A building grows in Manhattan

The first use of this meme?

Pretty solid Yap stone over here; the crypto of its day

You want sub 1 TFR? This is how you get it

A book on accounting for transit called “Mind the GAAP”

Connecticut is going to spend $1 billion on a moveable bridge to serve *one* boat that goes up and down the river. The Army Corps of Engineers was inflexible on this issue despite the cost bloat. Should be a go to example for “marble cake federalism.” By @zliscow.bsky.social interviewed by Ruiz

Museums seem to have a bit too much adjoined office space. This could just be more exhibits!

Eminem's "Without Me" aged poorly in that rather than "nobody listens to techno;" everyone listens to EDM and no one lists to rap anymore

Euripides, you-buy-a-these

A tree grows in Manhattan

Hard to say which causes which — but the German practice of Lüften (or Querlüften for cross-ventilation) probably makes Point Access Blocks/single-stair more valuable for those apartments which straddle both sides. Americans generally do AC and leave windows shut more often.

Seems about time for another Battlestar Galactica reboot

To borrow another example, taken from the `dbreg` README: github.com/grantmcdermo... Here I am running a fixed-effects regression on 180 million(!) row parquet dataset... and it completes **< 2 seconds**... on my laptop 🤯 This is powered by @duckdb.org under the hood. #rstats #econsky

What are some good birds for someone just getting into birdwatching

Crazy how much lingonberries dominate cranberries on all dimensions, but are basically absent in the US

Seems like there is no big movie or prestige drama TV going on that people are talking about

Inner courtyards in Helsinki cc @urbancourtyard.bsky.social

The unexamined life seems very much worth living, don’t know what that Socrates guy was going on about

172. CBTC on the Mumbai Suburban Railway. Developing countries should usually build concrete before electronics, but the overcrowding on the Mumbai locals is such that CBTC must be a priority; peak headways are said to be 3 minutes, and CBTC is expected to cut them to 2 minutes.

A great thing about courtyard designs, like here in Helsinki, is the flexibility to convert to commercial uses like this beer yard cc @urbancourtyard.bsky.social

I think much of Kirsten Chalke’s discussion is echoing a lot of numbers that I think are coming from @arpitrage.bsky.social’s insights: arpitrage.substack.com/p/rethinking... (She mentioned “a NYU professor” so apologies if I’m misattributing)

Hope everyone was productive with their summer goals now that the season is winding down and class starts soon

Showing up to an academic finance conference

Dan Garodnick style zoning reform - moderate density increases everywhere - contrasts with prior efforts to stuff the building in a concentrated area. This satisfies @jeffrlin.bsky.social’s idea of zoning based on changes; rather than levels www.dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

cc @jeffrlin.bsky.social: relevant to the decomposition of where lower housing values from highways were because of direct disamenities or opening up more developable land

This is probably related to the huge amount of unnecessary work that must be done on-site to build escalators in North America, per the union contract. The balustrade is a particularly sore spot for the manufacturers, I’ve been told. Pgs. 73-74: admin.centerforbuilding.org/wp-content/u...

Wake up babe new cost bloat just dropped www.mercatus.org/macro-musing...

More congestion pricing.

I think the legal challenges under the current administration plus the political challenges anywhere without significant public transit are large challenges. Still, Gupta's piece is very good, hitting on many of the advantages of congestion pricing, including the virtuous circle of transit.

Politically speaking, it's unlikely Trump's DOT approves another VPPP for congestion pricing, but any serious American city should start ramping up planning and review efforts now so that they can have a congestion pricing program ready to go the second a sympathetic administration is in place.

One reason Universities can't expand more is their own faculty are the most NIMBY people imaginable and block expansion efforts

Congestion pricing has been a success in New York City, so more cities should adopt it across the country! A new piece from me at Vital City: www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/con...

Somewhat bizarre how many political and cultural trends are downstream of the challenges upper middle class people face getting their kids into elite universities

With proof of payment, you can load transit a lot easier, and you can also build elevators direct to platform. The MTA is starting to change this, but typically you would have two sets of elevators in the station, increasing costs

Some more over here

*NEW PUBLICATION* Our new paper, just published by JPubE, extends the standard value of statistical life (VSL) model to make it more realistic. Doing so can help explain why many people dislike using a single value for health, and why they underinvest in prevention. julianreif.com/research/rei...

DC, Maryland and Virginia agree to funding to fully automate @wmata.com — new signals, trains, and platform doors — over next two decades.

Blue sky death spiral continues

Mumbai line 3 (Aqua line) now operational from Aarey to BKC. Cost of 535 million (2023 USD)/km which is high, but it's one of the more challenging underground subway lines to construct in the world, with all sorts of NIMBY challenges along the way. Should hopefully be very valuable though.

Curious if the transit cost people have responded to this critique @alonlevy.bsky.social @egoldwyn.bsky.social www.statecraft.pub/p/how-to-sal...

Saint Paul is a case study for the "urban doom loop", as proposed by @arpitrage.bsky.social and others: empty offices -> cratering tax base -> raise taxes or cut services. And as @aarmlovi.bsky.social wrote, medium-sized, slow-growth cities are most at risk. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

College towns are NIMBY because of the faculty; which in turn makes it hard for Universities to expand

Super super important work for housing scholars.

Interesting paper

This is such a great and cool project by the authors -- using LLMs to break the barrier of documenting fine-grained regulation data. Plus, they made the data publicly available! Their overall regulatory index *at the tract level* is strongly correlated with house-price-to-income in the census.

📢Heavily revised working paper on AI + Zoning — with @alexbartik.bsky.social and Dan Milo, we have a new draft of our paper which expands on our method to understand housing regulations with AI. Incudes a new public data release with more housing regulation data:

RCT suggests smartphones make adults dumb cc @paulgp.com @novosad.bsky.social academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

In Europe they seem to have a lot of these modular offices set up on the construction site