Toilets are killing and injuring more people than ever, and we just ignore it. We have an aging population and deadly designs. We should fix this before more people die.

Thanks Tim. @lloydalter.bsky.social wrote about this recently too - he's also pro Japanese toilets but favours grab-bars over height open.substack.com/pub/lloydalt...

Giles co-authored the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act with Justin, and I was delighted to work with him on other projects too. I was, frankly, terrified of Giles’ razor-sharp intelligence but soothed by his kindness and great good humour. God, we will miss him.

E-bike fires are killing Londoners. Nothing can put them out 556 fires in three years, six dead and a call-out every other day. We speak to the firefighters and doctors struggling to cope with a deadly new epidemic.

When I first started looking into the epidemic of e-bike fires that's killing Londoners I had no idea what I was getting in for.

Check out my @londonermag.bsky.social story, featuring some insane footage of an ebike explosion in Catford that destroyed a house.

New #ONS estimates of #families and #households in the #UK, up to 2025, were released today (www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...). The most eye-catching finding is the trend towards living with parents, especially so for young men.

Here’s a thread with some key takeaways 🧵:

I also enjoyed the suggestion yesterday that "friends" (plural!) of Morgan McSweeney had called up the Guardian to say he had no knowledge of it either.

Do 2nd homes get out of paying standard property taxes in NYC, or would this new tax be on top of that? Last time I looked, property taxes for high-end properties in NYC were much higher than Council Tax in London.

Yes, it's positive for people on the margin of buying a home - less so for renters with few savings.

Number of accidental deaths per 100,000 people in the UK in 2023

Having a lot of older people living in homes with stairs and driving everywhere leads to more people dying in accidents www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

RICS market survey charts showing trends in reported increases or decreases in lettings supply and demand

Rent trends reflect demand too, which has been very soft of late. The RICS survey is fairly noisy & imperfect but suggests consistently shrinking supply has recently been offset by static demand.

Skyscrapers bring about difficult trade-offs between the cost and benefits of density, say Gabriel Ahlfeldt (Humboldt & CEP), Nathaniel Baum-Snow (Toronto) and Remi Jedwab (George Washington).

cepr.org/voxeu/columns/tall-build...

"We Are Not as Wealthy as We Thought We Were": Elevated American Household Net Worth Reflects Poverty, Not Wealth Abstract

See @kevinerdmann.bsky.social on this in the US www.mercatus.org/research/res...

As I understand it those 'rent avoidance' strategies don't show up in the cost of living measures. Interesting to think about what would happen to measured rents if house-sharing & extended living with parents were somehow prevented and more households had to compete for a scarce stock of homes.

i feel bad for our country but this is tremendous content

I’ve been asked to deliver the annual lecture for the Planning Officers’ Society in a couple of days’ time, so if you want to learn more about our research into suburban intensification and the strategic potential of small site housing, see here 👇🏻
www.planningofficers.org.uk/events/pos-a...

Seems a good day to remember that, in his book An Intelligent Person's Guide To Modern Culture, Hungary's favourite right-wing thinker Roger Scruton implied that the Pet Shop Boys made a 'minimal contribution' to their own records. They successfully sued him for libel. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/enterta...

BREAKING: Free parking advocate concedes defeat.🧵

All 11.333.878 buildings in the Netherlands

12½ years ago, I made a map of all the buildings in the Netherlands. Unexpectedly, people loved it!
Ever since, I have been wanting to make an updated version of the map. Newer data, higher resolution, more interactive! I never got around to it, until last week: bertspaan.nl/buildings

a penguin is holding a pile of money and the word pengu is on the bottom right Alt: Oliver Bullough affectionately cuddling a pile of dollars

Oh really, well then explain this recent pic of you

Statue of Roger Casement in Dun Laoghaire

They recently put up a quite dramatic statue of him in my home town

A Homeless Library: The Library of the Housing Crisis? David Mountain, 27 March 2026.[1] In the storerooms of a little-known fenland museum is a treasure trove of rare books on town planning and housing policy, comprising an entire specialist library. …

One of the country's finest libraries of books on town planning and housing policy - the Harry Simpson Memorial Library, currently located in Wisbech - is at risk of being pulped. Please publicise and support the campaign to save it.
davemnt.wordpress.com/2026/03/26/a...

This might be the most interesting real estate project in North America right now when it comes to the debate over how to build more housing and bring down the cost of rent. Today: The story of a place called Sen̓áḵw and the skyscrapers NIMBYs couldn’t stop.

buff.ly/FM2xPrJ

2.1. TfL should bid to operate the tolling scheme, with appropriate exemptions for local residents and black cabs.

chart showing Value of a five per cent deposit on a starter home as a proportion of the median gross annual earnings by region: England and Wales, 1997 and 2025

In most regions, starter home deposits have more than doubled relative to the typical salary over time.

Read 'Credit where it's due' here ⤵️ buff.ly/0OaFqsX

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

We know that homelessness and precarious housing are closely connected to early, preventable deaths, but are we learning lessons to seek to prevent future deaths?
That is what research published today examines: homelessinquests.blogs.bristol.ac.uk

Learning from the last crisis Four lessons for tackling the cost-of-living crisis arising from the war on Iran

What lessons should government learn from the cost-of-living shock that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine for how to support households in the face of the current energy price spike?

open.substack.com/pub/rodhick/...

Why Berlin can't just do as Paris does on cycling and parking policy Paris is to hold a referendum in February 2024 to triple parking charges (to €18/hour) in parts of the city, and double them (to €12/hour) in some of the outer parts of the city. Details of exactly what is proposed here. Great idea, I am all for it.

Sorry to rain on the parade a bit, but “doing a Paris” on cycling is quite hard, as the parallels with other places don’t fully hold jonworth.eu/why-berlin-cant-just-do-...

Not sure you're talking about the same thing. You're talking about local control of planning, she is talking about cooperative housing etc as a tenure and delivery model. You could however argue that the former is unhelpful for the latter.

Interesting today programme piece on regional inequality - but I worry we are still fighting old battles

Spatial inequality basically flatlining, the problem is growth - still talking about London as some sort of high growth city makes us complacent