You can get money for the MBTA or you can pay Cambridge a 25% tax on new home construction but you can’t do both

Wow – real asking rents in Jersey City are completely flat since 2017 www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/n... (🎁🔗)

In the topsy-turvy world of California housing policy, building six townhouses instead of a single McMansion will result in hundreds of thousands of "impact" fees that have nothing to do with impacts and "affordability" mandates that guarantee housing unaffordability.

Between this and the recent dealer stabbing, it's clear that the horrendous management that led to BMC turning its front lawn into a drug market in spring of '25 was not an isolated incident. We deserve better.

Public engagement the way most places do it is a kind of performative dance. Everyone plays their socially designated roles and there's very little content to it, because all the planners are allowed to say is "thank you for your comment, we'll take it into consideration."

People stay stuff because it's socially approved, and then they start to believe it, and elected officials probably don't know better than to accept it, and civil servants generally don't have political cover to push back, so stuff that "everybody knows" becomes conventional wisdom.

A *huge* part of discourse is that there are certain objections to change that are coded as socially acceptable, even when they're the opposite of reality and standing in for the true agenda (plain old NIMBYism). School stuff is one of those items (others include affordability and trees).

A major theme of conversations at NeurIPS this year: Protein binder design is powerful, but ~no one believes the strongest claims about its efficacy. Innovators + academics want to support one another, but whom does it benefit when we claim clearly overfit zero shot results? 1/

This is what happens when you let NIMBYs block cleaner, cheaper, and much less polluting natural gas. We're not getting enough nuclear or offshore wind immediately; the failure to build gas infra is impoverishing, sickening, and damaging us all in New England.

Incredible we built a society where tens of thousands of people are forced to live in this misery just because the wealthiest people in America want more parking and because left-NIMBY cranks still won't let go of their housing Lysenkoism which insists that new housing causes gentrification.

“Pioneer New England Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit in state Land Court against the City of Cambridge on behalf of developer Columbia St, LLC, challenging the City’s inclusionary zoning ordinance.” pioneerlegal.org/pioneer-new-...

Still thinking about this article. It’s always been a sore spot in YIMBY circles that so many progressive foundations pour money into NIMBYism, and I’m glad it’s finally being aired in public. Keep talking about it. www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/philant...

Straight from the horse's mouth: “These models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. It's a very fundamental thing.”

"per square foot, affordable housing cost more 1.5 times as much to build in California as market-rate housing" www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/o...

The problem isn't his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. It's that he plotted to abuse his position as the mentor of a grad student by conditioning his support for her work on "romance/sex." Every report that fails to mention the true offense is failing (again) the student who endured this.

Wonder why we have a housing crisis? Just look at how long it took to get infill on empty lots approved: 20 years and a king's ransom in fees, wasted time, and financing costs.

Over on the Gelman blog, there's a post about this histogram of z-scores in published papers. I'm always baffled by the discourse around it. Why is this plot a symptom of a problem? Under what model would we expect this to be a bell curve?

🏡 Help us get more housing on the 2026 ballot! Join AHMA, Cambridge City Councilor Burhan Azeem, and the Legalize Starter Homes Ballot Initiative for a Day of Action this weekend! tinyurl.com/2sk34xt9

This is what's so aggravating — yes, it was not working in extracting a policy concession but it was working in *driving down trump's numbers and provoking GOP infighting* which is what's important if you take Dem rhetoric about the perils of MAGA remotely seriously.

New working paper studying project permitting in Seattle estimates that design review as part of the development process increased review time by 4 to 5 months. Author's model estimates that design review was associated with a 3% decline in the number of units permitted.

The fact that Parks and Rec's depiction of public meetings is 1,000% accurate really undermines a lot of dogma and that breaks brains

Beggar-thy-neighbor politics do not work + erode public finance, Somerville edition: www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/23/b... Between the epidemic of zoning brownfields for commercial only, the collapse in office values, and tax shifts in Boston + Cambridge, the Commonwealth may have to step in.

This reads like the guy naming the dishes went left to right and had a stroke halfway through.

“As one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation.”

Abundant Housing Massachusetts is thrilled to invite you to our Celebration of Abundance! This event will honor the the great work happening across the state to make housing accessible. 🗓️ Oct 23| 5:30pm - 8:30pm 🏠 Broken Records Beer Hall - Brighton 🎟️ tinyurl.com/5a332mn7

The Groypers are on a long march through the institutions and right-wing Jews are way too complacent about the idea that it’ll be fine because these people also hate Muslims.

Guest Column: It’s Time to Make Hyde Park Ave. Safe for Everyone By @boston.gov City Councilor @enriquepepen.bsky.social   - mass.streetsblog.org/2025/10/14/g...

Simple repaving not enough to make Hyde Park Avenue safe, Forest Hills residents say www.universalhub.com/2025/simple-... #Boston #JamaicaPlain #Roslindale #HydePark

The Trump administration’s invasion of U.S. cities and America’s collective shrug speaks to what a weak position our cities have put themselves in by walling themselves off and repelling the U.S.-born lower and middle classes. We’re turning away friends that we need.

Business leaders, investors and academics have cheered Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey’s efforts to counter the Trump administration’s research funding cuts with state money — so much so that a recent meeting on the initiative required overflow seating.

New Boston polling our this morning, for @abundanthousingma.org www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/06/b...

I try to make this point all the time. What makes housing affordable is one or a combination of three factors: 1. It’s old 2. It’s in bad shape 3. It’s in a market where housing is abundant. You definitionally cannot build 1 or 2. The third factor is the only one we have any control over.

The Boston Globe Editorial Board is running a whole series on the state’s excessive building code regulation over the next three weeks – single-stair, Massachusetts’s unusually low high-rise definition, and the mess of different septic system rules www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/21/o...

Walking through Boston Common, I came upon this quote from 19th century abolitionist Wendell Phillips, above a statue of him. Seems relevant to these times: “Whether in chains or in laurels liberty knows nothing but victories,”

Well, if there is one thing that is clear from Tuesday's preliminary election results in Boston it's that we should build bike lanes everywhere.

In a new paper, I try to resolve the counterintuitive evidence of Meehl’s “clinical vs statistical prediction” problems: Statistics only wins because the game is rigged.

Important 🔥🔥 must-read from @beenwrekt.bsky.social ⬇️ www.argmin.net/p/the-banal-...

Today a driver with TLC plates almost hit me while I was on a bike. The Waymos cannot come fast enough. Regulate congestion regardless of who causes it, and get humans out from behind the wheel of cars. They kill over 40,000 people per year, it’s just not safe to have humans driving motor vehicles.

The effects of climate change are too important to be sloppy, in my view. I should note that I'm far from the first to point out this stuff w/r/t hurricanes and tornadoes. The first I saw was a historian in the 1980s whose name I've forgotten. Point is, this is a long-known error.

Unfortunate that the Wash Post puts up this kind of chart without explanation. Most of the graph covers a time before satellite and other observation tools let us reliably see hurricanes, and so we're picking up a lot more of them, which biases the numbers. Same with tornadoes before Doppler radar.

god shoutout to being 25, living in dc, and taking day trips up to baltimore to eat crabs and crush natty bohs bsky.app/profile/pjcr...

This is a horrific story. Driver hit him and left him, injured and helpless, and nobody stopped to help until paramedics happened by @universalhub.com @stacos.bsky.social #BostonVehicularViolence #VisionZeroBoston We need protected bike lanes! @wutrain.bsky.social @clrhenrysantana.bsky.social

Boston has higher rents than Jersey City. Yet JC builds 4 times as many apartments per year despite being 1/3 the size. The Wu administration blames 'economic conditions' for the housing slowdown in Boston. The true reason is policy, and JC should avoid Boston's failed housing policies.

RIP Tom Lehrer. He was said to have called Little Boxes "the most sanctimonious song ever written," making him by definition the ur-YIMBY.

the minute universities start using class preferences, reactionaries will sue them because the actual goal is to make elite institutions inaccessible to everyone other than rich white kids

The field of neuroscience views the goal of human genetics as "finding genes". This is an outdated view. In whole genome studies of rare variants, finding genes is the easy part. The more interesting and important goal is to map out the causal pathway from genes to brain function to cognitive traits

my modest disagreement is that i think it is important to signal virtue even if, privately, you are a piece of shit. performing decency is an important part of maintaining the norm that decency is part of a well ordered society.

The accessible American mid-level state school with a 60%+ admissions rate that still is able to go round for round with everything but the absolute best universities that the rest of world has to offer is a world-historic triumph that these fucking clowns are burning down due to their ivy neuroses

Two thoughts: Endless process and planning are incredibly costly. Just build the pretty good project, don't insist on utter perfection. There's no reason we cannot afford to pay for this with Pike tolls alone.

I’ve helped co-moderate two City Council forums the past two nights. My general takeaway is that I’m at the point where I can’t support candidates, even ones I like personally, whose first instinct is No. As in No to new housing, No to bus lanes, etc. We have enough No in our city. We need more Yes.