This is so good from Cory Doctorow on all the tricks Amazon uses to get both consumers to pay more, and how businesses on the platform end up paying it 45-51 cents on every dollar. Plus he rightly calls for regulatory change, not just individual consumer action www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

So many people were detained extrajudicially, were tortured, or died because of Dick Cheney. You can't get to the danger we're in now without everything he did. The weapons he helped forge are ones we need to take away from U.S. presidents forever.

Republicans still being willing to carry on this charade for 15 fucking years is a direct indictment of the media

Published my first Op-Ed w/ Professor Ed Goetz on how the national narrative about Minneapolis misses how zoning and market rate housing are necessary but not sufficient to help lower-income renters 🧵 www.startribune.com/twin-cities-...

Since the LIHTC program was created in 1986, the number of LIHTC units has risen every year as the program has become the major generator of affordable housing in the US. Because of affordability expiration, however, the number of LIHTC units is expected to begin falling over the next decade.

The US federal government's spending on housing—directly through the budget, or through tax expenditures—amounts to more than $400 billion a year. Only about 1/4 of that goes to low-income renters. The majority is spent on subsidizing higher-income homeowners. www.urban.org/research/pub...

Diversity doesn’t weaken unions. Racist bosses like Vance using racism to divide workers by race so they can exploit them weakens unions. All this stuff is arsonists complaining about the temperature in the building they set on fire. bsky.app/profile/diew...

Jeremy W. Peters identifies the tell-tale sign of “leftist dogma” in @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social: pronouncing Haiti’s name correctly

That’s right folks, knowing basic facts about one of the formative events of Western history makes you a threat to the nation

i hope that a governor spanberger and a democratic general assembly uses its authority to discipline the university for its capitulation and to remove these BOV members who have decided that they work for donald trump and not the people of the commonwealth

The day after the Chinatown raid, New York AG Tish James launches an online portal for the public to submit photos and videos of ICE activity. "We are committed to reviewing these reports and assessing any violations of law," she writes. Portal ag.ny.gov/federal-acti...

We're two weeks out from Virginia's election. Almost no state's electorate has realigned as much as Virginia's over the past decades. When Mark Warner won the 2001 Gov. election, he did so with a coalition that included the Western coal counties and Hampton Roads, but mostly lost NOVA. 1/x

This is one of the worst papers I've read in a long time and should not be cited by serious scholars and journalists

New, by me, on why the City of Atlanta should not extend its TAD (TIF) districts and how it will hurt, not help, low-income Atlantans. (Bracing for a new round of ad hominem attacks from Mayor Dickens or his staff/lobbyists, but I am traveling so may not see it.) 🧵1/N

GET RID OF YOUR RING CAMERAS www.yahoo.com/news/article...

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

BREAKING from PP We found immigration agents have held more than 170 *citizens* The govt doesn't track citizens held. So we did. We tallied: Nearly 20 kids, two w/ cancer More than 20 citizens held for day or more, incommunicado www.propublica.org/article/immi... by @nicolefoy.bsky.social

I thought this was lovely.

Absolutely brutal.

Promoting the editor-in-chief's personal side project. Zero named sources in a story that promotes the editor-in-chief's personal political position. Misspelling the subject's name. It took one day for CBS News to become a conservative blog. www.cbsnews.com/video/some-n...

apparently “bari weiss doesn’t actually know what journalism is” extends to getting basic facts like the name of a subject right

🧵1/3 I've argued against a 25-year extension of all the (already) 20+year-old tax increment financing districts (TADs) in Atlanta. Someone sent me an email from "Atlantans for Safety" arguing against my explanation for why extending the TADs is a bad idea. Their email & my responses are (next)...

This South Side Weekly report on the Chicago building raid is well worth reading. Most striking to me are the indications of collusion between federal authorities and the building owner and management to effect a mass eviction at the blighted property. southsideweekly.com/federal-agen...

Body-camera video appears to contradict the government’s claim that Marimar Martinez, 30, drove toward officers before one of them opened fire at her late Saturday morning in Brighton Park, her attorney claimed. trib.al/9Sxu9IN

for any UVA folks that follow me you should circulate this among your networks balkin.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...

"Why don't they just apply for citizenship?" This is a question often directed toward undocumented immigrants living in the United States. But the pathway to American citizenship for the vast majority is long, complex, and financially draining.

An “immigration judge” is not an actual judge in the judicial branch. They are a DOJ employee. As Judge Young, an actual judge, made clear in one of the truly essential parts of his Tuesday ruling. www.lawdork.com/p/judge-will...

To the Democratic pollster and data pundit, “moral claims and exercises of imagination, claims about what is possible come with glaring asterisks. New tactics and strategies are by definition unvalidated, and in that sense they are admittedly a risk. But there are risks the other way, too.”

A new report by @vplc.bsky.social and the RVA Eviction Lab looks at attorney fees in eviction cases: In 2024 in VA, judges awarded nearly $18 million in fees to landlord attorneys, a 48% increase from 2019, even as eviction judgments fell 19%. rvaevictionlab.org/2025/09/27/u...

🚨NEW: For the first time in history, the single largest group of people arrested in the interior and sent to ICE detention is people with NO criminal record. As of yesterday's data release, 40%(!) of those arrested in the interior and detained by ICE had no prior conviction or pending charges.

In the last six weeks, the Tenant Union Federation launched seven (7) majority tenant unions, across five (5) states, representing 1000 units of housing owned by Capital Realty Group, a New York-based corporate landlord. The first portfolio organizing of its kind... www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I promise you that E. Klein doesn't have a clue as to how to get anyone out of this current fascist predicament. He really doesn't and he is demonstrating it in public for any sentient being being to see. You follow his lead at your peril and everyone else's. Don't be misled.

I think more smart people should be clear that "cultural issues" are really just labor discipline and therefore not distinct from "economic issues".

If there's one piece of research that came out in the last year that I think all housers should read, it is probably this brief. *Affordable AND available* and the need for more income-restricted *deeply* affordable housing for those most vulnerable to housing instability, eviction, & homelessness.

"the era of landlordism should be brought to a responsible close" Michael E. Stone (1993).

On fascism and racism, Langston Hughes said, "Fascism preaches the creed of Nordic supremacy." He also noted, "Fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America... This kind of terrorism is extending more and more to groups of peoples whose skins are not black."

Yeah, no. I am not anti-abundance (with a small a), but if the capital-A Abundance "movement" keeps platforming nazis (or goes on their podcasts like one of the authors of the book did) in some quest for "bipartisanship" especially at *this* point in time? FFS.

The president is sending the military to control American cities and if you're a reporter who's framing that illegal power grab as "pushing the boundaries of constitutionality" or "acting boldly to fight crime" or whatever, please go find another line of work where you won't get us all killed.

This statement alone is enough to nullify any and all obligations to accept the legitimacy of his authority.

at least all the braindead takes will be in one place now

This is the first explanation I've seen that makes clear that the terminations are on-their-face illegal. National media would have us believe there is far more untested statutory or Constitutional grey area about a variety of issues than there actually is.

I see that the YIMBY/Abundance crowd still loves to rely primarily on non-peer-reviewed working papers from economists in order to support their nonsense rather than looking at the mountain of actually peer-reviewed work showing that corporate landlords are, in fact, as bad as many assume them to be

NEW: Greystar, which manages nearly 950,000 apartments, has agreed to stop using “anti-competitive” algorithms to suggest rents. ProPublica previously showed how such software lets landlords set rents in a way that could result in cartel-like behavior. By @heathervogell.bsky.social

This is so fun. www.bostonherald.com/2025/08/12/e...

Favorite books in the last 10-15 years on equitable urban development? Prefer wider ranging books to narrower ones (eg, those focusing on transit, urban design, environmental sustainability). Some attention to affordable housing and equitable economic development preferred. Prefer US focus. Thanks!

Housing markets =*local*! Ofc institutional single-family rental (SFR) investors aren't big % nationally, but own large % of (SFRs) in some metros: e.g., Atlanta: 25% Jacksonville: 22% Charlotte: 18% & b/c they target certain *parts* of metros, means even larger %s in many parts of these metros.

I hear this a lot but it's not really accurate and is, a best an unhelpful over-simplification. Yes it is true that on the margins, lower supply raises profits for investors, but it neglects a lot of realities on the ground about how private equity and REITS operate and where they invest. 🧵 1/

This article on on NYC landlords unable to pay their expenses gives a foretaste of what I suspect the pushback to a rent freeze is going to look like. www.thecity.nyc/2025/08/07/b...

I feel like this is a clear succinct statement of Trumpism, or at least one central strand of it. It is about reasserting the authority of the bosses over their "talent".