THE BABYS - Isn't It Time - John Waite YouTube video by tomnook111

I feel like this banger has been forgotten.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=s-c8...

I saw an economist discuss the effect of ai on urban growth, etc. & he said “young people will still overwhelmingly go to NYC & San Francisco…”
And it’s so odd that economists talk like this. Young people never ”overwhelmingly went” to NYC & SF in my lifetime. At most, you imagine they would have.

I usually focus on how the mortgage crackdown collapsed the low tier home market. But you could say it is 100% directly responsible for the liquidity shock that collapsed NGDP growth and required massive fiscal and monetary stimulus.
kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/revisiting...

1/ @yonahfreemark.com wrote an interesting piece about how to improve public engagment in the US, which he correctly notes is relevant not just to transportation projects, but also housing and climate. @thefoxandthecity.com has a good thread about it below. As a former pollster, I have thoughts!

Detrended employment compared to the percentage of mortgages going to sub-760 credit scores.

The credit crackdown caused the Great Recession.

Another Nevada Hallucination Matt Darling recently alerted me to something that had somehow escaped my attention.

We needed a recession that had already happened because of a thing nobody noticed to stop a thing that didn't happen that was explained by an economic model that isn't true.
And, would you believe it, things didn't turn out well.

Another Nevada Hallucination
open.substack.com/pub/kevinerd...

"We the people who live in those cities are the reason why those assets appreciate in the first place."

Has any other technically true fact created more downside than the idea that cities are expensive because they are special and are full of special people?

Smash Mouth - Walkin' On The Sun YouTube video by SmashMouthVEVO

m.youtube.com/watch?v=LQj-...

UPDATE: The Trump administration is deporting "nonviolent medically impaired grandparents" to Laos over a 33-year-old drug conviction, a decision Judge Tana Lin says is "inhumane" and "cruel" — but says she is powerless to stop.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

I don't know the statistics, but it seems like a necessary component of safe design should disallow parking in the spaces near where cars may be turning. Otherwise, it seems like there would be cases where it would be very hard to see if you're turning in front of or into a moving biker.

I think this is right, and the way it plays out in your homeownership chart is that for the past decade, households that can get mortgage funding have been buying former rental homes. So, owned homes per capita is flat, but renters who can't form households raises the homeownership rate.

“Jury Duty“ pulled it off again with season 2 “Company Retreat”. What a silly, ridiculous, profound, and beautiful show.

ICE is not about immigration.

ICE is about normalizing a paramilitary force on peaceful streets.

Abolish ICE.

Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing it would be appropriate to use private money to pay for.

The more I think about this, I see a status quo bias at work. Why only do this for new tenants?

There should be an annual environmental review on every commercial and residential building, and if vacancy would be better for the environment, then they need to move out.

We owe it to the earth.

Holy smokes.

How Big Upzonings Affect Housing Supply In this report, we explore how housing investment in New York City and Philadelphia changed over the past 15 years after the introduction of major zoning cha…

How Big Upzonings Affect Housing Supply www.urban.org/research/pub...

BALINT: Are you trying to get revenge on states that did not vote for your boss?

VOUGHT: What's interesting about your question is Joe Biden--

BALINT: Oh, for goodness' sake!

There's a big difference between the privately securitized NINJA loans, teaser rates, etc., and the lending that the federal agencies had been doing safely for decades and retreated from after 2008.

The US is short 10 million houses. A new White House report lays out a blueprint to fix that White House economists estimate the United States has a shortage of 10 million houses. That's according to a report out Monday.

Well, look at this.

If the report recommends loosening underwriting standards at the federal agencies, I'm going to piss myself.

apnews.com/article/trum...

The housing crisis is making young Americans poorer. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal reflects a number of common statistical and rhetorical claims regarding home affordability that I think are misleading or call for some rethinking, and I th...

Some discussion about how to ask the wrong questions re: housing affordability.
kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/the-housin...

Disappointed, though not surprised, I began to describe various life- saving components of USAID’s global health portfolio, highlighting how we prepare for and respond to emerging pandemic threats; support the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV; and immunize millions of children from the deadliest childhood diseases. I spoke for about five minutes, focusing primarily on our infectious diseases work and hoping to keep the attention of people who seemed to have no experience—or interest—in global health. When I finished, the room was silent, the political appointees looking at one another in what appeared to be disbelief. The silence was broken by Ken Jackson, who chuckled softly and shook his head. “Wow, there really is so much that USAID does that we never knew,” he said. “This is the story that needs to get out there.” Joel, also smiling, chimed in next, echoing Jackson’s amazement. “I had no idea you did all this,” he said. “As a Republican, when I think of what USAID does in global health, I assumed it was just, you know, abortions.”

This is NUTS

www.thehandbasket.co/p/trump-usai...

When you add it all up, the collapse in immigration looks like this: a decline of roughly 50K for illegal (even including the people arrested and not released) and a decline of about 132K for legal. Over 70% of the cut in immigration has come from LEGAL immigration.

this is the real national suicide

The creepy Trump-as-Jesus picture Trump posted to Truth Social on 12 April 2026.

"Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light....Supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way....And then I see the disinfectant...by injection inside or almost a cleaning."

The rest of the country is still in the condition where families are generally paying excess rents. That was the condition the coastal cities were in in the 1980s and early 90s, but eventually, the low end hits a limit. I‘d guess over 30 years nearly 1/2 their below median residents have left.

Isn’t it just a ridiculous irony that the schools of self-identified supply-side economists, almost to a person, all decided that what they needed to tell everyone is that “WE HAVE TOO MUCH!!”

What a moment in history.

Stancil makes a common error because he doesn’t understand the problem. He thinks people are upset because they can’t trade up as fast as they want, but they are mad because they are being forced to trade down, which in housing is very stressful.

Ah. I see. Yes.

And, when you're Erdmannpilled and you see quotes like that, doesn't it just burn your retinas?

I had seen bad takes from Cochrane, but I hadn't seen that one.

It's funny how it's always Nevada, too, since there wasn't even a building boom at all there.

For goodness sake.

But, the "Everything is fine" folks don't even know they aren't measuring rent inflation precisely enough to understand this.

7/7