Poppy Bagel Liberalism
In defense of getting things done
As many varieties of the Abundance movement gather this week, I am offering a contribution to the dialogue.
One of the founding texts of the Abundance movement was Ezra Klein’s naming of “Everything Bagel Liberalism,” a phenomenon where many well-intentioned collateral requirements undermine the effectiveness of progressive policies.
Many have adopted the framing, referring to collateral requirements as “bagel toppings.” Others suggest that a better approach is to adopt policies without collateral requirements, favoring instead a “plain bagel” approach.
From the perspective of someone trying to accomplish some policy outcome, there is a lot of merit to keeping policy tools tightly focused on achieving those outcomes. Collateral requirements, or bagel toppings, can complicate things and direct some energy from a policy effort toward something off-topic. At worst, collateral requirements can undermine the goal of the policy itself.
In practice, collateral requirements are sometimes necessary to stitch together political coalitions. If properly limited, they can be acceptable concessions to help advance incremental change. While an everything bagel is “bad,”[1] limited collateral bagel toppings can be acceptable. Poppy bagel liberalism, if you will.
Creating and divvying up surpluses
One way to think about many policy efforts is that they create a kind of surplus. For example, a zoning reform that allows more units to be built on an individual property raises the overall value of that property. Similarly, a law that prohibits gender discrimination in hiring raises the employment opportunities for women, and grows the economy for everyone. In the Abundance framework, this is also considered growing the pie.
Surpluses also happen on the public sector side, if somewhat differently. Streamlining the process for building public infrastructure may not raise the total amount of money available to government. Instead it creates a policy surplus by increasing the speed of building, or the total amount of infrastructure that can be built with that same amount of money.
Budgetary actions can also create a kind of surplus. If some existing program sees its funding doubled, the new surplus can be directed toward the existing goals of that program, or the goals of that program could be diversified. Newly funded programs are definitionally a surplus, representing new monies where none had previously existed. This can be different than growing the pie, since some new funding might just be a reallocation of limited resources from one bucket to another.
Everything bagel liberalism often is premised on how policymakers divvy up a new surplus. In Abundance from Klein and Thompkins, the CHIPS Act was held out as an example of a new program that was hobbled by collateral requirements. The many additional requirements and processes sought to achieve goals outside of the “main goal” to encourage domestic microchip production. Policymakers recognized that they had a new surplus of funding, and could make choices for how to allocate that surplus. Some would be spent on manufacturing, but it was decided that some of that surplus would be carved out to achieve other policy goals. The criticism of this approach is not that those other collateral goals were without merit. Instead it was that there were so many bagel toppings that the primary goal was frustrated and drowned out.
Everything bagel liberalism in the Golden State
Earlier this year, a report from YIMBY Law criticized many of the recent housing reforms adopted by the California legislature. While a lot of high-profile housing legislation has passed in recent years, few of those bills have produced many homes. The report blames the many collateral requirements baked into those bills, from affordability mandates to added processes that ultimately make them unattractive to developers. While the bills purport to create policy surpluses, they were cannibalized by too many bagel toppings.
YIMBY Law’s suggestion is for the legislature to adopt reforms without collateral requirements. This is easier said than done. Each of those high profile but anemic bills were loaded down with bagel toppings to satisfy some interest group or committee chair, to build a legislative coalition large enough to pass. This sort of death by a thousand cuts is common in the California Legislature. These were not bagel toppings for their own sake, championed by the bill’s authors. Instead they were necessary concessions to get key committee votes, or to pacify opponents.
When the authors or sponsors of these bills defend their choices to take amendments, they argue that without the bagel toppings, there would have been no bagel whatsoever. Unfortunately, they are often correct.
Poppy bagel liberalism for housing supply
Poppy bagel liberalism is the idea that some policy surplus can be redirected to collateral goals, but not so much that it undermines the main goal of the effort.
California’s Density Bonus Law is a good example. That decades-old law allows developments to be larger and enjoy more streamlined approvals, if a percentage of their units are dedicated as permanently affordable. In 2020 and 2023, the law was expanded to allow even larger projects, with the inclusion of incrementally more affordable homes.[2]
Like a lot of the housing reforms discussed in the YIMBY Law report, the enhancements to Density Bonus Law came with bagel toppings. The added benefits for developments were only available in exchange for bagel toppings of added affordable units.
The key difference is that for the Density Bonus legislation, the cost of the affordable units were less than the surplus created by the policy. Model pro formas were created to evaluate the impact of the affordability requirements, and to ensure that the benefits offered were more than sufficient to offset them.[3]
According to data from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, projects are using the Density Bonus legislation more frequently than the bills examined by YIMBY Law. In 2021, the program was used by 10 percent of multi-family developments. In 2024, it had risen to 30 percent.[4] The projects using Density Bonus are larger and contain more affordable and market-rate units than projects that do not use the program. There are some bagel toppings in the law, but not so many as to become an everything bagel.
Senate Bill 35 is another example. That law offers by-right approvals for projects if they accept a variety of bagel toppings including affordable units and the use of union labor. The bagel toppings surely deterred some projects from taking advantage of the legislation, but the Terner Center found that between 2018 and 2021, more than 150 projects opted in to using the policy. For these projects, the benefits were worth the costs.
Negotiating the difference between a poppy bagel and an everything bagel
The purpose of Density Bonus Law’s bagel toppings was to build a broader legislative coalition to secure passage. The Abundance movement (and economists of all stripes) believe that we need more housing supply to improve affordability. They generally support upzoning without any sort of collateral requirements. Still, many advocates and elected officials are not persuaded by the supply arguments, and are not enthusiastic about policies that create more market-rate homes.
In California, those same supply-deniers often do support creating new permanently affordable homes, and have historically supported Density Bonus Law as a mechanism to deliver them. Bills to enhance Density Bonus Law, with its bagel toppings, created an opportunity to build a coalition between housing supply advocates and advocates for permanently affordable homes.
In the negotiations for the 2020 bill, some advocates argued to increase the program’s affordability requirements, which was echoed by the staff from the Department of Housing and Community Development.[5] The pro formas showed that their preferred changes would entirely cannibalize the bill’s surpluses, resulting in no use of the program, no additional affordable units, and no additional units whatsoever.
Fortunately, math prevailed, and the bills to enhance Density Bonus Law passed with some bagel toppings, but not too many.
If I can extend the metaphor to the point of absurdity, the bagel is a spectrum. Policies with collateral requirements range between plain, to poppy, and on to everything.
The disappointing outcomes from the bills analyzed by YIMBY Law does not mean that they are necessarily failures. A small number of new homes is better than no new homes whatsoever. Perhaps those bills should be considered closer on the spectrum to the incrementally successful poppy bagel than the useless everything bagel. Relatedly, perhaps the concessions that were accepted to secure passage were the best possible choices available to decisionmakers at the time.
Bagel toppings can be inelegant distractions to some main purpose, but they can also be the cost of doing business. The purpose of poppy bagel liberalism is to acknowledge political realities, while striving to keep collateral requirements to the bare minimum. Determining the bare minimum will often be more political art than science. Though in situations like Density Bonus Law, financial models can be consulted to determine the objective the breaking points.
The poppy bagel policy is the one where the collateral requirements are the minimum required to get your legislation over the finish line.
The proper purpose of poppy of bagel toppings
As described in Abundance, Pennsylvania Governor Shaprio used executive authorities to suspend red tape and quickly reconstruct the I-95 highway. In effect, using executive authority created a type of public sector surplus. Whatever funding was available for highway repairs was instantly enhanced by the Governor’s executive order, allowing those dollars to do more, faster.
As noted by Klein and Thompkins, Shapiro’s executive action did not ignore every progressive policy, and he required the project to be built by union labor. There is a good policy argument that skilled union labor was necessary to get the project done quickly and safely. Of course, choosing to use union labor also spared Shapiro from protests by the building trades. The bagel toping of union labor was good politics. Shapiro could sustain the surplus created by his executive action, by carving out some of it for union construction workers.
This is similar also to the bagel toppings in Density Bonus Law. The affordability requirements were necessary to keep together a diverse legislative coalition for passage.
The I-95 and Density Bonus Law are different from the bagel toppings in the CHIPS Act. While the concession for union labor helped sustain Shapiro’s executive actions, the bagel toppings in the CHIPS Act were politically unnecessary. The Biden Administration did not need to impose collateral requirements in order to get the CHIPS Act adopted, because the legislation had already passed. Instead they chose to impose many collateral requirements after the fact.
Using bagel toppings to secure legislative coalitions is not a new idea. Logrolling is nearly as old as congress. Arguably, some horse trading helps grease the wheels of legislative bodies. What is distinct and relatively new about everything bagel liberalism is that many new collateral requirements are not reluctant concessions, but done for their own sake. In contrast, poppy bagel liberalism accepts that some bagel toppings can be politically necessary, but keeps them to a minimum.
As California Goes, So Goes the Nation
Some might balk at following the lead of California for policy tools to achieve abundance. After all, California is the epicenter of the housing crisis. But California is also the source of the nation’s first and most successful reforms for accessory dwelling units, which has inspired similar reforms in other states. California has the most burdensome and abused environmental law in the form of CEQA, but recently adopted substantial reforms, spurring other states to consider reforms to their own laws. For both self-inflicted harms, and efforts for reform, California is a pioneer.
Sure, California has an everything bagel liberalism problem. We are also innovating the poppy bagel solution.
[1] As Klein has acknowledged, the term is somewhat confusing as disparagement because the everything bagel is the best bagel.
[2] The 2020 legislation was Assembly Bill 2345 (Gonzalez), and the 2023 legislation was Assembly Bill 1287 (Alvarez). Both bills were drafted and sponsored by Circulate San Diego, during my tenure as CEO and General Counsel.
[3] The pro formas are available at https://www.circulatesd.org/ab1287proformas.
[4] Circulate is preparing a report on these figures.
[5] Before 2020, Density Bonus Law allowed developments to receive up to a 35 percent bonus, if they included up to 11 percent of their base density units as affordable. Assembly Bill 2345 in 2020 proposed increasing the potential bonus to 50 percent, if up to 15 percent of their base density units are affordable. Advocates from the Western Center on Law and Policy, among others, argued that the 50 percent bonus should be available for projects that include 17 percent of their base density units as affordable. While that might sound like “more affordable units,” the pro formas showed that such a high requirement would not be any more financially advantageous than building only 11 percent affordable, and using only the preexisting 35 percent bonus. If the 17 percent figure were adopted, no project would use the policy and there would be no additional affordable units created. In contrast, the pro formas showed that the 15 percent threshold ate up some of the proposed surplus, but not all of it, meaning that at least some projects would actually use the new policy.