Someone send this to George Darouze

Another remarkably superficial piece on one of the more extensively studied questions in urban economics. "Getting CDC recommend vaccines alone does not guarantee health." It's not sufficient, but it's necessary, and publishing a lot of context free stuff about its insufficiency will only do harm.

Are "pre-rebuttals" a thing, like "pre-zonings"? If so, here's a pre-rebuttal from @jensvb.bsky.social and I to the latest argument that supply doesn't matter (from CCPA, sigh). The Key: Doubling up is the demographic indicator demonstrating our shortage. homefreesociology.com/2025/07/06/h...

Beyond being bad for affordability, I think discretionary approvals process are socially/morally destructive for this reason—they turn seemingly normal, well-adjusted people into monsters.

Any future Democrat administration needs to consider that international opinion & cooperation will depend, to a degree, on energetic prosecution of the Trump regime's criminals - to give the world some confidence we won't have to deal with a rogue state every four years.

love when there’s a newspaper profile of some psychopath that points out they allow themselves “a lone vice, like a single cup of black coffee in the morning.” personally I am a bundle of trash glued together by vices. they’re all load-bearing

🚨 Yesterday, Ottawa City Council approved its new zoning bylaw, abolishing parking mandates across all urban and suburban regions of the city! Hear what councillor @arieltroster.com had to say about the importance of removing parking mandates.

We've done it. Refinements and corrections will certainly come. There are still areas where we want to push the envelope further. But our understaffed team, working on a tight timeline, has delivered what is very likely one of the most aggressively pro-housing zoning reforms in the country.

My theory for North America is that this is the consequence of the fact that every urban profession shifted to work in the wrong field: road engineers design public spaces (it should be planners), planners meddle with architecture via design reqs/codes. Architects became façadists.

Japanese cities are a strong argument that "human-scaled design" flows not from design rules, but from tight lot fabric and loose land-use restrictions.

if personnel is policy, then the most fundamental questions about an institution is not "what are the policy directives" but rather "what will get you promoted" vs. "what will get you fired"

No one says to legit business owners, "hey I see there's an underground market selling toxic knock-offs of your product: how will you incorporate the toxic product AND protect your customers against its harms?" But apparently it's fine to make this suggestion to educators with respect to AI.

Anyone who supports this is an embarrassment. "Instead of typing it out they'll generate their idea"? Are you insane? Call yourself whatever you want but you aren't creatives, that's for sure.

My graduate report was a comparative review of design guidelines in two university towns. I had set out to write about the economics of student housing, but under pressure to complete the report and graduate I refocused on design & attractiveness... which I now believe misses the point entirely.

Interesting new working paper that studies chains of movers after the construction of a new apartment building in Honolulu. Paper finds that the project resulted in the opening up other, lower cost, housing on the island, benefiting the housing market overall.

What happens when you downzone? Our new open-access research paper in @findingspress.org investigates effects of decades of downzoning in Chicago. Findings: —Downzoned areas added 1/7th of the new units as comparable non-downzoned areas; —Downzoned areas became more white & were more expensive.

I started out studying architecture because I had a "save-the-world" interest in the built environment. I quit and got into city planning because I realized the career prospects were better and it was more aligned with my personal strengths.

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If you need me, tap me on the shoulder. I’ll be happily working all day listening to this on a loop.

I disagree with this government about a whole lot, but as far as imposing province-wide standards on Official Plans goes, I'm inclined to let them cook. Speaking as a zoning reformer and, thus, as an interpreter of how policy plays out in practical terms: we need to be more judicious with our OPs.

"Neighbourhood interiors were never intended for commercial activity", says one letter writer. To be fair, this is true, if you toss the entirety of human history and modern day Earth outside North America in the trash, and think that urban planning less than a century old is ironclad natural law.

Single stair bldgs have lower occupant loads, shorter travel distances, and more compartmentalization vs the two-stair buildings we're familiar with. The two-stair building might have 5x to 10x as many people crowding down a stair. (Perhaps that poor design is what drives the fire dept angst).

Something this large & powerful combined with the certainty its operator has problems with emotional self-regulation - terrible combo

the meta ai video slop TikTok is I think the first tech thing where I have been 100% on the side of the Luddites (vernacular usage, I know the actual Luddites were more complex than that, nerds). Usually I think there's a little too much of that reflexively on the left tbh, but no this shit sucks.

My review of Toronto’s new Mass timber tower: a quiet triumph. www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

right wing “abundance” is funny to me because everyone involved has to constantly dance around the fact that their entire political party is a cult dedicated to the most anti-abundance politician of all time who is doing everything possible to destroy American state capacity. good luck with that!!

Them: “Paris is only nice because it was built before cars and they protected all of the beautiful historic architecture.“ Paris:

In which I go to war against the term non-market housing. medium.com/@AdamMongrai...

I see a lot of people on here debating the merits of having a Popeye's in Evanston, but IMO the real point here is that discretionary permitting is a bad system and progressive political candidates should not be explicitly endorsing it.

teachers! excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone. take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE against-a-i.com

Montreal, Tokyo, Paris, Marseille, Halifax

I think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts. Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog comment crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

I have to wonder of AI-users: what task is important enough that they would not have a machine do it? Wild that so many people are immediately comfortable relying on a thought and self-expression simulator as if these things were a stupid chore & not central to human agency and consciousness

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So not only is non-profit housing alone not enough to clear the housing backlog. Any suppression of market rate housing supply directly sabotages the effectiveness of non-profit housing by overwhelming it with lower-middle class renters who, in a functional housing market, could afford market rent.

A good way to think about the housing crisis is landlords pocketing essentially all the consumer surplus the last 40 years

Portland is fun because if you talk about permitting changes in the abstract people will say “this neoliberal deregulatory agenda will only hurt the poor” But if you talk specifics everyone will agree that it should not be so hard to open a damn hot dog cart.

everything is housing or gender, and go deep enough the two are one and the same

The rise of people like Lander and Walz, whose ideologies don't exactly match mine but have the exact right combination of "love thy neighbor" and "fuck you, asshole" attitudes, is massive positive for people who care about left of center politics

all i want is to one day own a modest sized home in a walkable neighborhood and raise money for shelter animals. wear an outfit i like, walk to the grocery store, buy some nectarines, feed cats, and live in peace. just don't understand why achieving this is so hard

Here I am, thinking this would be about the silly historicist renderings, but of course Ottawa is such a deeply unserious place that even this modest proposal 2km from the core of a city of a million residents is criticized for being too urban.

So much of the “promise” of AI right now is saving time creating. Let me say it from my chest: all I want is to spend *more* time creating. I’m not making content. I’m engaging in my vocation, my calling, my literal reason for existing.

There's a dimension of this that I like to call "coercive neoliberalism" - the belief we can get good and desirable things for free by simply requiring them from the private sector, and expecting that this will not distort incentive systems or create perverse outcomes.

The coolest thing about Paris is that you save a ton of money on smokes because you can get so much of it secondhand.

Oh The Urbanity: "Show me a city with a legally protected mansion district near downtown and I'll show you a city that hasn't really taken the housing crisis seriously." Halifax:

we've known how to build cost-effective 2 & 3-story rowhouses for generations in a manner that not only reduces costs, but reduces risks and increases resiliency. simple forms. simple roof w/ no/few plane changes. no need for tiny gutters or a ridiculous number of downspouts. monopoly house FTW!

Internet Roadtrip is my favorite thing on the internet right now—it’s basically Twitch Plays Google Street View. They started in Boston, spent several weeks on a quest to cross the Canadian border, and are now exploring New Brunswick. neal.fun/internet-roa...

To consider 🤔

Why "select" parks? If we've identified that the rules are unjust and are not being enforced anyway, what's the point of incrementalism besides creating new and stupid contradictions?

Round 1: 3rd in class, 18/61 PAX. The car's actually stock except for 245 tires that bump me into STX/DST. Are there any #weirdcarbs autocrossers?