A lesser known part of the BUILD plan in Illinois is to stop requiring parking for smaller and medium size homes (regardless of transit proximity), adaptive reuse into housing, and ground floor businesses in mixed use developments

Read Jonathan’s 🧵 about why doing that matter so much

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┻┳| •.•) (Yonah is back)
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Zoned Capacity Is Like an Artificial Oil Deposit Why cities can claim they have room for thousands of new homes on paper and still not build them

This research provides concrete evidence that, as @aarmlovi.bsky.social has argued, large-scale upzonings—enabling very substantial density in areas with high demand—can indeed attract very large amounts of new housing, beyond what we would expect otherwise.

New residential buildings in Gowanus. Source: https://www.crainsnewyork.com/real-estate/boom-times-continue-major-new-gowanus-projects/

Upzonings in New York City produced substantial increases in housing supply. Source: https://www.urban.org/research/publication/how-big-upzonings-affect-housing-supply

When NYC rezoned Brooklyn's Gowanus neighborhood to allow high-density residential uses along a cleaned-out canal, it hoped to attract thousands of new housing units.

That's exactly what it got, new research comparing upzoned areas to similar, non-upzoned areas shows: www.urban.org/research/pub...

Neighborhood scale upzonings increased housing production in many NYC neighborhoods

Upzoned block faces saw significant increases in housing unit permits in Philadelphia

How do upzonings impact housing supply?

In brand-new research published today @urbaninstitute.bsky.social, we show that big upzonings in New York City & Philadelphia had large, statistically significant effects on supply & permitting with several years of reforms.

www.urban.org/research/pub...

I'm less than a quarter Hungarian but when you do the haircut...

BUILD Research Network - Better Urbanism, Infrastructure, and Land-use Decisions The BUILD (Better Urbanism, Infrastructure, and Land-use Decisions) Research Network connects researchers, policymakers, and funders working to improve housing, energy, and transportation systems.

Are you a researcher or policymaker working on housing, energy, or transportation issues?

Welcome to the BUILD Research Network! A project of
@ssrc.org w/ support from @arnoldventures.bsky.social, BUILD is a new platform for strengthening the research-to-policy pipeline.

build.ssrc.org

🧵/9

Link to Mayor Mamdani's AMA here:
bsky.app/profile/sesq...

Feel free to submit a different stock photo of a subway entrance at a parking lot that makes the exact same point and doesn't affect the thesis or intent, if so moved

Our AGF blog is new but we have great readers!

Deputy Mayor Bozorg already knew the thesis--she knows how zoning & feasibility work--but I'm honored to see it shared as a useful explainer

Mayor Mamdani is laser focused on housing supply & his team is leaving no stone unturned

I believe I linked to you? Will fix if not
x.com/i/status/203...

If you're mad about DC's awful draft plan, and want to connect the dots across why every missing middle "Plex" bill of the 21st century has failed, while Missing Massive towers are marching forward?

Check out our new AGF post on the "zoned capacity illusion" open.substack.com/pub/abundanc...

Oil is in the news right now, but all it really means is that there is a difference between what's physically possible vs what is economical, and in any industry you obviously need to know what that is

Oh this is a good one! Hits many of things I'd love to see more strongly integrated into the next phase of Seattle's land use planning

Zoned Capacity Is Like an Artificial Oil Deposit Why cities can claim they have room for thousands of new homes on paper and still not build them

New Abundance & Growth Fund team blog:

Come for the broadside on the "zoned capacity delusion", stay for Missing Massive jokes & cheeky footnotes

Megacity housing production reform will require slow, wide-area incrementalism *and* fast, targeted Missing Massive
open.substack.com/pub/abundanc...

@groktr.bsky.social can you help?

Attention @stephenjacobsmith.com and other pro-NIST building & materials science hopers

Neoliberalism is bad

What we need is some kind of new Classical Liberalism--taking the best ideas from Enlightenment from Locke to Smith to JS Mill--and updating them for a post-imperial open society with updated views on gender & social equality

We could call it New Liberalism

We need to stop prioritizing parking lots over people.

Today, I assembled a roundtable to discuss our Building Up Illinois Developments Plan — and the consensus was that we need to act fast.

Looking forward to passing it and getting to work in our neighborhoods.

The economics of decking outside of Manhattan are……. 😬😬😬😬😬

Public policy can seem dry--like it or not, it's like being in grad school forever

But then sometimes a big special interest group puts on the hot dog costume & says "Yes, we're toxic to multifamily. But Mayor Bass already killed multifamily. So it's impossible to say if we're bad or not"
🌭🌭🌭

A puzzle:

-Modern affordable housing sets AMI-based rents

-Modern rent control set rents with CPI or similar

Why isn't there AMI-based rent control?

Imagine if units >40yrs old got CPI controls til they fall to 80%AMI...after which they get AMI-based increases like all other affordable housing

I just asked Claude to summarize @seattletransitblog.com and @theurbanist.org coverage of the ST3 debacle.

Go read the original authors, but get a taste for how bad it is here:

It was already bonkers to duplicate Sounder commuter rail + express buses with a new LRT "regional spine" that's slower than the existing alternatives

But it's even worse to prioritize that duplication while shredding the better elements

This is a disaster for rail planning credibility in Seattle

Austin’s Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents After decades of explosive growth, Austin, Texas, in the 2010s was a victim of its own success. Lured by high-tech jobs and the city’s hip reputation, too many people were competing for too few…

A 19% drop in inflation-adjusted rents? That's nothing to sneeze at. 🤩

Pew's latest data on Austin's zoning reforms is a must-read.

YIMBYs have proudly rooted our analysis in academic econ + common sense ("housing bans tend to ban housing")

But proposals like §901 go far beyond academic literature, leaving us with think tank guesses

Today's Urban Institute paper claiming the loopholes aren't actually good enough is concerning

Yes! Plus a guaranteed pipeline of large investor demand for the new off-chassis homes from any builder who wants to spin up or contract with a factory!

There are already ~15 firms offering fully exempt CrossMods for BTR or for sale development

That's the Detroit example--but it's all infill in Detroit

Detroit's state capacity is so withered that they don't even know how to reactivate utilities from old demolished homes on time anymore

Site built or manufactured, Detroit is in deep trouble on infill utility reactivation

We "vibe-scored" base ROAD package at ~50k-100k homes/yr on average over the business cycle, with uncertainties & local interaction effects driving a wide band. Pew had similar

We were afraid the new LII BTR ban would cut ~50k/yr, but CrossMods can backfill much of that!
bsky.app/profile/sadb...

Big investors can keep deploying SFR capital if they meet the industrial policy goals accompanying HUD Code chassis reform

Disciplining big capital can spook its animal spirits, but that's a risk with industrial policy & market shaping

Not my laissez-faire approach. But not a hard ban either!