UC Merced narrowly dodged a bullet on this one, @nerd4cities.bsky.social. youtu.be/5-sNd7VB3xM?...

People want the equivalent of "worn jeans" in their neighborhoods. I get it. But the thing about worn jeans is that, to really achieve the authentic effect, you have to actually wear them!

I think Cayala is great! Not to brag, but when I first visited Guatemala City im 2016 and toured it, when it was still new, I exclusively heard shallow critiques. "It feels fake." "It's a mall." "You drive to it." I said, guys, let the trees grow up, the housing get built and a community form...

I'm at a major supermarket chain in Guatemala City and they're out of bananas. Oh, the irony!

Cool newish stacked duplexes in Houston, with a few small design features well-suited to the climate.

For the past several years, state legislatures have been ground zero for the housing reform discussion. Our 2026 state legislative tracking project is underway. Follow along at www.housingaffordabilityinstitute.org/housing-refo...

These are 10 of my favourite #UrbanEconomics & #SpatialEconomics articles published in academic journals in 2025, continuing with a tradition started in 2018 (order is alphabetical by first author, no ranking implied):

My four favorite movies that I watched for the first time in 2025.

I'm really enjoying this history of the founding of Sacramento. It's doing a good job of capturing the way of contingent entrepreneurship can nudge otherwise mechanistic location theory forces.

What exactly are the New Year's Day traditions? Working out hungover?

Thanks to a series YIMBY reforms—and high-quality administration—in San Diego, the city has been in the midst of a building boom, even as construction has plummeted elsewhere. The result? Rents are down six months in a row. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/12/17/s...

At California YIMBY, we receive good ideas for bills at a steady clip. But a substantial share—maybe half—are one of the following: (a) Los Angeles doing something that's already illegal; and/or (b) Los Angeles doing something in a stupid/inefficient way that no other city does.

I think the most effectively way to frame this issue is, "Don't you want choice in where you live and how you get around?" When framed this way, multimodal reforms transform from a burden (e.g. "we have to do this because of climate change/sprawl/costs/etc") into an amenity.

Thank you to @kcranews.bsky.social for having me on to discuss SB 79 and where pro-housing policy going forward in California.

A lonely Little Caesars in Twentynine Palms.

If you could put three urban planning books on the desk of every city manager/urban planner/elected official in America, what would they be?

Yup. Just another case of regressive intergenerational theft.

A low-rise commercial building turns into 274 homes over shops in Miami. (2016➡️2019)

In New Zealand they have a term for this: the ring of shame. By this I understand them to mean, close-in suburbs that combine extremely high feasibility (i.e. cheap, low-rise structures on expensive land near the center) with extremely restrictive exclusionary zoning.

It's actually pretty insane that the CEQA exemption for *merely bring a zoning code into compliance with a general plan* didn't pass. If that doesn't blackpill you on following the vanilla channels of passing a bill, I don't know what will.

To save Las Vegas, let's take the car sewer that is the Las Vegas Strip and turn it one of the world's great promenades. mnolangray.substack.com/p/to-save-la...

"Let's go around the room and share the best things that happened to us in 2025. Nolan, do you want to start?" "Oh, uh, hmm...well, passing SB 79 was pretty incredible." "Wait, didn't you get married this year?" 🤦🏼‍♂️

Charging $15 a week to remove ads from a compass app is essentially just fraud. I'd wager that literally everyone who pays this is confused or made a mistake. Google should remove junk like this from the app store.

State funded projects should be entitled and permitted by the state. This situation is absurd.

glad to be back home in halifax

When discussing reforms like multiplex zoning, demand estimates rarely enter the discussion (except as a force to be countered). @lausterna.bsky.social and I think that’s unfortunate and we run some simple estimates what it would look like to zone for the demand to live in an area.

What are the best city planning-themed board games?

This is why the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles is the greatest museum in the world. (That's all I'll say about it, and would strongly advise against Googling it. Just go!)

Do you ever encounter a book/movie/album/video game that you're so sure that you're going to love that you put off consuming it so you can savor it? And then years later, you finally comsume it and you kick yourself for not doing so sooner? That's my relationship to this book.

This was an absolute banger of an invention.

Merry Christmas from the Panama Canal!

There is no such thing as free parking!

Want to join our team? Right now we’re hiring three part-time Fellows in Communications, Policy, and Development to join us this spring. Apply here: open-new-york.breezy.hr/p/9f2bf31f79...

We really need to clear out the thicket of junk that has built up in these local building codes in California. We have a statewide code and there is virtually no oversight over, or analysis required, of local code amendments.

I love how every country has a version of a hot pocket that they're extremely proud of.

Thinking I may start YIMBY Guatemala City, who's in?

A Santa Monica councilmember ran and won on a pro-housing platform, but is now being told by state regulators that he's not allowed to vote on housing issues because he works for a pro-housing advocacy organization. Plainly not the intent of conflict of interest law. www.smdp.com/state-regula...

Intergenerational living is a very natural, and for many quite desirable, mode of living. ADUs, duplexes, etc. make it possible! www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

I realize I'm late to this party, but sheesh, Succession is so good. Every episode has the polish and intensity of a finale, it's incredible.

Ideally, the less Bluesky becomes associated with, "Come here and people will be mean to you," the better.

Condos are an affordable homeownership option, but they're rarely built in CA. A major reason is the construction defect liability, which creates excessive legal threats disincentivizing construction. @muhammadspeaks.bsky.social from @cayimby.bsky.social explains www.lewis.ucla.edu/2025/12/17/1...

SB 79 is an unfunded mandate, if you ignore the billions of dollars in property taxes and impact fees it will generate.

The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is such a surreal landscape. Note the faint outline of the huge barges on the horizon.

I actually wrote a term paper on the Venezuela-Guyana border dispute for this quarter, if any of yoy have any, uh, high level questions about that.

I can't speak to transit, but my sure-to-be-unpopular take on Adams' legacy is that he was basically fine on housing. He didn't add any new harmful programs (DeBlasio's MIH) or do any downzonings (Bloomberg's Queens). But he did embrace City of Yes and the pro-housing charter amendments.

All the evidence suggests that safety cameras work incredibly well, but keep shilling for reckless drivers pissed about a $50 ticket over the corpses of dead children.

I don't think it's fully appreciated, just how much the sudden end of ~two centuries of extensive and reasonably straightforward daily reporting on every neighborhood/town/city in the US, in a standardized and searchable format, is going to screw up future historical research.

A parking lot turns into 72 homes in Sacramento. (2015➡️2020)