Unlocking Abundance Together: How Real Estate and Energy Stakeholders Can Power Growth and Investment

Today, it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that anyone with any stake in a physical project needs to agree on its parameters before it can be built.

The result: While America is leading the future in bytes (in software and digital services), its development has ground to a halt in bolts.

America now faces a severe shortage of housing and energy that poses an existential threat to economic dynamism, climate progress, and the viability of long-term infrastructure investment.

The US is at least 3.9 million units short on housing, and most acutely short in its productive, superstar cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. A large body of research shows that this shortage constrains productivity and fuels inequality, among other costs.^[i]

Energy markets, which depend on continuous change to the built environment, are similarly failing Americans. A weak energy sector raises utility bills, dampens innovation, leads to more polluted air, and hurts climate progress. Clean energy deployment remains at just one-third of what’s needed to reach climate targets, with the US adding only 32.3 gigawatts of clean power in 2023, when 60-127 gigawatts annually are required to meet climate goals.^[ii]

These shortages are the result of self-imposed scarcity—an artificial throttling of our productive capacity not driven by natural constraints, but by policy choices. A framework of abundance presents an opportunity for real estate and energy investors to identify and dismantle these bottlenecks to unlock a prosperous, investable future.

As this reality has become more widely recognized, a quiet nonpartisan consensus has emerged on one idea: we must make it easier to build in America.

Across the political spectrum, leaders are converging around efforts to accelerate housing and energy development as a means to strengthen national prosperity and global leadership. Influential thinkers like the New York Times’ Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, now co-authors of the book Abundance, along with a growing chorus of conservatives and libertarians, have catalyzed a growing movement across traditional ideological lines. This abundance movement frames regulatory reform, targeted public investment, and improved government effectiveness not as competing tools, but as a winning combination that unlocks capital and enables long-term growth. With particular case studies housing and energy.

Abundance and the community of thinkers around it have identified the difficult politics of “abundance.” It’s a technocratic platform that doesn’t lend itself to any easy campaign slogans or flatter voter preconceptions. And where bottlenecks to material abundance exist, they’re generally propped up by entrenched interests. Abundance is a desperately needed solution to America’s most pressing problems, but scarcity is a huge windfall to a few.

REGULATORY CONSTRAINTS

The housing and energy crises share a common culprit: a system designed to say no.

In America, it’s easy to delay or derail a project. That’s not an accident. It’s the result of a policy regime built to avoid potential harms, not the equally real—and often deeper—harm of inaction: rising rents, stalled clean energy, declining productivity. Our regulatory model is therefore incapable of solving any problem that requires building quickly.

Three chokepoints define our housing dysfunction. First, zoning laws prohibit density and innovation, locking vast swaths of urban land into low-yield uses. Second, bureaucratic reviews are slow, costly, duplicative, and easily litigated, imposing multi-year delays that often kill viable projects.^[iii] And third, discretionary approvals and adversarial public comment processes empower the loudest objectors—often would-be neighbors protecting their convenience—to veto change at everyone else’s expense. Utility-scale energy faces the same challenges, while typically requiring additional permits because state or federal lands are involved.^[iv] 

Infrastructure requirements only compound the problem. Housing needs transit. Electricity needs power lines. Each new layer of complexity makes it harder to build anything at all.

Other countries show it doesn’t have to be this way. In nations such as Japan, Germany, and South Korea, clear and consistent approval processes make it far easier and cheaper to get homes and infrastructure built.

While New York’s housing stock grew just 19% over five decades, Tokyo nearly tripled its supply through a simple and flexible national zoning code, rapid approvals (2-6 weeks versus New York’s 3-12 months), and performance-based standards rather than extensive procedure.^[v] 

Tokyo points the way: We need to legally allow abundant housing and energy through zoning reform. Then we need faster processes to approve permits and get projects built. The best solutions will be guided by set standards about how much environmental risk is acceptable, or how much a neighborhood must benefit, to build a certain amount of energy on natural lands or housing in that neighborhood. Then projects that meet those guidelines should be automatically approved. And any role for the courts must be productive, not destructive.^[vi]

The capital is there. The market demand is clear. What we need now is a regulatory model that promotes abundance—not one that protects the privilege to say no.

FINANCING BARRIERS

High-return public investment, like smart deregulation, is essential to abundance.

In today’s high-interest rate environment, even permitted projects often fail to pencil. Ørsted’s cancellation of two major US offshore wind farms—intended to provide power equal to the needs of almost a million homes—was largely due to rising capital costs.^[vii] Similarly, housing developers increasingly emphasize the capital barriers to new multifamily buildings, like a scrapped 352-unit apartment building in Philadelphia.^[viii]

Public investment can bridge the gap. Unlike private lenders, public capital can absorb longer time horizons and incorporate social returns, a fact observed as far back as John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory.^[ix] Consider office high-rise-to-housing conversions—an elegant way to revive downtowns and add transit-connected homes. These projects are generally financially infeasible, even where bureaucratic barriers have been eased. But research shows a small public investment could deliver affordable units at a fraction of the typical cost.^[x]

The same principle applies to middle-income housing, long absent from hot markets; market-rate financing simply won’t cut it. Massachusetts Housing Development Incentive Program (HDIP) shows the power of public financing in action. The program, which offers tax incentives to developers, has to date created 2,700 market-rate housing units for a cost of only $23,664 per unit to the public, and was significantly expanded by the legislature in 2023.^[xi]

Likewise, utility-scale clean energy requires particularly large upfront investments that are being hampered by rates.^[xii] Finally, next-generation energy needs support through its middle period between seed and commercial maturity.

The solution isn’t just more money; it’s more options. Expanding tax credits and full expensing would ease cash flow for builders of housing and energy. Proposals to offer construction financing through America’s government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, could unlock a new wave of multifamily investment.^[xiii] And some housekeeping is needed on our next-generation energy investments, including geothermal and nuclear energy.

The regulatory and financing challenges are linked. Projects that take years to permit require higher rates of return over long time horizons. A fragmented, unfamiliar development model is riskier for lenders.^[xiv] If we want capital to flow into the infrastructure of the future, we need a system that makes building fast, legible, and investable.

GOVERNMENT EFFECTIVENESS

Abundance isn’t just about policy—it’s about execution.

Even the best-intentioned efforts to fix problems can be paralyzed by a public sector that’s slow, risk-averse, and overwhelmed. Any abundance agenda includes a key pillar—government effectiveness—not necessarily focused on a bigger or smaller government, but rather a more effective one, addressing the failures that have steadily destroyed trust in government.^[xv]

The problem isn’t primarily about increasing staffing or staff resources. More hands or better software won’t fix a system that treats delay as a virtue. Nor is it solved by cutting public servants. The real bottleneck is a culture of legalistic caution, born of outdated statutes and reinforced by institutional fear. Around the same time that red tape slowed development, agencies became subject to new laws such as the Paperwork Reduction Act that slowed government action significantly.^[xvi]  

Today, agencies are rewarded by Congress and their own legal teams for increasingly cautious interpretations of those laws, not for solving problems, and this has bred a culture of inaction. Jennifer Pahlka, founder of the US Digital Service, puts it plainly: “Culture eats policy.”^[xvii]

This cultural rigidity is deepened by anti-corruption reforms that, while well-intentioned, have stripped governments at all levels of discretion and outsourced work into contracts that both reflect and reinforce the culture. In his new book Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman spells out the consequences: even mundane projects—like fixing a park— have become prohibitively expensive and slow.^[xviii] Public sector leaders learn that action receives more scrutiny than inaction. They learn not to bother. “It should not be this hard to serve the public,” write the authors of Abundance. (In the Dunkelman example, it’s a private developer named Donald Trump who ends up fixing the park.)

Fixing these problems demands two changes: reform and leadership. We can and should rewrite laws to reduce the complexity of direct government action as well as the private sector’s interaction with government. 

But we will still desperately need new types of public sector leadership. For one, management will need to embrace accountability, creativity, and innovation. Outsourcing and action restriction are poor substitutes for those virtues, with accordingly poor results to show. A stronger government is also a more expert one, meaning more technical experts to properly manage complicated contracts (or help bring that work in-house).

While revitalizing the private sector, abundance thus promises a stronger American public sector to match.

FROM GRIDLOCK TO GROWTH: CLEARING THE PATH TO PROGRESS

America is blessed with an abundance of capital, ambition, and innovation. And yet we throttle it. Few people understand this better than real estate and energy stakeholders. Both sectors are grounded in the physical world. They build things people depend on. They navigate complex permitting, financing, and delivery challenges. And increasingly, their work is understood as core to solving our greatest modern challenges.

Each of our American dysfunctions has its defenders. They tend to be incumbents, some actively benefiting from the status quo, like homeowners who want to preserve the wealthiest parts of San Francisco in amber. Others, like a renter who thinks new development causes gentrification rather than ameliorates it, are incredulous of the benefit they would receive. Legacy environmental groups, who have oriented much of their work around suing to stop projects they don’t like (including clean energy projects), sit somewhere in between.^[xix]

But the costs of inaction are clear: Los Angeles is short at least 340,000 homes, and New York 350,000, as rents continue their upward march and young families can no longer afford to live in our most prosperous places.^{[xx, xxi]}, The US is badly lagging on climate goals.^[xxii] Until the government can act with clarity and speed, faith in it will continue to erode and capital will remain sidelined.

To unlock our potential, we don’t need to reinvent the system—we need to unjam it. That means regulatory frameworks that reward progress, not process. Financing tools that reflect today’s rate environment. And public institutions that are capable of and accountable for results. Imagine a world where we close the national housing gap and rents begin to fall everywhere, and where energy bills do too as we speed towards decarbonization—a world of fast and fair growth. As Klein and Thompson write: “Abundance is the state in which there is enough of what we need to create lives better than we have had.”^[xxiii] We know how to achieve that. Other nations have shown the way.

The growing momentum of the abundance movement provides a key opportunity to change the status quo. A coalition of thought leaders, policy experts, and advocacy organizations are working to craft and implement solutions that make it easier for America to build again.

The market has spoken: unsustainably high costs for both housing and energy reflect pent up demand that self-inflicted barriers have created. The abundance agenda represents a market opportunity, not just a philosophy. The success of these efforts will depend on increased involvement from the investor community joining together to remove the bottlenecks that perpetuate scarcity. And few can speak to the barriers to building better than the builders. The time has come to unlock abundance, together.

SUMMIT #18

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Note from the Publisher

Gunnar Branson | AFIRE

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US Solar in 2025: What Matters in the United States for Solar Investors

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Decentralized Energy: Energy Systems, Decentralization, and the Built Environment

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Let’s Be Honest – It’s About NOI

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Targeted Investment: Untangling the Building and the Grid

Elena Alschuler + Marisa Mendenhall + Haya El-Merheby + Brian Klinksiek + Julie Manning | LaSalle Investment Management

Faring On Adoption: How Does US Commercial Real Estate Fare on Green Energy Adoption?

Andrea Savio | Georgetown University

Powering the Future: Energy, Trade, and Climate Risks in Global Real Estate

Tanja Milosevic | Grosvenor

Root Causes: An Honest Addressing of the Climate Crisis

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Grid-Interactive Multifamily: Beyond Efficiency: Multifamily Buildings as Energy Assets

Thomas Stanchak | Stoneweg

Power as a Platform: The Role of Real Estate in the Grid of the Future

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Unlocking Abundance Together: How Real Estate and Energy Stakeholders Can Power Growth and Investment

Derek Kaufman + Joshua Seawell | Inclusive Abundance + Mike Kingsella | Up for Growth

Investing in Tech Adjacencies: Leveraging the National Tech Buildout Beyond Data Centers

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Navigating the Labyrinth: The US Regulatory Landscape at the Intersection of Nuclear Energy and Data Centers

Amy Roma + Chip Cannon + Porter Wiseman | Hogan Lovells

Transmission Alley: Rural Real Estate, Railways, Renewables, and the Future of Data Infrastructure

Michael Maloff + Gary Goodman | Dentons