A housing policy fight over stairs, and what the anti-abortion movement is planning next

and some thoughts on Abundance discourse

Hi everyone, Happy Mother’s Day.

I have two pieces from this past week to share and then wanted to offer a few thoughts on some online warring I’ve been following lately.

The first piece is an effort to bring readers up to speed on everything that’s been going on lately with medication abortion (mifepristone, specifically.) As you probably know, the anti-abortion movement has been on a mission for the last few years to try to ban abortion pills — the most common method for ending a pregnancy in the US. They’ve been throwing virtually everything at the wall in this regard, including a US Supreme Court case that was thrown out for lack of standing in 2024, lots of failed efforts to brand mifepristone as the scary-sounding “chemical abortion” and insist that lifting restrictions amounts to “lowering medical standards.”

Here’s a summary of the new developments I wrote about this week:

In late April a conservative think tank - the Ethics and Public Policy Center - published a report claiming that despite decades of rigorous research affirming mifepristone’s safety, abortion medication was _actually_ unsafe, based on health insurance claim data alleging that nearly 11 percent of women who took mifepristone had an adverse reaction.

(Mifepristone, I should reiterate, has been FDA-approved for the last 25 years, and used around the world for longer than that. France approved the drug in 1988.)

Trump’s FDA commissioner, Martin Makary, had said just a week earlier that he has “no plans” to restrict abortion pills, but that he “can’t promise” his agency wouldn’t act on data that “suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal.” Anti-abortion activists basically believe they now have what they need to move Makary and the FDA.

The EPPC report was not peer-reviewed and has been heavily criticized by legal health and reproductive health experts, but activists are feeling hopeful that it will give them the ammunition they need for new restrictions.

Trump in December said that it was “highly unlikely” he’d limit access to mifepristone, but he notably declined to rule out the possibility. He added that “somebody could come up with something that, you know, this horrible thing,” implying new information could change his position.

Sen. Josh Hawley immediately glommed onto the new EPPC report to say the FDA should reimpose earlier its restrictions, and he also introduced a bill this week to allow patients to sue doctors who prescribe the drug.

If the anti-abortion coalition succeeds in pressuring the FDA to restrict access, the most likely near-term scenario would be reinstating requirements that were relaxed during the Biden administration, like rules requiring in-person dispensing of the drug.

In other words, this could effectively end the option for telehealth. Other potential restrictions could include reducing the approved use of mifepristone from 10 weeks to seven weeks of a pregnancy. (The World Health Organization’s position is that it’s safe to take mifepristone up to 12 weeks.)

It’s not clear yet how the FDA will respond. Last week the Trump administration filed a brief arguing that the three Republican attorneys general filing suit against mifepristone lacked standing to challenge the FDA’s authority. To be clear Trump’s DOJ was not defending abortion medication on the merits of its safety.

While many anti-abortion activists are feeling optimistic that the EEPC report will give the FDA reason to revisit restrictions, a push to do so would still require Trump’s approval. And while the president continues to receive intense pressure from his base to curb access, some advocates are skeptical that Trump will use his political capital for it. (The FDA reversing its position would certainly also be met with lawsuits by drug manufacturers.)

Merely restoring FDA restrictions though is of course not the movement’s end goal, since this isn’t really about “women’s health and safety.” It’s about banning abortion, and they want to ultimately pull the drug from the market entirely. POLITICO had a revealing report last week, with access to a private Zoom call of anti-abortion leaders discussing their plans and how they plan to leverage the EEPC report. I can’t make this stuff up — they’re calling their campaign “Rolling Thunder.” My full story is here.

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My other story last week is on one of the most-talked-about ideas these days in housing policy — whether apartment buildings above 3 stories should be permitted to be built with just one staircase, instead of two. Such “single-stair” buildings are pretty standard throughout the world, but North American fire safety standards developed pretty differently over the last 165 years, and as such American fire safety officials today remain very opposed to the idea of making this change. They generally see two staircases as an important emergency measure. While New York City and Seattle have allowed single-stair buildings up to six stories tall for decades, it’s been pretty much nonexistent anywhere else in the US.

This has all set off a debate that I covered in my piece, because over the last few years, a group of urbanists, housing advocates, and architects have started making the case that American building codes should change to allow construction of these single-stair buildings, and that it’s safe to do so. Not as tall as you find in other countries, but up to six stories tall. And they’re having advocacy success: Over the last few years at least 15 states — including California, Minnesota, Montana, Tennessee, and Virginia — have passed laws or amended regulations to allow single-stair design in four- to six-story buildings, or are actively considering such changes.

Proponents say this will allow construction to be done more cheaply, to be built on smaller plots of land, and to allow for more aesthetically pleasing buildings with more natural light, like you see throughout Europe and Asia. Advocates say the risk to fire safety is negligible given other modern construction safety standards like sprinklers and pressurized stairwells that didn’t exist back in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

American fire safety groups, including the IAFF and NFPA, have been opposed to such changes, and that certainly carries political weight. I spoke with both of them for this story. But American lawmakers have been expressing a lot of openness to the idea, in part because they’re hearing about fire safety leaders from other countries adopting different positions, and because the housing shortage has gotten so bad. Housing reformers have been pressing their case, saying it’s not as if the US has markedly better fire safety outcomes in apartments than we see in other countries, and the experience of Seattle and NYC is also not worse than other large US cities. American fire safety groups are saying the risks are too serious, that international comparisons should be treated more skeptically, and that more research/study is generally needed in a host of areas.

I covered the debate, research and legislative push in this story.

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This last part feel free to skip past if you just come for the reporting summaries! But I wanted to reflect on some recent online hostility that has intersected a bit with me and some of the things I cover.

Over the last few weeks there’s been something of an escalation in the back and forth online about the “Abundance” movement (i.e. the book published in March by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. The book has done very well, it was the #1 non-fiction New York Times best seller, and as of this writing it’s still #5.)

I have followed along reading a lot of the book reviews and commentaries and listened to interviews. (I liked this one from

Mike Konczal

, and this one from

Matt Bruenig

). I haven’t written about it specifically, other than referencing it in this column back in early April about fertility and affordable housing.

Back in the fall I reviewed three books published in 2024 about the future of the housing movement, and I zeroed in on the different visions proposed in each, all from authors who ostensibly agreed on some YIMBY-ish things, but disagreed on other ideas. (The headline was: “The Housing Movement Is Divided Against Itself.”) Abundance adds yet another wrinkle to those disagreements about strategy, and there will surely be others.

Lately online there’s been a small but persistent effort to say I am “part” of the Abundance movement. The evidence for this seems to generally amount to the idea that I write for Vox, that I write about housing policy and agree with some YIMBY ideas, and that I am friends with some people in the movement. Left of center policy journalism is a pretty small world, and I’m also friends with critics of the Abundance movement. I’m also excited about some housing ideas that many of my YIMBY friends don’t seem to care for much.

No one has really asked, but for what it’s worth here’s my general take:

I think we need zoning reform for more affordable housing and to address the nation’s homelessness crisis. I don’t think that’s all we need to tackle those things — but I think they are essential and urgent pieces of the puzzle.

Other ideas the Abundance movement focuses on, like permitting reform and improving state capacity, make general sense to me as policy objectives, but unlike some leaders in the Abundance movement, I don’t think they’re particularly great ideas to be casting around as what Democrats should prioritize to reclaim power. I don’t buy the argument that people are voting for Republicans because they’re fed up with Democratic governance inefficiencies and I don’t think running on building high-speed rail faster or establishing green energy more quickly is what’s going to help Democrats build back political power.

I also generally worry about the Abundance-linked trend to take bipartisan policy positions like zoning reform and reframe them as what Democrats should do to get stronger politically/hold electoral majorities. I think this risks unnecessarily polarizing these issues, and historically many good policy ideas have gotten through by leaders not centering them in their candidate speeches and advocacy programs. Keeping them lower profile, and lower salience, to get over the finish line. I think tweaks to state capacity and zoning and permitting all make sense, but I don’t think being an “Abundance Democrat” is the galvanizing message many of its proponents believe it is or could be, and I think that kind of label carries risk.

Building more housing to bring down the cost of living makes sense to me, but a lot of the movement has seemed more like a cousin of “deliverism” — i.e. we need to build housing and transit and green energy things to show voters that if you elect us we can deliver results. I wrote about this after the election, but I think betting on voter gratitude for policy wins is generally a mistake. It’s good to pass good policies because that’s inherently what good elected leaders should do, but the historical record should make one skeptical that good policy success will most likely lead to political rewards for the party that passes said policy.

On the other side (?) of what seems to be a growing intra-Dem factional dispute is this position that people who support the Abundance agenda, or who are not actively trying to squash the Abundance movement, are helping to distract or deter the Democratic Party from moving in a more populist or progressive direction. Aaron Regunberg argued a version of this in The Nation last week, writing that critics of Abundance like him see “corporate-aligned interests using abundance to head off the Democratic Party’s long-delayed and desperately needed return to economic populism.” He said he and his allies believe the Democrat Party will reclaim power by focusing more on oligarchy, on monopolists, on billionaires and on corporations as villains, and that the Abundance movement stands as a barrier to this at best, or actively fighting against them, at worst. Gabriel Winant, a historian at UChicago expanded on this idea on Twitter today saying essentially that the problem with Abundance from a left perspective is that its adherents are seeking to form a coalition with people whose larger political vision is at odds with a redistributive/progressive one.

I’m still thinking this all through, but one issue is I’m not convinced the alternative program is one that’s going to win back enough power in this era, either. I think there’s still time and room for more ideas. I want to see a more redistributive society, and a stronger, expanded welfare state. I certainly know some people in the Abundance world do, too. And I think some of the leftist critics are right that not everyone in the Abundance coalition shares that vision. But this is really just again why I don’t love these policy ideas taking such a new central role in the party’s agenda-setting debates. I think there would be a lot of room to push forward on some of these technocratic ideas in a quieter, less polarized way, and the party would be better off fighting with each other about these broader, bolder questions and visions.