No book has been more consequential to the political discourse this year than Abundance, so consider it appropriate that I gave it a “DC read”—I started by scanning the index for familiar names.

Specifically, I was searching for Houston.

Our sprawling swamp of suburban housing and construction sites seems like one realistic example of what American abundance can look like in practice, so I was a bit disappointed to see we only have two pages in the index. Texas gets three.

Most of the book is dedicated instead to the places that suffer from a lack of abundance: San Francisco and its housing shortage, California’s overpriced and unfinished high-speed rail, Washington, DC’s labyrinth of well-intentioned yet ineffective regulations.

Focusing on these failures is necessary to establish the book’s overall thesis: The United States is currently entangled in a knotted yarn ball of regulations, largely passed on a bipartisan basis in the 1970s, that were crafted in response to the menace of pollution and unchecked development. Laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and their state-level equivalents intended to solve the very real problem of, say, the Cuyahoga River catching on fire. But the way those laws are now implemented undermines the clean energy and dense housing and high-speed rail that our nation needs to grow and thrive. Our ability to build faster, better, and at lower costs remains tied up in regulations that focus more on process than outcomes. Federally funded scientific research faces a similar challenge.

Abundance is a worthwhile (and quick) read that builds on the punditry of its authors, The New York Times’ Ezra Klein and The Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson, and accurately diagnoses some of our nation’s core political ailments. No doubt the nation will be better off if their compatriots on the left heed the call to action.

But the book suffers when, rather than offer a realistic vision of what abundance looks like right now, Klein and Thompson turn to aberrant successes—like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro declaring an emergency to get a bridge rebuilt in less than two weeks—or imagined visions of a post-scarcity future unleashed by energy too cheap to meter.

Technology has come far since Star Trek’s 1960s visions of a conflict-free future, and even more so since the rise of AI, but our capacity for envisioning that utopia has diminished the closer we get to it, as if we’re a nation of Camerons from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off standing a nose length away from A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

So I was hoping the authors would take a step back and look at the unexciting normalcy of Houston-style abundance—what we do well and what we do poorly. They acknowledge that Houston and Texas have a formula for getting things done, but don’t pressure test the specific policies and projects that allowed us to thrive.

Our lack of zoning, once a punchline among urban planners, has become a cause célèbre. Our ever-growing suburbs ensure that housing supply meets demand, a fact that even has The New York Times Magazine touting the upside of sprawl. While mass transit systems across the nation face budget challenges, our county toll road system gets maligned for having too much surplus revenue. Klein and Thompson quote a researcher on using hypothetical transcontinental transmission lines to bring renewable energy to our cities, but do not mention Texas’s Competitive Renewable Energy Zones, which actually built 3,600 miles of new, high-voltage transmission lines to connect wind farms to the ERCOT grid. To quote Rick Perry—who was governor at the time—oops.

Abundance references a library’s worth of canonical texts on America’s twentieth century growth and where we went wrong (People of Plenty, “The Procedure Fetish,” Recoding America, etc.) but there is a Grand Parkway–size gap that could have been filled by Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right. That book, published in 2014 by Houston Chronicle business reporter Erica Grieder, documents how light regulation in Texas and Houston allowed us to build affordable housing, clean energy, and functional transportation systems more effectively than, say, California. As Grieder lamented at the time, much of the nation’s political commentariat would rather focus on our state’s backward social issues than our forward-looking economic success. That apparently hasn’t changed.

Yet perhaps the fault, dear reader, is not in the wonks, but in ourselves.

The sad truth is that Houstonians have never done a good job touting our city’s achievements. We never built the infrastructure to brag about our infrastructure. Conservative urbanist Aaron Renn explained the issue well around the time Grieder published her book in a New Geography essay titled “How Houston’s Missing Media Gene Hobbles Its Global City Ambitions.” While a city like San Francisco fostered a robust media ecosystem to help promote its tech sector’s consumer products, Renn wrote, Houston never needed positive coverage to sell our core industry: petroleum.

“Most energy companies in Houston are B2B operations, so have little need for mass media,” Renn writes. “Also, unlike with the latest smart phone or social media app, you don’t need to convince anybody to fill up his gas tank or turn on his furnace in the winter.”

As a result, Houston fails to tell our story on our own terms. Instead we rely on national media coverage that’s incentivized to report on exciting conflict (fights over the 10 Commandments in schools) rather than our boring wins (nobody’s fighting over new housing in the suburbs).

Not only does this mean the nation misses out on insights from Houston on the benefits—and limits—of our sprawl-based abundance model, it also means that Houstonians are susceptible to national narratives overriding the Houston way of doing things.

Just look at how city officials are blocking a proposed new residential tower in Montrose because of California-style complaints about setback requirements and construction trucks. We’re falling behind Austin on removing unnecessary barriers to building housing, like parking minimums and multiple stair mandates. At the county level, recently elected leaders have been criticized for imposing new layers of bureaucracy and process (like a county administrator) without delivering better outcomes. Even the state can hardly claim to be better on abundance when it preemptively opposes the construction of new transmission lines for offshore wind turbines. Forget warp speed to a Star Trek future—Houston is going backward. Maybe the wonks were right after all.

Back in 2000, Al Gore’s presidential campaign tried to portray Houston as a symptom of then-Gov. George W. Bush’s failed leadership: polluted, poor, and dirty. At the time, Republicans circled their wagons to defend our city and state by founding the Proud of Texas Committee. Today, Houston has few defenders on the right as partisan motivations to nitpick a blue city override Lone Star pride. Political ire once reserved for Austin—the blueberry in the tomato soup—is now aimed at the 610 Loop. I was hoping that Abundance would fill that gap and hold up Houston as a potential model for the nation. But as the authors explicitly say, their audience is the political left—folks perhaps less convinced by an abundance that includes freeways and suburbs and natural gas pipelines.

But if Klein and Thompson won’t speak up for Houston, who will? Now that’s a cause in need of an abundance agenda.