I think the California Bluesky Housing folks have convinced me to vote for Steyer for governor. I have real misgivings about voting for a billionaire with no experience in public office, government should not be run like a business. However, depressing Republican turnout in the general sounds good.

Today is mine and @onetwobre.bsky.social’s anniversary. She got me a first edition, first printing of Death and Life. Of course, I’ve had the same paperback copy that every planner owns for years, but it’s pretty neat having a first printing. It looks good on my urban planning shelf.

I’ve never seen a copy of Neighborhood Defenders in a bookstore before. The Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur was incredible. It was probably the most well-curated bookstore I’ve been to, full of classics and other influential work. I’d love to do nothing but read through the entire store.

For the past year, I’ve really been struggling with the in-fighting amongst people who should be allies for creating better cities. Specifically, there was an instance last year in the @thewaroncars.bsky.social discord where I was called racist for saying street takeovers by cyclists are bad.

This may be the world’s shortest no parking zone.

Since the weekend, a fire has been burning on Santa Rosa Island. I had plans to go backpacking there next month, which won't be happening now. (Channel Islands is the last National Park I need to visit in California.) More importantly, the fire is devastating island fox habitat on Santa Rosa.

It’s Indie Bookstore Day! @onetwobre.bsky.social and I are headed into LA by train to take transit around LA, visiting as many indie bookstores as we can. Folks say you need a car to get around LA, but that seems less and less true. Let’s see how well this works.

A dozen years ago, I worked for a now-defunct bike share company that tried to do bike share for Los Angeles. Unfortunately, company leadership was completely incompetent and I think they poisoned the well for bike share in LA. Otherwise, it should be number 2 on this list.

The average American has three friends.

For the past couple of years, I've been tracking Tadej Pogačar's campaign to become cycling's GOAT. He's making advances on Eddy Merckx's record, but isn't there yet. If he can keep his current dominance for another few years, he will be the GOAT, but he's not there yet.

You know it was a wet bike ride when you have to put the hairdryer in your shoes after you get home. (And yes, I know they make shoe dryers, but I live in Southern California and this is a rare occurrence.)

I’m thinking about making videos for Orange County like @nickandert.bsky.social does for LA. OCTA is a disaster and seems to only want to widen freeways. I’d like to show an alternative vision for transportation in OC. Somebody, please tell me that this is a bad idea and that I shouldn’t do it.

I don’t know why folks want the US to go back to being a manufacturing economy. I love making things, but I’d never want to work in a factory. Look at the export economies around the world. They’re poor, crowded & can only dream of achieving the American standard of living. Why would we want that?

I did my third FTP test this year. I haven't been the best at eating or exercising over the past six weeks, and it shows. My weight had been slightly down before the kids' spring break, but bounced back up on our vacation. Thankfully, my power has continued to progress & is where I want it.

Why did LA28 suddenly relocate a bunch of sports to venues along major rail lines? My hunch is that with this much uncertainty — Trump, tariffs, the very real possibility that no one will even want to come — everyone realized we need to work with what we've got

People are pretty good at figuring out how to get where they want to go and will use the transportation mode that is most convenient for them; so you should just go ahead build your city’s transportation system for the mode share that you want.

This is a symptom of a wider issue in local government decision-making. Too often, any opposition to a project will cause it to not move forward. Somehow, local government needs to create unanimous consent on each and every project in order to do anything. It's an unreasonable hurdle.

Does anybody have a recommend a good tenants rights attorney in the San Diego area? A friend is looking for one. I don’t know any of the details of why he’s looking.

This was the first time I’d ever received a warning before an earthquake hit. I’m real far away and barely felt the earthquake, but it’s awesome to see this type of warning system work.

Bill McKibben keynoting YIMBYtown this year really cements something I've been saying for a while: housing policy is climate policy, and the YIMBY movement is a green movement.

Does anybody have good data about the reduction in total development costs, on a per-unit basis, we can expect to see from reduced permit review times? cc: @mnolangray.bsky.social, @maxdubler.com, @shanedphillips.bsky.social, @resnikoff.bsky.social

Last month, I talked about the risks of the dollar not being the world’s reserve currency. It looks like that’s already happening. Today, yields on the 30 year T-bill nearly hit its peak in the past decade. The bond auctions over the next two days are going to be terrifying.

I 3d printed the Right Hand of Pierre and Jacques de Wissant to use as a helmet rack. Unfortunately, I have two more helmets that it doesn’t hold. I guess I’ll need to print Jacques’ left hand.

This is great news for LA. Every city in California should follow suit, and the State should implement this in the next building code update.

I need to drop my car off in Corona, right next to the Metrolink station. Instead of having someone drive all the way there and back to pick me up, I thought I’d see if I could take the train back. Apparently, I would have needed to plan 12 hours ahead. No wonder nobody takes transit in SoCal.

If a proposed development complies with applicable general plan & zoning standards, it should never go before a public hearing. Without a public hearing, there is no CEQA. While this is good, it’s a half measure. Force cities to approve projects that comply with zoning to be approved ministerially.

This is a really interesting & relevant project to me. I’m in a home with a 100amp main service. Installing a 50amp circuit for an EV charger was a challenge. This limit on power within a home isn’t one I had considered in the “electrify everything & green the grid” model until I ran into it myself.

Does anybody know if HCD or anyone else has a publicly available list of affordable housing projects at-risk of having their restrictive covenants expire? I know that cities need to list at-risk projects in the housing elements, it would be great to find this information compiled somewhere.

Love seeing this. Every transit agency should be doing this on every stop larger than an acre. Housing and shopping, co-located with transit is how we solve both our climate and cost of living crises.

I wish there was a newsletter like @awalkerinla.bsky.social's Torched, but for LA's Measure A funding and LACAHSA. This week has been bonkers, and I can't keep up. Today's Executive Committee For Regional Homeless Alignment meeting should be a great firework show.

For the past 80 years, all Americans have been receiving immense benefits from the dollar being the world’s reserve currency. Government spending supercharges our economy, and it’s only possible because the rest of the world is willing to buy our public debt.

“Housing is hard,” I heard this multiple times this morning at the grand opening of a new affordable apartment community in Santa Ana. Housing doesn’t have to be hard, it was the easiest thing to build for millennia. We have made it hard, and we can make it easy again.

Katie Porter announced her run for governor today. I've known Katie since she first ran for Congress in 2018, when we were both just candidates here in OC. She was an incredible Representative during Trump's first term & will make for a great governor who can take California where it needs to go.

Any Orange County, CA residents looking for a tool to advocate with your reps to help protect HUD? We have one! actionnetwork.org/letters/act-... HUD does vital work in our community, it needs to be protected from budget and staffing cuts. Use your voice! 📣🏠

Today’s What’s Next is all about low quality search results in Google and how AI is making the web worse. I’d really love to see a human curated search engine like the early days of Yahoo. Just employ a bunch of librarians to manually index websites with all of the best information.

One of my goals this year is to double my power to weight ratio on the bike. I started the year at 2.0 W/kg, with a goal of 4 W/kg. I'm planning on doing this by getting my weight down by 35 lbs and my power up by 110W. Today was my first check on my progress. I'm right on trend for my overall goal.

Well, sir, there's nothing on earth like a genuine, bona fide electrified, six-car monorail!

You know your city is completely unserious about bike infrastructure when its only Class I bike path is just randomly closed, and the only way around for cyclists is to ride against traffic on the edge of the roadway, where cars are doing 50+ mph. Thanks, Anaheim, for all you do to keep us safe.

Talking to a developer earlier this week, they said contractors have already increased the cost of construction for future projects by 15% in the past month due to the prospect of tariffs. We’re not going to building new housing in the coming years, and housing costs will skyrocket.

This is a lie. Running for office is fucking hard. One of the hardest things I’ve done in my life. The hardest part is that you have a numerical value of the number of people who don’t like you in your community. It took me years to recover. But it’s worth it & we better off if more people did it.

Here are my final Oscar predictions before next weekend's awards ceremony. Absolute blowouts for both supporting actor awards. Anora will be an amazing win if it gets Best Picture with no other Oscar wins (although it didn't win at the SAG, so maybe Conclave wins instead.)

Tesho was one of the last folks from Twitter that I've missed since coming here. So glad to see him come over. Really enjoyed meeting him a couple of years ago at CNU. I really like his approach to city building. Focused and humble, searching for how he can best improve the lives of his neighbors.

I got myself the tiniest little router plane. Look at how cute it is!

One of the discussion topics when making loans to affordable housing projects that have Project Based Vouchers is what happens if the Section 8 program goes away. I've always thought that was a crazy thing to worry about. Turns out, maybe it wasn't so far outside the realm of possibility.

I introduced CEQA legislation (SB 607) to avoid CEQA being used to stop new housing & make other smart changes to aspects of CEQA that turn it into a process nightmare that doesn’t always help the environment. SB 607 will help create abundance of the things that make life better & more affordable:🧵

I’ve been championing this change for a few years. I even drafted a bill that would do just this & tried to get YIMBY CA behind it. I’m thrilled to see something similar proposed in actual legislation. I hope I had a small part to play in spreading the idea. Now we’ve just got to get it passed!

It feels like we’re on the verge of bikes being cool again, like BMX in the ‘80s. The delinquents in middle school are all riding bikes these days. It seems they’ve figured out the freedom bikes provide. Next thing you know, we’ll see a remake Rad, the best bike movie in the history of cinema.

I don’t get why we’re doing this separately from a housing bond. The issues are the same, the goals are the same, the bond measure should be the same. Lower the cost of living and save the environment by building denser housing in our cities and making it easier to move around. It’s all of a piece.

I appreciate this post so much. I just started learning R because of the original post (and I'm really hitting the limit of what Excel and QGIS can do for me), but learning R is daunting. Posts like this, that walk through exactly how to do something are so incredibly useful as a starting point.

I hate how housing policy people use “housing units” or just “units” when they’re talking about homes. Simply calling new apartments and houses “homes” resonates with regular people so much better.