Social media + post Covid collective psychological response. Worldwide, it is sort of like a religious awakening which is why it is not affected by material circumstances. I don’t know what you do about it but making tech companies reveal their social media algorithms feels like a start.

"Meetings are held, emails are sent, phone calls are made, and something like 520,000 children die of malnutrition, diarrhea, tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV." prospect.org/2026/05/22/w...

Huber: "Keeping the renters out was the point." Warren: "People over profits." Stancil: "Whiners never had it so good." Winship: "Apply avg rent inflation to the poor family & note the high income of the household with 4 adults." & screwing that family will be as popular as the Great Recession was.

Of course, there is a high likelihood that the pitchforks will come out before the new rental market can grow enough to correct these conditions. Progressives don't want landlords and Conservatives don't want renters, so they'll "Baptist and Bootlegger" us into a permanent problem. 7/

Single-family rentals are the only form of housing that can legally expand in most places. As it slowly does, rent will come down for the poor family & young adults will move into the new rental homes. The rising consumption and disinflation will not apply uniformly as the market corrects. 6/

If you live in LA, the most important mayoral election in decades is coming up. thankfully, the best candidate is obvious: It’s Nithya. Vote for Nithya Raman.

If it costs $50k to build a structure parking space, you need to charge $10/day just to cover capital costs assuming 50 years and 4%. And yeah $50k feels outrageous but it it’s what it is and if you can’t charge like $20/day you shouldn’t build structure parking.

This columnist starts by whining about how her BART station is raising commuter parking prices in response to demand, then immediately pivots to venting her frustration about not being able to find a spot at current prices. She does not make a connection between these issues. Remarkable stuff!

Lmao who else is supposed to own a rental building?? You’ve only got like three private ownership options – private equity, family offices, and institutional investors. I don’t believe anybody smashing the repost button on this one even knows what any of these words mean.

This seems like a good design

"Eating Brunch with friends" depraved levels of decadence. Basically genocide. "Eating a Chipotle burrito alone after paying a $10 markup to have it brought to you by courier" the actions of a hero of the coming working-class revolution.

I think it’s important to recognize how this goes both ways, too. Social service spending props up non-profits who back the candidates, but also allows the politicians to insulate themselves from political repercussions for poor financial management.

My annual home insurance bill over the past nine years, in a location with zero flood risk and ~zero fire risk: 2017: $702 (liability limit on dwelling: $479k) 2020: $977 ($535k) 2022: $1,290 ($626k) 2024: $1,464 ($687k) 2025: $1,805 ($757k) 2026: $2,250 ($823k)

It's a really weird issue. If the price of gasoline goes up 40%, it goes up for everyone by 40%. Under shortage conditions, rents increase systematically in a regressive pattern. It's how you can tell there is a shortage. Rents go up more in neighborhoods where incomes are lower.

One big blind spot they have is that their methodology can't account for the highly regressive pattern of rent inflation when there is a housing shortage, so that they don't capture that the cost of living over the past decade has risen 15% more for the lowest income quintile than for the highest.

I think that's why the shortage shows up so clearly in adults per family household. The rise is because of adult children who don't move out of their parents' homes. That is a natural inflection point in historical housing consumption. When children become adults they form new households. 1/

Really this project stayed alive bc of Najarian. The other 3 cities are ambivalent at best.

If I thought they were smart enough to do it, I would say the Trump Admin is deliberately waiting to drop money on LA until it’s too late for it to make a difference, so that they can turn around and say we’re incompetent. But they’re too incompetent to do that, they will blunder into it.

I am fairly certain that for many people the plan was to decrease tourist trips to NYC and it worked. I disagree with the plan but it is what it is.

After NYC started really banning Airbnb we started staying in Jersey City. Hotels in Manhattan are nuts and you get more space in an Airbnb. And fwiw I think every Manhattan Airbnb we stayed at was just someone who was out of town for a few weeks or month.

One thing that becomes obvious as a parent is that a huge portion of the places we went to as kids was just down stream of unit configuration. If you want family tourism, you need condo & whole house rentals.

this newspaper really thinks there are only eight universities in this country and even so only ever reports on four of them

My public research university literally has a cattle ranch

Some fun/depressing napkin-math from The Economist on how much Trump's trade & immigration policies - and chaotic policymaking overall - are costing the otherwise-solid US economy (thanks mainly to the AI boom): www.economist.com/finance-and-...

Introduce yourself with 10 bands you’ve seen live. 1. Stars 2. Smashing Pumpkins 3. XX 4. Willie Nelson 5. No Doubt 6. Garbage 7. Dar Williams 8. Daft Punk 9. Depeche Mode 10. Super Junior

It’s funny how billionaires have cooked their brains so much that they think Nashville is on par with Shanghai

If you had asked me (and a lot of other young people in 2008), I think our hope was that this graph would recover based on new construction in cities. But instead it’s been 20 years of grinding people out through a worsening housing crisis.

I think normies sort of do get this but the online left definitely does not.

Miller Lite stat o' the day 40 the median age of a first time home buyer in 2025 - the number was 28 in 1991.

This graph is still shocking, 20 years later, we’re still not building enough housing. Almost my entire adult life.

A lot of lefties seem to want a world where labor intensive services are cheap and incomes are high and I’m not exactly sure how that’s supposed to work

You have to remember the cardinal rule of shade, which is that shade from trees is GOOD but shade from buildings is BAD

The US planners love forcing setbacks from the perimeter property lines but all the best cities in the world seem to do the opposite. “Are we the bad guys?” Yes

You could just go to UC Davis

At its heart, the NYT is the newsletter for America's oligarchy and specifically, its opinion section are America's top 5%ers both flagellating themselves for not being more like the common man while simultaneously having a Lucille Bluth ass idea of what the typical American is like.

The past several weeks have been super stressful in the union. Saturday we successfully executed a multi year plan, so I gave myself a 20 hour vacation and drove to the desert Monday night. Here's the Milky Way over Imperial County, California, taken just north of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park

Burbank is definitely the most NIMBY of the three and it shows in the number of vacant storefronts and offices. Many years ago someone told me the plan should be to try to land Amazon HQ2. Moonshots.

*cough* Burbank

It is incorrect that LA Parks has only done moonshots. They have been putting small parks in all over the city too.

Again COVID caused a mass psychological shift towards a negative societal outlook. This is the story.

Not only is Trump the most corrupt president in U.S. history, you could make a persuasive case that about a dozen things he has done this term would earn him that title even if he’d done nothing else. And we’ve learned about two of those things just in the past week.

To take it back to dark matter though, that really feels like the epicycles needed to make the geocentric model of the universe work. The only evidence for the existence of dark matter is that the mathematical model we have of the universe doesn’t work without it. Doesn’t feel like great evidence!

Like LA’s transit system, the parks are falling victim to the housing crisis and the LA establishment’s inability to do anything outside moonshot ideas that require some higher level of government to back a dump truck full of money up to the city.

🚨 LA's park system has dropped to 93 out of 100 U.S. cities — our worst-ever rankings in the Trust for Public Lands' ParkScore index. Last year we were 90th. The year before that we were 88th. A decade ago, we were 65th. Go here for the disheartening data: www.tpl.org/city/los-ang...

Motornormativity is everyone in the comments explaining why it's simply not possible to imagine people going to hospital by any means other than a car, while a fifth of the population does not have access to a car.

Many people looking at the republican primary carnage and concluding that you should not cross Trump. When in fact the correct lesson would be that if just 10 more republicans had crossed Trump when it mattered (January 2021) they could have saved themselves. But now it’s GOP delenda est.

This has been one of my white whales for over a decade; news outlets keep saying it despite it being demonstrably wrong.

Obviously this is not an environment conducive to new revenue on *this topic specifically*...but this is the kind of result you get when voters not only get to make bad long-term decisions, but are insulated from the consequences of their choices by cobbled-together fixes.

It’s funny how mad @kenwhite.bsky.social gets about aesthetic standing because that’s pretty much the entire premise for so many edifices in zoning & land use. “Shadow studies.” “Visual impacts.” Historic districts that can tell you what shade of paint & window sash material you’re allowed to use.