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You may have heard about Ezra Klein's new book, Abundance. It was co-written with Derek Thompson,

and it hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list this week. The book diagnoses a crisis

in modern America, this inability to build stuff like infrastructure or new technologies or

housing. That's the part we're going to key on today.

One of the themes in abundance is that progressivism or liberalism or whatever you want to call it

used to be all about building, you know, big projects that had these bold visions. But now Klein and

Thompson say often it's just the main force

slowing things down. Now, part of this is about nimbism. Part of it is about these well-intentioned

regulations that have evolved into this tangle of red tape. And all of that is keeping supply

from catching up to demand. It's driving up prices. It's limiting housing availability.

Today we're going to try and bring that argument here to Utah. And there may be an illustration of what Klein and Thompson are talking about in the avenues of Salt Lake City.

It's not a perfect analogy, but it does show some of the factors that complicate this project of building things.

Tony Samarad of the Salt Lake Tribune took us through the story of a fight over a housing development that has played out there over the last few years.

It centers on a three-acre piece of land at the end of F Street and 13th Ave.

This is a tree-lined green space where people have walked and recreated and viewed wildlife

for the generations that they've lived up there in the avenues, almost like a little park.

Well, in April of 2020, when, of course, the world's attentions were diverted by the coronavirus

pandemic, Utah's largest home builder, ivory homes, applied with City Hall for an initial

rezone of this open space, which would have allowed them to build 25 new single-family

homes, and 20 of them would have these smaller kind of self-contained mother-in-law apartments.

But by June, there was neighborhood leafletting and signature gathering campaign in that upper area of the avenues that

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