BOM – Abundance by Ezra Klein
Welcome to the Real Estate Espresso podcast, your morning shot of what’s new in the world of real estate investing. I’m your host, Victor Menasce. Happy first of the month. On the first day of each month, we review the book of the month.
Now, in order for a book to be considered worthy of a book of the month, it has to meet a very simple criteria. It has to be impactful enough that it will either change your life or your perspective on the world. Whether it does or not, of course, is entirely up to you.
Our book this month is absolutely worthy of a book of the month, and for me, it comes from an unlikely place. We’re looking at a book called Abundance by Ezra Klein. It’s also co-authored with Derek Thompson, published last year in 2025.
Now, Ezra Klein is a writer and editor. He’s been a columnist and an editor at the Washington Post, a policy analyst at MSNBC, a contributor to Bloomberg. He’s written for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He’s appeared numerous times on Face the Nation, The Daily Show, PBS NewsHour, and many more. He’s earned a reputation of being somewhat left-wing in his views.
Now, of course, there’s a danger in typecasting people. Stereotypes are often incorrect. And as you’ll see, much of what he talks about in his book could be considered more of a libertarian or even Republican set of core beliefs.
Now, in real estate, we live and die by the gap between what people need and what the market can deliver. When housing is scarce, rents rise, household formation slows, employers struggle to hire, and communities get brittle.
Abundance is a book that argues the United States has not merely stumbled into scarcity, it has, in many ways, designed it. The author’s central claim is that we’ve built layers of well-intentioned rules and processes that make it painfully hard to build housing, infrastructure, and clean energy at the scale that we say we want.
If you’ve ever tried to entitle land, you’ll recognize the pattern immediately. The paradox is that many of the systems created to protect the public interest now prevent the public interest from being served. One generation’s solutions became the next generation’s bottleneck.
He summarizes the book as organized around five bottlenecks: growing, building, governing, inventing, and deploying. For real estate investors, the growth section is the heart of it — how zoning and land use restrictions make housing scarce and expensive, and how that scarcity spills into everything else.
Here’s the key real estate lens: scarcity is a transfer of wealth from future residents to current owners. It’s not moral or immoral by itself. It’s simply the consequence of constrained supply. When demand rises and supply cannot respond, the price signal has only one place to go, and that’s up.
A good example of that was just recently reported: that one in five land transactions in the state of California is a property transfer as a result of inheritance. It seems like inheritance is one of the few ways you can get a home in California if you can’t afford to buy one yourself.
Abundance pushes back on the style of politics that obsesses over process and forgets outcomes. I’m going to translate that into developer language: every additional month in approvals is a cost. It’s interest carry, it’s professional fees, it’s staff time and lost opportunity. It’s not just cost, it’s risk. Uncertainty has a price. Investors demand a premium when timelines become extended, and lenders get tighter when the path to permits is unclear.
That’s why permit risk is not trivial. It’s absolutely pivotal. The book uses high-profile examples of public projects that drag on for years and land far over budget, sometimes without finishing at all. Critics of the book have pointed to California’s high-speed rail as a symbol of the broader failure to execute, where decades of planning and billions have been spent with very little to show for it.
I want to be fair, because the strongest critique of Abundance is obvious to anyone who has sat in a community meeting. Democracy is messy. Environmental review exists for a reason. Labor standards exist for a reason. Community input exists for a reason.
If you strip away every safeguard in the name of getting it done, you can absolutely build faster, and you can also build very recklessly. The L.A. Review of Books makes this point sharply. The diagnosis is often compelling, but the hard part is navigating real-world trade-offs and building legitimacy while still moving with urgency.
So what do I take from the book Abundance as an investor and as a developer?
First, underwrite like time is money, because it is money. If your pro forma works only if you happen to get approvals on an optimistic timeline, you don’t have a business plan, you’ve got a hope. Put serious contingencies in the schedule. Then ask: if it takes twice as long, does it still work?
Second, predictability beats speed. I would rather work in a jurisdiction that takes 12 months consistently than one that takes six months and then sometimes takes three years. Predictability lowers the risk premium, and risk premium shows up directly in the cost of your capital.
Third, abundance is not just policy, it’s a practice. If you want to build in a community, you have to build trust. And you don’t win by defeating the neighborhood. You win by aligning incentives, by designing a product that solves a real problem, and by communicating transparently.
My bottom line on the book is Abundance is worth reading if you care about why housing is expensive, why infrastructure is so difficult, and why delivery matters more than rhetoric. I don’t agree with every implication. I think the book sometimes makes the path look cleaner than it is in practice. But it names a truth that every builder knows: a society that cannot build cannot keep its promises.
As you think about that, go ahead and get a copy of Abundance by Ezra Klein. And have an awesome rest of your day. Go make some great things happen. Talk to you tomorrow.
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