Going to planning school at UCLA in 2020 was great because I can use my fluency in social justice rhetoric to completely flummox left anti-YIMBY grad students.

This sort of anti-intellectualism is inherently reactionary even if you dress it in a Che Guevara t-shirt

SCAG wants to pull the rug out from under SB 79 in LA. They want to eliminate planned train lines that haven't fully completed the CEQA process, like the K Line north and Sepulveda Line. Some of our best neighborhoods! Boo!

It should be legal to build homes that I do not personally want to live in. Not every home will serve everyone at every stage of life. Families are not the only people who need housing. New housing primarily benefits the people who get places to live, not the investors who make money on it.

Dulce Vasquez from the top rope.

Important thread about a big California housing issue that few people are talking about:

Radically affordable housing in Austin (scroll to the end of the photos). www.zillow.com/homedetails/...

Subway Takes is content for transplants who aren't comfortable in their own skin in the city. What you have to remember is that if New York isn't open for everyone it's no longer New York, it's something smaller and worse.

I’m glad at least one (1) person understands

Yeah I’m pretty pro-panopticon for anything involving cars. Speed governors, automated license plate readers, ignition interlocks for people with more than one DUI. Sorry, your rights to privacy ended when you began operating a multi ton piece of heavy machinery around me!

If you live in LA, the most important mayoral election in decades is coming up. thankfully, the best candidate is obvious: It’s Nithya. Vote for Nithya Raman.

In all the discussion of a singular "millennial anthem", we all did overlook this particular entry for a particular kind of too-online person.

This is a backdoor way to ban speed and red light cameras and should be opposed

A lot of replies being like “Wait something good!?” No you morons, republicans want to be able to allow chud truck drivers to speed through your neighborhood without consequence. You are a fucking sucker if you think congressional republicans care about privacy. This stupid country I swear to god.

every one of these folks should be primaried unconscionable betrayal of their constituents

I rented a car recently and had to park for the night and was deeply frustrated I could not find nearby parking because it’s all free and therefore quite parked up. Would have happily paid some money and it wasn’t even an option. Charging for parking appropriately is good, actually!

If you pay $9 a day on 5 days a week, you will not come close to covering the full cost of building, operating, and maintaining a space in a BART parking structure. (These garages were generally built only to serve peak-hour demand, so I don't include weekend revenue in this calculation.)

"They're raising prices in places where demand is highest and lowering prices in places where demand is lowest" is a concept everyone understands and generally accepts *except* when it comes to pricing anything to do with cars and driving.

Lmao who else is supposed to own a rental building?? You’ve only got like three private ownership options – private equity, family offices, and institutional investors. I don’t believe anybody smashing the repost button on this one even knows what any of these words mean.

There are about 27 million apartments in 5+ unit buildings in the United States. Housing is expensive because we do not have enough homes in the places people want to live, not because Blackstone owns less than 1% of the apartment market.

This columnist starts by whining about how her BART station is raising commuter parking prices in response to demand, then immediately pivots to venting her frustration about not being able to find a spot at current prices. She does not make a connection between these issues. Remarkable stuff!

The reopening of the Castro Theater as a mixed-use movie and live event space has been a huge win for the neighborhood. I'm glad the owners were able to restore this local jewel to its former glory and I can't wait to dance the night away in there next month. www.ebar.com/story/166507...

This writer would probably feel more of "a sense that what she does in her day to day life resonates with people beyond herself" if she had not gotten two Stanford degrees and then worked in elite media for her whole career. (LARPing as a farmhand for two years at Deep Springs is cool too, I guess?)

San Francisco is moving in the right direction on inclusionary zoning. It will reduce its IZ requirement to 5 percent of units, and to compensate, will double its housing trust fund, which is mostly funded from property taxes. Property tax is a much better way to fund rent-restricted housing!

Hell has frozen and pigs are flying: Michelle Tandler has posted a good take about housing.

My friend Mitch is in the New York Times talking about bringing spaghetti into baseball stadiums. (Gift link.) www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/d...

Barcelona is always at the forefront of NIMBY innovation. Now they’re imposing a moratorium on new 24-hour convenience stores. Anything to combat touristification except building new housing.

That Harris and Walz didn't go to fancy schools like elites should is an underrated cause for why the press loathed them.

The buried lede here is that this action drastically reduces the risk the public will be subsidizing the cost of rebuilding expensive homes in Malibu and Orinda and discourages future construction in high hazard fire zones. Good news for most of us www.sfchronicle.com/california/a...

“Yes In My Back Yard” movement stuns in new photo:

What a disaster LA’s “mansion” tax has been… www.wsj.com/economy/hous...

A profoundly untalented woman skateboarder who routinely scored lower 8 year old girls in large competitions made herself a C-list right wing celebrity after getting second place to a trans woman in a three woman field at a small contest that Red Bull sponsored in the Midwest. They’re all like this.

People will say this about bikes when literal toys for grown men like this exist

I do not care who the landlords are or whether or not they make a profit, so long as tenants have decent homes at prices they can afford in the places they want to live.

Seeing a few quote posts here saying that any new housing needs to be public housing, and I can assure you that is not the lesson from San Diego’s price decrease.

We now have three years of post-ULA permitting data to compare to pre-ULA, and...it's not good. Average annual building permits issued in LA City have fallen by 1/3 since the measure passed. If you think this is due to macro factors, look at the rest of the county and state - doing mostly fine.

I'm fine with a Governor who doesn't know who the Global Director of WIRED is, yeah. Totally fine. It's not a thing anyone needs to know except people who work at WIRED.

Buy Ned’s book!

Realized the Obama library looks like one of those trophies that investment bankers give themselves after closing a big deal and now I can’t un-see it.

I still think these two paragraphs from Ganz are the most important contemporary political writing

Many jurisdictions actually have minimum parking requirements for bars. Objectively pro-drunk driving urban planning.

The “we don’t have the votes” excuse for refusing to force a vote on impeachment is conceding the point and saying even the opposition party doesn’t think this high crime merits removal from office. It’s not being politically astute and pragmatic, it’s self-defeating in its cowardice.

‘Union’ means ‘group of workers collectively bargaining’, not ‘ontologically good thing’. There are more workers than firms so thinking unions are in the right is a good strategy for being right most of the time, but not all the time.

It’s also paying off in lower transit operating costs and greater service reliability: according to the article, police holds (when trains are held for more than five minutes due to law enforcement activity) are down from 2,996 in Q2 2023 to 955 in Q1 2026

Property crime on trains is down about 95% since BART installed tall fare gates that make it significantly harder to ride without paying.

The solution to disappointing elected Democrats is more and better elected Democrats.

I am pleased to see our local rich people stepping up to support civic beautification.

the American experiment was born in cities (Boston, Philadelphia), and has achieved its greatest expression in cities (New York) therefore, the Acela corridor is the American heartland

Most Americans live in and around cities. Therefore, urban areas are the American heartland.

Historic preservationists should not be allowed to tell people what colors they can paint their houses. If a law mandating historically accurate paint had been in effect in the 60s, San Francisco would never have gotten our iconic Painted Ladies, and how sad would that have been?