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Posts by Jeff Fong

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Reverse Inclusionary Zoning A better way to pay for subsidized housing

Starting to think more deeply about subsidized housing and I'm increasingly of the mind that cities ought to get back in the business of turning a profit.

3 months ago 0 0 0 0
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Fighting Over the Development of a Single Grocery Store in San Francisco Is Exhausting, and Totally Worth It The trench warfare strategy of Housing Activism

politicsinpractice.substack.com/p/fighting-o...

3 months ago 1 0 0 0
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Georgism through Land Leasing Municipal Land Leasing is real, effective, and very, very Georgist

progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/georgism-t...

3 months ago 2 0 0 0
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Inescapable Equilibrium? Thoughts on the Boyd Institute's conversation with Dr. Cameron Murray

Demand side macro-determinism

www.urbanproxima.com/p/inescapabl...

5 months ago 2 1 0 0
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The Biggest Challenge Facing Robots? Surviving Us. Robots need social skills
6 months ago 0 0 0 0
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How We Forced the “Richest Retirement Town in the Country” to Approve More Housing A YIMBY Law story

and now for some actual good news: the yimbys are getting good enough at suing the suburbs that they don't even need to sue anymore! they got a building improved in a very bougie burb just by sending nastygrams signed "sonja trauss"...

7 months ago 9 1 2 0
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The weirdest border town you've never heard of Life between the lines
8 months ago 0 0 0 0
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Strong Towns Need Strong States An open letter to Chuck Marohn

Next up in the state leadership vs local control discourse

8 months ago 1 0 0 0

And, in a more ideal world, we'd also be capturing (expropriating?) a lot of rising land values to roll back into direct/indirect public housing housing provision.

In my mind, this is still a supply story, it's just a matter of exploring all the mechanisms for producing more supply relative to need

9 months ago 1 0 1 0

agreed - this is meant as a very narrow answer to the question of whether devs will ever "oversupply a market"

the more important point is thing is letting densification reduce per capita land consumption as land prices increase (these being the lion's share of real estate cost in major metros)

9 months ago 0 0 1 0

question then - would you be onboard with the idea that, even if privately funded housing dev cannot save us, we still need to reform all the same laws, regs, processes that YIMBYs go on about? (b/c the people and systems blocking housing block all types of housing - irrespective of fin model)

9 months ago 0 0 1 0
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Progress in Chinese Urbanism A conversation about Datong, urban renewal, and finding the future in the past

Had a winding conversation on urbanism and the idea of progress in China - this included Moses-esque urban renewal and the story of ... Chinese Municipal Elon Musk?

9 months ago 0 0 0 0

And fwiw, all that applies to public or BMR housing - the enviro review that kills a duplex also kills the 100% BMR project.

I'd love to see more housing subsidy in the US; but even pumping federal money into the system as-is wouldn't solve our problems.

9 months ago 0 0 0 0

(Last comment and then I'll shut up)

That article misses the point.

What we need to legalize are different types of housing products that let people consume less land and also that can be financed in ways diff ways.

9 months ago 0 0 2 0

(2) a lot of this is about allowing people to reduce their per capita consumption of land. In high cost US metros, the land component can be something like 66% of the overall cost - legalizing more (and more types) of housing that sit on smaller lots is a huge part of solution.

9 months ago 0 0 0 0
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(1b) you correctly point out the difference between ADUs vs apartments in a diff comment, super important - missing middle housing, which is illegal in most places, could be funded in ways/by people who won't expect the same type of returns as volume devs (this is a big @strongtowns.org point)

9 months ago 0 0 1 0

(1a) devs will absolutely oversupply a market, specifically by building themselves off a cliff into a downturn. This only happens to the extent that we allow them to actually build during the boom (it's also aided when we have a permitting process that can be navigated in months instead of years)

9 months ago 0 0 3 0

Respectfully, and with the caveat that I'm not familiar with the housing situation in the U.K., I think this is broadly wrong.

9 months ago 0 0 2 0
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Is Zohran Mamdani a YIMBY Socialist? If it quacks like a permit streamliner…

When the sewer socialist is better at talking about licensing reform than a libertarian...

9 months ago 1 0 0 0

Yeah, I personally don't love the Corbusier towers in the park kinda development, but given the situation housing is housing and it maximizes revenue to the Squamish so whatev *shrug*

9 months ago 1 0 0 0
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Senáḵw High-Rise First Nations urbanism in Metro Vancouver

The Senáḵw development in Vancouver, BC is, IMO, the most under-reported story is North American Urbanism today.

There's the obvious YIMBY angle, but there's also a Georgist one, something about regulatory arbitrage, something about placemaking, and even a bit about the politics of reconciliation.

9 months ago 5 2 1 0
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Please do not meme yourself into thinking that communist countries defunded their police forces.

9 months ago 4591 573 179 53
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Abundance Network x YIMBY Action Podcast A great conversation on the relative efficiency of various strategies for buying votes

YIMBY Action x Abundance Network

9 months ago 0 0 0 0
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Interview: Pablo Sepúlveda, founder and CEO at zlvas Cities and their data part II

Sat down with Pablo Sepúlveda to learn how zlvas (pronounced zel-vuhs) is productizing the entire NYC zoning code.

As we move forward, we're going to see more and more attempts to represent laws, regulations, and ordinances as structured data (exactly what zlvas is doing for NYC land use)

9 months ago 0 0 0 0
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Middle Housing rezoning goes to #Berkeley city council vote tonight.

Big question is how many homes per lot.

Will it be a handful of large 2,000 sq ft+ houses, or will a larger number of smaller starter homes or flats also be allowed.

For best results we want flexibility for either. 1/

#berkmtg

9 months ago 97 13 3 2
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The Death of a Waymo When propaganda of the deed comes for autonomous vehicles
9 months ago 0 0 0 0
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How Hamlet makes public data useful Cities and their data Part I

www.urbanproxima.com/p/how-hamlet...

10 months ago 0 0 0 0

I dunno if the person who used to take care of this on the old app made it here, but...

...an lvt would fix this

10 months ago 1 0 0 0
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Power Building for Pro-Housing Reform (as told by a product manager) A guest post by Jeff Fong, YIMBY Action National Board Chair

as it turns out, standing up a YIMBY chapter is not unlike a doing a new market launch

10 months ago 0 0 0 0
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Infill Friday.

Edmonton edition. One house hiding in the trees to...

Fourplex!

10 months ago 41 2 3 0