Is he talking about DC’s mayor? 👀

"Food being a human right doesn't mean that someone does it for free. It just means that it's getting paid for by someone to be available to everyone."
(BTW, that also applies to housing!)

Make Your Own Damn Movie! - Wikipedia

Huh, this exists. Guess I should do a "Make Your Own Damn Building" reaction meme
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Yo...!

Cheap Eats, Cheap Labor: The Hidden Human Costs Of Those Lists Those all-too-common lists of cheap places to eat are part of a broader restaurant culture that devalues immigrant labor and ignores the consequences, says commentator and restaurateur Diep Tran.

"new restaurants are too fancy" discourse, in particular...
www.npr.org/sections/the...

The same thing can and does happen to house prices, if only we let it happen:
ggwash.org/view/99926/h...

Tata Nano sends used car prices tumbling in India Tata’s new Nano ‘peoples car’ isn’t due to arrive in Indian showrooms until the end of this year but that hasn’t stopped it having an influence on the Indian used car market. Used prices for...

Even more pertinent: the introduction of a really cheap *new* car caused *used* car prices to plummet
www.drive.com.au/news/tata-na...

Basically this:

A new convert to nonpartisan redistricting!

I’d Love to Pass Through the Strait of Hormuz, but No Worries If Not “I’m reaching out because, well, I’ve got this shipment of 2.1 million barrels of crude oil, and I would LOVE it if I could just squeeze on by and pass throu...

Sometimes you publish a brilliantly silly piece about an ongoing news story, and sometimes, minutes after it publishes, that news story takes a major turn that instantly renders the brilliantly silly piece dated. Them's the breaks in the fast-paced world of satire.
www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/id-...

Not everyone realizes that social status competitions are occurring in parallel. Why can't every clique just get along... 😆

The classic Onion headline "This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t" has been modified to say "This Project Will Calm Traffic and Improve Safety for All Road Users vs. No It Won't"

This is what the bike lane discourse sounds like

Gov't fees are a soft cost, as is the stormwater bond I have to post. But the $50K/unit stormwater detention tank & filtration system for my townhouses (SFHs are exempted entirely) is a hard cost.

Fire walls have more material and more complicated detailing. Most of the increase is site work costs: more complex stormwater, higher "multifamily" standards for driveways, and smaller sites being more difficult for staging

One potential mechanism behind the eternal arguments between "downwardly mobile gentrifier" NIMBYs vs. upwardly-mobile YIMBYs: "experience of upward mobility... is associated with a less zero-sum worldview" (aka abundance mentality)

Instead of 136 apartments one block from Metro (47 affordable or artist units), there will be 17 rowhouses for $1.5M+ apiece. The site has been empty since 2009 and is ONE block from Metro.

Both graphs are per unit, variable sq ft.

DC's strict solar-rights laws have predictably been weaponized to prevent taller housing, e.g. the 9-story bldg proposed for this vacant lot.
I'm developing a surface parking lot right now; it won't get a solar canopy b/c future ADUs above it would have a much greater carbon impact.

These are *not* small structures; they have welded steel bracing and concrete footings. Cost is 40% more, energy and carbon footprint is 2-4X larger (concrete = lotsa CO2).
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Ground/roof-mount systems can just drill prefab studs in.

But finding an all-trips mode share survey for downtown residents would be very difficult, particularly given small sample sizes. Maybe some city's downtown BID has done one?

Get the crowd back together: office conversions won’t be enough to rebuild downtowns’ population density Converting existing office buildings to residences won’t be enough to stop the “urban doom loop,” because apartment buildings contain many fewer people than similarly sized office buildings do.

Would be interesting to see. I suspect that combining high walk mode share + substantially lower population density = much lower transit ridership from the same building
ggwash.org/view/98189/g...

MTR's newer CRRC sets are definitely optimized for very heavy duty, with almost all comforts stripped away. Average journey times are short in super-dense HKG, so who even needs a seat? Polar opposite of original BART, which was intended for long seated commutes

The bigger falsehood about the L illustration is that it assumes SFH = middle-floor condo in price or cost, which is absurd on its face.
Not sure why this persists when real-world numbers exist
flickr.com/photos/payto...
bsky.app/profile/west...

Ethanol is just comically inefficient solar energy | Food and Environment Reporting Network For all the backbiting and vitriol, the main candidates in the recent Iowa GOP presidential caucus agreed on a lot of issues, from immigration crackdowns (wonderful) to federal incentives for electric...

You know what *is* an incredibly smart idea, but one with bad aesthetic vibes? Bulldozing farm fields for ground-mounted solar panels.
thefern.org/2024/01/etha...
Agrivoltaics can usually avoid the concrete foundation; cows are shorter than trucks & don't move as fast

As long as drivers are paying:
bsky.app/profile/west...
I haven't run the numbers myself, but I've talked to people who built solar carports that paid for themselves with DC's crazy high incentives

I'd be willing to trade a solar parking lot requirement for zero minimum parking requirements + street parking pricing. Making parking more expensive would do MUCH more to combat global warming than the solar carports would.

The greenest parking lot is... no parking lot.
Allowing one (1) household to live in DC instead of the exurbs = 26 MT CO2 = as much CO2 savings as a 3000-parking-space solar arrays (= half of a large shopping mall parking lot).

Is small or big solar better for the environment? Comparative life cycle assessment of solar photovoltaic rooftop vs. ground-mounted systems - The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment Purpose Both the capital cost and levelized cost of electricity of utility-scale ground-mounted solar photovoltaic (PV) systems are less than those of representative residential-scale solar rooftop sy...

Concrete foundations double the system's carbon footprint
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
(Obviously, this doesn't apply if there was already going to be a parking-lot shade structure, but those are only common in a few states.)

That this idea (greenwashing minimum parking requirements) is so popular gives me a headache.
The crash-proof structures have to be huge to withstand truck crashes: "A carport is roughly 40% more expensive compared to a ground mount system"
www.cnet.com/home/solar/s...

Chevron executive Andy Walz suggests Americans should drive less amid high gas prices "People should try to drive less. They should try to conserve energy," Andy Walz told CBS News. "We should be doing that all the time. Energy's essential for people's lives, but we should conserve it....

"Chevron executive says Americans should drive less" is just chef's kiss

Lathrop shows us how much our building code has killed the livability of our housing

The old buildings have thin floorplates with light on 2/3 sides of each unit. Good for crossbreeze and better tenant experience

The new buildings are double loaded corridors that have light on 1 side on many units