mike Solana’s 2025 “The Abundance Delusion,” makes the Silicon Valley lineage unusually explicit. Solana recalled arriving in San Francisco in 2011 and finding ideas of post-scarcity and superabundance already common among Bay Area technology optimists. He associated that culture with AI enthusiasts, effective altruists, and other technology-oriented futurists. [2] Solana also located the rise of modern YIMBY politics in San Francisco’s confrontation with technology-driven growth. As highly paid technology workers moved into the city, one explanation blamed those workers for escalating rents. The competing YIMBY explanation was that the deeper problem was a refusal to permit enough new housing to accommodate demand. Solana presents that dispute as an important origin point for the modern movement to liberalize zoning and make construction easier. [2] Solana’s account is revealing because it recognizes the current abundance agenda as a political expression of ideas that circulated through the Bay Area technology world for years. Housing, infrastructure, energy, automation, and technological progress all belong within that worldview. Seen in that context, today’s support in technology circles for pro-housing politics is less surprising. This is not a claim that every supporter of zoning reform is acting on behalf of an AI company. It is a claim about the larger political alignment: a technology sector that needs extraordinary amounts of land, power, infrastructure, and capital has an understandable interest in weakening the institutions that can slow or condition physical growth. The ideological connection is now difficult to overlook. The Atlantic, which helped give the abundance movement its name, explicitly joined housing deregulation, energy production, infrastructure construction, and technological innovation under a single political program. A later Atlantic writer traced that vision back into the Bay Area’s older culture of post-scarcity thinking among AI enthusiasts and technology optimists. [1][2] In an era when artificial intelligence requires unprecedented amounts of electricity, infrastructure, capital, and construction, Silicon Valley has increasingly compelling reasons to take an interest in precisely this question: Who gets to decide what can be built—and how easy should it be for local communities to say no? The false plan: more units, therefore affordability. The problem is not that new housing has no value. The evidence supports treating housing supply as one part of a broader housing strategy. It does not support treating deregulation as a magic wand. The abundance version of the housing plan generally makes several unspoken substitutions:
This is why “build more” is not a housing plan. It is a production strategy. A real housing plan must specify what kind of housing will be built, what income groups it will serve, how it will be financed, how existing residents will be protected, and how the city’s public systems will keep pace. Cambridge has already moved substantially toward allowing more housing. The issue is no longer simply whether anything can be built. The issue is whether unit counts will substitute for affordability, design, environmental responsibility, and democratic accountability. Cambridge’s own recent affordable-housing record points toward a different answer. In its 2026 report on the Affordable Housing Trust, the city reported that it had financed the purchase of 14 properties and created or preserved 900 affordable units during the five-year reporting period. Another 1,000 affordable units were in the pipeline. The city invested more than $40 million in the Trust in fiscal year 2025. [3] We are already using public resources to create and preserve homes that remain affordable over time. It is much more direct than hoping that enough expensive apartments will eventually filter down to people who cannot afford them today. AI, housing, and the cost of surrendering local control. Cambridge is located in one of the most valuable research and technology regions in the world. It is reasonable to expect continuing pressure for offices, laboratories, university expansion, high-paid workers, contractors, students, and investors. But the city should not confuse serving a regional technology economy with serving every private growth demand that reaches its zoning code. Cambridge should not be expected to make every sacrifice simply because the region’s technology economy is prosperous. Nor should residents who question a particular building be dismissed as enemies of housing. A community can support more homes while asking whether a proposal destroys existing homes, removes mature trees, overwhelms infrastructure, produces mostly luxury units, or shifts public costs onto people with the least power. What a real abundance agenda would look like in Cambridge. A serious housing program would build more—but it would build with purpose. First, it would prioritize permanently affordable housing, public acquisition, nonprofit development, family-sized homes, supportive housing, and preservation of existing affordable units. Cambridge’s Affordable Housing Trust demonstrates that public investment can create housing that does not disappear from the affordable stock when market conditions change. [3] Second, it would attach public conditions to private development. New projects should be evaluated for affordability, tree canopy, stormwater, heat, embodied carbon, construction impacts, transit, public space, and utility capacity. The point is not to stop every project. It is to ensure that growth pays a fair share of the costs it creates. Third, it would protect current residents. A city that adds housing while losing existing renters through eviction, lease termination, demolition, or unregulated rent increases is not necessarily becoming more inclusive. Anti-displacement measures, preservation funding, tenant protections, and the acquisition of vulnerable properties are as important as new construction. Fourth, it would make housing a regional responsibility. Cambridge cannot solve the metropolitan housing crisis by itself, and it should not be required to absorb every regional demand while neighboring communities avoid comparable responsibilities. Jobs, university growth, transportation, housing production, and infrastructure should be planned across the region. Finally, Cambridge should measure success by outcomes rather than slogans. The relevant questions are: How many homes are affordable to households at different income levels? How many remain affordable permanently? How many existing residents are displaced? How many trees and homes are lost? What are the effects on heat, flooding, carbon, utilities, schools, and transportation? Who owns the new housing, and who captures the increase in land value? Cambridge’s own housing-data framework recognizes that these are different measures: the city separately tracks median rents, housing cost burden and affordability, housing stock, housing starts, and sales prices. [4] Public debate should do the same instead of collapsing every question into one production number. Cambridge needs more housing. It also needs more protection for existing residents, more trees, more climate resilience, more public infrastructure, and more transparency about who benefits from development. These goals are not enemies. The false plan is to tell Cambridge that deregulation will solve affordability, that unit counts are the same as homes people can afford, and that any local condition is an obstacle to progress. That is not abundance. It is a transfer of decision-making power from the public to the growth machine. Real abundance would mean homes people can afford, clean energy, reliable public services, healthy neighborhoods, and enough democratic power to decide what kind of city Cambridge will become. Sources [1] Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems”, January 12, 2022. [2] Mike Solana, The Atlantic, “The Abundance Delusion”, September 8, 2025. [3] City of Cambridge Community Development Department, “Cambridge Releases 5-Year Affordable Housing Trust Report”, March 18, 2026. [4] City of Cambridge Community Development Department, “Housing Data”.
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