Who are you going to trust on urbanist policy - the people who have been working on it day in and day out for 15+ years? Or people who exclusively learn about land use issues from substack?

People don’t wanna put two and two together with what he did to usaid and him putting up those maps of global birthrates and saying white people are being replaced

NYC has a high-rise (77 Greenwich St) combination of a 40-story condo building with an 8-story elementary school. It's super cool! schoolconstructionnews.com/2018/01/04/b...

What does delay mean when Sound Transit refers to in the current context? Does delay mean won't start/finish construction in the years targeted? Or does it mean won't work on it all for the foreseeable future?

We also generally don’t let out-of-state workers (well, out-of-region) on our public works jobs bsky.app/profile/sict...

We generally do not let foreign workers work on public works projects in the US. It’s work reserved for union members (often some of the highest paid ones), who tend to be native-born.

Reactionary centrists and republicans spent years smearing, belittling, or dismissing anyone who properly described the Trumpism as a white supremacist project. bsky.app/profile/nbcn...

Oh this is a good one! Hits many of things I'd love to see more strongly integrated into the next phase of Seattle's land use planning

i'm sorry but when did government stop prioritizing homeownership? www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/o...

A house by 30 seems unrealistic but…how about a condo? www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/o...

Birthright citizenship goes beyond American Exceptionalism. Birthright citizenship is a feature of New World nations that are young and were founded on a multiracial composite of African slaves, Asian laborers, European colonists, and Native inhabitants.

Isn't it kind of funny how the move is "seek treatment" not "hire some drivers".

Imagine if Seattle built housing like this along the ship canal.

Love a good space movie. Project Hail Mary has the goods!!

Did a fun challenge of taking some of better transit knowledge I've been reading and absorbing over the last few years, and tried to apply it to a project idea that's been in my head for a few years and a route that has been in the Seattle transit community's for longer. medium.com/@markusjohns...

adam says it much more succintly. the american right will happily impoverish the united states and make it an oversized backwater if it means they can dominate women and minorities and play act as a master class

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

Shot / chaser

The narrative that Democrats need an opinion on Hassan and control his megaphone is literally just a successful right wing news cycle. Tons of folks falling for it.

More housing supply makes housing cheaper.

I whole-heartedly endorse this piece by our president, @elizabethwwilkins.bsky.social Chock full of @jdcmedlock.bsky.social thought if I do say so myself rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/beyond-...

Two towers up to 34 storeys are proposed for the northwest corner of Fraser Street and Marine Drive in South Vancouver. It'll include 652 rental homes, 15,000 sf retail/restaurant, and a childcare facility for 37 kids. #vanpoli #vanre #vancre dailyhive.com/vancouver/60...

i said last year that these people were segregationists and that “merit” just meant “white and male” to these people

the serious answer is that we need a wholesale recommitment on the left to public higher education as a high quality low/no cost public good rather than a jobs training licensing agency. I do not anticipate this happening.

Oooh hard disagree. I think civil servants should deploy their expertise in the public interest. Consulting the public is part of that but not the last word imo.

There’s 100 things to hate about this but I keep getting stuck on: no one knows what “AI literacy” is! Most of the people working on this program probably used an LLM for the first time in the last 24 months!

Random thought. I personally, really prefer the look of the front loaded e-cargo bikes. But I rode one for the first time last summer & felt like I need a several day driving training course to ride confidently. Wonder if the e-tric is a more intuitive ride, even though it's more goofy looking

Something I don't yet have exact language for: 1. Planning claims to be obsessed with "engagement" and "input." We legit do a lot of it. 2. We do a lot of holding things that the public *would* care about because we're afraid to hash things out in public. This seems...not ideal?

Only a week worth of data verified off of the MTA's in-station cameras but... the new fare gates look to have cut fare beating by a lot in the pilot stations where it was most rampant. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVyW...

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.

Or put another way: ~every social housing program in the world was built to house the working class. Turns out it's useful for your anti-poverty efforts to own a bunch of housing but it's never been the main focus.

Who wants to take this survey on Renton’s version of Vision Zero that they have just launched! Please please take this survey and mention that you want walkable and rollable neighborhoods love yall

Combined, these policies could get us out of the shortage once and for all. We have raised the housing investment level before, and now—with so many cities and states reforming their zoning laws, opening the door to housing—is the time to do it again.

The housing shortage is big, and getting out of it will take a long time. For multifamily, we would have to jump from 350k to 600k homes per year (which we haven't done since the 80s) and maintain that level through 2033. The timelines are much worse for lower production levels.

Take a look at the historical multifamily production chart. The first half of the period, there's a lot of green. The second half of the period, a lot of red. Zoom in on the green mountains and you'll find federal policies carefully designed to make the line go up.

This is pretty exemplary of how electeds fetishize hyper-localism. The more localized and smaller the group, the more authentic and virtuous. A dozen homeowners from a single neighborhood are valorized as "community voices," worthy of sabotaging a regional transit project.

“I am political,” Ms. Rachel told me of her new effort to free kids from ICE detention. “It’s political to believe that children are worthy of love … and that our care shouldn’t stop at what we look like, our family, at our religion, at a border. Mr. Rogers was very political.”

It’s done. American taxpayers will pay $1 billion to TotalEnergies to *not* build new electricity generation capacity in America. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/c...

"Milwaukee had a lead crisis in their schools, and they made a standard request for assistance from C.D.C., and the request was ignored for weeks, and then declined, because the entire lead team had been fired."

An excellent leader right here

America’s major cities should have zoning capacity for at least 4-5x their current populations, like they did back before the Big Downzones of the 60s and 70s.

The only things that will change driver behavior are infrastructure that damages their cars if they do the wrong thing and extremely heavy-handed enforcement.

you have to start from the fact that drivers basically cannot read while they are driving. fundamentally incapable. speed signs? one way? no turn in red? cannot read. just look at all the cars that drive down 3rd. and they can't even comprehend road cues: bsky.app/profile/stre...

Obviously, any project being "deferred" is a hard blow. But when we're talking about projects like South Kirkland Issaquah, which is barely more than a line on a map right now, there are a lot of reasons to be hopeful that solutions can be found over a 10 year timeframe. All is far from lost.

So under the radar for normal people, so fantastic. Hopefully it'll be easy to pitch: "Hard-working condo owner gets her roof fixed right away, greedy lawyer doesn't get to stuff their pockets with money."

California’s Construction defect reform bill (AB 1903, Wicks) is live. It’s been a journey but we’re finally here. Please let me know if you have any questions: leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTe...

Holy cow, rates up to 6.53% today! A borrower putting 20% down on a $600,000 home would pay $168 more now than they would have the day before the U.S. bombed Iran when rates were 5.99%. War is costly in innumerable ways, including the cost of homeownership.

The nice thing about the posting to policy pipeline is that it’s quite democratic. If you are willing to patiently read a bunch of PDFs, synthesize a problem and solution in public, and respond to feedback you can participate.

smallplexes do not pencil in high cost cities. zoning codes need to go much bigger.

Ken Cofflin, retired SF fire marshal, previously wrote SF’s controversial and costly fire sprinkler mandate for pre 1974 high rise condo owners. Now he’s offering services as a consultant to help owners demand exemptions or scope reductions to the ordinance. www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/h...