Salim Furth

Chicago has a market for parking reform The city’s new reforms will help build more units

Zak and I coded over 900 upzoning requests introduced in Chicago to analyze how home builders responded to the city’s parking reform (part of the Connected Communities ordinance)

Guess what: they responded by building less car parking 👏

The Anti-Abundance Critique on Housing Is Dead Wrong Antitrust critics say that homebuilding monopolies are the real culprit of America’s housing woes. I looked into some of their claims. They don’t hold up.

Striking piece in which a reporter calls up the sources relied on by the anti-monopoly movement to claim construction oligopolies are driving up housing costs—and finds that none of them agree with the activists who supposedly basing their ideas on them.

New post: marketurbanism.com/2025/07/25/y...

We are nothing if not earnest :-D

YIMBY organizing would not have gotten very far over the past several years if advocates weren't earnestly committed to explaining complex and highly technical issues in land use to laypeople.

Probably the moving speed difference is all bike type. But there are other factors - turns are fairly frequent, routes are less familiar if you're touring, touring routes are built around quaintness, not quickness, and yes, you'll regularly be cycling in bike traffic moving 15 kph.

Some places I've found interesting are interspersed in the discussion of planning v. libertarianism here: marketurbanism.com/2021/08/19/r...

- Central Maassluis is underrated

Cycling:
- give yourself more time than you would for the same distances in the US unless you have a serious road bike. A km in NL takes me as long as a mile in the US.
- Plan for serious headwinds as you ride SW.
- Use the Buienradar app for weather.

From a planning perspective:
- make sure you wiggle around Ypenburg on your way from the Hague to Delft
- Consider adding central Rotterdam, with phenomenal postwar modernist architecture. It also feels more modernly-urban than Amsterdam.
- Consider adding Houten, perhaps the peak of Dutch planning

12 Angry Men, but none of them as angry as Bobby when he sees this layout

@bobbyfijan.bsky.social, did I find the world's worst apartment layout? And is it the most-viewed layout diagram in history??That's Henry Fonda at the top of the frame.

He lived in an apartment when he was little, and even after we moved to a house, he would point to an apartment building in his favorite picture book and say "home"

Kids are building a setup with blocks.
8 y.o. "Only houses allowed. If I see an apartment building, I'll wreck it"

WHAT HAVE I DONE WRONG 😭

Some next-level nominative determinism

LOLOL. It's one of two gates in the city of **** referred to as Porta Ticinese. This one is a "12th-century gate featuring a central gothic passage with two lateral arches and a merlion tower."

I googled it, but I won't spoil

Va. appeals court says Arlington can eliminate single-family-only zoning The Northern Virginia county’s push for more “missing middle” housing had divided its residents and was paused in response to a lawsuit from some homeowners.

Arlington's missing middle policy ending single-family-only zoning was effectively reinstated Tuesday by a Virginia panel of judges, who ruled that homeowners suing over that effort did not adequately take real estate developers to court, too.

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202...

Prague?

Opinion | The RFK megaproject promises just empty gloom. Let’s try this instead. Rather than an expensive megaproject, D.C. should focus on an organic approach to city-building.

@salimfurth.bsky.social makes the case that DC should not settle for a new stadium at Stadium-Armory and should instead press for more housing through incremental development. It will be Hill East East: www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Opinion | The RFK megaproject promises just empty gloom. Let’s try this instead. Rather than an expensive megaproject, D.C. should focus on an organic approach to city-building.

"if football stadiums made cities interesting and engaging, the Ravens’ M&T Bank Stadium would link together bustling neighborhoods. Instead, its gloomy emptiness extends across the adjacent blocks..."

Hey @salimfurth.bsky.social great article!

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Nice article, featuring @salimfurth.bsky.social and pals, on the busiest state legislative for the pro-housing cause yet www.governing.com

All the usual caveats about trusting proprietary rent data apply here (it tends to capture the high end of the market best, since that’s what gets listed on major national listing sites), but, this is a lot:

My least controversial transit opinion is that single-ride paper tickets make good bookmarks.

Plenty of people have read & used it. During the drafting process, I had a call with the authors and so they know my views and say they'll take them into account (in small ways) in their next draft.

Would be nice to see more Boston zoning changes in that direction

I think decision making in school siting is an important frontier in land use policy reform. Lots of states have regulations or guidelines that either require or suggest very large sites for new schools.

Thanks for letting me live rent free inside your head, tho, it's very spacious in here :-)

Woah, I hadn't seen that new section. But why uncomfortable? A tiny bit of shade...

All of the names in this story are excellent

Helps to literally own the money printers

Is the Federal Reserve Overstaffed or Overworked? Insights from the Fed’s Financial Statements Abstract This policy brief compares the operating expenses of the Federal Reserve with other large federal agencies. Inflation-adjusted salaries of Fed employees increased 67 percent from 2007 to 2024...

The completely ridiculous cost of building in the U.S., Federal Reserve edition: The Fed is spending $2.5 BILLION on renovating their DC HQ building. www.mercatus.org/research/pol...