"Do you think these people are on your side?"
Who is on your side? People who made it all but impossible to renew and improve basic civilizational infrastructure (housing, roads, railways, electric grid, power plants etc.) by introducing so many demands that the system slowly ground to a halt?
Nope. They may say that they are on your side, they may even think that they are on your side, but this is a classical case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. If someone makes it all but impossible to build new things by elevating chronic naysayers and various special interests into a vetocracy, they are not on your side.
You don't have to trust the abundance movement, but they still have a valid point. In the last 10-15 years, there is a growing awareness all across the West that we have painted ourselves into a corner by heaping too many regulations on further development of cities and land and introducing too many chokepoints where any project can be stalled in courts. This not only makes our living standards worse, but also increasingly leaves us vulnerable to various authoritarian regimes - not just in the sense of raw industrial power, but also propaganda.
If you are a progressive, try to swing your preferred politicians towards more permissiveness, too. This situation badly needs correction and if the progressive part of the spectrum gets stuck on its de facto preference of NIMBYism - for any reasons, be it "everything bagel" demands or the sort of visceral distrust towards other political players that you yourself exhibit quite nicely - they are done for.
Regular people don't want to spend several years fighting a paper war with fifty implacable stakeholders in order to build a block of flats. This is just madness. If someone imposed that system on another country by force, we would consider it an act of war comparable to a naval blockade. Why precisely are we doing this to ourselves?
Unfortunately we need less inclusivity in city planing, that much is clear. Too many people have interest in vetoing everything. It is time to learn this bitter lesson and move on. Maybe you could be the person who makes the change in the progressive circles - try talking to the people you trust about this.
I feel ya.
> Unfortunately we need less inclusivity in city planing, that much is clear.
I don't think we need to go that far. :)
It's been long known the NEPA, CEPA, and other safeguards, were fully captured by bad faith actors and in much need of reform. Like closing legal exploits used to thwart any and all development, as you well know.
It's been kind of amazing how quickly YIMBYism has spun up and matured into a scrappy effective advocacy group(s). And we're starting to see progress, payoff, real results.
The recent CEPA reforms are already yielding positive results. eg By short-circuiting environmental reviews for redeveloping properties that are already in built-up areas. Real common sense "well, duh" type reforms.
There's no shortage of needful common sense reforms. I'm now confident these reform efforts will now accelerate. State-by-state, since federal action is currently closed off.
The biggly "abundance"-esque type challenges I worry about are structural and financial. Reforming public utilities, tackling regulatory capture, investment, green banks, industrial policy, etc.
In a nutshell, I want everything promised in the Green New Deal, times at least 4. (Which does account for inclusion, empowerment, environmental justice, and so forth.)