Am I the only adult who think Spidey and His Amazing Friends and Iron Man and His Awesome Friends have some real pop punk bangers? Just over here putting Webs Ahoy on a Yoto card for… the children

HELLO SIR, IF YOU WANT TO IMPROVE HOUSING AFFORDABILITY, IT DOESN’T HELP TO BAN RENTAL HOUSING

Does your city still send big, slow, lumbering fire engines to every medical call? Time to rethink that. Miami-Dade "began its motorcycle emergency response teams (MERT) in 2002. The program had huge success at the outset, reducing response times by 60%..." www.fireengineering.com/firefighting...

@ballstonbakfiets.bsky.social tells me I'm the only person in the country who cares about this, but you too may be interested to know that you can watch Artemis II launch at 6:24pm tonight with astronauts going on a voyage around the moon

Q: What bill passed the Idaho House 63-7 last week and the D.C. Council unanimously today? A: six-story single-stair

I do not like to take credit for “wins.” I’m an ~advocate, and decisionmakers who do the things we support are the ultimate movers. That said, it is notable that the D.C. Council voted unanimously for the One Front Door Act today, which would legalize point-access blocks up to six stories here!

A minimum lot size law is signed in Idaho 🏡🥳🏡 legiscan.com/ID/bill/S135...

The National Fire Sprinkler Association is none to fond of your plex zoning reforms nfsa.org/2025/09/02/l...

The main problem with them in Seattle is they’ll build them on the long side of a 50x100 lot with parking so they’re too narrow and too shallow and have stairs in the way of every level. Comparison to Brooklyn rowhouses:

Yes to everything in this @mattyglesias.bsky.social post about the downsides of most new townhouse developments www.slowboring.com/p/make-townh...

Vice President of the United States says we’re at war due to threat of… nuclear suicide vests???? youtube.com/shorts/Kzae1...

ding ding ding

Guess the one single land use in San Francisco that has an off-street parking mandate

I'm expecting a wheelbarrow-full of pardons for insider trading on January 19, 2029. Note that the prospect of those pardons helps to keep subordinates in line. Corrupt-cop style, make sure that lots of people get a little taste, then make clear that the pardon depends on continued loyalty.

American firefighters will go to the mat to oppose a four-story, eight-unit apartment building with one stair because the sprinklers could fail, and then tell you with a straight face that this is safer if that happens

Read another article claiming Portland has "high housing costs." Sure prices could be lower, but the claim is just out of date. It was true in 2017, when PDX wages were 3% higher than the US but rents were 9% higher. As of late 2025, PDX wages are 8% above national & rents are 10% below national.

Don't ever poke your head up on LinkedIn, people will ask you for things

A survey of 400 Bay Area parents found that 31% of parents who live less than 2 miles to school drive their 10-14 year old kid to school because of Stranger Danger and 2% drive because of Traffic Concerns: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

City spent some $200m building the DC streetcar, which is slower than buses, gets stuck behind cars & comes infrequently. 10 years later, it’s shut down due to lack of interest. The lesson from this isn’t don’t invest in transit. It’s don’t invest in a project that’s not actually improving transit.

I feel like there’s a trend of right-wing women in policy who have young kids, jobs, and no childcare. This is a micro trend, but growing. I am dying to see the time logs of these women because I totally do not know how it’s sustainable.

When did a US fire code first include a section requiring new buildings to have a fire apparatus access road with an unobstructed width of no less than 20 feet? I've traced this standard back to the 1976 edition of the UFC, but did an earlier version of any US model code include such a standard?

Goals

This graph gets a lot of attention from [the niche community of] people interested in American building and housing costs, to show that American fire deaths are high relative to countries with single stair egress requirements at taller building heights. But looking at other countries flags questions

Oh hey, looking to see what @ggwash.org is writing about the 15th St bike lane debacle, and there's the Hamilton cargo bike crew ggwash.org/view/102815/...

All kids should get to do this at least once in their lives: wheels + bells + protest = empowerment

Fantastic ride organized by @hillfamilybiking.org today to protest the sudden NPS decision to remove DC’s 15th St bike lane

I am in The Atlantic today on Paul Ehrlich, who died last week, and how "The Population Bomb" still looms over our politics www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Can somebody please write a book about education in Steubenville, OH? I can’t stop thinking about it since listening to Sold a Story ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/04/02/w...

One cynical argument for ignoring California's housing crisis holds that displaced Californians will flip the Mountain West blue. Oops: "approximately 39% of those leaving the state registered to vote were registered as Republican (compared to 25% Democrat)..." www.reviewjournal.com/business/hou...

As schools are struggling with traffic congestion due to more kids being driven to school, they're trying to speed up the process with software that can track whose parents are pulling up when to speed cars and kids through.

I have a geography joke, but I have to filter it through 15,000 words of 1920s Marxian literary criticism for reasons no one really understands

Everyone(thing) Sucks Here

The Montana Supreme Court issued a long-awaited opinion in MAID v. Montana, upholding the Montana Land Use Planning Act in its entirety, and vacating some of the conclusions of the district court. A big win for housing in Montana. @shelterwf.bsky.social #mtpol #mtleg 1/

Looking forward to talking about manufactured housing next week at this Pew webinar including Rachel Siegel and industry folks: www.pew.org/en/about/eve...

Usability is important, and one thing I see on my local zoning appeals board with ADUs. Most ADU applicants will only ever go through this process once or twice in their lives. If we want them to build more housing, making the process straightforward is the least we can do.

West Virginia becomes the latest state to legalize ADUs: www.wvlegislature.gov/bill_status/... Their new law looks a lot like ADU legalization in other red states--AR, IA, and MT, BUT...

GAO going hard for housing innovation in 1982: www.gao.gov/products/ced...

DC and NoVA people, there are secret, very bike-accessible cherry blossom trees at Long Bridge Park. They’re a different type of tree than the ones on the mall, and they’re right about peak bloom this weekend 🌸

What’s more unpopular than crowded schools? School closures

My best advice for enjoying working parenthood is to lower your housekeeping standards and then lower them again

Which state has had the most elastic housing supplies in the post-pandemic period of supply chain challenges, tariffs, and high interest rates? Higher cost places where some of the new fixed costs for materials are easier to absorb? Nope, Texas

Good on Sen. Schatz for taking a politically unpopular stand here to defend housing construction in the face of temptation to take the win on the positive aspects of ROAD.

It's so unfortunate that the primary lesson policymakers took away from the GFC was "thou shalt not lend money to poor people". (The housing bubble was a generalized phenomena and not particularly concentrated in subprime)

“Mama I do not NEED to put my nose in the water because I already KNOW how to swim” 🤔

@mayor.nyc.gov Mamdani says cities should remove minimum parking mandates.

@kevinerdmann.bsky.social on why banning build-to-rent single-family housing won't help today's renters become homeowners unless Dodd Frank refroms to lending standards are reversed. kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/observatio...

Nice new piece by Brian Potter on what went wrong with Operation Breakthrough, including this kind of scary anecdote: open.substack.com/pub/construc...

MAHA’s strongest point is on the benefits of natural fibers. Not because of ~toxins~ but because we the people are sick and tired of nylon and we’re not gonna take it anymore.