Santa Monica is beefing up traffic enforcement, we love to see it

Contributor: Los Angeles is sabotaging itself on housing The city's chronic housing shortage is not for lack of technical capacity or earnest speeches but due to political leaders’ ambivalence toward a remedy.

“Moments of genuine crisis require leaders willing to make tough choices. Cities that build housing do so because they declare it a top priority and align their institutions accordingly. Cities that hedge and delay quietly sabotage themselves” @jessezwick.bsky.social

www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

Cracking The Code: Reclaiming Building Standards for Public Interest Building codes contain complex tradeoffs between safety, affordability, livability, and sustainability that are inherently political. To realign codes with the public interest, reform is needed to rea...

Cracking The Code: Reclaiming Building Standards for Public Interest

may be the first housing paper to cite my book!

by @jessezwick.bsky.social

www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/cra...

really enjoyed this discussion hitting on the 'international' code council (🫠) that touches on how US is outlier in denser buildings costing more per SF than detached houses

Episode 99: The 'International' Code Council with Jesse Zwick (Incentives Series pt. 3) North American buildings are built different — literally. Councilmember Jesse Zwick explains how the organization behind our unusual standards is built to fail, and he makes the case for a new approac...

This was a fun one! Check out our episode with @jessezwick.bsky.social about the organization responsible for US building codes, the 'International' Code Council. This conversation will leave you fired up to *entirely* rethink our approach to building standards. www.lewis.ucla.edu/2025/10/08/9...

Nestled up against the steps of City Hall in LA is a large placard with missing posters for the recently disappeared in the city.

What timing!
@volts.wtf interviews @scottwiener.bsky.social & @buffywicks.bsky.social on CEQA reform.

This is a must-listen for anyone who considers themselves an enviro or a progressive. Dave is as green & progressive as they come and he asks all the right questions.

(link in next post)

Hey those are my constituents! :/

Rojas' ability to GIDP in front of Ohtani with multiple men on needs to be studied. Literally take three strikes or squeeze or anything else, man.

A modest proposal

Roki Sasaki IG announcement

Japanese phenom pitcher Roki Sasaki announces he signed with the Dodgers.

Who knows how this will turn out but Sasaki’s upside is best pitcher in the world.

Governor Newsom signs executive order to help Los Angeles rebuild faster and stronger | Governor of California

Here's the executive order Newsom talks about. This seems to make it even easier to build in areas that keep getting destroyed by climate disasters and doesn't address the serious reckoning that LA will need to have about density, affordability, and managed retreat

www.gov.ca.gov/2025/01/12/g...

The Urbanist Playbook for Trump's Second Term It's time to get real... and get stuff done.

YIMBY policies are good because they lower rents, reduce emissions, and decrease inequality.

but there’s another reason that makes pro-housing policies even more urgent: if we don’t build ASAP, the Blue Wall will not be enough for Dems to win the presidency

open.substack.com/pub/betterci...

Evolution of pick up truck design over time

“As pickups transitioned from workhorses to lifestyle vehicles, their design shifted accordingly: Cabs expanded for more passengers, while beds shrank. The first generation of F-150s was 36% cab & 64% bed by length. By 2021, the ratio flipped, with 63% cab & 37% bed.”
www.axios.com/2023/01/23/p...

[any policy issue] okay but you understand. this is about the price of housing

Days since NIMBYs compared housing streamlining to genocide: 0

A graph of the average age of US housing units, which rises from 25 in 1929 to 35 by 1945 before declining to 27 by 1970, holding roughly there for decades, and then climbing rapidly from 27 to 37 post-2010

America's housing stock is the oldest it's ever been and just keeps getting older. We don't have enough homes in this country and too much of what we have is dated and decaying.

I don’t know of a single city that has pushed as far as this.

If you’re talking about HCHC project the process is very different because it was on city owned land. At the same meeting I put forward and council approved a purely administrative approval process for all new housing projects in Santa Monica.

Let’s take a look at the highest-realistic-capacity sites in LA’s draft list of rezoned Housing Element sites.

I understand the city is working on an updated list, but as it stands, things are not looking great...

New pro-housing council wasting no time getting to work

You need someone with more political skill and more ability to raise money, I think!

I think people basically don’t like to get yelled at and the best and most steadfast yellers in LA politics are NIMBYs (right and left)

I also think public safety issues/ stances are a stronger political identifier for people right now.

Seems like a pro housing pro bike candidate with sufficient credibility on safety would clean up, but there is zero political infra/ donor class/ institutions in LA with those crossover views.

I think the basic truth is that LA civic engagement/ infra among the normie majority who hold reasonable pro-growth views remains weak.

When I worked on Nithya’s race we didn’t have any of those traditional institutions, but there was a strong “progressive” political/donor/nonprofit infra that put us over the top.

So inspiring to hear that Austin area landlords are much less greedy than landlords elsewhere in the country.

Car tyres shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment – urgent action is needed Tiny flakes of plastic, generated by the wear and tear of normal driving, eventually accumulate in the soil, in rivers and lakes, and even in our food.

Every year, billions of vehicles worldwide shed an estimated 6 million tonnes of tire fragments. These tiny flakes of plastic, generated by normal driving, account for 28% of microplastics entering the environment globally.

Heavy vehicles eg SUVs/EVs especially.
theconversation.com/car-tyres-sh...

Opinion | Note to Democrats: It’s Time to Take Up Your Hammers There is a straight line from homeless schoolchildren to Donald Trump’s election victory.

So many thoughtfully worded takes on the need for supply-side progressivism. So few blue state pols truly rising to the challenge. But there’s still a window to fix this.

www.nytimes.com/2024/11/30/o...