Robert Hale

Does this say 2031? 5 years from now?

Some office districts got Keystone Opportunity Zones waiving almost all state & local taxes.
New offices were built there.
Center City did not get any KOZ.
Residential conversions are a direct response to local policies, giving tax abatements to convert but nothing to stay as office. Not inevitable!

And Amtrak’s “was it our sagging wire or NJT’s pantograph, who can tell?” charade is total nonsense. Metro-North and ConnDOT upgraded the famously slow New Haven Line to constant tensioned wiring to stop pantograph tangles. It cut them by ~80%. Amtrak *refuses* to do it in NJ. This is on Amtrak.

Ahhhhh yes ”monarchy” is when the duly elected bicameral legislature passes a bill according to the state’s constitutional provisions and then is signed by the twice-elected Governor

Losers who have no answers to an increasingly unaffordable Connecticut

A wealthy safe streets advocate could do the most good by paying a team of maybe a half dozen journalists to aggressively and comprehensively report every single traffic death in every major city. Depicting the horrifying human cost, FOIing PDs and DOTS, contextualizing it in policy choices, etc.

One thing the mayor-elect could do between now and January 1 is to call on Kathy Hochul to veto the bill on her desk that would ban one-person train operations in the NYC subway. Mamdani was absent the day of the vote, and banning OPTO is incompatible with lower cost (or free) transit.

Sanders: Well, it's got a lot of attention among the elite, if I may say so. Leonhardt: Yes. Sanders: Look, if the argument is that we have a horrendous bureaucracy? Absolutely correct. It is terrible. Over the years, I brought a lot of money into the state of Vermont. It is incredible, even in a state like Vermont — which is maybe better than most states - how hard it is to even get the bloody money out! Oh, my God! We've got 38 meetings! We've got to talk about this. Unbelievable. I worked for years to bring two health clinics that we needed into the state of Vermont. I wanted to renovate one and build another one. You cannot believe the level of bureaucracy to build a bloody health center. It's still not built. All right? So I don't need to be lectured on the nature of bureaucracy. It is horrendous, and that is real. But that is not an ideology. That is common sense. Any manager - you're a corporate manager, you're a mayor, you're a governor — you've got to get things done. And the bureaucracy - federal bureaucracy, many state bureaucracies — makes that very, very difficult. But that is not an ideology.

extremely online posters: “abundance vs. populism is a battle for the future of the Democratic Party!”

Bernie Sanders: ya abundance is absolutely correct, we need to make it easier to do good things like build health clinics. that’s just common sense

YouTube video by The Ezra Klein Show This Is How the Democratic Party Beats Trump | The Ezra Klein Show

Ok, fine, I can see some Conservadem campaigns making sense, but it's weird to trot out reproductive rights-where the Democratic position has supermajority support, as the first issue to pragmatically move right on. www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8iw...

The funny/sad/enraging thing about this is that the competent technocrats who worked for Mayor Bloomberg would never survive a minute under Mayor Cuomo, since the one thing the man has experience doing is pushing out qualified, competent people.

Watercolor rendering of the Long Island City waterfront post-rezoning

NEW: The OneLIC plan has been approved by the @Council.nyc.gov Zoning Committee!!!

This will bring over 14,000 new homes — including over 4,000 permanently affordable — to a transit-accessible area of Long Island City. This is NYC's largest neighborhood rezoning in decades.

We should have nicer housing for rich people too.

Have people seen what a million buys in NYC? Welcome to your 1 bedroom apartment in Brooklyn heights. Ridiculous.

hakeem jeffries sees his highest political calling as sniping on brooklyn democratic factional battles and new yorkers should have the opportunity to vote to free up his calendar so he can devote more time to that

When is a tent too big? Regarding Abundance Conference 2025

I wrote up my thoughts about Abundance Conference publiccomment.blog/p/when-is-a-...

MN doesn’t meet that standard anywhere within city limits either.

Liberals don’t have to lose on immigration “Moderating” on immigration doesn't mean abandoning it

The biggest problem American liberalism faces is how to maintain high levels of immigration while respecting the democratic will of the public. I have an idea.

www.theargumentmag.com/p/liberals-d...

Nonsense like this is why perception and reality don’t align. Most of the city is “blocks away” from the subway. This had nothing to do with the subway. And yet, here’s a crappy dishonest headline.

CT housing shortage, post-COVID climate behind new wave of hotel conversions to apartments From Hartford, Vernon and Cromwell to New Haven, Shelton and Brookfield, about 780 apartments have either been built, approved or proposed in former hotels over the past year.

“From Hartford, Vernon and Cromwell to New Haven, Shelton and Brookfield, about 780 apartments have either been built, approved or proposed in former hotels.”

The article makes it sound like a lot, but for context that’s about .05% of CT’s 1.5 million homes.
www.ctinsider.com/news/article...

My landlord installed a dishwasher in my unit shortly before I moved in, probably to lower the water bill. I get my meditative hand washing in by cleaning my cutting boards and knives; the dishwasher handles everything else way better.

Hours? The 1-hour cycle on my pretty basic 18-inch dishwasher works fine for anything that isn't caked in grease.

I'm sure these barriers have a modest impact, they're cheap, and at minimum, people who are worried about falling onto the tracks can stand behind them.

But, wow, they are a funny excuse for actual barriers, which actually prevent people from falling in. They're the sombritas of platform doors.

PATH’s ability to grow ridership while it catches on fire every other day and barely runs weekend service is astounding to me. Shows the sheer latent demand - imagine what these numbers would look like if PATH was a functional rapid transit system.

Mayor Adams Announces Public-Private Partnership To Reimagine 14th Street Corridor in Manhattan  - New York YIMBY Renderings reveal the proposed 14th Street corridor overhaul from Marvel in Manhattan.

Yawn. A serious effort to redo 14th would consist of telling the DOT to look up what to do in the NACTO manual and get after it. newyorkyimby.com/2025/07/mayo...

A lot has happened to PATH in the past 25 years -- 9/11, major construction work, COVID, etc. But consistent across all of these events have been ensuing reductions in off-pk service levels: since 2005, the number of PATH trips crossing the Hudson on Saturdays has fallen by *50%*

Hmm, if you're going to be digging tunnels, I see more value in digging them for the RER (B/D Nord-Châtelet, Montparnasse, making the C useful) and a cross-Paris TGV than diluting the 1 and adding more métro mileage way out in the banlieue.

July 2023 vs. July 2025.

How 200k+ growth vs 147k growth is described...

What are we doing here people?

A 30+ year old design, locked in for at least another 40 years to come.

Clearly none of the design improvements that @mta.info used for the R211 subway cars has trickled down to @mtalirr.bsky.social. An utter lack of any imagination.

CT P&Z’s have no authority over solar farm approvals. The result: 88% of projects are approved.

A 2025 bill would have added “local control” to solar, and Gov. Lamont worried we’d get less carbon-free energy. Makes you wonder if those dynamics might apply to housing!
www.wfsb.com/2025/05/13/i...