Solar power also continues to skyrocket in Texas, with solar generation up 45% compared to last year and setting a new record high!

FTA New Starts Program funding actually does encourage this, which means Austin likely has more robust TOD policies for our still in process #ProjectConnect light rail versus areas served by Metro North in CT where parking lots by light rail are still fine.

And this issue of NIMBY voters + unsustainable city budgets isn’t just an LA problem. Plenty of other American cities are going to have white whale projects, unaffordable housing & shrinking tax base in the next 10 years.

Shutting down USAID will cost taxpayers $6.4 billion over two years. That’s enough money to save more than one million children’s lives. Read @nickkristof.bsky.social: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/o...

The reason they’re going to take up such an insane amount of space is that the city wants to dedicate them to each building (vs. international best practice of having them be city-owned and shared), and only collect 3x/week (vs. up to 14x/week in Barcelona).

Just had one thousand advocates, volunteers, and housing policy leaders from 30 states trek to New Haven, CT for @yimbytown.bsky.social & as far as I know, not a single high level leader or staffer for the Democratic Party was there. Seems like a huge missed opportunity.

All-star Single Stair Panel @yimbytown.bsky.social to close out a fantastic conference. Special thanks to @stephenjacobsmith.com + @edmendoza.bsky.social who took on some of our audience questions. Excited to see even more progress on technical building codes at the next #yimbytown!

Texans representing @yimbytown.bsky.social! Great discussion with @texansforhousing.bsky.social #txlege housing coalition partners. Great to share our recent housing wins with the #yimbytown audience

THAT’S MY AUSTIN DELEGATION!!!!! WINNERS OF THE INAUGURAL DONALD SHOUP AWARDS!!!! ♥️♥️♥️

YIMBY leadership in action @yimbytown.bsky.social with @ggwash.org @abundanthousingma.org @sightline.org @cayimby.bsky.social @opennewyork.org & excellent moderator @jennyschuetz.bsky.social #yimbytown

YIMBY Idol will be coming home with @texansforhousing.bsky.social #yimbytown #missingmiddle #housingall 3:15pm today!

Texans know how to solve the housing crisis and that's what we're bringing to YIMBY Idol! Come support the best solutions to expand missing middle from the folks who do it best 🏘️🏘️

If you care about housing policy, you should know John Zeanah's name. He worked to get 3-6 units covered by IRC in Shelby County (Memphis) way back in 2022! Delighted to see this report & hear about his new board position.

Shoot! I mean, Congrats @cayimby.bsky.social 😂. We'll get this done soon at the #txlege 😘

It's crunchtime, folks! SB 79, our bill to legalize apartments in transit rich areas of California, is about to go up for a vote! Call, text, and email! @cayimby.bsky.social cayimby.org/call-sb-79/

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I mean, this might be one the best campaign shirts I've ever seen: store.jamestalarico.com/products/sta...

The excitement around Single Stair reform (& technical building codes) is undeniable. @texansforhousing.bsky.social is already working to encourage cities across the state to adopt the new #txlege approved Single Stair model code. Can't wait to share this conversation with local advocates!

So who is bringing this to New Haven for @yimbytown.bsky.social next week?

What's going to happen when iCE kidnaps soccer players from African and South American nations competing at the World Cup simply because ICE has a habit of profiling. Simply put, if the teams decide to go for a walk in between games, will they be picked up? Mark my words, this will be a reality.

It seems that Justice Jackson alone saw the real-world consequences for scientists: “Yearslong studies will lose validity. Animal subjects will be euthanized. Life-saving medication trials will be abandoned. Countless researchers will lose their jobs. And community health clinics will close.”

“The United Nations has historically resettled more refugees in Houston than any other U.S. city. If we were a country, we’d rank fourth in the world for refugees resettlement. That’s because we’re good at it.”

But that's what this court excels at: removing substantive rights cloaked in legal formalism. Roberts will go down with Tawney and Fuller as one of the worst chief justices in history.

Like clockwork, some part of a local housing reform package will be removed, amended or delayed in the name of "compromise". That's not good policy, its pandering. And ultimately, it undermines the success of whatever is being proposed.

Last official rewrite of the City of Austin Land Development Code happened in December, 1984. And was passed with no citizen comment:

"Urban planners basically design subsidies for drunk drivers" is a hell of a message about our crap land use, and I'm 100% here for it.

I suppose the New York Times will run daily stories on this until he resigns, unless Secretary of Defense is a less newsworthy job than a college administrator?

Love to see it 👏👏 Nashville CMs wearing pro-housing t-shirts at their council meeting tonight in support of a major re-zoning that will hopefully pass this evening 🙌

If you have an Austin Public Library Card, you can make 4 suggestions each month. Please use 1 for this book. "How to Suggest Titles for Purchase" library.austintexas.libguides.com/catalog/sugg...

@cmzoqadri.bsky.social repping Austin as a co-author on this great piece today in The Nation www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Important to note: It’s *always* process, never policy. Saying the city didn’t follow the rules & you want it “done right” makes you seem like the good guys. Saying you don’t want more neighbors or housing makes you seem racist & exclusionary.

Wild that no one in the US seems to have learned anything from the last 10yrs of Brexit trade policies.

In the building code, 32” is the minimum width for a door in an apartment building, 36” is the minimum width for a stairway, the elevator is required to accommodate a 24”-wide gurney. So why are they saying 36” at-grade is not enough for gurneys to medical emergencies in ADUs?

Weird how they never oppose the most dangerous form of housing with the highest number of fires: single family wood homes that aren't required to have sprinklers or fire proof stairs, or smoke fans...

Let’s talk about the unintended consequences of things like giant fire trucks, dual exit requirements, and the National Fire Code.

All we (parents) want is an enclosed (i.e. fenced, not necessarily indoor), car-free, mostly child-proofed space where we can hang with other adults and buy coffee/beer while keeping an eye on the kids. The American legal/cultural framework has made this demand apparently impossible to satisfy.

Speaking of @arianagarcia.bsky.social, here's an important story from her about the effects of Trumpian staff cuts on Big Bend National Park, Texas' crown jewel among its various national parks. So much is happening, stuff like this slips through the cracks. But eventually, ppl will care.

These two things cannot both be true: 1: throwing a sandwich at a federal officer is a violent assault worthy of prosecution. 2: raiding the Capitol grounds, assaulting police offices & vandalizing federal property in an effort to interfere with an election is a harmless protest worthy of pardons.

I cannot emphasize enough that the playbook being used against mRNA vaccines (and vaccines in general) is IDENTICAL to the playbook used to restrict voting rights after the 2020 election: actively sow public distrust, then cite the distrust you sowed as an independent reason for your desired policy

This type of thoughtful reuse & appropriate redevelopment is supposedly what neighborhood activists say they want, but somehow, its *still* not quite right! Guess what? It's never good enough. They don't actually care about the parking, the traffic, the setbacks. They just don't want the housing.

We need to build some real social stigma around being afraid of cities. You don't have to like them or live there, but a politics built this strongly around watching TV and going "ewww" is embarrassing, and people should be embarrassed by it. It's like "fear of werewolves" being your top issue.

Want to learn more from @seanjurs.bsky.social about the Single Stair revolution in Colorado? Vote for his panel @sxsw.com 2026! participate.sxsw.com/flow/sxsw/sx...

Breakfast with a view

Fatalities in the congestion relief zone are down 40% from this time last year. Zero motorists were killed in the zone. That's right: since the January 5 launch of congestion pricing, not a single driver, passenger, moped rider, or motorcyclist has died in a crash in the zone.

Strongly agree with the takeaway here that the ultimate goal needs to be increasing the size of the House and having proportional representation. The size of the House has been artificially capped for almost a century. prospect.org/politics/202...

I saw some “America is too big for HSR” discourse on Threads so I thought I’d resurface this image. The four largest cities in Texas have two million more people than the four largest cities in France, and they’re closer together. There are lots of places in the US where HSR would work great.

"Using a synthetic control approach we find that the reform lowered housing cost growth in the five years following implementation: home prices were 16% to 34% lower, while rents were 17.5% to 34% lower relative to a counterfactual"

Everyone in DC knows that if you want to hide something, announce it on a Friday in August. Better yet, make it nearly impossible to track down. That's exactly what SCOTUS did last week. But the news is too staggering to hide for long: SCOTUS has decided it's time to destroy the Voting Rights Act.

this work saved millions of lives in 2021, won the Nobel Prize in 2023, and is cancelled in 2025

there was a competitive brand of baseball that prioritized fun and fan experience it was called the minor leagues and it was eviscerated to save a dollar