THE POLITICS OF MORE

Do liberals need to learn how to build?

- BY BENJAMIN WALLACE-WELLS

A basic conviction of the abundance movement is that stagnation represents something like a national emergency.

I grew up in the late eighties and early nineties in a pair of functional redbrick postwar apartments on the fringes of New York City—first in a two-bedroom in an eight-story building in Inwood, on the northern tip of Manhattan, and then in a three-bedroom in a twelve-story building in Riverdale, in the West Bronx. Each had a coin-operated laundry in the basement. The Gordons, friends of my parents, lived on the nineteenth floor of a taller building a few blocks away in Riverdale, and from their little balcony you could look east across the borough and see low-rise brick buildings much like mine, in which hundreds of thousands of people lived, little yellow windows against the gray Bronx sky. “They were basic,” Samuel J. LeFrak, who built hundreds of such structures in Brooklyn and Queens, said of these apartments. “The windows opened and closed. You opened them in the summer and you closed them in the winter.”`

At the time, the city’s population wasn’t quite eight million, but to my mother it was an article of faith that this was an undercount—that census-takers were too nervous to fully explore the poorest neighborhoods, that illegal immigrants hid from the survey, that the true figure must be at least nine. She taught in public schools in Washington Heights and East Harlem, and each fall immigrants from new countries enrolled in her class: Cuba, then the Dominican Republic, then Ecuador. The world was vast, and we had so many affordable apartment buildings. Surely New York City would grow.