RIP 2025 2025-2025

Man look at that bottom right corner. What a mess.

amazing photo on spanish wikipedia's chinchilla article

@davidwachsmuth.bsky.social David! You're on Bluesky!

Agree! And I'd add that most vacancy taxes are structured to only penalize long-term vacancies, where properties are vacant more than 6 months or the year, and purposely held off the market. See, e.g., Vancouver's expansive Empty Homes Tax exemptions. vancouver.ca/home-propert...

I thought a bit through @missingmiddleca.bsky.social's inclusion of vacancy taxes in the category of harmful policies with regards to overall supply and decided to blog it. medium.com/@AdamMongrai... With thanks to @jensvb.bsky.social and @lausterna.bsky.social wonderful work on Unoccupied Canada.

This is not even tangential to the matter at hand but whenever I read something to the effect of not shooting the messenger, I am reminded of @daraobriain.bsky.social's virtuoso bit about people saying controversial things. (Starts at 2:25 here.) youtu.be/fjx1zV7MOQQ?...

US building codes requiring two stairs in multifamily buildings: not only worse living environments, but also more dangerous in fires! What a combination.

Also like the negative effects of rent control on construction are not particularly large if the program is designed properly! The revulsion from economists feels mostly aesthetic to me

Sharon got 40k followers by being right about things!

This is an argument I have made for a while - if you want to allow more new housing development, you'll face a lot less opposition if you protect existing tenants with rent regulation. Nice to have some more evidence to back that up.

Something something 3% vacancy rate

making bolognese and the recipe calls for dry white wine and chicken broth but we are out of both of those so it actually calls for two cans of Coors light

4 years almost to the day from Larch Lab's City of Vancouver single stair report to today www.larchlab.com/wp-content/u...

While prepping for a presentation in Toronto a few weeks ago, I picked up that one of our graphs hadn't been updated with 2025 numbers. We just made the change. Here's how historically affordable Québec is doing.

There was a twist on the Mencken quote (Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy) that stuck with me. We are essentially governing ourselves out of the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be getting something that they don’t deserve.

awash in the tantalizing pleasure of knowing a shipping label has been created for my order

*small domino* my mum tells me not to drink diet coke because she read in the Guardian that it causes dementia *BIG DOMINO* zoom meeting with the editor-in-chief of Neurology to discuss errors i found in multiple peer-reviewed papers

Breathing easier -- study finds that congestion pricing worked in NY resulting in significant reduction in air pollution.

There is no way to find a lasting solution to the housing crisis when prices are set by the highest bidder. Every serious plan requires more homes than there are people to dilute the price-setting power of competing bids. carrefour.vivreenville.org/storage/app/...

What an ideal evening to not have looked at Bluesky for three hours

last night my daughter asked whether there were negative letters, like negative numbers. what a good fuckin question

In light of another sports association losing their minds/nerve/soul over trans people, here is a reminder: the people who care about trans people in sports don’t know anything about sports, and less than nothing about women’s sports.

This this this

I don't know if I read it from Roth before it stuck with me, but the description of recent reactionary movements as a force trying to make the world *smaller* feels like the most correct and insightful. Lines up with yesterday's post about keeping "normal" small. defector.com/the-conserva...

Like a lot of Jason's stuff, this is insightful. My take, as someone who scanned as "not normal" for some time, is that we'd have better conversations about identity and alterity if we framed "normal" as a standard that everyone is expected to meet, and not just the average of all existing things.

My team re-signs a guy: beginning @hockeyviz.com watch to determine if I can pitch my enthusiasm in the office sports chat as a bloodless, purely scientific appraisal.

as always, transphobia consumes your entire personality until there is nothing left but deeply offputting garbage

Punch. There is no direct translation for punch in French (we have « coup de poing », i.e. hit of fist) and we are poorer for it.

Just saw an ad for a $12 500/month apartment that stresses that heating is included. Way to sweeten the deal you marketing geniuses.

Goddamn that’s clever

I think more than anything else AI feels like a miracle to people with questionable literacy because it can read and write for you, and a lot of us who are highly literate underestimate how many of our society's leaders, esp in business, struggle with literacy.

uk news is like “prime minister matt yglesias states that labour will pass a law defering criminal sentencing to local hoa boards who may send those convicted of wrongthink, amongst other crimes, to prison for up to 2 years without the possibility of appeal. his approval hovers around 4%”

In Toronto for a talk tomorrow and I just discovered with significant delight that you can just walk into City Hall.

Just reading this post and replies made my palms sweaty. Didn't even click the video yet.

Wow! This systemic problem is really structural and far-reaching. Anyway, here are three tips for how you an individual can fix your conduct

I honestly find the MensWearGuy inspirational for what I think a good kind of cultured humanism can look like. This is the sort of presence I would like to have in the world.

the ,) is so good god damn it jerry

This is my favorite bit of writing on the matter. More questions than answers but the right questions I think. cc. @buddyyakov.bsky.social www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/def...

Quebec City is beefing up its bike share (called àVélo) in areas most affected by construction of the upcoming tram project. àVélo is a fully electric public bike share service that saw 2 million trips in 2025, which I believe is higher than Vancouver’s Mobi!

Right. I think it was from @peark.es that I read the quote "nothing like a price to change a sentiment" and I think we have to be extra thorough when we account for revealed preferences in housing, accounting for price dynamism and non-fungibility. This is how we broach the subject in the book:

Katelyn is an essential voice and I have learned so much from her work. My Canadian friends in particular would do well to read some reporting on the culture war fronts that are being imported wholesale from the US into our lives and the lives of our friends and families.

Good thread and this is one of the particular wrinkles we're trying to iron out. The measure we try to put forward is that vacancy rates should be high enough that rent growth falls under inflation.

"Just like mice go away when you remove their food sources, maybe young single people will go away if we remove the kind of housing they need." Insightful work again from Addison.

Haven’t read the report, but the photo of three-dimensional modules being craned in with double-hung windows kinda sums up the problems with Americans trying to pursue industrialized construction – it’s an advanced topic and we haven’t mastered the basics.

In the Louvre of Bluesky, I believe we have found our Mona Lisa.

Small thing, but I like that European electrical codes aren’t so prescriptive about where outlets are placed. In this bedroom in the US, you’d need one duplex outlet per wall, inevitably placing one (and only one) on the wall of the bed, but behind the bed frame rather than next to it

We are phasing out the terms “extant” and “extinct” from our exhibits and will now refer to species as either “Darwinners" or “Darlosers.”

Good thread.

Look if you're trans, you have to live. Do whatever you need to do to make it.