You may not believe that building new housing lowers rents, but your landlord does:

Climate action will improve people's lives not just by avoiding catastrophe, but in concrete ways. For example, living car-free in an amenity-rich walkable neighborhood is currently an inaccessible luxury for most Americans, but making this available to far more is essential for climate action.

Honestly tipping as a concept is so dumb if you think about it Guy who thinks we should have a system where generous people (who tip) cross subsidize ungenerous people (who don't tip)

Service-led planning, when?

This a dunk on Riverside County. While SBCTA has a lot of dumb gadgetbahn projects they are at least sort of trying to expand transit, meanwhile RivCo plows everything into highways does a shocked pikachu face when you ask for more medium-distance transit options.

One thing I think about a lot, especially now with ICE terror, is the time I tried to join a community safety group but it fizzled out after a couple of meetings because everyone who signed up lived in different towns and didn't know or feel comfortable talking to their neighbors. That's suburbia.

Continues to be insane that while SB County was contemplating spending $100s of millions on an airport car tunnel, there continues to be no transit connection between ONT airport and anywhere in Riverside

The Abundance movement often points to environmental groups as the obstacles to building. But who actually files the lawsuits blocking projects? It’s not environmental groups. It’s been lawyered-up HOAs protecting property values all along. Regulation by litigation is the problem.

American society is riddled with practices that promise advancement through savvy entrepreneurial mindset, but in practice saddle the consumer with pointless busywork and impede collective bargaining (in a broad sense). Healthcare markets, investment accounts, tipping culture, it's everywhere.

This Yglesias piece in the NYT is horrifically bad. Almost every "fact" it cites is provably false. At best it is cocktail party banter from a pundit who knows nothing of energy. At worst, it was cut/paste from oil industry talking points. So, a rebuttal: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/o...

Biggest technological revolution in our lifetime and it's not AI:

America, colored, 2025

the pitch of 'traditional family values' is that you may be a subordinate in the workplace but when you get home you get to be boss of the household

They Came to Mourn. LAPD Came in Force. Now Two Men Could Face Serious Consequences Because LAPD Won’t Acknowledge They Were Wrong. la.streetsblog.org/2025/12/18/t...

CBP is in Chicago taunting and intimidating organizers. Yesterday, Border Patrol Chief Bovino & other agents: -Harassed striking Teamsters on the Mauser picket line, asking them their status. -Went to front door of community group Enlace and waved, in what the org describes as creepy & intimidating

Organizing works! Sutter Health is continuing trans healthcare for youth. Big thanks to everyone who called, protested & organized to get them to reverse their decision to end care. There's more to do: other providers such as Kaiser & Children's Hospital L.A. made the other choice. Keep organizing!

Will never forget, by contrast, the suburban transit agency staffer who asked me incredulously why you would want to make the train faster.

New Data shows at least 3,800 children, including infants, have been put in detention since Trump took office. Many were held for long stretches. “There is no other way to describe it; it’s a jail for children," one parent said. www.themarshallproject.org/2025/12/17/c...

Today, Amazon Teamsters came to San Francisco City Hall to demand that Amazon come to the bargaining table NOW! The California Labor Movement stands with these Amazon workers as they fight for their first union contract!

Middle aged white lady I met at a store in New Orleans today, after hearing I was from SoCal, expressed sympathy about ICE raids and then launched into vague death threats against Trump. You love to see it. Meanwhile Dem leadership are still afraid to speak out against ICE's racial terror.

"I’ve been reporting on the criminal justice system for more than a decade and have spent time in cities with a lot of law enforcement. I’ve also lived in an authoritarian country overseas, yet I’ve never experienced a police presence like this."

The unemployment rate for Black workers soared to 8.3% in November. That's more than double the rate for white workers.

The US is losing blue-collar jobs for the first time since the pandemic—year-on-year job losses have hit 65k as manufacturing, transportation, & mining industries lose jobs at a rapid pace while growth in construction has nearly zeroed out

The biggest obstacle to winning a progressive agenda for public school finance is the reactionary politics that lets parents opt out of their schools, their districts, and their taxes. Here’s my review of @schooldaves.bsky.social’s great new book! advaitcore.substack.com/p/the-politi...

Not enough discussion of how all these so-called "Midwest Emo" bands are from the South

This is about 1/4 of what I pay for gas a month, and I bike to work and only drive on weekends. If you can't afford this, you can't afford a car.

Today, I spoke with Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his wife, Jennifer. In April, when I met with him in El Salvador, Trump said he would never set foot in the U.S. again. This case has never been about one man alone; if the govt can violate the constitutional rights of one, all our rights are threatened.

In late 2020 a Chinese man called Guan Heng travelled to Xinjiang with our BuzzFeed map of detention facilities to provide ground truth for our work - he provided the first corroborating evidence for many sites. He escaped to the US - then ICE detained him. www.wsj.com/world/china/...

Small scale and local control over transit is the status quo in much of the state, especially Southern California, and has led to: - OCTA's neglect closing the Surfliner for over a year - the SBCTA hydrogen train - Incremental improvements like the Serra siding stalled & SCORE behind schedule

The Discourse is about speed cameras and ignition interlocks. Neither of these are carceral, because they are alternatives to police and prisons. Speed cameras remove racist and violent cops from enforcement of speeding, and interlocks prevent multiple offenses - or crashes - that lead to jail time.

i keep coming back to how we could be a year into the california social housing agency issuing bonds & getting shovels in the ground to build #housing, but instead, we're merely a few months into a STUDY on the best way to rename affordable housing to be "social housing"

Extremely common for pundits to pose this as an innovative hot take when it is in fact the status quo (see also most CAHSR takes). Cost escalation routinely leads to descoping or lower aims from the get go- this is not a solution, but in fact the main reason why high construction costs are bad.

An ordinary man *with union card*. The union, in fact, makes us strong.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an ordinary man, has defeated the great might of the US Government

"America is crying out for a coherent national water policy, and states would be an obstacle to this no matter how their boundaries were drawn." prospect.org/2025/12/12/c...

Join us @icgee.bsky.social @publicenterprise.bsky.social and @seamlessbayareaca.bsky.social for a webinar about how transit funding holds back ambitious investments like electric rail that we need for climate action & affordable transportation. January 8th, 1-2 PST. actionnetwork.org/events/trans...

This has more to do with declining literacy and youth academic issues than any of the commonly cited reasons: young people jus aren't reading for fun in any context

U.S. Latinos are now more worried about being asked to prove their legal status during their daily activities (43% today vs. 31% in March), and roughly 1 in 5 have changed their daily routines because of it.

Penn State professors and faculty members filed for one of the largest public sector union elections in state history on Tuesday. keystonenewsroom.com/2025/12/09/p...

The often unspoken reality behind this phenomenon is that American K-12 education is very bad and so undergraduate gen ed studies are remedial even for a lot of kids of higher social class

US energy reporters and climate folks, take note! In one stroke, German gas utilities are abandoning the prospect of retail hydrogen delivery and accepting the obligation to shrink. In so doing, they're showing why US gas utilities are so insistent about H2 - it's their final tool of delay.

California Air Resources Board: "To achieve climate goals, we need less driving" Transportation Researchers: "To reduce driving, we need fewer lane miles" Caltrans: "We need billions of dollars to keep widening highways." California Legislature: "You got it." usa.streetsblog.org/2025/12/02/o...

"...its appearance here, structurally speaking, is the direct result of there being no criminal or even substantial political penalties for the architects of the torture program, either at Langley or within the Bush administration. " www.forever-wars.com/torture-tech...

The US's light rail obsession has something to do with latent ambient anti-urban and conservative culture. Every little town had a trolley 100 years ago so getting a streetcar doesn't make you the Big City, meanwhile metros are only for scary places like New York, Europe, or Asia.

So much of personal budgeting advice is based around the idea that everyone should be a suburban homeowner that lives at Costco and never does anything rather than being a creature of the city where third places are prioritized and one must spend money more frequently (if not in larger amounts)

Thinking about how when NYC experienced a similar horrifying random subway murder a few years ago, the response was not to install psds or other infrastructure fixes, but to flood the subway with cops. Overpolicing and infrastructure bloat feed into each other.

Just. Throw. Money. At. It. China in the early 2000s built 50,000km of high speed rail with a GDP the size of Switzerland's. You can find the money for heavy rail in the couch cushions. I am so sick of all these penny-wise pound-foolish policies that end with worse results for more money spent.

Building cheap shit does not solve the the problem that we are overpaying. We should strive to be the county that has the industrial machinery to build the Nice Thjngs we deserve

It’s reminiscent of how wonks view US transit investment, where the “answer” to exorbitant infrastructure costs for heavy rail is always Cheaping Out by building infrastructure poor countries build out of necessity (BRT, light rail) instead of building up the necessary industrial capacity.

The mayor has clearly chosen her side. The city has chosen its side. They have all the money and resources in the world to harass activists but nothing to implement meaningful change to make our streets safer.