Many people are saying

Were these design standards written by a drop of water trying to get inside?

“Diapers so comfortable that kids don’t want to potty train” is another one of those problems in the same category with “we made food too delicious and cheap”

In this weather, a leisurely e-bike ride counts as a triathlon

Fascinating history of screwworm eradication: open.substack.com/pub/construc...

A groundbreaking parking reform bill is on to Gov. Stein in North Carolina. It will get rid of all resi and commercial parking requirements statewide except in coastal communities www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1...

Headed into the semiquincentennial like

Checking out the scene at America 250. They are playing an inordinate amount of ABBA here

You've got to hand it to Trump, he's had two good ideas. 1) Fixing the Malcolm X Park fountain, and 2) putting a ferris wheel on the National Mall. But the ferris wheel shouldn't be this little rinky dink temporary one, it should be like the London Eye. www.npr.org/2026/06/18/n...

Yes to land reclamation, especially the cheap kind open.substack.com/pub/alltrade...

Factory-built housing is a particularly confusing area of terminology in the U.S. You see this Florida statute, and it looks like provides strong protections for HUD Code manufactured housing: www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/ind...

There is way too much going on in the field of urban planning and way too little confidence that market prices can assess tradeoffs. www.slowboring.com/p/against-ur...

All of modern culture exists in the shadow of this graph.

Among married Yiddish-speaking women in the U.S. ages 20-50 with 4+ of their own children at home, 21.5% are the primary breadwinners in their household, a share that has increased quite a bit faster than for similar non-Yiddish speaking women.

Many people have noted that ultra-orthodox Jews are one of the rare groups of people having lots of kids in developed countries. @sonjatrauss.bsky.social has an interesting new piece about some of the religious/cultural practices that support this: www.worksinprogress.news/p/issue-24-r...

We have a 12 year old nephew visiting for the weekend, and I am maximally out of touch with this age group. Anything fun we should do, or places we should eat, in the DC area?

County Board rejects historic status at Melwood site, allowing affordable housing to proceed

For some reason it's the summer of Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann at Mercatus, so I'm reading this classic.

Just complete insanity that Dems allow it to be so difficult to vote in deep blue precincts

In 2018, @scottwiener.bsky.social introduced multiple bills as a young legislator. SB827, legalizing apartments near transit, drew headlines & huge opposition. It failed. #SB828, a very consequential bill that massively increased the # of homes that rich cities had to allow, went almost unnoticed.🧵

America can build Dutch-quality bike/ped infrastructure ONLY if it is not for practical transportation

If you haven’t read @anyamartin.bsky.social’s history of the Senakw development, you must worksinprogress.co/issue/how-th...

I think we simultaneously need to normalize that not having children is a perfectly ok decision (aka don't make your adult kids feel guilty for not having their own kids) AND be more ok sharing that having kids is the kind of life changing experience/blessing I would wish on everyone.

Are both DC YIMBY mayoral candidates focused on sixplexes? From a housing supply perspective, doubling down on DC's successes building dense new multifamily neighborhoods would deliver a lot more www.axios.com/local/washin...

One thing to consider is if you have kids, they will destroy your house and everything in it. Another thing to consider is that if you don't have kids, you're probably less likely to have people around who are dying for a 15 minute dance party after dinner. www.vox.com/future-perfe...

I'm not sure how much we can learn from responses to the survey question, "Would you like more quality time with your children?" I can't imagine what parent wouldn't answer yes to that. But, while there's definitely a relationship between quantity of time with kids and quality time...

This is what you get without zoning to prevent incompatible uses

For a free guide to managing curb (i.e., on-street) parking well, read the Introduction to #ParkingAndTheCity. It distills UCLA professor Donald Shoup's 734-page classic, The High Cost of Free Parking, down to 53 pages. They're surprisingly entertaining.

Re Platner's AR-15: It's not obvious that he was breaking the law by possessing one in the 2010s. After the Heller decision, DC's assault weapon ban was based on the presence of features (pistol grip, flash hider, etc.). They were completely legal to register and own with some cosmetic changes.

It's funny how the HUD Code relies on an interstate commerce clause justification to exist, but the code made this housing much less moveable than earlier mobile homes were. From one of the great manufactured housing paper from Christ Herbert and coauthors: www.jchs.harvard.edu/research-are...

Playing catch with little kids be like, “you missed my glove.”

So much of the political class have not updated to their assumptions about how house prices interact with public sentiment

Me: I need you to play on the deck for half an hour so I can vacuum. Four year old: you have to give us drinks and snacks so we can survive

Malcom Gladwell talks to Stephen Smith re #elevators! "Have you ever heard of the perfect is the enemy of the good? That defines American elevator policy today." --MG @stephenjacobsmith.com podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

The ICC is sponsoring a committee to study how the International Residential Code affects affordability, but unfortunately zero economists are on the project www.iccsafe.org/committees/b...

Virginia got its biggest statewide wins for housing supply of the YIMBY era this session, but it could have been a lot better. Gov. Spanberger went out of her way to weaken two important bills. I break it down here: ggwash.org/view/103580/...

The Oakland fire dept is telling me I have to install sprinklers in the 18'' crawl space under my house even though NFPA 13D says this is only required in places intended for living or storage. You hear about fire depts making housing more expensive but I never expected to live it.

The Squamish people of what is now Vancouver were illegally dispossessed of their land 100 years ago. They sued, got the land back, and used their sovereignty to ignore local zoning and build 6,000 new homes over the loud objections of nearby wealthy NIMBYs. Now other tribes are getting in the game.

Virginia got its biggest statewide wins for housing supply of the YIMBY era this session, but it could have been a lot better. Gov. Spanberger went out of her way to weaken two important bills. I break it down here: ggwash.org/view/103580/...

It's maybe not great that the words "honest," "genuine," and "real" have become red flags of Claude's writing.

From @mattyglesias.bsky.social "Here in the United States, interest rates are currently 0.55 percentage points higher than the Congressional Budget Office projected in their most recent forecasts...

I'm serving as a guest editor of a Cityscape Symposium on pro-housing reforms with Nathan Bossie and Leah Lozier of HUD. We're interested in studies that examine the effectiveness of policy changes in: ✅ zoning ✅ permit processes ✅ building codes ✅ impact fees ✅ housing finance

I'm serving as a guest editor of a Cityscape Symposium on pro-housing reforms with Nathan Bossie and Leah Lozier of HUD. We're interested in studies that examine the effectiveness of policy changes in: ✅ zoning ✅ permit processes ✅ building codes ✅ impact fees ✅ housing finance

No institution loves daytime fireworks more than the Baltimore Orioles

Headline writer should have googled Boise house prices prospect.org/2026/05/22/m...

This is a great video that puts a human face and personal story to the incredible quantitative research on moving chains done by Evan Mast and others. I think it's going to have a big impact. youtube.com/watch?si=pm9t2HI0WtzV1zMp&v=QQYMUMTI7fk&feature=youtu.be

Nice Brian Potter post breaking down the build to rent housing market here: www.construction-physics.com/p/the-rise-o... Once you realize some of these developments are basically detached apartments, the slopulist approach of banning """investor-owned housing""" really makes no sense.

Analysis by Aaron Shroyer and coauthors finds that USPS land could accommodate 237,000 residential units through mixed-use post offices. Many people are saying this is some of the best-positioned federal land for reducing housing undersupply @zaiac.bsky.social @mnolangray.bsky.social

This is a refreshingly honest conversation among socialists about the failures of central planning. That said, I see a lot of people on here saying that this is an admission that they lost the calculation debate. I think this is subtly different than that. 🧵