he's running

honestly wild that coyner in a harris+6 district thought it was a good idea to insert herself in the middle of a statewide race on the side of letting jackbooted thugs run rampant across the commonwealth. rip bozo

folks,,, get ready to pass some vanvalkenburg housing bills

that’s my flag 🫡

went over to the other site for the first time in ages to check the local registrar's turnout charts and what the fuck is going on over there man

Still need more baseball? We found a CD in our archives containing dozens of unused voice lines from MLB Slugfest 20-03 rejected by the MLB. Here's some of our favorites.

One misconception about IZ is that the market-rate homes in an IZ building cross-subsidize the non-market homes. But this isn't how tax incidence works. Developers cannot set above-market rents, because renters would simply find cheaper rents elsewhere. 1/

THE FOUNDATION FOR THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC

lol new anonymized landed gentry political front just dropped

NIMBYing green energy infrastructure is quickly going to become (already is?) the main climate policy fight. Almost all the fossil fuel infrastructure that has ever been built already exists, so they and their Republican allies can just keep throwing up barriers and stand to profit.

oops

Congratulations to Congressman @mike-pruitt.bsky.social (R-Blacksburg)

ICC committee votes to ban the types of apartments the IBC forces developers to build. Soon the IBC will reach its final intended form and outlaw apartments entirely!

Fun fact: the "purpose" section of the IRC includes "affordability," while the same for the IBC does not!

Signs of life at the long-stalled K-Mart shopping center refresh project:

There's a regionwide (multistate?) PBR outage projected to last for at least another month and not a single broke journalist has gotten to the bottom of it. What kind of society do we even live in anymore?

This is very sad news. Eugene was a Charlottesville icon. Civil rights organizer. (He led he fight to desegregate the schools.) Affordable-housing innovator. Exceedingly generous to all with his time and, to the poor, his money. Successful businessman. A kind, loving man. We'll miss him terribly.

😱

Very important to keep the door closed to the half bathroom if you have a squatting WC and small pets.

Wow. The agenda is up for the 10/20 Council meeting... and it includes a settlement agreement in the White v. Charlottesville case. The city will prepare a Traffic Impact Statement by the process in 24VAC30-155. In exchange, the plaintiffs will drop the case against the new zoning ordinance.

👀 The Flats just changed hands. New owner appears to be Inland Real Estate Group out of Illinois. $489k/unit or 180k/bed. inlandgroup.com/about-inland

Incredible content.

Grid scale batteries are changing our electricity system. Excellent new visual story on batteries in FT today shows just how far this technology has evolved. Fasten your seatbelts, this is just the beginning. ig.ft.com/mega-batteri...

I've liked this idea since the first time I saw it: nacto.org/latest/stree...

It’s been a few months but wanted to post the winning entry from the Baltimore Single Stair Design Competition — the Eutaw Street Lofts by Silver Spring, MD based architect Daniel Morales. 🧵

NFPA responds to this Pew study showing modern multi-family housing is safer than detached houses with a column attacking single-stair reform. Affordability arguments are "dubious" and pushed by "special interests" — citing high profits for… single-family homebuilders. www.nfpa.org/news-blogs-a...

I can't stop thinking about this. We're pursuing zero fire risk in multifam, while tolerating much more in single-fam. People respond by building and living in single-fam, where they're exposed to not only one of the highest fire death risks in the developed world, but also TONS more car crash risk

Love this new report on buildings' relative fire safety from @alexhrwtz.bsky.social and Pew colleagues. www.pew.org/en/research-...

Feels like there might be a story behind this guy's departure from the WDVA US Attorney's office, just over a month since Todd Gilbert was replaced as interim US Attorney with former Albemarle Commonwealth's Attorney (and notorious prosecutorial failure) Robert Tracci.

Infill housing is climate action. More people need to live in the blue zones. Excellent to see @jasonthorne.bsky.social posting this; leaders, take note.

"and other locations throughout the United States"

Developers, get your small lots ready: four-story single-stair is (almost certainly) coming to Virginia in 2027. The code change achieved a unanimous consensus recommendation for support at Friday's General Stakeholder Workgroup, including from the fire services and building officials associations.

for any UVA folks that follow me you should circulate this among your networks balkin.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...

legalize it

364 days since the City’s last pedestrian fatality. We almost made it a full year. www.cbs19news.com/news/pedestr...

👀

Pew finds something that everybody in codes and standards knows but few will say out loud: we apply far stricter fire safety standards to apartments than to houses. www.pew.org/en/research-...

“Modern apartments have a fire death rate … six times lower than older apartments… (or) single-family homes…” Aka why new single stair flats would be among the safest buildings in your city. www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-bu...

Am I the only one who entirely missed this vehicle-into-building incident?

This seems to be a big trend in microtransit. MicroCAT also sees a huge percentage of rides to/from schools.

What's in the Comprehensive Plan? This long story summarizes the four parts using audio from an August 26, 2025 work session. There are about 117,000 people in Albemarle and a very, very small fraction have participated in the creation of what planning staff call AC44. You can listen, too!

Yep, capex on actual generating capacity fell by a third across investor owned utilities in 2019-2023, while opex dropped 7%. That's not margin, that's total costs! Deflation! Meanwhile transmission and distribution costs exploded. That's what's driving higher retail prices, not generation.

1) New paper! Replacing US fossil-fueled vehicles & appliances with electric versions could improve health & climate outcomes, but could cost up to $790 billion in distribution grid reinforcement. Strategic demand-side management could cut 2/3 of those costs.🔌💡 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

10) Individually, just coordinating electric vehicle charging with heat pump and water heater operation - aka "virtual power plants" - reduces grid buildout by 43%. This surprised us, as VPPs mainly involve software and communication, not hardware, so are cheaper to deploy than the other strategies.

Perhaps the coolest thing I've learned from the rapidly-growing YIMBY tent -- the most carbon-efficient electric vehicle is one we've all used our whole lives: The elevator. Elevators not only move people under 100% electric power, they dramatically reduce pollution across the entire economy.

They asked a rider what he liked most about the new system: "The frequency is the thing for me. . . every 15 minutes is incredible." Frequency is freedom.

ah, well

Today, the Center for Building published “Beyond Zoning” by John Zeanah, Memphis’s Chief of Development and Infrastructure. He chronicles the non-zoning barriers faced by Malone Commons, a low-rise multifam/mixed-use project, and how they worked through them www.centerforbuilding.org/publication/...

doubt it convinces anyone but i like the pro-solar framing that it's better at converting energy than corn. fuck corn, we're kicking corn's ass now