You've probably been wondering: "How many eels is a cottage worth in 14th C. England?" This is a reasonable question. I get it. And happily, I'm here to help! I included a chart showing this kind of equivalence in an article I wrote for HistoryExtra , but here's an excerpt! 🗃️🧪

As Socrates said, "All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success."

I think my single worst architectural take is that I semi-unironically love this stupid building and think that we should have more stupid buildings

THAT'S MY MAYOR

As we head toward the end of budget season in Albany, a reminder that SEQRA reform isn't just about housing — it's about protecting forest land, too. https://rpa.org/news/lab/the-land-conservation-benefits-of-modernizing-new-yorks-seqra-process

Mutual on the old place posted, what I thought was an astute observation: there are two types of men who struggle with this, one needs to be told "Just go and ask people out, you're fine", and the other "No, you are making people uncomfortable", and they almost 100% self-select the wrong way round.

Climate change denial takes many forms. The demand for state subsidized home insurance in wildfire, hurricane, and flood risk areas is one of them.

"Pension funds should invest more in building up the community" / "FU to those [pension fund-financed] developers who are trying to make a return off of that new housing block"

the two sides of the dysfunction coins, it should be done by the private sector for no profit or it should be done by the public sector but without building any state capacity

The thing to understand is that the vast majority of Seattle's tree loss is on city-owned land, not housing lots someone wants to add density to. You could just change the city policy to preserve more of those trees. Instead they target home lots, to keep multifamily and renters out of posh enclaves

I'd say that this applies to anyone traveling in a car in any city. Being in a car versus walking, riding, or taking transit fundamentally changes how you view a place and your relationship to it. I wish more leaders set this kind of example. www.npr.org/2026/04/16/n...

Zohranomics for bike share LFG

All counties with less than 25% of their population facing a high rent burden. It's basically a bunch of rural areas + SF

The Trump admin claimed that NY has a ton of home care fraud. Turns out the problem was that their analysts (using the term generously) struggle with object permanence apnews.com/article/new-...

Cars do not belong in cities, and removing the driver from the car doesn't change that in the slightest Even if every car in Phoenix was a robotaxi it wouldn't even come close to the safety and livability of Paris with a robotaxi ban

Great observation from @kevinerdmann.bsky.social. "Developers only build if rents are rising" totally misunderstands how developers make decisions kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/no-builder...

Austin did a supply boom, but also their tech bubble popped. I think "the overwhelming consensus of data-based and historical research is that supply reduces rents" is a better line than "Austin proves it," in part because I am not sure that Austin proves it

BREAKING: Anthropic declines to release Mythos Preview, citing fears that it will listen to Chapo Trap House and join the DSA

Empty-nest baby boomers own nearly 30% of the country’s homes with three or more bedrooms, a previous Redfin study showed, while millennials with kids only own about 14% of them. www.sfgate.com/california/a...

AOC: “This is a threat of genocide & merits removal from office. The President’s mental faculties are collapsing & cannot be trusted. To every individual in the President’s chain of command: You have a duty to refuse illegal orders. That includes carrying out this threat”

flags flown from us government buildings - american flag - department flag - state flag - local flag - the "rambo 2 is real" flag

what next? what, are we gonna provide *roads* for the wealthy too? gonna have health inspectors keep contaminants out of their groceries? are we just gonna have gutters and sewer systems around rich people's homes?

I lose my mind with this shit. Rents are not surging because population growth is subdued! Population growth is subdued because there is no new housing being built which is the same reason rents are surging!

In our sister city, Nantes, *all* their city planning incorporates this reality into their design. It makes mobility better for everyone.

It’s around 90 of these buildings. I’ve heard a developer quoted that these would usually be >=150 units without the 100+ rules. We got 5,000 (or much more) units less! And we didn’t even get the “benefits” we tried to get with that 100+ rule.

Have you ever seen a scale map of the solar system? Where you learn that despite the vast distance between Earth and Mars, the outer planets are just incomprehensibly beyond? This has been a tweet about Tokyo

A striking fact I learnt researching my book: For those in the bottom half, much of the real wage growth between 1979 and 2019 happened over just 7 "tight" years. For top wages, full employment wasn't a big deal. For bottom wages, it was the nearly the whole game.

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson signed the so-called 'millionaires tax' into law, enacting a 9.9% income tax on earnings of more than $1 million a year.

I like the policy recommendations in this report, I just wish they weren't preceded by a lengthy (and error-filled) attack on YIMBYism.

Honored to have contributed to this piece from the Fiscal Policy Institute!

In a letter threatening to withhold Medicaid funding from the state, Dr. Oz asserted that 5.1 million people in New York received home care in the first part of 2025. There is no evidence for this. Either CMS officials know very little about Medicaid, or they have intentionally mishandled the data.

I think of this every time someone says "upzoning can't bring down prices"

Free parking has immense costs to society at large and is one of the worst possible urban policies

Victory Court, San Antonio, Coliseum, Central Estuary, 980 removal, the large vacant parcel at Broadway/51st and others will require the public sector to re-design the infrastructure. The private sector won't do this at Oakland rents/labor costs. Oaklanders need the public sector to lead this.

At some point the anti-BTR progressives are going to put 2 and 2 together Or they won't

Great observation about "affordable housing" The division of the world into "income-restricted = affordable" and "market = luxury" is one of the most toxic things in housing discourse (and the competition is stiff)

I love this analogy. Regulatory reform is vitally important to expand capacity. But we need to pair it with federal investment policy to actually fill that capacity. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.

NYC to LA, it turns out that protecting tenants + solving the housing shortage is a winning combo. DSA has the sauce

Another W for St. Paul

This kind of smart, walkable, mixed use urbanism... www.aaronlubeck.com/p/happy-birt...

you can tax the guy who makes the tools but then if the tools become widespread enough you've just made everything more expensive. the boring answer of higher taxation over a broad tax base that is redistributed through a robust social safety net is still better than any ONE WEIRD TRICK

Per Shelterforce, the RCT study of the Family Self-Sufficiency program (which found it didn't work) was a snapshot of a system in flux, and still in its early days. Very reasonable critique: shelterforce.org/2026/03/12/t...

governments should be giving away e-bikes and that was true before the self induced gas crisis.

The Northeast's housing crisis didn't start in 2020. Or 2010. Or 2000. It started in the 1970s with land use policies designed to constrain supply & it's never been able to meet demand since.

people don't realize how concentrated GOP fundraising is. more than half of all money that they got in 2024 was from donations over $1mn. it's like 200-300 rich cranks that keep the party operating. underrated explanation in why they've gone so insane.

it’s kind of annoying how we have dozens and dozens of studies showing building more housing puts downwards pressure on rents, but once a year a small cadre of crank economists publishes a shoddily-researched paper to try and muddy the waters and for some reason, papers like Hell Gate take the bait

Just got a municipal ID. Cutest bureaucratic experience of my life

Long overdue new post about vacancy decontrol speculation in NYC. Buildings that lost more than 10% of their RS units after sale sold for a 46% premium over buildings without decontrol. rentrentier.com/vacancy-deco...

Evil Woodstock NIMBYs who hate affordable housing vs Good Woodstock NIMBYs who hate golf courses