The shorter, published version of this essay, entitled ‘The Real Housing Crisis,’ was published in Future Observatory Journal issue no.3, ‘In Abundance’

An abundance of what?

Klein and Thompson’s ‘abundance agenda’ argues that we must ‘build baby build’ to solve the housing crisis. But the countries they target already have enough under-occupied dwellings to solve their own housing crises, nor would simply building more of them make housing affordable. Meanwhile, the real housing crisis is that we do not have the material or emissions budgets to build many new houses with anyway. Rather than simply cutting red tape, we must re-imagine our ‘system settings’, to unlock a richer, deeper concept of equitable and regenerative abundance.

Ed. Towards the end of 2025, I wrote ‘The Real Housing Crisis’ for issue no.3 of Future Observatory Journal, which explored various ideas around the theme of abundance. What follows is the longer draft of my article, a fuller critique of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s damaging book ‘Abundance’, often extending the analysis beyond housing, but usually coming back to ‘building’—including a pointer to some recent research, Project Circle, outlining what I think is a genuinely…