From Social Impact to Political Power: Catherine Vaughan on Abundance NY

In this episode of Generation Reset, Kerry Rodriguez sits down with Catherine Vaughan, co-founder of Abundance New York, to discuss how a former social impact consultant moved into electoral politics and began building a political ecosystem focused on making New York easier, faster, and cheaper to build.

Catherine traces her path from global health and agriculture work in Rwanda and Ethiopia to Stanford, McKinsey, the Hillary Clinton campaign, Flippable, Swing Left, and eventually Abundance New York. After entering politics in 2016, she became focused on the leverage of electoral work — especially state legislative races, donor strategy, and the political infrastructure needed to support candidates who want government to deliver more effectively.

The conversation explores:

• why nonprofit and social impact work can have limits compared to policy and electoral politics
• how the 2016 election pushed Catherine deeper into the political arena
• the “moneyball” approach to political giving and down-ballot races
• why state legislative campaigns can offer outsized political impact
• how Catherine and Ryder Kessler launched Abundance New York
• what it means to build a political home for pro-abundance candidates and voters
• and how listeners can begin building their own political power locally

Throughout the discussion, Catherine argues that housing, transit, clean energy, public space, and government delivery are not separate issues — they are connected by the question of whether government can actually meet people’s needs. She also explains why political power is built not only through campaigns, but through media, advocacy organizations, donors, voters, community boards, and local institutions.

This episode is ultimately about political activation, local government, housing, civic infrastructure, and what it takes to turn frustration with broken systems into organized political power.

Generation Reset with Kerry Rodriguez is a podcast exploring political activation, civic engagement, and the forces that push people into — or away from — public life.

Produced by the ContraSearch Network, a division of ContraSearch, Inc.

Transcript

Cold Open

SPEAKER_01 0:00

And he lost that race. I mean, the power of incumbency is real. At that point, we kind of put our heads together and we were like, can we work on something together? Can we build an organization that would make it easier for candidates like Ryder to run and win? We wanted to create what we call a political home or a political ecosystem that is kind of putting forward these ideas about how do we make it easier, faster, and cheaper to build and deliver what New Yorkers need.

Meet Catherine Vaughan

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Welcome to Generation Reset, a podcast that explores political activation, the forces and impulses that push people into or out of US politics. I'm Carrie Rodriguez, your host, and on the show this week, Katherine Vaughn, a former social impact consultant who pivoted into US politics in spite of political headwinds, and who is currently championing the abundance movement in New York. Our conversation covers a turning point that led her into politics, how she teamed up with a friend from college to create a political ecosystem supporting issues they cared about and what listeners can do to wield their political power.

From Social Impact to Politics

SPEAKER_01 1:09

I didn't have very much money at the time. I was an entry-level worker, but where could I spend my time where it would have the most impact? And I was reading a lot about, you know, how there were places in the world where there were treatable, preventable diseases that people were still dying from and thinking about the marginal impact of my time. So I uh spent a few years in Rwanda and Ethiopia working in global health and in agriculture. From there, I went to Stanford for two years. I uh then joined McKinsey. I was doing some work with like global foundations and, you know, kind of still in this in this space. And then it was 2016, and I decided that I would take a leave from McKinsey to go work on the Hillary campaign. Um, and then I thought, well, maybe and maybe I'll get a job in the administration, you know, and I won't have to go back to McKinsey. And obviously that did not pan out. Um, but the day after uh Trump was elected in 2016, uh, I start, I kind of was talking with some of my campaign uh team members, and we kind of hatched this idea for an organization that became flippable. Uh, and flippable was a political action committee that focused on flipping state legislative seats from red to blue. We we thought that like kind of like a money ball approach to democratic um donations was investing in state legislative campaigns in flippable states and flippable districts so that we could, you know, gain democratic majorities in states like Michigan or Pennsylvania or North Carolina, or you know, break uh Republican supermajorities in states like North Carolina. Um, you know, and we did that work for several years. We ended up merging with an organization called Swing Left, um, where I still sit on the board, and Swing Left does kind of like strategic allocation of donor dollars and volunteer time up and down the ballot. Um, and so anyway, I was living in New York, kind of like a deep blue city and state where Democrats had supermajorities, and seeing that a lot of the problems that plagued New Yorkers were not being solved. And so started scheming with my good friend Ryder Kessler, who's my co-founder at Abundance, about how do we get the right Democrats in office? How do we get people who are focused on making the city and state more affordable, building more housing so that our state can be more welcoming and more people can live here, building more transit so that people can get around and our city can be less car dependent and safer for pedestrians, um, and also building clean energy so that we can, you know, have cheaper and more reliable energy.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

The background that you just shared is a little bit similar to mine. So I did start out in social impact consulting at a competing firm called FSG. And then later on I go into uh industry and from there I do go to business school as well. But you mentioned a few things that I wanted to kind of come back to and understand a bit more. So in 2016, you said you joined the Hillary campaign, Hillary Clinton campaign. Would that be the first time that you ever took a, you know, decisive step into politics, or beforehand did you ever participate in supporting a candidate that way?

SPEAKER_01 4:12

I had done a little bit of volunteering for Obama in 2008, but I had never been on a campaign before. And I think a lot of like my, you know, when I was in college, I think a lot of the like the ways that kids were pushed into social impact was like the nonprofit route. Um, and I just like I didn't have as much of a political consciousness. And some of that was on me too. I think it was a hard like I cared about like helping people and I wasn't like watching C-span and I didn't know all, you know, I think like it's it can be intimidating to like get into politics. So I wasn't like as well versed on like what was happening politically. Um, but I, you know, I think over time I realized like you gotta get, you just have to get in the the arena and start start learning. Yeah.

Why Electoral Work Matters

SPEAKER_00 4:56

What did you see as maybe the limitations if you if you saw any, just uh between being in the nonprofit sector focused on social impact and why move into PAC? Actually, that's quite interesting, the transition into a PAC.

SPEAKER_01 5:09

Yeah, I mean, I think the like the nonprofit sector is great, and there's lots of really amazing nonprofits out there doing good work. You know, an individual nonprofit, especially a direct services nonprofit, can only serve so many people is really limited by its budget. And if you think about the budgets of like even foundations versus government, I mean it's orders of magnitude of a difference. Um, so if you think about like the spending and also the like the pol, the impact that policy can have on millions of people, you know, to me it seems like a higher leverage way to focus my attention and my energy. Um and also, but at the same time, I really love like management. I love like running things, and that can be harder to do in a really, really big government bureaucracy. So like I haven't made the leap, for example, to like working for the city government or state government or federal. Um, but you know, this the kind of moving over to the pack space and abundance it has a C3, C4, and PAC. But moving over to that space allowed me to continue doing what I love to do, but with a focus on um on changing like whose butts are in the the right seats and also on changing

Moneyball Politics

SPEAKER_01 6:18

policy.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

So you mentioned the money ball strategy, which is you know, you're looking at granular data and then using that. I mean, I'm thinking about the baseball movie, I'm sure that's what you were referring to. But then you also mentioned uh purple districts. And so how do you flip districts that are purple? We know that in today's era where post a recent Supreme Court ruling, we don't really have, you know, gerrymandering is impacting the livelihood of these purple districts. I don't think we're gonna see much of them moving forward since the electoral maps are gonna get redrawn to favor one party over another. How has this money ball strategy of trying to use granular data to get gain an advantage? How has that changed as a result of this recent gerrymandering ruling that has come out of the Supreme Court?

SPEAKER_01 7:11

Yeah, I mean, in some ways, um, like you could see actually there being more purple districts coming from gerrymandering because of how, you know, each side is trying to, you know, each side is trying to have a larger advantage or have an advantage over a larger number of districts, but that means that you might have to spread the margins out a little bit more. Um or or like you're kind of spreading yourself thin. So you could see more, more purple districts coming from that. Like I think, I think Republicans' redistricting strategy and the fact that they're kind of winning this redistricting game could actually like completely, you know, bite them in the ass because they, you know, if there's a big wave, they they've now drawn a bunch of closer districts to try to win more districts and and Democrats could win a lot of them. Um, if you think about how how people tend to give, it's very heartstrings driven, like, and it's very, it can be very expressive. Like you get mad about a vote in Congress and you want to go take out like Mitch McConnell or something like that. And it's like, okay, but that's not achievable. So let's focus our resources on on races that are where the money actually will make an impact. And I think that like we're thinking like orders of magnitude. Like if you think about when I was doing this work and it's changed, people are spending more money at state legislative races. But like what I used to say was like the average state legislative race was like $150,000. And the average congressional race or like house race was like a million dollars, and the average Senate race was $10 million. So that's an order of magnitude as you go up, and then you know, obviously, like presidential is a billion dollars. So you're really, you know, the marginal impact of your dollar is so much lower as you get higher up, you know, as you're as you're working on these higher-level races, and you could spend that money much more effectively trying to flip a chamber.

Founding Abundance New York

SPEAKER_00 9:03

Okay, so I remember meeting writer Kessler at the event as well. And how did you both think about starting this uh pack uh and the abundance chapter here in New York City? Where did the idea come from to focus really on the abundance? Because uh, for people who don't know, the abundance concept, at least as far as I can tell, originated from a book that recently got published by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. But if it predates that, then we'd love to know.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

It does. Yeah, it predates the book. So Ryder and I go back um 22 years. Uh we met in college, but um we we both kind of did our own thing career-wise for uh, you know, we for a few years after college, he became a a tech entrepreneur who was working on um a tool that helped uh service workers get more tips because like we're that old that um, you know, people stopped paying in cash and iPads didn't yet exist. And so there was this point where everyone was paying with credit cards and they could not tip with their credit cards. And he built this little thing called a dip jar and you could dip your credit card in and tip people. And then we both got interested in politics or like decided to pivot our careers to politics. I think we'd always been interested. And he decided to run for state assembly in 2022. Um, and so obviously I was like so thrilled to support his campaign. And he, this was before abundance came out, but he was kind of running on an abundance agenda before the term existed. He wanted us to, he wanted, you know, Democrats to focus on building more housing in New York so that we can be more welcoming to more people and more affordable. He was focused on public transit and public space and on renewable energy and on kind of government that works for people. And he was really connecting the dots across these issues and stitching together a new coalition. He was running to the left of his of the opponent that he was running against, who wasn't a 35-year incumbent in the legislature. Um, but and and he had this kind of like lefty coalition. He was endorsed by the WFP, but he also had this coalition of kind of emerging urbanist groups like Open New York, um, Streets Pack, and a lot of folks involved in in the transportation and housing spaces. And he lost that race. I mean, the power of incumbency is real. Uh his uh, so he, you know, at that point, we kind of put our heads together and we were like, can we work on something together? Like, is there a way? Can we build an organization that would make it easier for candidates like Ryder to run and win? So we, you know, we wanted to create what we call a political home or a political ecosystem that is kind of um putting forward these ideas about how do we make it easier, faster, and cheaper to build and deliver what New Yorkers need.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

So this is like a is this like an infrastructure that can you say a bit more about what's missing that you're trying to build?

SPEAKER_01 11:58

Yeah, I think that like, I mean, let's look at the at the policy level. We have not New York is suffering. We're in a huge housing crisis. You know, we have like 1.4% vacancy rate, median rents in Manhattan are over $5,000 a month. We desperately need to build more housing. Like housing supply is the problem. And yet our politicians have not been able to get us there. Um, and we're starting to see progress on that. I think a lot of that is due to the efforts of groups like Abundance New York, Open New York, and others. Um, but just as an example, like, you know, neither the establishment nor the left was focused on solving the supply crisis in a really big ambitious way. Um, and so we were thinking about like, okay, well, how do we put those ideas forward? And thinking about what are the systems of incentives or like the ecosystems that surround a given elected official. And so as we think about it, it's like your supporters, your voters, and your donors, um, that's part of your ecosystem. Um, then advocacy organizations or kind of uh or interest groups, that's part of your ecosystem if you're an elected official. So, like, you know, is like advocacy organizations, unions, um, other kind of interest groups that are that you're talking to and that you're listening to and that support you electorally. Um, and then the third is just like the media environment. So, like, what are the types of publications? Who are you reading, listening to, watching? And are they putting forward ideas, ambitious, bold ideas about how to make our city and state, you know, welcoming and work for everyone? Um, and so, you know, I think we wanted to create something similar. Um, so we, you know, started this Substack. So we were putting out original content on these, on these ideas and trying to get some of those narratives interwoven into, you know, press and kind of traditional, both traditional media and also social media. Um, we have a community of about 5,000 people. Um, they come to events, they support great candidates, they they are there to cheerlead when an elected official makes a really courageous vote or decision. And they're also there to hold them accountable when they don't and they shrink away from those bold decisions. Um, and then we also stitch together a coalition of advocacy groups across these different areas that are part of that ecosystem that is, you know, kind of shaping incentives for electeds.

The Abundance Agenda

SPEAKER_00 14:16

One thing that is coming out very clearly is that when I'm hearing you discuss about the abundance, the abundance movement, housing plays are very central. But are there other like the shortage of housing and then the need to supply more housing to make housing more affordable? But before we get into, you know, maybe the topic of housing in particular, are there other issues that you think the abundance movement is focused on that you want to uh make clear?

SPEAKER_01 14:45

So I would say the three main issues that we've focused on, um uh there's three that we started with and we added a fourth. The three that we started with all have to do with the built environment. So housing, public transit and public space, and renewable energy and resiliency. And those are all areas where often there are kind of the same people opposing progress in those areas. The same people who don't want a new development across the street also don't want a bike lane or a bus lane, um, you know, and they also might not want a battery storage facility or, you know, offshore wind. And so kind of the NIMBY opposition, we see the, you know, kind of same opponents across these different areas. Um, and then I would say the fourth pillar that we added was um, we call it democracy and delivery. And that's really about like a government that can actually deliver services for people, whether that's like benefits that people are entitled to, or a government that can actually expedite like the process of building and, you know, permitting and building housing or transit. You know, like it there's a lot of issues. You know, I think transit is a really big one in our community. Um, we used to be able to build subway lines and subway stations at a much, much faster pace than we can now. It's it's exorbitantly expensive, much, much more expensive than in other countries, um, you know, to build a mile of subway track and to make our city more accessible, or bus lane is thinking about some of the political fights around making our city more transit accessible for more people rather than prioritizing car like private vehicle storage or you know, people driving their cars

NIMBYism and Gentrification

SPEAKER_01 16:16

around the city.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

So I I'm I'm happy we're getting into this topic about NIMBYism, which stands for not in my backyard. And when I so I grew up in New York and I spent uh most of my upbringing in Harlem, I was very privy growing up as a kid to the new developments coming into being built around my neighborhood. I'll say that as a kid, this was in middle school, high school, seeing this was kind of painful for me because it took away from the character that I thought was something beautiful to Hurlem. It actually took me many years to really understand and value and appreciate a mixed community because it's much stronger for that. That you have a neighborhood of that isn't predominantly poor. And now, if you ask me, do you want a mixed community where you have a distribution of people from different parts of the economic ladder, I would say yes, because that does bring economic vitality to the area that helps a lot of a lot of the helps everyone, I would say. And at the same time, you know, there's this other critique that I grew up with, especially in college and just almost post-college, where you know, you had this gentrification, a fight against gentrification. What do you have to say about um this, you know, the NIMBYism when it comes to neighborhood identity, when it comes to gentrification?

SPEAKER_01 17:50

There are a lot of different conversations happening about housing and building housing developments. There, I'll I'll name two. One is like in wealthy neighborhoods. And I think that that is the NIMBYism that you tend to see there is when a new development is proposed, especially in affordable housing development, but even just like apartments, and you see this in the suburbs, you also see this in wealthy neighborhoods in in Manhattan, in New York. Um, you know, people are like it's, you know, and there's a lot of racial undertones here. People don't want the character of the neighborhood to change. They don't want poorer renters moving to their neighborhood. It's kind of the very, very ugly NIMBYism that we have been battling forever. And so, you know, I think that's that's one archetype. And we still see that. We still see that when new developments are proposed. And so, like, there is a whole, there are people who are just like very flagrantly saying, I don't want affordable housing units in our neighborhood. I think there's another, there's another NIMBYism that I think exists more on the left. And it's almost the opposite. It's like, I don't want to see luxury apartments in my neighborhood. I don't want to see the um, you know, gentrification in my neighborhood. And and I think unfortunately, I think that is a misguided view in that gentrification is happening. And right now, what you see is because there's a housing shortage in the city, you've got, you know, 20-something investment bankers um doubling or tripling up in brownstones, right? Like that our family, that our family, uh like a family could live there. And families are getting displaced because we don't have the types of apartment buildings and the type we don't, we have not built enough. Um, and so people are getting displaced, neighborhoods are changing composition, and sadly that is disproportionately affecting, you know, lower income and people of color. Um, that's happening. The way to stem that is to build more, not to build

Housing as Musical Chairs

SPEAKER_01 19:34

less.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

You know, in the book of abundance, just to kind of tell people to give an image of what this looks like when it comes to a housing shortage, you know, they go on to explain it as musical chairs, where you can start the musical chairs with 10 people and 10 chairs. And when you cut the music, because you have 10 people and 10 chairs, everyone's guaranteed need to be okay and to be seated. But the housing shortage is when you have 10 people and nine chairs or 10 people and you reduce the amount of chairs that so that it doesn't equal 10. And so people are guaranteed to be uh unhoused as a result. And so just to give that image for for people to understand what that means and and why there is a push for wanting to build more housing so that there are more seats, uh as many seats at least as people, if not more. I want to come back to this part about the neighborhood identity. With more luxury apartments being built or just more housing being built, what do you have to say about the threat it might pose to the cultural identity of a place?

SPEAKER_01 20:37

Yeah, I mean, uh like I think I go back to like unfortunately that's happening with luxury. It's happening faster when more building isn't built, right? I think another thing to say is like luxury is a term that is used, I think, by NIMBY's a lot, um, just to mean market rate apartments. And those apartments very quickly like become not very luxurious, right? Like in 10 years, the appliances are outdated, the building does not look like a luxury building. Um, and that is the housing stock, right? Like we need to build, we need to have we need to preserve existing housing stock and we also need to build more. But I would say, like, you know, displacement and gentrification are happening because more and more, like if our economy is growing and more people want to live here, then like it's a musical chairs game. Like you're saying, that was a perfect analogy. And so, you know, people will move into, you know, like Harlem, people will get priced out of Harlem, no matter what. And so we need to build more housing. Like, I think the reality is a lot of these neighborhoods are shifting. And um, and I think that is just the nature of like how cities change. And I think if we turbocharge how much we build, we're not gonna see that, especially that kind of racial displacement happening at the rate that it's happening now. But absolutely, people are getting pushed out. People are getting pushed out because the city is so expensive. And we should not be living in a city where Like school teachers and you know, people who are working in our schools, our hospitals, our libraries, like public, you know, employees can't live here because it's too expensive. Like, can if there's the racial component, I think there's also the class component of like this is becoming the way that our city works right now is basically, you know, it's it's hollowing out the middle class. You have rent stabilized units, you have public housing that, you know, are are restricted to and you have rent, you know, income restricted housing. Um, and then you have market rate units that are exorbitant. And so what do you do if you don't qualify for income restricted housing um but you and you also haven't won the lottery, so you're you're not in a uh a rent stabilized unit and you can't afford market rate. Like we are, we're in a we're in a very tenuous situation because of this whole musical chairs um kind of scenario that we're in. Um so I think I think the answer is to build and to build everywhere. And perhaps, you know, I think Antonio Reynoso, who's a candidate we're supporting, he's a big proponent of, you know, that wealthy neighborhoods need to do their fair share of building too. So perhaps some of those cultural dynamics of who is getting pushed out further and further out could be mitigated by building a lot more in Midtown, right? Building a lot more in, you know, the West Village. If you think about like there's a lot of neighborhoods that are historically landmarked, and that is also very correlated with race and class. And, you know, my neighborhood, I live in Park Slope. A lot of it is historically landmarked. It is so transit-rich. I'm like 10 minutes from Atlantic Terminal. That's like almost every subway line. There is no reason why there should be two, three, four-story buildings that are, you know, 0.1 miles away from Atlantic Terminal. Like, I do we do away with all historical landmarking? Probably not. There's probably some value to some historical landmarking. But I definitely think in general, we need to up zone like crazy around

Changing Minds on Building

SPEAKER_01 23:53

transit.

SPEAKER_00 23:53

Do you are you optimistic, for instance, that you're gonna get, because this is maybe psychological, how what what what's the strategy if we we talked, you mentioned moneyball. What's the money ball strategy to get people to accept that in order for like for something good to happen, which is if they care about not displacing people, and if they care about, you know, a diverse community, how do you get them to overcome the psychological barrier? It could be psychological, I'm assuming it is, partly, of you know, letting go of natural landmarks is one thing as a big offset.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Well, I I probably wouldn't lead with the historical landmarks. Like that, that's my hobby horse. I live there, and it's like, okay, I'm I like want more people to be able to live there. Um, but I would start with like when we talk about the character of a neighborhood, are we talking about the buildings? Because if you look at like the West Village, the West Village is historically a haven for, you know, like the gay rights movement, um, for artists, for people coming here with no money trying to make it. Can anyone do that in the West Village anymore? If you're a gay kid from the South who's trying to start a better life here, can you move to the West Village? Absolutely not. If you are an artist, if you're an actor, you know, making no money, can you move to the West Village? No, rents there are like $10,000, right? I think one argument is like, what does it mean to preserve the character of a neighborhood? And to me, it's being able to welcome the types of people who have always lived there and to accommodate, to accommodate, you know, the the growth of families, right? Like, you know, a lot of people, they raise their kids in New York, then their kids get priced out. But that's crazy, right? Like you should be able to continue living in the city where you grew up. Um, so I think that there's a, you know, I think that that is an argument that a lot of people can get on board with when people see that their kids and their grandkids they won't be able to live near their grandkids because the city is so exorbitantly expensive because we haven't built enough. Um, you know, I think those are arguments that are a lot easier to start winning hearts and minds. I think some of it is like, yeah, like a lot of a lot of New York is single family homes. Like we're a city, you know, like if you live near transit, like you should not be insisting that people not have, you know, ADUs or that we not build apartment buildings. Um, and you know, that applies to the suburbs too, right? Like we have invested so much in Long Island Railroad and in Metro North. And there's a lot of municipalities that simply refuse to build and refuse to build apartment buildings because they don't want like those sorts of people living there. Like that's unconscionable. And we should not be investing transit dollars in those places to connect them to the city and allow them to commute if they're not letting other people do the same thing.

SEQRA, Speed, and Regulation

SPEAKER_00 26:31

So I want to get to now some part of the process of what it actually looks like to build in this movement. And, you know, I've been following a little bit about some of the articles that you that your group has been publishing, where you even celebrate um secra reform, which is these are reforms that are trying to reduce, you know, rules that that are that like bottlenecks that keep developments from being built quickly because you have to run environmental reviews and ensure that there are necessary protections for people involved in the construction. And it seems like there's a want to reduce the amount of rules that go into key, like maybe just safety and environmental review. Can you give us a bit of sense of why it's something to celebrate?

SPEAKER_01 27:22

Uh yeah, I don't think there's anything related to safety. I think if you look at environmental review, the secret process, um, and and secret reform was recently passed in the budget and it applies to what's called previously disturbed land. So it's basically infill housing. So housing where there's already housing. Um all of those resident, like any residential buildings, need to go through a currently, they need to go through two years of environmental review. And they, and in 99% of cases, nothing is found. Um, it's saying, like, okay, there's already housing here. Can we build another house? Can we build, you know, can we build another apartment building? And two years is wasted. And so stuff just doesn't pencil out. It doesn't get built. Um, and it's unnecessary. It is not it, it is more environmentally friendly to build more housing with near transit so that people can commute without cars to the city, right? Um, it is currently easier in New York State to go into greenfield land and build a house not connected to transit and drive your car all around and and spend all of that, you know, like kind of all of the environmental uh, you know, waste uh associated with building a new house, a new single family house, than to build an apartment building uh, you know, in a in a neighborhood that already has apartment buildings. Um, so that was like there are deregulatory measures that we applaud. There are also regulations that we applaud. Congestion pricing is a big one. We were huge fans of congestion pricing. That is a regulation, that's a rule. Um, that is a tax uh, you know, imposed on people driving into the city. Um, so I think abundance is often smeared as like a blanket deregulatory uh philosophy. And that's not the way that

Community Input and Local Democracy

SPEAKER_01 29:10

we see it.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

You know, I'm thinking from my time in social impact, the desire of trying to give communities a voice in the way that their neighborhood is changing. The reason why there might be some slowness in trying to get projects out and going in in building apartments is because you you want to create a method where you're gaining or you're gathering input from many different stakeholders, including the residents who could be impacted so that you make a well-rounded decision. What are what's your thoughts on this as you know, though, as you have this you know, genuine need to reduce the high rent prices, and so you're asking for things to move faster. How do you still involve the community that uh in one some ways have slowed down that process because they want to be involved in it?

SPEAKER_01 30:03

I mean, nothing that we have advocated for has r reduced in um less community input. So, for example, like the charter amendments that we advocated for last year um, you know, had these fast track proposals, but everything still went through the community board process with the Ulurp. Um, I'm on my community board. I would, I have to say, like, I think that there's a lot of imperfections with community boards as a locus for community input. Um, they tend to attract like people who have the time and often the resources to be able to attend meetings like on a weekday at 6:30 p.m. And um there's a lot of issues with that particular form of community input. What I would say is communities also they do have input. I would say the most democratic way that communities have input is through elections. When we have elections and we elect our council members who and we elect our borough presidents and our mayor, and they are voting on these land use issues, then you have an election two or four years later where you can say, you know what, actually I don't I don't like what you're doing to the neighborhood. And our elect our local elections are, you know, turnout is still low. And we were also a proponent of of even year elections because that because turnout is much higher in even years, and that would be even more democratic. But they're much, much more democratic than the current ways that we gather community input. So I would say like these processes were developed with very, very, very good intentions to prevent another Robert Moses from like, you know, uh steamrolling over communities and building highways through community. And you know, I totally get it. And these processes have been subverted by powerful interests who are often working at exactly across purposes with the exact intent for why these you know processes were set up.

SPEAKER_00 31:45

Yeah. And and just to kind of give people a book to um look into where the where development in at the expense of communities can can you know really take place and has taken place. I recommend the book by Robert Caro, The Power Broker, which you mentioned, Robert Moses, it profiles him and how he reshaped the landscape of New York City. You know, he built highways, the ones that you see on the you know west and east side of Manhattan. So that's that's development without with with little to no care to what impact it has on the community. And maybe one of the fears that people have when they think about letting developers build with little to no regulation. But you know, I understand what you're sharing. And maybe to round the conversation up, I want to get a little bit more into this the federal versus state dynamic here because you know you're saying that you're you're focused on New York, and some of the people who in your publications you're supporting are assembly people. When it comes to trying to expedite the process of building, you know, there's the regulations that you have to encounter and deal with at the state level. How about are there any challenges that the abundance movement is facing at the federal level that requires you to expand your perspective so that, you know, in addition to having a foothold in New York, that you have to kind of begin to move your way through other states so that there's an ecosystem nationally? Or do you think that, you know, it's better to focus on the state level because it's actually more uh expeditious for you?

State vs. Federal Power

SPEAKER_01 33:30

Yeah, I mean, we we focus on the state level. We are um supporting a few congressional candidates, and Congress is super important for our work. Um, you know, we talk about how, you know, Congress has the power to shape incentives for localities, municipalities. And so, and thinking about, like I was saying before, when we're investing billions of dollars in transit projects, that should come with conditions. It should come with conditions that you should be able to build housing near these stations so that more people can live. Like, why would we build, you know, a train line so that just the existing people who live there who are lucky enough and who then benefit from increased property values are are able to use it? Um, so thinking about what are the carrots and sticks that could be tied to investments and and federal subsidies going to states and and cities? And how can we make sure that like you know, zoning laws are relaxed or or whatever it is to allow more building to uh to the like the housing crisis is nationwide. It's particularly acute in New York, but there's a housing shortage everywhere. Um, so I think that's that's one thing. I think permitting regulations and you know, we have just not like we talk about making it easier, faster, and cheaper to

How Listeners Can Act

SPEAKER_01 34:41

build.

SPEAKER_00 34:41

You know, just maybe to round out the entire conversation, what's one advice you have for people who care a lot about housing and you know are questioning what they can do about it? What advice do you have for them to um make a to see a change and to be part of the community?

SPEAKER_01 34:58

Yeah, a lot of this is just about um how do you build your own political power. So that's a lot of what we do with our community, especially, you know, some of our like less partisan, less political work is around helping people join their community boards. I'm a big skeptic, as I mentioned, of community boards, but they are currently written into our charter as part, they are part of the ULERP, the unified land use review process. So uh, you know, if you want to have a say on developments in your community, joining your community board and voting on it is huge and you know allows you to really get insight into local processes on a bunch of things, not just on housing, but on lots of public projects.

Closing

SPEAKER_00 35:38

All right then. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I found this conversation really great, and um I'm hoping that the listeners do as well. Thank you, Terry. That is Catherine Vaughn, co founder of Abundance New York. If you like the episode, then I encourage you to subscribe to the show wherever you listen. I'm Carrie Rodriguez. Thank you for listening, and I will see you at the next episode.