Boomers be running around turning off every light that no one is standing directly under in their 3,000 square foot detached house for two people

My dollhouse furniture survived 35 years, right up until it made contact with boys

The James Webb Space Telescope is so freaking cool. The mainstream media should spend more time telling us what it's up to: gizmodo.com/runaway-blac...

Fairfax City, VA's zoning ordinance has about one page for every 80 residents. That's too much zoning.

"The democrats are the opponents, the Senate is the enemy." -- Rep. Anon

The reasoning and arithmetic you love to see on display from our Commerce Department

DHS wants to make biometric data collection mandatory for everyone associated with any immigration benefits request. This includes US citizens involved in the application. I just submitted a Public Interest Comment criticizing this proposal. www.mercatus.org/research/pub...

@ballstonbakfiets.bsky.social developed the world’s best cocktail for getting into the ✨Christmas spirit✨ Vana Talinn egg nog

California's under 18 population has declined by several hundred thousand since 2010, so in my opinion school crowding should not be anywhere near the top of its public policy concerns.

The well has run completely dry of answers to the question, “Why can’t I be shot out of a cannon??!”

How can we rationally write building safety rules when we can't even remotely agree on costs? Here, a condo board and the fire sprinkler lobby disagree by an order of magnitude on the cost of retrofitting sprinklers to meet a San Francisco retrofit mandate www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

Sorry haters, but the pencil towers looked cool as hell in the snow:

Prior to adopting its version of the International Building Code in 2007, New York City hadn't overhauled its building code since 1968: furmancenter.org/files/public...

They say I have a face for text-based social media

There’s are stories like this in the news and if you talk to parents everyone knows at least one personal story about some busybody calling child services over some insane thing. Socially enforced helicopter parenting.

Good take here on Family Friendly Housing by @ad-mastro.bsky.social www.thedeletedscenes.com/p/is-yimbyis...

Very upsetting that ACLU is pro-drunk driving. Requiring in-car breathalyzers for people convicted of a DUI is not "a form of racialized wealth extraction." People of all backgrounds are getting killed and maimed by reckless drivers. Let's stop the carnage! calmatters.org/newsletter/c...

During the period of the post-baby boom fertility decline, we've also seen a big increase in the number of houses with lots of bedrooms relative to the number of households with lots of people.

I'm still less optimistic about LLMs as a useful research assistant than many of my colleagues are, but I do have to say that ChatGPT has gotten a lot better at writing Stata code in the past year

In raw density terms, the Boston region is the sprawliest big metro in the country: realestate.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/u...

I honestly didn't realize that New York City still applied minimum parking requirements. New Zealand, with a population of a nudge over 5 million in a remote corner of the south Pacific, has removed MPRs nationwide -- before one of the greatest cities the world has ever seen? Amazingly absurd.

me dressed up and exercising at the airport before my 8 hour flight

Utah is lagging behind its neighbors in terms of statewide housing reform, but this video from the Cox administration is some good messaging: youtu.be/PjEmkNfuVjg?...

New "luxury" buildings are good, not just for overall housing affordability but for a city's overall economic health.

San Francisco has been rezoned! It's not perfect but it's a step in the right direction. Now we need to pass single stair reform! #architecture #housing #sanfrancisco From the @openscopestudio.bsky.social blog: openscopestudio.com/a-shift-in-t...

Any tips of where to stay in Boston for ease of taking small children to Fenway?

Even accepting his premise that the real shortage is in larger units (I think @ebwhamilton.bsky.social has made a strong case in the past that this is not true), this analysis just seems incorrect. Many of the policies in the first paragraph *would* promote family-sized units!

In 1978, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors downzoned the city, banning multifamily homes in many areas and sparking a decades-long affordability crisis. 47 years later, on a 7–4 vote, they passed the Family Zoning Plan to finally begin to undo that mistake. The times, they are a-changin’!

Off the top of my head this conversation is extremely relevant in Arlington, VA right now

My colleagues @awjustus.bsky.social and @aarmlovi.bsky.social have a new article out connecting electoral design to local housing politics. They show how proportional representation in Cambridge has sidestepped the pitfalls of both district based and traditional first-past-the-post councils

People say there’s not a lot of crime on the National Mall, but there’s actually one rampant crime that the National Guard is doing nothing about. The crime is families with young kids eating outside food in the museum cafeterias.

Obviously it’s insane to set parking requirements based on Black Friday’s unpriced demand, but I will say Tysons was an absolute zoo today in spite of everyone also shopping online. It was so crowded we had to eat our burgers on the floor.

I'm just now seeing this 2024 report, but as @ebwhamilton.bsky.social predicted, most popular project type was 3-unit townhouses -- e.g., the largest bldg possible under IRC + conventional SF mortgage financing www.arlingtonwins.org/updates-blog...

Sound up www.tiktok.com/@jdtatarian/...

This was a great conference, with a keynote by Mississippi Gov. Reeves which was the most interesting keynote by a politician I've ever heard

Relative to peer jurisdictions, I think Arlington County, VA is quite well-governed. However, the county has an advisory panel going to consider big changes to our governance, including a ❗ move from at-large to district-based representation❗

Core vocabulary of the baby sister: 1) mine 2) me first 3) mio mio mio

Free movie idea: gritty IMAX reboot of The Great Escape starring Tom Hardy after he was captured from Dunkirk

It's interesting to me that Freddie de Boer is so dismissive of improving pedagogy in teaching reading when communist countries famously achieve/achieved very high literacy rates: freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/there-are-...

I agree that most Americans want a detached single-family house in the abstract, but current policy that skews development toward this one type suffer. Under current policy, people have to pay a premium for walkability and density, holding house size constant: www.mercatus.org/research/res...

Welton Sanders’ book Manufactured Housing has lots of examples of two-story HUD code homes

My contribution to the Mark Sanford discourse is that he’s the only governor I know of who seems to have put some real political capital into trying to make it possible to make schools that kids can walk to.

Interesting finding here from @zyudhishthu.bsky.social that downtown Chicago is one of the only areas of the city adding kids, due to being one of the only areas that's adding housing.

Holy cow, in one day our house went from two balance bike riders to two pedal bike riders and one who is almost getting the hang of a balance bike

I recently rewatched the Wolf of Wall Street and holy cow... it's 180 minutes! Who has the time?? And it would have been funnier if it was cut by at least a third imo

The Fed must set different interest rates in Spokane

"We’ve lived all our lives in the Great World 2 Afterparty, and now that party is over." www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-great-...

One way to reduce condo defect liability: stop forcing architects to design buildings that leak. HCD’s “objective design standards” guide *encourages* making building envelopes more complex, heightening leak and therefore defect lawsuit risk cao-94612.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/documents/Ap...

Pattern language

Must-read think piece from @ebwhamilton.bsky.social on the connection intersection of housing and family formation. "To Support Families, Repair the Housing Ladder" www.governing.com/urban/to-sup...