House approves housing bill, setting stage for tough Senate negotiations After a bipartisan House vote, the housing deal faces a bicameral test.

www.politico.com/live-updates...

#YIMBY posts are a little light this morning on the house passage of H.R.6644 - Housing for the 21st Century Act

Half of the United States' population lives in these 144 counties.

Explore: walkerke-county-popu...

www.slowboring.com/p/trailer-re...

Watched Father of the Bride with my daughter, it hit way differently than when I saw it as a kid.

‘Can You Print a House?’: God, Robots and the U.S. Housing Crisis

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/r...

Why not wigs with sabres?

Opinion | America’s Housing Crisis, in One Chart

"per square foot, affordable housing cost more 1.5 times as much to build in California as market-rate housing"

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/o...

econofact.org/prospects-fo...

The rise for first-time homebuyers really gets going around the pandemic which makes me think that everything that came with that event to push up home prices and then interest rates is doing a lot of work here. I'm in Austin, feels like continued price declines would change that number.

And to add to the byzantine clarity on codes the state requires that new single-family homes be built to the 2015 IRC energy efficiency chapters with a modified compliance path: comptroller.texas.gov/programs/sec...

It would be interesting to research in which of those jurisdictions the costs of new construction are lowest. Especially where the same labor pool could potentially be working in more than one city.

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” ― Epictetus

Housing Reform in the States: A Menu of Options for 2026 Although state legislatures took unprecedented strides toward releasing the housing supply from its regulatory straitjacket in 2025, most pro-housing policies have not yet been adopted in most states....

Tireless Mercatus team @salimfurth.bsky.social @ebwhamilton.bsky.social @charlescgardner.bsky.social just dropped 18 (!) strategies for state govts to increase housing supply. Love the ideas to limit "lawsuits of questionable merit" [ahem, Virginia]. www.mercatus.org/research/pol...

When in doubt there's always The Simpsons

Apartment construction in Austin, TX.

ZIRP

Watch The Four Falls of Buffalo, then watch the Josh Allen children's hospital video, then watch Hard Knocks and root for the Bills.

Gotta re-legalize starter homes on small lots, encourage more experimentation with manufactured housing and other construction modes, restore fiscal discipline to bring down interest rates

At what point should holders of inflation protected securities start to worry?

Grew up in Austin, TX and I was a huge fan of the WGN Sandberg led Cubs and the TBS Justice led Braves.

Investment property owners?

Had fun watching my Longhorns win it this year. It's a great sport, just patch up those interference calls.

I'd also like to thank @kylewalker.bsky.social whose tidycensus R package is my go to for exploring legislative district data.

Y'all have a great ADU law that we sure would like to bring to Texas!

That lack of volume hurts the scale benefit that manufactured home builders are able to achieve in lowering their costs.

They are built to different codes which is one part of the cost difference, but here in Texas there also doesn't seem to be a lot of demand for them. Texas manufactured housing plants will build 1,900 homes in a month here, the highest I've seen residential mods hit was less than 400 for all of 2017

National Zoning Atlas again informs advocacy - this time on manufactured housing reforms in Texas. Our Legislative Brief on Senate Bill 785 used NZA data on 824 jurisdictions, finding 44% would be affected.

A link to the Brief (& other uses of NZA data by advocates) up at zoningatlas.org/advocacy!

Manufactured Housing Survey (MHS) The Manufactured Housing Survey (MHS) is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). MHS produces monthly regional estimates of the aver...

The only things I would add would be delivery and installation/anchoring of the home, but those are dealer setup costs that are included in the pricing data that is published by the US Census Bureau's Manufactured Housing Survey. (www.census.gov/programs-sur...)

Housing Reform in the States: A Menu of Options for 2025 To address the high cost of housing, lawmakers across the country can learn from the experience of states such as Colorado, Tennessee, Connecticut, Arizona, and Montana. Options for reform include rev...

"HUD Code housing is one of the country’s most important sources of housing affordable to low-income people without subsidy. Zoning codes are one factor limiting the use of manufactured housing" - @salimfurth.bsky.social @ebwhamilton.bsky.social www.mercatus.org/research/pol...