This guy's the man. He specifically requested they introduce him as a "faceless bureaucrat"

The current 6-day Jeopardy champion works at a housing tax credit agency in New Jersey and for his banter with Ken he just looked directly at the camera and said "New York, California, shame on you, build more housing" and folks when I say heroes walk among us

3Ls: the NYC Department of City Planning is hiring a graduating law student! It’s a thrilling time to work at DCP. Under Mayor Mamdani and Chair Sherman, New York City is crafting ambitious plans for a more affordable and vibrant city. Learn more here: cityjobs.nyc.gov/job/agency-att…

"Zoning reform alone will not save the Rust Belt or other depopulated places, but it is nevertheless imperative for encouraging nascent revitalization efforts." papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

New paper with Brian Connolly, forthcoming @washulawreview.bsky.social: “Rezoning the Rust Belt.” Contemporary debates about zoning treat it as an issue for high-demand places. Reform is about making NYC and SF affordable, or keeping the Sun Belt affordable. But the Rust Belt needs reform too.

New paper! Have you ever noticed a sign declaring "Zoned Community" as you drive into town? (No? Aren't you the weird one...) They're a pretty unusual way of communicating about law--and especially regulations governing real property, irrelevant to passersby. What are they *really* for? (1/2)

This stretched two full miles, ending at the Big House, game traffic honking support the entire time. Ann Arbor upon Ann Arbor. It was awesome.

I love #Boston #NoKings

It goes without saying by now, but these are forms of discrimination that have been upheld as FHA violations since immediately after the passage of the Act and which have specific textual grounding. They simply oppose fair housing and don't want to enforce it. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Another thought on the politics here too: This is from Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott. It's not "four moderates" bipartisanship, it's the real left and right. That tells us something important about "abundance" politics.

I finally had time to digest it, and the big bipartisan housing package looks impressive. A little of everything, from zoning and NEPA to mortgages and vouchers. Lots of smart sensible tweaks, but also a sea change getting the feds in the game on zoning reform www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/min...

My old local!

I get the focus on national politics now, but in Ann Arbor our city plan is facing anti-growth pushback and needs support. Growth is good! Families *want* to live here, and we should make that possible. Learn about this cause and get involved here! www.moreneighborsa2.org?utm_source=n...

My NYC mayor take: The best accomplishments of the Bloomberg, deBlasio, and Adams admins each came on issues where they hired great staff and gave them room to execute. Andrew Cuomo has never done that in his life. He's uniquely unsuited for being mayor -- whether you're left, right or center.

This was a very fun project to join. I got to think about how local gov will be transformed in a world of longer life spans. Think over-represented seniors at public meetings and property tax revolts over the schools. www.cambridge.org/core/books/l...

Very happy to see this in print--and thank you to the amazing editors at the Virginia L. Rev. for getting it here. virginialawreview.org/articles/the... I argue that the Fair Housing Act uses a distinctive conception of discrimination. It questions market structures and not just transactions.

I really love this paragraph, which captures what's both valuable-to-necessary and annoying-to-dangerous about Abundance Politics (as opposed to various abundance policies)

This is a terrific and extremely important post by @salome.bsky.social lpeproject.org/blog/the-rig...

To be clear, this eliminates the market-based demand side and market-based supply side programs. As Russ Vought himself explained, the goal is nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with segregation

A final, personal note. This rule is lawless and this administration is lawless. “Why bother” is a fair question—and one I asked myself a lot when working on this. It’s pretty clear HUD doesn’t care about comments here (even if a lot of folks at HUD really do). But we just can’t think that way.

In March, HUD declared it was “revising” (read: gutting) its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regs. That was illegal. I got mad and submitted a comment. www.regulations.gov/comment/HUD-... It’s not in the 100 worst things happening right now, but it’s still MY thing. So, thread:

The Trump proposal to cut and block-grant housing vouchers is as callous as you think--but also stupider. States have bad incentives on rental assistance--even the limited $ would be spent inefficiently, with less tenant choice. Conservatives should oppose this too. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/u...

I can tell you what makes me feel unsafe, as a Jew, right now: secret police, deportations and prosecutions of political opponents, eugenics. Not in my name. Proud to have signed this letter.

My own review of Abundance is up, at The Guardian: TLDR: It's a necessary policy intervention, right on the merits, and there's no one better at explaining this stuff. But for people quick to call others "tradeoff denialists," they are too guilty of the same. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

Really proud to have @profrrothschild.bsky.social as a colleague www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/c...

Plainly true. See also: the (illegal) attempts to nullify the Fair Housing Act's AFFH provision, destroy the FHIP program, reject HUD referrals to DOJ over Texas cases...

OK, the actual reason to do this was to take some stock of the discourse -- so some themes: All of this deeply sharing the basic premise that we should build more housing, transportation, clean energy. We should increase state capacity. And a lot of that requires deregulation and less process.

Everyone means the exact same thing when they say “neoliberalism,” which is, “the bad policies that the elites made.”

Because Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's "Abundance" is less a book than a discourse-generating machine (by design), I'm going to review the *reviews* (I also have a review of the actual book coming, I'm not a total weirdo). Roughly from worst to best:

This point by @alexandersahn.bsky.social is so important that I'm bringing it over here for him. Because both the left and right of the abundance movement are mostly interested in where the left went wrong, it tells an incomplete story. (1/2)

More seriously, the USDOT action here is (you guessed it) illegal, dishonest, etc Duffy claims that the statute doesn't cover "cordon pricing" but didn't even have the sense to take down the USDOT page, described as the "VPPP FAQs," discussing... cordon pricing. ops.fhwa.dot.gov/congestionpr...

I was reading the MTA's complaint when this landed, and I had been thinking "strong legal arguments, but notably silent on Trump's divine right to rule."

There's a lot I like in this proposal to leverage LIHTC for zoning reform, and a lot I dislike (I think they miss major downsides of singling out cities, on politics and policy). But what's most interesting is its relevance to the Everything Bagel debate. www.niskanencenter.org/leveraging-l...

The DOJ memo attacking sanctuary cities is hostile to the Constitution. This is a complex area but the idea that states and cities simply must hop to and enforce the President's favored policies--even absent a statute--manages to trample both federalism and separation of powers. aboutblaw.com/bgXX

Nosferatu was terrific. Really captured the importance of real estate transactions.

The combo of these passages from the antitrust anti-YIMBY guys is the housing policy equivalent of “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but also we don’t believe hammers work on nails.”

Really enjoyed this piece, which I mostly agree with. There's one missing piece that I'd love @gregshill.bsky.social's thoughts on. Prior to demoting enforcement, and sometimes still, the safe streets movement made a related, opposite move. (1/2)

The judge I clerked for once told me: “you know the most important skill for a judge? It’s judgement. It’s right there in the name”. I think about that a lot these days.

In what universe is a "blanket housing discrimination lawsuit shield" (here, sovereign immunity) consistent with FL's obligation to "affirmatively further fair housing"? news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/...

I’ve seen a *lot* of opposition to this intervenor trust fund idea—and I’d be opposed in the housing context. But I also vaguely understand (some?) PUC proceedings to be highly technical. Can energy folks let me know how to think about these? The analogy to local community mtgs seems non-obvious

Over on my side project (book rec newsletter) @ericarstern.bsky.social and I interviewed the person with the coolest job I know, Molly Wasser. She's got books for you on everything from astronomical scales to historical romance to doggies! books4endofworld.substack.com/p/relocating...

The PEZ museum gift shop has some very strange ideas about which presidents people want

When I was presenting "Fair Housing for a Non-Sexist City," arguing that housing patterns shaped the gender wage gap, and that law could intervene, the #1 question I got was how work-from-home would reshape things. Who could say? So glad that (at least in NL) we're getting the good outcome.