Sometimes I believe economists are too cute by half with their models and equations. There are boundary discontinuities everywhere for those with the eyes to see.

My HPR paper with @charlescgardner.bsky.social has been free to read for a year and a half. But reading is hard. Footnotes are confusing. Citations are boring. Fortunately, someone took the paper and pivoted to audio for us. Audio appetizer tasty? Full meal here: www.mercatus.org/research/res...

For a century, Americans with wealth could effectively segregate on housing type alone, enforced by a globally anomalous system of land use regulation. In the last decade, technology has enabled efficient management of single-family rentals to end that segregation. This regulation seeks to undo it.

Let America Cook Again

ADU Bingo: ✅️ Unconventional financing ✅️ Built on Boomer parents' land ✅️ Leveraged their equity ✅️ Unlocked financial/lifestyle benefits unavailable to those without access to all of the above ADUs are popular with planners and politicians due to their shared mandate to funnel benefits to homeowners.

English speakers need to return to our vorgestern/übermorgen origins. The day before yesterday? The day after tomorrow? Grow up.

My grandfather-in-law, Jürgen Messer von Santiago, is a builder. Insanely talented. We were in his homeland recently and I asked him what it would cost to build walkable, mixed-use concentration camps today. I'll never forget his answer: "We can't do it. It can't happen here."

Heute in den USA (links). Vor 100 Jahren in Deutschland (rechts).

Man, this fucking broke me.

Lüften is social engineering to normalize German landlords shifting the blame for painting over black mold to steal security deposits. It relies on Calvinist shame and a Good German sense of order that rejects the great innovations of Americanism. Resist.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Not X, but Y? Wow. AI slop.

Every day, MoCo wakes up and looks in the mirror and asks itself a simple question: How can we MoCo harder than we did yesterday?

Tune in to hear Bobby "The Floorplan Fascist" Fijan chat with New Founding, a Christian nationalist project funder building a (Ruby) RidgeRunner compound in Tennessee. No novel Fair Housing Act interpretations, but queue up more of their episodes for Holocaust revisionism, anti-DEI slop, and more!

I watched Eden (2024) on the Netflix platform. While there are reasons to watch it, not exclusively Ana de Armas-related, the German accents are very bad. The German accents are so bad, I spent the film so puzzled by the premise of the production I created a Letterboxd to work it out. My review:

Only in America! (because every other developed country has windows that block sound, rendering this method of protest ineffective)

Man, cities are so beautiful. And there is not another city in the world where this is possible. That is American Exceptionalism and damn if I'm not too jaded yet to believe in an exceptional America.

No wars but the 2019 Chicken Sandwich Wars.

Approximately one-third of the IFS blog are variations on the "despite what you may reasonably deduce from our publications and entire body of work, we promise we love all babies and are definitely not racists" genre of post. It's just the t-shirt meme with faux-academic lexicon and chart slop.

I haven't followed this drama closely enough to know the merits, but it seems instructive that the official university statement is riddled with grammar and style errors. Parallelism problems, subject-verb disagreement, preposition mismatches—nearly every sentence gets redlined at the 100 level.

Apropros the discourse: Miniatur Wunderland, the world's largest model railway, used to invite the major political parties to create dioramas of their vision of "Utopia" You need to know nothing of German politics or parties to understand their vibes/agendas. That is an immense power—and the point.

There is, within this paragraph, a sixty-three-word sentence comprised of three independent clauses, within which two relative clauses and three adverbial clauses are nested, and which, in that space, employs a dozen commas and twice as many pronouns as common nouns, including three shapeshifter...

This is the best I've read of the genre. Listening to the article via the AI robot voice reader makes it even better.

This guy is a jackass. FHA family status protections explicitly prohibit discrimination against families with children, as landlords are wont to do over wear-and-tear and racialized biases (see: Evicted) Using this photo would help insulate managers from FHA family status claims.

Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries: “Strong floor, no ceiling” Colombian President Gustavo Petro: “A clan of pedophiles wants to destroy our democracy.”

If I was a Davidson County, TN Democrat in a position of authority and saw this map, I would build so much fucking housing.

The "health and safety" pretext for zoning is nonsensical today because it was never more than a Jim Crow assertion of Black neighbors as unsafe and unhealthful. It's how zoning was legitimated as a police power after antecedants—segregation ordinances, racial covenants—proved legally ineffectual.

Diagramming this fucking sentence.

I am the mouse and the architect of my maze. The giver of my own pleasure and torment. I desire. I desire desiring. I desire being desired. I desire desire itself.

Be forewarned: You may also encounter maps of major downzonings. Such is life. Beauty and sorrow coexist. They must.

Single-Stair Sickos might like to learn that a lot of European cities used to produce detailed books on their built environment, including complete floor plans. Here's a snippet from Hamburg und Seine Bauten (1914)

Right-wingers are afraid of everything except looking stupid in public.

Peak Gustavo Petro

The problem with single-stair in the U.S. is that, in all but a fraction of <10 metros, these units would be unmarketable without filling the site with structured parking, which a 2.0 FAR cannot financially support. And 2.0 FAR can't pay for the land in the fraction without huge parking ratios.

If only the White House was a mass produced builder-grade ranch house in the 78th most notable mid-century sprawl subdivision in Nashville, Tennessee. USAmerican historic preservation is the fakest thing humans have ever devised.

"Urban Planning" has become an exercise in gilding vibes with a veneer of empirics. Just a remarkable lack of rigor in 99% of work product from this industry.

More than a century into the American Zoning Experiment, we have the first example of application for its stated purpose: to regulate nuisance land uses.

🚨 NEWS: Colombian President Gustavo Petro accuses U.S. government officials of murder and violating Colombia’s sovereignty and says the Trump-ordered strike of a boat in the Caribbean killed a fisherman named Alejandro Carranza.

When planners promote DADUs while preserving provisions that make them unfinanceable—owner-occupancy requirements, separate-sale prohibitions, etc.—they are planning for a wider privilege gap. Only rich households can benefit from DADU income, giving their kids a leg up, saving on elder care, etc.

When I hear folks talk about bringing smallplex construction back to American cities, I ask for their take on the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Nobody ever has a take. We aren't bringing smallplex construction back to American cities.

Not covered here: suburbanization of poverty and rising homelessness. (And the fusion: many cities have moved services for the unhoused further afield to "clean up downtown") Data is difficult for mass analysis, but anecdotes are abundant for those who follow pedestrian deaths in their localities.

Broker Math never fails 👌

Aside from the murder, crimes against humanity, etc.—it's remarkable how bad he is at this act a decade into it. A real hillbilly would not g-drop "fishing" here. It's a stressed syllable. He got so caught up talkin' and comin' and whatnot, he forgot to be doin' proper velar nasal alveolarization.

Pack it up, y'all. Nobody will do it better.

Wow, I can't believe @seanforfive.bsky.social threatened to email the zoning administrator to find out if eating ass is a permitted use in the RM40 zoning district

There is a German TV show called "Unser Supermarkt" which is like a reality TV show about a supermarket except the drama is just supermarket employees talking about missing barcodes and where to stack the Kartoffeln and very normal checkout processes. It is peak German culture.

Euclid and its consequences. 800 words not sufficient, but local governments' virtually limitless land use powers—in a nation of otherwise severely limited gov't powers—leads local governments to use the land use hammer for every nail. Progressive politicians should roll it back. Laugh meanwhile:

This is a totally fascinating deep dive into one of those European social housing projects that goes mini-viral in North American housing circles because it's so pretty and cheap--and it turns out to be a lot more complicated. brendanwhitsitt.substack.com/p/24-does-eu...

On one hand, it sucks that we have a system that allows a small number of cranks to delay public goods and force the public to spend tons of money on frivolous legal defenses. On the other hand, it's fun to watch the worst person you've ever encountered lose over and over and over again.