Happy Saturday. Please enjoy this video of Ignacia Fernández singing death metal for the talent portion of the beauty contest: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZXu...

This is a wonderful piece of journalism from Wisconsin that highlights two of the most pervasive barriers to expanding the manufactured housing market for working families: zoning restrictions and social stigma around 'trailers.' Both are relics. wisconsinwatch.org/2025/11/wisc...

Book recommendations for a 7 year old book worm? She loves almost everything and looking for something a little more challenging/rewarding than Dog Man or the like. Graphic novels/comic recommendations welcome too.

Fits the recent pattern with the federal government, i.e. a sharp curtailment in hazard mitigation spending: wisconsinexaminer.com/briefs/trump...

20 years later, remembering the Evansville tornado outbreak that killed 24 people, most in the Eastbrook mobile home park. 60 miles from my hometown it was the event (w/Katrina) that cemented my understanding of how the built environment shapes vulnerability.

How can you not be romantic about baseball

The amount of toy junk that is given to kids is ridiculous, it’s like a never ending Zerg creep that you have to endlessly push back. Can we just not hand out trinkets at every minor event or opportunity?

Preach!

Halloween in a walkable neighborhood is life affirming

Getting sassed by the older kids, a DC Halloween tradition

Trouble ahead: “Nevada is home to the fastest rate of Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) development in the country—over the last 30 years, the number of homes in the WUI more than tripled. The state has also seen nearly 20% of its land area burn over the last 40 years.”

Basement apartments are another way that naturally occurring affordable housing often intersects with risk: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/n...

Are you or someone you can recommend an expert in post-disaster debris removal and property remediation? I have a journalist I've worked with in the past writing on the topic and hoping to help connect them to someone who knows their stuff.

Looking forward to reading this. While I think that balancing analysis re: disaster losses between climate & development decisions is important, I’ve never understood why some of Pielke basic methods (e.g. using a property damage only dataset) and assumptions aren’t more frequently challenged.

Sourdough post of the week (month?) Pizza and breadsticks.

I’m no expert on how the US in the before times would have assisted Jamaica through USAID and the military’s humanitarian missions…is anyone able to provide a rundown? I’m sure our amazing civil society organizations will be there, but what have we lost in terms of capacity and resources on offer?

Whatever kind of beliefs you have about prayers, good energy, etc. you have please send it towards Jamaica.

Over the past year, the social fabric of Palmer Lake, Colorado, has been torn apart by a gas station — an enormous gas station. Buc-ee’s wants to erect a 74,000-square-foot travel plaza along the nearby interstate. And not everyone is happy about it.

Need to get in the zone to do some boring but important work, time to put on my pump up music (which is actually the movie Spotlight)

Studying illegal construction in the East Calcutta Wetlands, there were stories of the land mafia sneaking onto properties in the dead of night to fill the fishing ponds with soil before any environmental group could object. Then the only use was to build buildings. Speaking of the White House.

"Pinellas County identified 1,400 mobile homes, which typically provide critical affordable housing, that needed substantial damage assessments following Hurricanes Helene and Milton." stpetecatalyst.com/storm-damage...

Not all upzoning is about single family housing...here you get significantly more housing units, and greater attention to flood risk, but at the price of displacing some of the County's most economically precarious households www.wtsp.com/article/news...

I don't get shocked by much anymore but the President deciding to demolish half of the White House without warning is actually shocking to me.

I'm not tracking as closely as when I was in the business, but seems like a very good year for the academic planning job market. Great news for PhD grads and recent grads, and a decent number of Associate positions too...

Experimenting this afternoon with overdosing on conference coffee

This is an area of research we need someone more dedicated to, to challenge the "it is ok because disaster losses track GDP growth" crowd. Along with everything else that argument misses, GDP is positively impacted by disaster losses, especially in a nation that finances recovery through debt.

@climatecentral.org has relaunched the Billion Dollar Disaster methodology and database, which is good news for all of us trying to communicate the importance of disaster policy: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/c...

I know it is “9 floors of basement” inside but I can’t help but love the exterior of HUD

Stolen from Reddit

Disasters come in all shapes and sizes. A small-scale disaster in North Carolina that is having large impacts on the community: www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025...

Listening to research (using qualitative and RCT methods) on messaging for reaching voters and elected officials...one takeaway is to use "natural disaster" or "extreme weather" and not "climate disaster" or "climate extreme."

This investigation is bananas: www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

God I love Pete Crow-Armstrong

This is a tremendous piece of reporting from the @latimes.com on community & housing recovery after California wildfires. The reporters (including @liamjdillon.com) have done an incredible job investigating the complex drivers of uneven recovery locally: www.latimes.com/homeless-hou...

Sharing a guest link to a vital piece of reporting from @thewallstreet.bsky.social about the on-the-ground realities stemming from upheaval at FEMA and what seems from the outside like a 'build as you fly' approach to agency reform: www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

I spoke with @issielapowsky.bsky.social at the @nytimes.com about an important experiment in post-disaster housing happening Maui. Ka La‘i Ola will provide transitional housing for hundreds of wildfire survivors, then convert to permanent housing and infrastructure. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/h...

I’ll be speaking on Monday at the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at Princeton. Hope to see you there! cpree.princeton.edu/events/2025/...

I wonder how long Sean Penn worked on his walk for this film

Guys I don’t think our strategy of squishing all the lantern flies is working

When social capital researchers talk about the importance of bridging capital for resilience, this isn't what they had in mind: www.propublica.org/article/kris...

First major after action review of the LA fire response finds "no single point of failure" in alerts, notifications, warnings and evacuations, but many areas of weakness that dragged down performance. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/u...

Need a quick primer on climate change and the supercharging of climate extremes? Share this: www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-undeni...

Terrific investigation by the @houstonchronicle.com finds that 20% of residential properties built since Harvey in greater Houston are in a mapped floodplain, 57,000 in-all. www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/202...

Jesus H. Christ 😡https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/09/24/fema-administrator-david-richardson-texas-floods/

Twenty years after Katrina, what is fixed? What is still broken? Where are we headed? I joined @americaadapts.bsky.social to discuss these questions and the work we are doing at the @urbaninstitute.bsky.social on disasters, recovery and community resilience: www.americaadapts.org/episodes/20-...

A quick summary of the major legislation that passed out of the Texas legislative section related to the Central Texas floods: open.substack.com/pub/andrewru...

Lemme spell it out. Trump's only leverage over Jimmy Kimmel and ABC came from FCC regulation. His direct power over H1-B visas gives him similar leverage over tech, higher ed, and others.