Housing and the False Promise of Abundance

Following the publication of Klein and Thompson’s (2025) remarkably popular book, Abundance has emerged as the key diagnosis and remedy for America’s housing affordability challenges. The book’s central argument, along with allied academic work, is that deregulation will substantially increase housing supply and in turn meaningfully improve housing affordability. We argue this framework rests on inconclusive and contested empirical ground. First, a thorough literature review of relevant research demonstrates the links between deregulation, supply, and prices are much weaker and more complex than abundance advocates suggest. Second, returning to descriptive evidence shows that the basic facts which motivate the abundance argument are also contested. There is no incontrovertible evidence of a major supply shortage in the U.S. The abundance movement’s hyper fixation on housing supply and deregulation risks foreclosing possibilities for other targeted interventions that have a greater potential for remedying the affordability crisis.