Fun find this afternoon: In 1957, the Port Authority did the engineering work to link the downtown PATH to the Lexington Avenue subway local tracks.

Some local flavor: downtown JC has a 15% IZ set-aside for upzoned land. In five years, not a single affordable unit has broken ground in downtown JC. When thr IZO passed, then-councilman Solomon pledged to relax the IZO if it didnt work. Instead he ran on making it more onerous & applying citywide

San Francisco is mulling cutting its inclusionary zoning set-aside from 15% to 5% www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/a...

If we could fund better transit in NJ through a new revenue stream, how would you do it? Didn't Pompidou reveal we could be using special improvement districts for regional/localized public goods? @upzonenj.bsky.social @3underscores.bsky.social @mdasilva.bsky.social @eaconner.bsky.social

So...tonight JC's new infrasturture director asked neighborhood meeting attendees for a show of hands if we should have paid parking permit zones. Is this how we're going to do street safety improvements now, under the new admin? Straw polls at NIMBY meetings with an average age of 65?

Bought a coat rack in Bayonne and biked home with it over my handlebars a couple days ago. It was an odd revelation having cars give me almost the legally required 4 feet of passing clearance. Feels so different, and virtually never happens when youre not carrying a 6-foot pole.

The new Target in Journal Sq is a disappointment. The store is too small with not enough variery ir quantity of items in stock, especially value sizes. Fine, but the store 's retail space could easily be 3x larger—above it there are two levels of dedicated "free" parking that sit mostly empty...

In his order denying the city's temporary injunction against closing Christ Hospital on Saturday, Judge Anthony d'Elia basically says Mayor Solomon has been gaslighting constituents with the argument that Christ Hospital illegally closed.

The only ethical slopulism is unethical slopulism, where you don’t believe any of the crowd pleasing shit and will do sane policy in office while handwaving away how it’s actually no tax on tips or whatever. Unfortunately both politicians and voters almost always become what they pretend to be.

If you sign up for updates from Ward F councilman Gilmore, he sends you advertisements for his for-profit business "Educational Gilmore Speaks LLC." The proceeds benefit the "EGS Scholarship Fund," which just means he gives kids discounts for his "services" and pockets the money. Grifter.

If your inclusionaey zoning is well calibrated, you can get vurtually 100% utilization without making it a mandate. If it is poorly calibrated and it is a mandate, it will raise rents by reducing supply.

I went to the Lidl on 32 St in Manhattan today and the produce was cheaper than at the Korean fruit stands in McGinley Square (and fresher). The first time I've ever found cheaper produce in a supermarket than these produce places.

"IZ seeks to produce affordable homes by substituting land use policy in place of broadly shared taxes and public subsidies. This analysis suggests that the public may be paying either way, and that the costs of IZ are both higher and more regressive than the alternative."

Highland Avenue before and after being destroyed by developers

Kind of interesting that this single-family house near the epicenter of the Journal Sq/Homestead Pl construction boom on Van Reipen Ave just sold for 2% *less* adjusting for inflation than it did in March 2018, despite the new retail amenities in the area.

Hilltop, Jersey City

Still the same situation.

Bus stop on Newark Ave still completely snowed in 3 days after storm, just as it was for two weeks after the last blizzard. Even worse this time: no foot path. Nothing was learned by city government.

Amazing. NYC NIMBY populist councilmember is voting FOR an upzoning in her district—because if she didn't, the mayor and borough president would approve something even bigger and with poorer tenants. This is thanks to the charter revision amendments Eric Adams sponsored last November.

The Planning Division's analyses and memos about the cost of this law included curtains and blinds as low-cost compliance options. But they have since confirmed to us they are not included under the law. Please email council to ask this law to be sent back to Planning for revision.

This debate has shown me how little due diligence the city council does on the ordinances that come before it and how much the activists for it remind me of the lobbyists against nuclear and wind energy. Working to make all new construction in a city more expensive is climate (and fiscal) suicide.

This bird-safe glass stuff seems extraordinarily expensive, and that’s before even getting into the questionable benefits (it doesn’t work well at night??) betterblocksnj.org/2026/02/23/j...

“Housing for whom?” assumes a zero sum world in which we have to choose between building new market rate housing and building subsidized housing for poor people. No such tradeoff exists. We can let the market serve people who can afford market rate housing AND subsidize housing for those who can’t.

new from me: a story about VACANCY CHAINS, the idea that underlies the argument that more housing is good even if you can't afford it www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Oregon's state senate just voted to ban unfunded inclusionary zoning, recognizing that it makes housing *less* affordable, not more affordable.

Great piece of legislation passed the Oregon Senate. SB 1521 bans inclusionary zoning UNLESS Portland-area govts create a pay-for to compensate builders for being forced to provide affordable units. NIMBY local governments won't be able to use IZ to block new housing supply.

This is like the tenth research group using a totally new dataset to reach this same conclusion: building new market-rate housing helps low-income tenants. "These findings demonstrate that housing supply expansions benefit lower-income households through moving chains"

The gall of developers erecting out-of-scale apartment buildings that violate the neighborhood character of single family homes. (Duncan Ave, Jersey City)

Better Blocks NJ is putting out a call to action asking all Jersey City pro-housing advocates to email the city council as soon as possible! The potential to build 1,000 apartments on a parking lot downtown is at risk unless planning starts to amend zoning near transit in downtown Jersey City.

Getting money for housing, NYCHA and transit won’t get easier by losing reps, that’s for sure.

🚨 Jersey City Heights residents: Meeting on safety improvements (including bike lanes) on Franklin Ave NEXT WEDNESDAY at 96 Franklin St (PS 8)

An MEP engineer told me the other day that he often times gets better heat pump/geothermal systems installed in red jurisdictions because they just go for the operations savings, while sustainability-focused jurisdictions dither and assume climate-friendly design has a sort of penitential cost.

Before 1986, affordable housing had accelerated depreciation schedules, which was a much faster way of getting things built than the current system of tax credits.

Much like “AI can’t draw human fingers”, I worry that “self-driving cars don’t work in snow” is something that will soon be fixed, and thus a distraction from more important questions about how to regulate these things.

When the Turnpike Extension widening was announced, Gov Murphy claimed it wasn't detrimental for climate because cars are going electric. In the past few months, car makes have taken tens of billions of dollars in losses due to slow EV takeup. www.reuters.com/business/aut...

There are street-parked cars on my block that still haven't been used a single time after almost two weeks.

11 days after the storm, this bus bump out in a city right-of-way is mostly snow covered. There is a narrow path to the bus, with a giant slush puddle that most people aren't nimble enough to leap over. It shouldn't take volunteers to shovel this out.

Jesus what a chart. Dashed line is CO2 ppm in 2023.

Worth noting that this paper doesn't really care whether housing in general improves affordability or not, whether it builds the tax base or not. It assumes market-rate housing is neutral & evaluates IZ on its own terms--how good is it at producing affordable apartments at no govt expenditure?

That's pretty interesting

I think this result–that voluntary incentives would produce more affordable housing than mandates–must seem deeply counterintuitive for some people. They key is that every development site is different, and some are more suited than others to trading a tax incentive for affordable housing....

Many affordable housing proponents support mandates on the premise that they produce more affordable housing than voluntary incentives, even if they kill housing supply overall. A recent paper by Lebret et al shows this premise is false. (thread)

A pattern we've seen in some of the parts of JC with lower market rents is buildings being built at 6 stories, even when taller buildings are allowed, to save on construction costs. 212 Culver Ave is the latest to reapply at 6 stories (down from 8). Down from 365 apartments to 266.

Traffic crashes killed 206 New Yorkers in 2025, tied for the safest year since 1910. More than 200 deaths in a year is still far too many. The goal of Vision Zero is zero. Getting there will require redesigning streets, lowering speed limits, and daylighting every intersection.

The same circumstances are true when it comes to metro systems. China opened more metro lines in 2025 alone than exist in the entire countries of Russia, UK, or France. Over the past 4 years, China built 2.5x as much metro lines as the US has in total.

A sewer socialist gets results by focusing on outcomes and on the nuts and bolts of unglamorous but essential city services. Is the opposite of that a parade progressive? (Tbf he's been in office 5 business days, prob can't blame him for this imo)

A sewer socialist gets results by focusing on outcomes and on the nuts and bolts of unglamorous but essential city services. Is the opposite of that a parade progressive? (Tbf he's been in office 5 business days, prob can't blame him for this imo)

Unfortunately I fear this is a sign of distress due to citywide height limits pushing demand from wealthy neighborhoods to poorer ones in Medellín.

If you have time at 11am (NOTE: it was moved from 9am!), call in and register your opposition to the $12 billion Turnpike Extension widening through JC. This is the first meeting under the new governor & new Turnpike Authority chair; first impressions matter! Call 800-346-7359; access code 487219