Chicagoans deserves buses that respect our time & dignity. with stops on every block, the system crawls. in a real life campaign, we should also make sure to protect essential stops and fix & PLOW THE SIDEWALKS. accessibility & speed aren’t opposites, they can rise together when designed with care

Wow. Really worth a read www.liberalcurrents.com/return-of-th...

Now reading:

Claude Code is really good. But I'm quite surprised that Claude totally bombs this question, hallucinating that Minneapolis did a minimum lot size reform when it did not. It's a somewhat wonky question, but isn't answering these kinds of queries a key way AI is supposed to help researchers?

At just 7:30 PM, it is uncanny how empty the Loop is

Affordable, missing middle housing is on the local news in Chicago

What's a successful example of minimum lot size reform that's not Houston?

So cool to see clear data on the “second-order” benefits of congestion pricing: considerably faster bus rides, plus sizable declines in car accidents and traffic noise complaints www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Gov. Tim Walz abandons reelection campaign amid unrelenting fraud attention, Trump clashes www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

IMO this defense of inclusionary zoning leans on two misguided premises: - "Critics of IZ believe that the market will solve all housing issues" - "New market-rate housing is primarily bad for low-income renters" shelterforce.org/2025/12/29/w...

Back in Chicago 😀

In New Zealand they have a term for this: the ring of shame. By this I understand them to mean, close-in suburbs that combine extremely high feasibility (i.e. cheap, low-rise structures on expensive land near the center) with extremely restrictive exclusionary zoning.

There’s a narrative that it’s economically much harder to densify already-developed urban areas, so YIMBYism won’t do much. This has some truth, but it can’t explain why the *densest* urban tracts have added substantially more housing than inner-ring suburbs since 2014

1 year later WE ARE BACK at the Hollywood Theater to see Chalamet

Nobody would call it a "boom", but since rezoning the entire city for missing middle housing, Saint Paul has had multiple consecutive quarters of record-high development in 1-6 unit buildings... with a grand total of 23 buildings in a year and a half.

Also this week, there's a nice story over in Saint Paul about the benefits of getting phones out of high schools. www.minnpost.com/education/20...

Had such a fun time at the Big Tent Urbanist Happy Hour last night, meeting new and old folks, repping @abundanthousingil.bsky.social, and taking some fun photos!

On the longstanding historical pattern of “deconversions,” here is an Old Town developer circa 1970: “When I first moved in everybody took boarding houses and converted them into flats. In the last three or four years it has changed so that people are converting now to single family residences.”

No comment on the bathrooms... let's talk about a new-build in Portland selling for $300k 👀

It goes back even further! Here is a major shareholder in the private Twin Cities Rapid Transit company that preceded Metro Transit, in 1950:

Despite being in charge of the Twin Cities' transit system, many of the people on the Met Council essentially never ride it. The funny thing is we've known this for over a decade. It continues to be true, everybody says "that seems bad," and then nothing changes

4 of my favorite reads in 2025. What else did people enjoy this year?

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...

50 new units on a long-vacant lot, 11 parking spots, three storefronts 😀

A bit pessimistic from Brian Potter: we know construction productivity growth has been awful in the US the past couple decades. However, there's not really any rich, large country that has seen strong growth in construction productivity the past 20 years (except Belgium?)

Now we just need Chance to tell people to take off their backpacks during rush hour...

It was a great year everybody

As someone whose spent a decade-plus covering social services in NY and TX, let me say this has nothing to do with immigration — and everything to do with government outsourcing delivery of key services to non-profits it cannot properly supervise and politics: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/u...

If the climate models are inaccurate for some properties, that’s one thing (and should require some evidence in support!) But the real estate industry is gonna need better arguments than “when people see the underlying climate risk of a property, they are less interested in buying it”

Back in spring, I made final images of some of the buildings slated for demolition along the path of the Red Line Extension. These were captured over a monthlong span when demolition permits were getting greenlit, wrecking crews finally dispatching after asbestos remediation and utility shutoffs.

Went to Boston. Saw the building

Weird request: anybody in Minneapolis want to take a field trip and look at a stairway for me? 630 Cedar Ave. S. had a big fire, and has scissor stairs. The state report about the fire implies that the stairways were open to one another (no wall separating them) – I'd like to confirm that was true.

How can we improve urban housing to support families? In a new post, I look at downtown Chicago. Despite building little family-friendly housing, it's been among the city's fastest-growing areas for families. That's owed to broadly building more housing. pencillingout.substack.com/p/chicagos-d...

Shoutout this incredibly photogenic cement truck that’s been all around Logan Square lately

Some snapshots of today’s snow day from the office

New post from @zyudhishthu.bsky.social Broad themes: 1. Families live in downtown Chicago! 2. Households with children continue to move to, or households without children start their families in, downtown Chicago 3. The number of children in downtown Chicago has grown a lot

Here is the requested take: publiccomment.blog/p/mamdani-th...

Really interesting analysis from @zyudhishthu.bsky.social about how building housing, in general, benefits the ability of families to live in a city. pencillingout.substack.com/p/chicagos-d...

Reminds me of this 1910 postcard, depicting St Paul as the "center of the earth"

i wrote about the old wieboldt's department store on milwaukee in wicker park—fire, labor strife, leveraged buyouts, and the idiotic urban renewal plan that leveled much of the surroundings for a 600+ car parking lot and a jewel osco in the early 1980s www.postcard-past.com/wieboldts-de...

I think I’ve read a lot of the best history books about Chicago, so I want to turn to New York a bit. So what are the must-read NYC history books? Bonus for emphases on housing and economics, but that’s not a requirement at all

Yet another wonderful post from A City That Works. citythatworks.substack.com/p/we-havent-...

Look at the impacts of Seattle's previous discretionary review requirements, which only kicked in at 8+ units: much less development above that size. At the same time, developers adjust below 8 units by building more sq ft/unit to adjust (meaning less lower-cost housing supply)

This is a nice story about the civic/social infrastructure that came out of Mamdani's campaign Now I want to see the @resnikoff.bsky.social take on it www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/n...

Make what you will of prediction markets, but in the past 24 hours they have hardly wavered at all in predicting Frey to be a strong favorite. Now, at 94% they are at their highest certainty yet in favor of Frey

Reading this on my delayed train ride to work where nobody takes off their backpacks or fills into the ends of the train, so people can’t board the train

I wonder if anyone ever actually paid 5 bucks for an NBER working paper...

Thanks to the NITA Act, and a city ordinance from @aldermanlaspata.bsky.social, Chicago has the highest population of any city in America that live on property that does not require vehicle parking

Observations from @salimfurth.bsky.social: "YIMBYs need solid research results. And economists need reality checks from people who know policy better than they do." marketurbanism.com/2025/11/03/h...

I didn't realize there was a prediction market for Minneapolis's mayoral election. I'm surprised to see that Frey is nearly as much of a favorite as Mamdani (who is at 90%) !! Meanwhile Davis and Hampton have been completely counted out