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...

My most neoliberal trait is a skepticism of anti-poverty policies that that narrowly target housing (both housing vouchers/affordable housing) as opposed to straight cash that people can use for anything. Housing with wraparound services is different as the market won't provide social workers.

Assistant City Manager Mike Rogers made an interesting case that Austin's planning department is too large and has too much time on its hands. citizenportal.ai/articles/595...

Conversely high-capacity housing and high-capacity transportation are also analogous and complementary.

The housing equivalent of "just one more lane, bro" is "just one more suburb, bro". They're complimentary in fact.

The primary weapons for both sides in Ukraine are small flying vehicles packed with explosives, tethered to a human operator by a very long fiber optic cable. When the vehicle explodes, the cable remains. This video shows a spider web of fiber optic cables strung through a forest.

the tallest mass timber building in oregon is holst's julia west house, built by walsh. it sits on a 5,000 sf parcel. no, that's not missing a zero. archello.com/project/juli...

What are y'all doing for your New Year's OKRs?

Texas has ~776k manufactured homes or 6.2% of the state’s housing stock. In 2024, the average manufactured home sold for ~$122.5K, compared to ~$313K for the state’s broader housing market.

My ridiculous but maybe true marker for a negative labor environment: a greater percentage of my Lyft drivers have been native English speakers in the last few months than the year before.

Channeling my inner Thomas Friedman, my Lyft driver says that all the major casinos are buying up land around Texas in anticipation of the lege legalizing gambling.

It's annoying when the state of Texas hamstrings cities from raising the revenue they need and spending it approximately. It's even more annoying when Texas cities hamstring themselves.

In Portland, they're putting six 850 sf townhome units with no parking on 50'x100' lots

Social science is validating Jane Jacobs' "eyes on the street" insights on crime prevention. Simple urban design solutions like better lighting and fixing up abandoned lots can lead to dramatically fewer murders. youtu.be/F-9RCKKvoJw?...

Random LLM usage non-parents likely don't know: most parents I know have generated coloring sheets for their kids using an LLM. Many have used pictures of their kids or family as the prompt.

Already stressed by habitat loss and pesticides, monarch butterflies lose a significant chunk of their migratory population each year to carstrike. www.greensourcetexas.org/articles/tex...

There's a medium-sized message here on the safety of buildings based on the size of their floorplates and number of stairwells. There's an enormous message here on how important it is for our safety rules to be evidence-based.

Consultants contracted by Minnesota found that an eight-story single-stair building with 6,000 sq. ft. per floor (building 4) has dramatically lower fire risk than a same-height code-compliant two-stair building with a larger floor plate (building 1) www.dli.mn.gov/sites/defaul...

Urbanist movie reviews: What the film lacks in plot and acting, it more than makes up for in strong point access blocks and a number of scenes in which the characters take long walks. The second half of the movie is dominated by characters struggling with the effects of automobile violence. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

When every house on the street decides to put up an 8' concrete/cinder-block fence rather than engage with the street, do the traffic engineers never ask themselves how they effed up so badly?

This is fantastic to see and I strongly hope Texas will do our own version. We have a lot of great construction engineers who could research cost-benefit to ensure our housing is safe AND affordable.

After NYC installed 2,000 speed cameras, crashes fell 30% and injuries 16%. doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

HOME and other ADU / 3-plex / 4-plex initiatives: DO give enough entitlements to build multiple units instead of a McMansion to replace old houses that would be demolished anyway. DO NOT give enough entitlements to make it worth knocking over a perfectly good house.

Congestion pricing has mitigated so much damage we regularly take from cars: noise, pedestrian deaths, and loads of stress. Now, add air pollution to this mix. Countless young children in NYC are going to grow up asthma-free thanks to congestion pricing. Why do we accept these harms?

Office leasing was up sharply in 2025Q3, but year-over-year is still flat because of declines in the previous three quarters.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his home value depends upon his not understanding it.

If you have four runners and three medals, the slowest runner won't get a medal. Even if you train them up, there will always be a slowest runner. Housing shouldn't be a race. We need enough housing for everyone, or else there will always be someone left out.

I was way ahead of my time when I'd sleep on the couch at my office.

When I first started as a housing advocate, we used San Francisco as the scare story for what could happen to Austin. We won't have San Francisco to kick around anymore.

While Austin is resting on our laurels, we're getting leaped by the likes of Spokane, Cambridge, and now Flagstaff.

"Survey of residents says market-rate affordability isn't a problem" says more about the residents than about the affordability. Why are we even surveying residents about things we can measure?

The news from Ann Arbor (second-hand so correct what's wrong). The city has a surface parking lot downtown. 10 years ago, a dev proposed housing and a privately-funded plaza. NIMBYs blocked it with a charter amendment declaring the parking lot a city park.

2024 was a banner year for Austin housing, both in policy progress from City Council and in actual lowered rents. 2025 saw no backsliding but the place of change slowed down considerably. Before, Austin CMs were competing to outdo one another with new proposals. This year, it's been pretty quiet.

Thankful today for my beautiful home and for all the people who are working hard to ensure everyone may enjoy their own home where they want to live.

In parking at least, Connecticut is more market-oriented than Texas.

As of July 1, 2026 Connecticut will be henceforth known as the land without residential Parking Mandates!!! A huge thank you to everyone who pitched in, testimony, emails, calls, op-eds, this was truly a statewide grassroots groundswell. What started as a silly idea is now reality A victory 🏆🧵