Pollack's law review article about sidewalk governance was great; looking forward to this book.

Blaming housing for the environmental damage caused by cars, when successful, inevitably leads to more driving and therefore more environmental harm. These people are either very good at lying to themselves or are incredibly cynical and dishonest.

The fact that small scale real estate investors who flip $500k starter homes into $2 million McMansions are NOT required to provide subsidized housing for poor people but the investors who flip the same homes into ten $650,000 townhomes ARE is such an indictment of California housing policy.

Seattle's "anti-bike protesters" now mimicking white nationalist slogans

There's also a bit of tension in the "pro-car"/"care about public safety" pairing in a city where the legal establishment has decided one can massacre an entire family waiting for a bus, as long as you do it sober and with a car, and you can muster up some crocodile tears about it after the fact.

Seems highly intuitive to me, although a lot of people seem to struggle with it. I spent much of my 20's and early 30's teaming up with other single modest earners to outbid families for large homes, which we accomplished by not wasting bedrooms on non-earners.

I would probably vote for the blah mainstream experienced Dem party hack over the flaky billionaire who has stumbled into some good policy positions in at least 40 states; California is definitely not one of them.

I have a ~20% drafted but still well short of half-baked plan to write a book about internal freedom of movement; should I follow through I now have a burning, insatiable desire to title the zoning chapter "Aren't we kinda being pricks?" www.marbleheadindependent.com/he-asked-if-...

To put a finer point on it: one reason there is such an appetite for poor-quality left-NIMBY scholarly work: it appeals people who are temperamentally conservative, but are desperate to see themselves as progressives or radicals, and such people are extremely overrepresented in academia.

Gotta vote tomorrow. Any fellow Ohio voters (or non-Ohioans who have developed opinions on OH-SOS for some reason) have any thoughts on Hamblin v Russo?

I vaguely remember reading that paper a couple years ago and thinking their case selection methodology seemed a bit questionable/risky and woo boy was that apparently an understatement

The reaction to bus lanes on Denny is revealing. Everyone who goes near that corridor knows perfectly well giving cars the whole road doesn't work. It's a parking lot half the day. Drivers aren't mad because this will make it slower, they're mad someone else might get to move faster than them.

I used to be annoyed that Mayor Harrell was so disinterested in housing that he was running years behind on the Comp plan. I retract that annoyance; thanks for being lazy, Bruce, as your laziness created the opportunity for a Mayor who takes the housing crisis seriously to do it right.

The Gods of peer review smiling upon my inbox this afternoon: two pretty promising-at-first-glance R&R's within 30 minutes of each other. Time for a celebratory beverage.

An excellent book, and a helpful prequel to the story of Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren's shared crusade to keep those filthy renters out of single family home communities.

Corporate ownership of single family house rental Discourse makes me insane because none of the neo-Brandeisians are willing to come out and say "I think that lower middle class SFH renters should be evicted and forced to live in apartments so that upper middle class families can buy those houses."

Eight years ago, I was a city planner in Central Queens. One of the worst part of the job was having to tell homeowners that it wasn't legal to build an ADU. Now New York City has a whole website dedicated to helping homeowners build an ADU. The arc of justice is long, etc. housing.hpd.nyc.gov/adu

This sorry episode, and Sen. Warren's shameful conduct throughout, is a fine example of how fundamentally unstable the 'left' part of left-populism is. A left-populist appeal brings people in with "let's go after private equity" and they barely notice they're actually attacking renters.

If your goal is to dissuade anyone from even attempting to build housing in jurisdiction, it's not a waste of time at all. Even if it ultimately fails to block this project, the message being sent here could easily dissuade others from attempting.

The obvious wisdom and effectiveness of Housing First is obscured by the fact we've made "a tiny, no-frills apartment" an expensive status symbol in huge swathes of the country by creating an artificial housing shortage

Every couple of months or so, someone puts out a piece of bad social science meant to undermine the case for more housing. For Roosevelt Institute, I wrote a blog post responding to the two most recent specimens. rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/there-i...

American planning in a nutshell: building apartments in a wealthy neighborhood? You need special permission and must rent 20% of them at a loss to poor people. Combining 10 apartments into a mansion for one extremely rich family? By-right process, no subsidized housing requirement, and a tax break.

I, a Mariners fan, am not particularly predisposed to have much by way of capacity for sympathy for Angels fans. But almost every time I learn some new peice of information about that organization I feel a bit of it.

I see Ross has found an answer to the question: "How can I comment on the housing crisis in a manner that will demonstrate how much cooler I am than these phillistines?"

every faction in politics will invent their own bespoke conspiracy theory to avoid confronting the inescapable truth that we just need to make it easier to build denser housing

That an openly anti-renter policy -- that was very recently tried, with predictable results! -- is such an easy sell to left-populists is an important data point for the view that left-populism is inherently unstable, and will struggle to resist the gravitational pull of right populism.

Another new paper on housebuilding and vacancy chains, this time with data on every Swiss resident & housing unit! An interesting context given Switzerland's high immigration, very large rented sector and strong tenancy rent controls... frederickluser.github.io/files/Moving...

Proponents of the "we don't need new housing, we just need policies that shrink the STR market and push existing homes back into the LTR pool" approach to solving the housing crisis should be paying close attention to Spain, where this approach is being tested. Early results are not promising.

Bezos will never manage to be anywhere near as pathetic a figure as Musk is, but that won't stop him from trying.

I can't quite bring myself to accept that the man who might end Orban's rule is named "Peter Magyar." It'd be like if Trump lost to some guy named Joe America.

This is an interesting semantic question. Which is more regulatory? A) "You can do exactly one thing with this land" or B) "You can do several things with this land, some of which are more intensely rule-bound than the thing in (A) but you can still do that too?"

This seems like a big deal! I think I've been operating under the assumption that anything suitable for posthumous publication would have been out by now, so a very pleasant surprise.

The days of the L8 are now numbered, thanks to a mayor not afraid to stand up to the bitter angry motorists who demand transit riders share the misery their transportation choices creates. What a world. www.theurbanist.org/2026/01/15/k...

I have an article forthcoming in the Annual Review of Political Science called, "Participatory Democracy & Its Limits." It focuses on limited citizen attention & how participation can backfire, w/ land use as an example. Abstract below; here's a preprint: kevinjelliott.wordpress.com/wp-content/u...

While I'm sure there's some true believers, I suspect a non-trivial part of the explanation for this is that it's a policy that functions as an answer to the question "how can we appear supportive of left-populist economics, without committing to actually consequential left-populist policies?"

I can identify some reasonable reasons to prefer land use/housing policy is primarily a municipal affair. What I can't wrap my mind around is elevating that preference to a first principle/a priori/quasi-theological commitment as Marohn does. At some point, "does it work" is something we should ask!

Two kinds of people who participate in these anti-institutional investors buying homes panics: 1) Anti-renter bigots, who want renters segregated out of single-family home neighborhoods 2) People who are easily manipulated into endorsing bigotry & segregation with a bit of left-populist rhetoric.

Lots of ppl have embarrassed themselves in the Trump era, but the "pretending Trump is the anti-war candidate for reasons other than propagandizing for him" crowd are among the most contemptible. If shame were still a thing in our world, they'd retire from offering public political opinions forever.

I agree, but it's not going to mean much if it doesn't come with a willingness to impose/enforce penalties for driving w/o a license onerous enough to deter. Because the bad/dangerous drivers *really* don't want to stop driving, those penalties will probably seem excessively severe to normal people.

In a world where employers were prohibited from firing employees for hurling racial epitaphs at paying consumers, it's considerably less likely they would give someone with a questionable past (like this woman) the job in the first place.

The specific decision bothers me less than that politicians, even the "good" ones, still find it acceptable to describe allowing ever-so-slightly more housing in a place as "attacking" that place. There's no journey to that conclusion that isn't incredibly pernicious and ugly.

Just witnessed someone absolutely torpedo a first date by going all in on "Michael Jackson was innocent" trutherism. You could tell he knew exactly what was happening in real time, but he just couldn't stop himself. Just a brutal thing to witness.

I, too am pro-Gondola, buy my reasons are less about to my general pro-transit views than my equally strongly felt anti-busybody views. Encouraging these people by letting them win is bad for their souls. They desperately need to find more edifying, less socially corrosive hobbies.

Spotify once again making me feel a little ridiculous by pointing out just how much of my life I spend listening to Nick Cave/Warren Ellis soundtracks.

wonder if mamdani tried to single stair pill him single stair, folks. you’re hearing it more and more. single stair. it’s a beautiful term. makes wonderful homes - and we love a lot of beautiful, affordable homes. i think i probably just coined it. i’m not sure. but you’re hearing it more and more.

Very curious to see what his running game looks like going forward. It seems like even modest adjustments from opposing pitchers/defenses could have shut down his base-stealing pretty easily, but they just didn't ever do it for some reason.

I would like to believe MTG's recent turn against Trump was motivated by cynical calculation to advance her political career, because then we could expect others Rs similarly situated to reach similar conclusions. Alas, I suspect she's just an idiosyncratic conspiracist following her muse.

It's wild that the city in the US making the most significant investments in public transit expansion is also the city with the deepest, most unwaivering commitment to the principle that as few people as possible should be allowed to leave near transit stops.

Never has that Norm McDonald "I know this may seem harsh" meme been more apt

The answer to the question "Can you see a large body of water when you look out the window?" is a strikingly effective predictor of voting behavior in Seattle.