E24-24, my proposal to raise the IBC’s single-stair apartment building height limit from three stories to four, has passed the final membership vote, and will now officially make it into the 2027 IBC 🎉

If Austin's upzoning helps inspire something similar in New York, all those years testifying at City Hall will have been even more valuable.

Zohran just cited Minneapolis, Austin, and Auckland as cities that lowered housing costs via upzoning certified ball knowledge, Auckland is a deep YIMBY cut

In case anyone doesn't understand the stakes in this race, James Talarico was the driving force in the Texas House behind updating Texas's model building code to allow single stairwell apartment buildings.

The most important part of the Paxton/Talarico election is the balance of the Senate. But it's also a chance to define what a good responsible Texan is.

This same reasoning is why it's easier for states to enforce that "cities must allow high rise housing near transit" than "cities must make a plan to allow 10% growth in housing units." The cities have all the local knowledge on how to comply in appearances without achieving the laws' goal.

We must secure the existence of our vehicles and a future for white SUVs

Spending time in France and Switzerland, it’s clear that the “missing middle” in North America isn’t townhouses and duplexes. It’s mid-rises. Especially mid-rise neighbourhoods. Our denser urban fabric (Montreal, Chicago, etc.) is still mostly 2-3 storeys, not 4-8 like is so common here.

As electric cars become the norm, gas cars are going to start getting a stigma as anti-social in much the same way that second-hand smoke does today.

Residents of Austin received cell phone alerts to shelter in place yesterday after three kids stole guns from a gun shop and drove around the city shooting at random people.

Most of the AI conversation centers on using AI for stuff people do: writing text, making pictures, writing code. But I'm super excited for the ways people are making LLMs useful for things people can't do at all, like drug discovery and weather prediction.

For 45 years, Berkeley built virtually no new housing. By the mid-2010s, it was one of the most expensive college towns in America. Around that time, YIMBYs took over and kicked off a building boom. Today, rents are below 2018 levels in nominal terms—a remarkable case of progress on affordability.

Hey Austin: remember back before we built all that housing, when we believed that prices only ever go up?

Do you want your city to have booming prosperity for its residents or broadly affordable, attainable housing? Someday, an American city is gonna pick both and it's gonna be amazing.

Got to speak with Governing Magazine about Austin’s housing success, risks, and why we can’t slow down now 😤 www.governing.com/urban/rents-...

I really don't think these types of rules move the needle on rents the way that building apartment complexes does. It's just hard to dink and drink your way to abundance. But they do move the needle on keeping middle class families in the city.

It's not widely known, but the house painter Mr. Popper of Stillwater invented the accent wall

The resolution is direction to city staff to bring an ordinance back to Council. It's good to see Council getting back to work on housing. Despite our big improvements, housing costs remain a huge issue for Austin and there's been a real feeling that we took our foot off the gas.

Austin notches another housing victory as the resolution for this set of HOME Improvements passes Council nearly unanimously! Many thanks to @cmkristalaine.bsky.social for leading this item and to all our pro-housing Council Members!

West Campus is the only Austin neighborhood in the top 10 list of growing neighborhoods. There's also one DC neighborhood and eight in metro NYC.

Also of note: like always, when you build housing, the steepest price cuts come in the cheapest apartments.

It is heartening that Austin is always the go-to good example but also kinda sad both because Austin's pro-housing work is very much incomplete and because there should be other success stories people are aware of.

RIP to the best aunt a boychik could ask for. You lived an amazing life.

I think some people get queasy when politicians weigh in on "technical" questions but we shouldn't in this case. Building codes embody tradeoffs (e.g. safety vs expense). Weighing tradeoffs is one of the key things we elect people to do.

Solar power also continues to skyrocket in Texas, with generation up 44% compared to last year. Over the last twelve months, solar has made up 11.2% of Texas' electricity, a record high!

Violating many preconceived notions, Houston is slightly more dense than Austin at each distance from downtown.

Trump is gonna be the leader whose actions catalyze the energy transition.

It’s not just going to be courts. Every government body from federal executive agencies to local planning commissions is going to be turbofucked too if they can’t figure out how to manage getting 40,000 unique, AI generated responses on everything that requires public comment.

If any reporters in North Texas want to cover a sordid story about building code development and a large manufacturer trying to intimidate somebody fighting their attempts to get their bullshit products required in buildings, please reach out [email protected]

Crashes and serious injuries dropped 15 percent and 52 percent respectively in West Harlem after New York City swapped vehicle storage for curbside trash containers, according to data crunched by @davecolon.bsky.social nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/04/17/c...

Suburban contradictions: two shots taken from the same point, rotated 90°: water fowl hunting in a marshy creek, the loading dock behind the Wal-Mart.

One thing I've been thinking about: Claude code is great. Mythos is so far superior to a person it isn't comparable. ChatGPT has helped prove mathematical conjectures that have been outstanding for decades. But it still struggles at some things competent adults or even children find easy.

Austin passed a big safe routes to schools bond. It's adding great sidewalks and bike lanes and crosswalks along major routes to school. But there is a "last 100 yards" problem! It's often very difficult to make it through parking lots and drop-off lines *on the campus itself.*

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.