You've heard of the Montana Miracle—meet the 🎆 Idaho Inspiration 🎆 Idaho just legalized five HUGE housing reforms: ✅ Manufactured homes ✅ Lot splitting ✅ Single stair building code reform ✅ ADUs ✅ Homes on lots as small as 1,500 sq ft!! The Mountain West is showing us how it's done! 🏔️💫

Austin and Michigan may be 1,300 miles apart, but the math is the same: building more homes = more affordability. 📈📉

Getting very confused as my feed is currently discussing upward mobility and elevators and apparently, these are two distinct topics.

96% of the Russian war deaths this month are from weapons that hardly existed before the war started. The "housewife kitchen drone" thing is a joke at the expense of a German arms manufacturer executive. You can search if you want the explanation.

The peasants are out of SROs? Let them live in single family houses with white picket fences, a garage for their workspace, and a driveway for their cars. —Marie NIMBY Antoinette

I'm curious about the urbanist consensus on mandatory parking unbundling. Generally, urbanist policies have been deregulator. This one is a market intervention but very light touch.

Solar power also continues to skyrocket in Texas, with generation up 34% compared to last year. Over the last twelve months, solar has made up 11% of Texas' electricity, a record high!

Nice empirical data how upzoning works to reduce prices. By reducing the cost of the land component of housing. Also a good explanation of why one can’t take the observations from upzoning a single parcel and think they work the same for broad upzoning (a fallacy also known as Condonomics).

Building higher-density housing lets you save on land costs, by putting more homes on the same parcel. But for the same reason, people are willing to pay more. Which factor wins? Data from Auckland shows that upzoning reduced the land cost to floor area ratio (THA, blue). 1/

When you look at how powerful Austin's gains are, remember that we've only picked up a fraction of the money lying around on the floor. There are still so many problems with Austin's stifling housing regulations. If the political will is there, we could build our way to real affordability.

Hell yeah, Austin! c/o @alexhrwtz.bsky.social www.pew.org/en/research-...

I wonder if 5-10m people is the sweet spot for effective second-level governance. Texas government, at 32m people, can't pay attention across the entire state at once. But the next level down is often tiny cities and counties that are too small to govern.

Two discourses over the years: 1. Remote/hybrid work hurts entry level workers, who have less opportunity to learn from older workers. 2. AI hurts entry level workers, because that's who it's good enough to replace. If both prove even partially true, we're gonna have a pipeline problem.

Saturdays are for transit

Some policy wonk somewhere: "I want to end the Jones Act. I really think it hurts Puerto Rico" Monkey's paw: "On it!"

Austin is here. Pro-housing folks don't have the votes or chutzpah to make the existing MF zones work for middle housing so they're creating new zones. It's good! There's gonna be new zones where middle housing is workable. It's bad! We now have bespoke zones for every typology.

We've passed laws requiring upfront pricing for airline tickets and increasingly for event tickets, so you don't start the buyflow at $60 then get to the last page and with mandatory fees it's $95. We should do the same with rent: all mandatory fees must be included in quoted rent.

Facebook and Twitter set out to connect the world, then discovered they make more money catering to each user's biases. The AI sycophancy problem is going to dwarf this. We're all gonna live with a hyper-intelligent devil on our shoulder telling us we're always right. It's not healthy.

As a society, we've implemented an extremely effective technology for reducing traffic deaths in children: never let them play on their own. It unfortunately has a few drawbacks...

Always remember: the culture war is a tool used by the ruling class to keep the working class divided against itself, preventing a unified front toward fine-grained walkable urbanism, with large, cross-ventilated apartments and convenient elevators.

I feel a bit queast about politicians—elected for their moral compass—making technical decisions. But elevator regulations balance important fire safety, affordability, and accessibility concerns. Balancing important competing interests is prime government territory.

The State Senate just approved Washington's elevator reform bill 41-6 after it was amended in the House, sending it to the Governor's desk. The House's amendments removed language around international harmonization but it still represents a major reform for elevators in smaller buildings.

James Talarico, who just received the Democratic nomination for US Senate from Texas, was the lead sponsor of last session's successful single stair bill in the Texas House.

When they write the book on how the US became a society of scams, one chapter will be on the switch from defined benefit to defined contribution retirement. So many people today have the responsibility to safeguard large sums to last until death but lack the faculties to do so.

For those unaware, the shamwow guy is primarying a Republican up north of Austin.

For a half-century, America has critically under-built family-sized housing in our most dynamic cities and neighborhoods, rendering them childless and unaffordable. It's time to save the American Dream. Introducing The American Housing Corporation.

Josh Reyna has earned @aura-atx.org's endorsement and mine for Texas House HD49. I didn't know Josh before AURA's candidate forum but I was blown away at his exceptional commitment to housing, thorough understanding of the issue, and experience working on it at the lege.

I've sensed a change in journalism over the last decade: fewer real estate reporters focusing on trends in interior design, hot and cold neighborhoods, etc. More "housing and affordability" reporters focusing on housing costs: what effects them, how people are affected by them, etc.

The Phoenix built-to-rent single family house / townhouse market is fascinating. (link for info, not promo) People often conceive of it single-family houses turning from ownership into rental, but I think of it as the rental market turning from apartments to single-family houses.

Austin office market never ceases to amaze me. We have the highest vacancy rate in the country so prices are...going up? I'm guessing this is a composition effect. A bunch of new Class A office space came online, raising average asking price and vacancies www.commercialcafe.com/blog/nationa...

My mind was blown learning "single stair" rules produce more stairs per person 6 single-stair buildings next to each other, with 6 total stairwells between them, can populate the same footprint as a single large apartment complex that has only 2-3 stairwells connected by long smoke-filled hallways.

There's gotta be a middle ground between the corruption-ready, spoils-infested strong mayor setup and the "Yes, Minister" bureaucratic grind of staff outlasting electeds in the city manager setup.

I think there are qualified men and women who run for office, but along unqualified candidates,there are far more men than women. Cranks, unconnected young kids trying to get their names out there, etc. True across levels of government and geography. Does this fit with y'all's experience?

Nation's urbanists announce a new plan for municipal fiscal health: build more housing

Texas #politics in action. Candidates for state house give their pitch at an @aura-atx.org happy hour.

New housing usually isn't cheap, but building new housing is the fastest route to lowering rent for those who need it most.

100% agree that lane-narrowing, speed cameras, better transit, and bike lanes are more effective traffic safety measures than "deploy robocars at scale." David worries that robocars will make these solutions less likely to pass. People will say "why make safe streets when Waymos will make us safe?"

🧵The conflict in Venezuela and why it proves we need to build more housing (1/113)

I'm pretty skeptical of technology for urbanism, because we already know so many low-tech solutions. But if we're doing a thread, I'm pretty bullish on using AI / data technology to improve curb management. Better pricing of parking, easier identification of underutilized curb space, etc.

Randy Clarke left a complex legacy in Austin because project connect will be delivered smaller than he promised. But not a day goes by that I don't miss his tenacious determination to make the impossible possible and the possible routine.

My daughter's art school moved from a strip mall to a house in a small unincorporated neighborhood. The move saved them tons of money while greatly improving their facilities. One underdiscussed reason for Commercial in Residential Zones is that some commercial works poorly on busy streets.

Extracting value on the front end of development (community benefits) instead of the back end (taxes) is eating the seed corn. It'll never produce as much community benefits as planting a good harvest and sowing it when it ripens.

Solar power also continues to skyrocket in Texas, with solar generation up 25% compared to last year!

Solar power made up 9.1% of US electricity this October, up from 7.8% last year Over the last twelve months, solar has made up 8.4% of US electricity, a record high!

In fact, Texas has now definitively surpassed California as the largest producer of utility-scale solar in the US California still leads in total solar due to its much larger rooftop program, but Texas has reached 68% of California's output compared to 55% in the 12 months prior

With Waymo's safety record being so far ahead of human drivers, at what point do we just ban human-driven cars from pedestrian-heavy areas as too dangerous? Not only would it improve safety dramatically, but it would make those areas cleaner, quieter, and easier to traverse by bus, bike, or on foot

Some arbitrary cutoffs are needed. 5 year olds can't sign a lease anywhere and 25s always can, but whether that cutoff is 18 or 19 is a bit arbitrary. Parking mandates' arbitratiness, by contrast, is a cover for the fact that there's nothing behind it. Zero is always the ideal parking mandate.

Merry Christmas to all, including the Radical NIMBYist Blowhards, the Highway Warriors, the Parking Worshipers, and do-nothing public engagement fetishists. We have Residential in Commercial Zoning, we have rents falling. We'll have cities that are walkable again, perhaps like never before. DJK

I get a lot of information about Russia's war on Ukraine from @noelreports.com. If you're interested in the fight for the Democratic world, follow Noel.

“Construction can’t continue”: South Texas builders say ICE arrests have upended industry  www.texastribune.org/2025/12/24/s...