Abundance

To maintain the climate we have had, or anything close to it, requires us to remake the world we have built.

He hired a young activist named Denis Hayes, who came up with the idea of a walkout on the first day of spring, which they would call Earth Day. On April 22, 1970, more than 20 million people—roughly 10 percent of the US population—poured into the streets. It was the largest single demonstration in American history.

The toxicity of growth

America in the 1950s and ’60s was paradoxically the richest superpower in world history and functioned as a kind of mass-industrial conspiracy to kill its own residents.

“It is considered gauche (I have tried it) to mention in a public meeting that a particular public policy will raise or lower home values, even though what is acceptable to mention—traffic, crime, walkable streets, local pollution—pretty clearly maps onto home values. Something less obviously selfish is required to get other community residents to

In her essay “The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake,” Jerusalem Demsas, who covers housing at the Atlantic, traces the politics of treating homes as assets. Housing is often spoken of as a safe investment, but it’s not. Homes rise in price when there are too few of them to go around. The greater the gap between supply and demand, the higher the r

If homelessness is a housing problem, it is also a policy choice—or, more accurately, the result of many, many, many small policy choices.

Today, California is more Petaluma than Lakewood. In the 1950s and 1960s, California routinely built more than 200,000 homes each year.38 Since 2007, California has never once permitted more than 150,000 new homes.39 “In Los Angeles, fewer homes were built in the seventies than in the sixties, fewer in the eighties than in the seventies, and fewer

There is an old finding in political science that Americans are “symbolically” conservative but “operationally” liberal.30 Americans talk like conservatives but want to be governed like liberals.