16 Examples: What an Abundant America Would Feel Like

Abundance usually gets explained as a list of problems: zoning, permits, licensing, slow approvals.

It skips the exciting part: what life looks like after we fix them.

Everything you need is close and cheap

1. Lunch costs $4. Singapore has $3 food stalls. Japan and Hong Kong have $4 lunches. Those prices come from tiny restaurants run by one or two workers with a short menu. In the US, most cities require three or four separate sinks, which makes a kitchen under 200 square feet nearly impossible. Workers don’t have to earn less for lunch to be cheap. Tiny restaurants and walkable neighborhoods just have to be legal.

2. A taco truck on every corner. In cities, you should be able to grab good, cheap food without driving or paying $15. One person should be able to open a food stall or truck cheaply, even without strong English or a lawyer to handle the paperwork. Cities like Chicago and Baltimore ban food vendors within 200-300 feet of restaurants. Those rules protect restaurants from competition, but everyone else pays more for food.

3. Anyone can open an owl cafe or a vegan lesbian bookstore. Japan is full of small, oddly specific businesses, often run by just one or two people. They survive because the space is cheap and enough people live close enough to walk in. In much of the US, apartments above shops are illegal. Lot size and parking rules force a business to rent far more space and parking than it needs.

4. Your life isn’t worse if you don’t drive. Your job, the grocery store, and the clinic are in walking or biking distance. Buses or trains come every 3-5 minutes. Right now, lots of people can’t drive because they’re too poor, too young, too old, blind, or anxious behind the wheel. Some just don’t want to. Car-free neighborhoods exist in the US, but there are so few that they’ve become a luxury. Frequent transit with homes built near them would make car-free life normal.

5. When you want a car, a new electric one costs ~$10,000. In China, BYD’s small Seagull sells for ~$10,000. Much of the world is buying Chinese cars but Americans can’t. Ford’s CEO drove a Chinese electric car for six months and didn’t want to give it back. He called their cost and quality far better than what he sees in the West. The U.S. government imposes a 100% tariff and a ban on Chinese car software. We can handle the security risk by keeping car data in the US and letting American auditors check the code. Europe charges high tariffs but still lets them in.

You can build a life in any city

6. Anyone can move to New York City, San Francisco, or DC to chase a dream. When I visit New York, I still get teary that I get to see it in person. People who live in these cities don’t always realize what they mean to young people who grew up hearing about them. My friends and family keep moving to Austin instead - Austin built homes so rents fell about 15% from their pandemic peak. One study found that if New York and the Bay Area allowed as much housing as the average US city, millions would move to better jobs. GDP would increase, so the average American would earn thousands more per year.

7. A room for $400-$500 a month. People used to be able to move to a city and figure things out later. It’s how Hemingway got his start in Paris. A writer starting out, a student leaving home, someone escaping an abusive house, or someone whose drinking makes it hard to hold a job could all rent a room with a shared bathroom. These single-room occupancy buildings housed millions of low-income and older Americans until cities banned most of them by the 1980s. Higher-income people thought them undesirable and dangerous. Some really were firetraps. We can regulate fire safety without banning the cheapest home there is.

8. You can stay in the city after you have a kid. Families want three-bedroom apartments, but big US cities have few. Europe has these but the US can’t because of stairs! US codes require two staircases in any building over three stories. Most of the world allows one. Two staircases mean a long hallway running between them, with apartments lined up on both sides. That leaves each apartment with windows on only one wall. Every bedroom needs a window, so three-bedroom units only fit on the corners. Relatedly, US elevators cost at least three times more than in Western Europe.

Getting care is easy

9. Everyone has health insurance, no matter where they or their parents work. If you switch jobs, go freelance, or rely on part-time shifts, you don’t worry about coverage. As a teen, I thought it was random and unfair that we had no insurance because my parents’ jobs didn’t offer it. I had about ten jobs before becoming a diplomat at 23. None had coverage. We could lower health prices and add a public option to the ACA for states that turned down expanded Medicaid. Unemployment and disability benefits should come from a fast, capable government too. Access shouldn’t depend on which type of employer you happen to have.

10. You can walk into a nearby pharmacy with a sore throat and walk out with medicine. In England, Montana, and Colorado, you tell the pharmacist your symptoms and they can treat sore throats and urinary tract infections in women on the spot. In most of the US, you need a doctor’s visit first and then a second trip to the pharmacy. Without a car or a regular doctor, two trips often means skipping care. Letting nurses diagnose and open clinics would put more trained providers near you.

11. Every family can get childcare, not just the ones who got on the waitlist first. More states are paying for childcare, but when New Mexico made it free for everyone it had just 32 child care slots for every 100 kids under 2. Paying for care only helps if there’s care to buy. That means making daycares easier to build, letting existing ones expand without $1 million fire-code retrofits, and protecting people who watch neighbors’ kids in their own home alongside their own kids from rules that ban them by accident. These in-home daycares are more likely to offer night hours and care in other languages.

Important things nobody lobbies for

12. No more baby formula shortages. In 2022, frantic parents drove from store to store finding empty shelves while European stores were fully stocked. US rules kept out imports, even from Europe. If a medicine, formula, or sunscreen is approved in the EU, UK, Japan, or Canada, we could fast-track it here.

13. Big drug companies shouldn’t be the only ones who decide which drugs get made. Today, mostly big drug companies can afford to carry a drug all the way to approval, so they decide what gets tested based on what will sell. That’s how a working tuberculosis vaccine got stuck when the company chose not to run the final studies. The Gates Foundation and other charities had to put up $550 million. Other countries let smaller players try. Australia lets small companies start early trials quickly (American startups often test drugs there first!). In the UK during COVID, university researchers ran a trial in about 180 hospitals by adding a few steps to patients’ normal care. Within months, they found that a $3 steroid cut deaths among the sickest patients by about a third. No company would have paid to test it, because nobody owns the patent. A hospital doctor, a university lab, a small startup, or a patient charity should be able to run trials without hundreds of millions of dollars.

14. Scientists with bold ideas get funded. Breakthroughs almost always look weird at first. Katalin Karikó spent years working on mRNA when few believed in it. Her grant applications kept getting rejected. Her university demoted her. Her work became the COVID vaccines and she won the Nobel Prize. The government should fund more basic science and in many different ways: small fast grants, money for promising people instead of projects, and funds set aside for ideas reviewers think are long shots. We’ll be more likely to cure Alzheimer’s, cancer, and malaria.

15. No pandemic ever again. The next new virus gets discovered in a city’s sewage before most people feel sick. Schools and offices stay open, because the air inside is cleaned by far-UVC, a type of light that kills germs while people are in the room. A vaccine arrives in months instead of a year, because scientists already designed one for each family of dangerous viruses and factories in many places can make it at once. We make enough face masks for everyone and new antibiotics arrive faster than germs learn to resist old ones. One study puts the chance of another pandemic as deadly as COVID at about 2% a year.

Government works so well it’s boring

16. Government is trustworthy, dependable, and not newsworthy. Everything from 911 to government websites works. Our water has no lead because we upgraded the pipes. When a loved one dies, you report it once instead of to every agency. Your Supplemental Security Income doesn’t vanish because you saved more than $2,000, a limit set in the 1980s. No parent loses food stamps because the letter scheduling their interview arrived after the interview.

We can decide to make this happen.

This vision is city-centric because I live in a city. Abundance is really a question: what would make life here better, and what’s stopping it? In rural areas or small towns, the answers will differ. Every place deserves its own list. I hope one of you writes yours.

These lists are easier to write with other people. Each of us sees a piece of the problem.

That’s what DC Abundance has been for me. Someone at Treasury sees problems a congressional staffer never hears about. A contractor sees where both of their plans break down in practice. Our group began with 50 people in a living room and grew to 600.

We can’t build these visions alone. Together, we will.

Today is DC Abundance’s official launch. If you’re in the DC, MD, or VA area, come tonight. is speaking!