Something I've been thinking about a lot: In a recent 5Cast episodes, Andrew Callaghan made an off-hand comment about how nearly all of the recently-minted conspiracy theorists he has talked to mention "Ancient Aliens" as being a watershed moment.

https://twitter.com/gaughen/status/1958396457771528556

I don't think it should be illegal, but whew buddy, a major outlet branding itself as "The History Channel" running content like this was profoundly unethical. In an entertainment industry with a backbone, anyone involved in that slop is blacklisted.

In recent years, supply-and-demand denying interest groups have cajoled state legislators in Sacranento from excluding any housing that has hosted a renter in the last X number of years from using state housing laws legalizing a lot more housing...

https://twitter.com/LA_Multi_Fam/status/1950207825583775877

...bad actor cities like LA then make the problem worse by shifting the burden of proof on homeowners. Many normal people give up, and projects don't proceed.

SB 79 is live in Assembly Housing! @Scott_Wiener cayimby.org/legislation/sb…

The impossible has become possible: we've passed a clean CEQA infill exemption. This is probably the most important thing California has done on housing in the present YIMBY moment. I explain the significance of this historic win in this thread. 👇

https://x.com/mnolangray/status/1938811331186225539?t=g8J9HMkUInFdN1ht4HFt1g&s=19

You've probably been hearing a lot about budget bills, environmental reviews, and labor fights out here on the West Coast. It's all adding up to probably the biggest policy change in modern California history. Here's a breakdown for the perplexed. In 1970, California joined various states in mandating that all public projects undertake an environmental review, disclosing and mitigating impacts. This made sense amid a frenzy of freeways, urban renewal, etc. Thus, CEQA: the California Environmental Quality Act.

In my experience, asking developers what they think will get more housing built nearly gets you an answer tied to a specific cell on their most recent project proforma, e.g. drive down interest rates, lower fees, etc. It makes sense: this what they spend all day thinking about.

https://twitter.com/JerusalemDemsas/status/1904567313103233531

Asking a fish about water, etc. They build homes, they don't do policy. It's weird to expect them to center hard-to-quantify things like entitlement risk, or upstream determinants of inputs like land costs, which are increased by restrictive zoning.

A big day in the legislature for pro-housing legislation! Three pieces of California YIMBY-sponsored legislation moved out of the second chamber. Combined with laws we've helped to pass in recent years, it will never be easier to build missing middle housing in California. 🧵 Background: In 2021, California made history by adopting SB 9, which aimed to allow duplexes and lot splits. When combined with robust ADU law, the goal was to allow for up to four units on lots in residential areas—key for ending our shortage.

It's important to remember that the idea of "expensive cities" and "affordable cities" is new. Historically, variation in home prices could be explained by variation in (a) incomes and (b) available flat land. Since 1960, variation in development regulation has changed that. 🧵

https://twitter.com/cayimby/status/1815179338788352480

Yes, home prices were always higher in wealthier SF and NYC and lower in poorer Columbus and OKC. But account for variation in incomes—and the fact that the former are hemmed in by oceans, and the latter are flat, featureless plains—and the variation was predictable. (And tiny!)

In explaining why it gave a $3.3 million Baby YIMBY grant to Philadelphia, a city that has recently tightened regulatory barriers to housing, HUD favorably cites...a broken, unfunded IZ mandate that acts as a tax on housing. Ooph. h/t @christianbrits hud.gov/sites/dfiles/C…
@christianbrits Ditto for the Seattle—a city that deserves credit for actually building housing. In a long list of recent wins, HUD oddly chooses the biggest L, another unfunded IZ program that research suggests has suppressed development in affected areas. furmancenter.org/files/publicat…

YIMBYs are clearly divided on this. I think it's a good project with a lot of potential. Some people I respect disagree. Fair enough. But the amount of silliness floating around, some it from people who don't know basic details about the proposal, warrants a thread.

https://twitter.com/cayimby/status/1803241631178736013

1. "This threatens valuable naturally valuable or hazardous lands."

In nearly bill California YIMBY has sponsored since 2017, we've excluded any land that might be remotely sensitive or dangerous—habitat, prime farm, flood zones, wildfire areas, etc...
leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavC…

Seven ideas for hosting a good monthly happy hour—something every serious YIMBY group should do:
1⃣ Host it on the same day/time, ideally at the same place—only move if you live in a massive fragmented city. You want this to become a habit. 2⃣ Host it at a local open bar—the point is to mingle. Weather allowing, host it at a place with outdoor space, e.g. a beer garden, to accommodate all.
3⃣ Don't waste your budget, assuming you have one, buying drinks or appetizers—better off members will voluntarily do that.

Wow. Kentucky State Representative Steven Doan that would implement...basically the entire YIMBY program! I'm still learning details, but this is a great model for a zoning reform omnibus bill. Let's dive in. 🧵 (h/t @robmolou) apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/24rs/hb… Right off the bat, Section 3 forbids jurisdictions from arbitrarily mandating larger homes and apartments, which effectively place a price floor on housing. Jurisdictions must default to the building code, which is rooted in actual health and safety considerations.

The best case scenario for contemporary vexillology: completely unremarkable flags.

https://twitter.com/natehoodstp/status/1736738733523673541

This generation of uninspired vector flags is going to feel so unfashionably dated, "of the 2020s" in 15 years. A sample of flags adopted in 2022:

For thousands of years, city planning focused on drawing out a street network, with water and sewer underneath, and reserving regular public spaces, and was mostly agnostic on uses or densities. One hundred years ago, that flipped.





Today, few cities have anything more detailed than an arterial plan, leaving streets and public spaces to be defined in an ad hoc, uncoordinated way, producing the hot mess that is American suburbia. As long as the rights-of-way are designed like freeways, have at it!

Pro-housing zoning reform in Arizona wasn't killed by any genuinely popular opposition. Arizona families were demanding solutions on affordability! It was killed by the League of Cities and Towns, using taxpayer dollars to lobby on behalf of exclusionary jurisdictions.

https://twitter.com/YIMBYTempe/status/1671171295260692480

In at least four states I'm aware of, Leagues threw everything they had into killing pro-housing reform this year. Impossible to understand contemporary zoning reform without understanding the pernicious role played by these groups.
reason.com/2023/06/01/nim…

A few thoughts on this piece, which I think encapsulates a peculiar kind of market suburbanism that has happily faded with the advent of the market urbanists, a set of views that reflected libertatian opinions on zoning when I got into this issue.🧵

https://twitter.com/reason/status/1667487546673332226

Characterizing single-family zoning as an implicit contract with the state has some odd implications for libertarians. Did the taxi cartel have an implicit property right in medallion scarcity? Do the sugar barons have an implicit property right in restrictive tariffs? ...

GM Renaissance Center is not great for a lot of reasons. (Not the least of which, it was designed to be the off-center vista of a side road?) But I would contend that it's significantly less bad than most of the Silicon Valley HQs that have been built lately. There are at least four different generations of urban renewal thinking in this photo.

Before the holidays, a rather strange article questioned whether building more housing would help with Ontario's housing affordability—stranger still, it questioned whether Ontario had a crisis at all. I debunk a few major claims here: cayimby.org/yes-ontario-ac… 1. The article (linked below) suggests that Ontario may not actually need more housing because household sizes are inflating. But rising household sizes—and overcrowding—are a symptom of a housing shortage, not an excuse to ignore it.
thestar.com/opinion/contri…

US zoning is incredibly weird, for the worse, in at least two major respects; one procedural, one substantive:
1. In the US, zoning codes are written completely by local governments, with little—if any—involvement from higher levels of government... tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… ...in most other developed countries that do zoning, zoning districts are written by national or provincial governments, with local powers limited to mapping predefined zoning districts. (At most with limited overlay powers.)

Deromanticizing Japan:
1. There is rarely soap, sanitizer, or paper towels in restrooms. This probably helps to keep costs low and allow for lots of public restrooms, and bidets help a little, but also...gross! Anecdotally, few men seem to wash their hands. 2. The Internet is, as a rule, quite bad. As with restrooms, public Wifi is quite common, but it's generally only slightly better than nothing. (Not that mobile data is particularly reliable.) I suspect this is why there's still a big culture of buying physical media.

If NYC is going to have sidewalk sheds be de facto permenant, the city should install permenant covers, which are quite common here in Tokyo. A bunch of totally "legitimate" shed businesses would lose money, yes, but the city would be a lot more pleasant! A wonderful unintended side effect of ending street parking and off-street parking mandates is that it provides a huge incentive to reduce vehicle sizes.