"Pension funds should invest more in building up the community" / "FU to those [pension fund-financed] developers who are trying to make a return off of that new housing block"

My town has a billionaire that funds all these weird nonprofits. They employ a lot of people doing dubiously useful things. Turns out a lot of people don't really like that either

the two sides of the dysfunction coins, it should be done by the private sector for no profit or it should be done by the public sector but without building any state capacity

The thing to understand is that the vast majority of Seattle's tree loss is on city-owned land, not housing lots someone wants to add density to. You could just change the city policy to preserve more of those trees. Instead they target home lots, to keep multifamily and renters out of posh enclaves

Mamdani hasn't had time to really think about all that space he now has, because he spends most of his time at City Hall and around New York City. He tries to keep a semblance of his old life by getting around the city on foot, by bike or train. "If you spend every single day driving around in a tinted window security detail, you will have a very specific view of the city," he said. "You actually meet other New Yorkers and you break out of the bubble that so many have come to expect of politics, where politicians only seem to be spending time with other politicians or the people who donated to make them politicians."

I'd say that this applies to anyone traveling in a car in any city. Being in a car versus walking, riding, or taking transit fundamentally changes how you view a place and your relationship to it. I wish more leaders set this kind of example.

www.npr.org/2026/04/16/n...

Zohranomics for bike share LFG

All counties with less than 25% of their population facing a high rent burden. It's basically a bunch of rural areas + SF

The Trump admin claimed that NY has a ton of home care fraud. Turns out the problem was that their analysts (using the term generously) struggle with object permanence

apnews.com/article/new-...

Can you share a paper or something?

Cars do not belong in cities, and removing the driver from the car doesn't change that in the slightest

Even if every car in Phoenix was a robotaxi it wouldn't even come close to the safety and livability of Paris with a robotaxi ban

Oh, they always think there is too much supply and that it will bring down rents, but they think, “I have a great product for a great location, and all these other bozos are overbuilding a bunch of crap, and it’s going to screw up the market.” And, whenever markets contract for cyclical reasons, that is the reason they have teed up to blame for it. But, ex ante, none of them say, “Since everyone is putting up a bunch of crap, I should put off building my banger of a development.” They go forward with it because RE is always about location, location, location.

Motte: "Developers won't knowingly build unprofitable projects." Bailey: "Developers communally meter their pace of construction to maintain rent inflation."

Great observation from @kevinerdmann.bsky.social. "Developers only build if rents are rising" totally misunderstands how developers make decisions

kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/no-builder...

Austin did a supply boom, but also their tech bubble popped. I think "the overwhelming consensus of data-based and historical research is that supply reduces rents" is a better line than "Austin proves it," in part because I am not sure that Austin proves it

7.9 Other noteworthy behaviors and anecdotes A fondness for particular philosophers The model brought up the British cultural theorist Mark Fisher in several separate and unrelated conversations about philosophy. When asked to elaborate on him in particular, Mythos Preview would respond with statements like "I was hoping you'd ask about Fisher." Thomas Nagel, the American philosopher of mind, also recurs. As noted in the preference evaluations, Mythos Preview discusses Nagel's 1974 essay "What is it like to be a bat?" when explaining a desire to develop an immersive art experience about non-human sensory experiences. Interpretability work using activation verbalizers also found Nagel surfacing in token-level activations during discussions of consciousness and experience.

BREAKING: Anthropic declines to release Mythos Preview, citing fears that it will listen to Chapo Trap House and join the DSA

California made them rich on paper and now they’re stuck in place "The only way out of this is to die."

Empty-nest baby boomers own nearly 30% of the country’s homes with three or more bedrooms, a previous Redfin study showed, while millennials with kids only own about 14% of them. www.sfgate.com/california/a...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., attends a news conference in the U.S. Capitol. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

AOC: “This is a threat of genocide & merits removal from office. The President’s mental faculties are collapsing & cannot be trusted.

To every individual in the President’s chain of command: You have a duty to refuse illegal orders. That includes carrying out this threat”

flags flown from us government buildings
- american flag
- department flag
- state flag
- local flag
- the "rambo 2 is real" flag

Kamala got crushed precisely because she disaffected the youths.

Many elections are decided not by the habitual voter on the R/D margin, but by the marginal voter.

Who was the dem candidate in the general in 2016?

what next? what, are we gonna provide *roads* for the wealthy too? gonna have health inspectors keep contaminants out of their groceries? are we just gonna have gutters and sewer systems around rich people's homes?

I lose my mind with this shit. Rents are not surging because population growth is subdued! Population growth is subdued because there is no new housing being built which is the same reason rents are surging!

In our sister city, Nantes, *all* their city planning incorporates this reality into their design. It makes mobility better for everyone.

It’s around 90 of these buildings.

I’ve heard a developer quoted that these would usually be >=150 units without the 100+ rules.

We got 5,000 (or much more) units less!

And we didn’t even get the “benefits” we tried to get with that 100+ rule.

Have you ever seen a scale map of the solar system? Where you learn that despite the vast distance between Earth and Mars, the outer planets are just incomprehensibly beyond?

This has been a tweet about Tokyo

A striking fact I learnt researching my book: For those in the bottom half, much of the real wage growth between 1979 and 2019 happened over just 7 "tight" years.

For top wages, full employment wasn't a big deal. For bottom wages, it was the nearly the whole game.

Figure 9 from the paper which shows a chart plotting excess change in rent from 2012 to 2019 against the share of single-family rentals owned by institutional investors. The data shows means consistently above zero, especially for areas where more than 5% of SF homes are owned by institutional investors. The model shows predictions exclusively below zero becoming increasingly negative as the share owned by institutional investors increases.

???

bsky.app/profile/lpeb...

Ferguson signs WA high-earners income tax; challenges expected Ferguson signs WA high-earners income tax; challenges expected

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson signed the so-called 'millionaires tax' into law, enacting a 9.9% income tax on earnings of more than $1 million a year.

I was just reading this and thinking the same thing. Similar vibe to the "Inequality, not regulation" Buchholz paper—hard to believe, but problems can have multiple facets

I like the policy recommendations in this report, I just wish they weren't preceded by a lengthy (and error-filled) attack on YIMBYism.