Salim Furth

One way to reduce condo defect liability: stop forcing architects to design buildings that leak. HCD’s “objective design standards” guide *encourages* making building envelopes more complex, heightening leak and therefore defect lawsuit risk cao-94612.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/documents/Ap...

Never mind, I'm not going to engage here. This website is a ridiculous parody of itself.

You should come to UEA!

NEW: There were lots of lessons for YIMBYs and housing scholars at the Urban Econ Association conference. My favorite papers were those that offered some cautions or leaden linings to popular ideas.
#UEAMontreal2025
marketurbanism.com/2025/11/03/h...

@ballstonbakfiets.bsky.social used to drive one of these around NoVa

Ugh, I'm sorry

Regardless of whether you build roads, congestion scales with city size because there's an increase in the number of destinations worth driving to (and those destinations are further away). Only a wonk would think that growth might not be associated with congestion :-D

Santa Fe aims to bring building into digital age with land use office modernization Miles Conway, CEO of the New Mexico Home Builders Association, said the paper-based permit system can cost a developer as much as $10,000 for a project.

[The photo is not from the councilor's street. The text is from an excellent article that doesn't otherwise relate to street widths.] www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_n...

Maybe fire departments in colonial-era cities like Santa Fe should buy appropriately-sized vehicles so they can reach all the residents, rather than expecting "good civic planning" to make wider streets??

Normies don't think in per-capita terms.
(A much easier example: immigrants probably increase traffic congestion even though they are less likely to drive than the native-born).

New post, words about words
marketurbanism.com/2025/10/15/u...

Overheard: "Son, what are you doing?? You may not rollerblade on the stairs!!"

To the lawyers out there: how are public art requirements constitutional?

What is the conceivable nexus between building a building and creating a need for more art? The new building will reduce the community's art per capita?

A table titled "Cities That Abolished Parking Mandates in 2025". It lists cities and the dates they removed mandatory parking requirements. The cities are Toledo, OH (Sep 9); Oak Forest, IL (Aug 26); Shoreline, WA (Aug 11); Denver, CO (Aug 5); Boulder, CO (Jul 24); Botnell, WA (Jul 8); Bremerton, WA (Jun 4); Fairview, OR (Jun 4); Franklin, WI (May 6); Fitchburg, WI (Apr 8); and Sherbrooke, QC (Apr 8).

So far in 2025, 11 cities have clearly signaled that the era of mandatory parking is coming to an end! 🎉

parkingreform.org/mandates-map/

1 & 3) Swap out barely-observed, divisive Columbus Day for fun, unifying National Parks Day.
2) Flip MLK Jr Day to August, timed to King's greatest speech, and nudge Labor Day to late September.
+ Juneteenth should be a Monday holiday so it has the predictability to develop its own traditions.

Our holidays have 3 big problems:
1) Columbus Day is divisive; a few others are a bit confused
2) Just 4 of the 11 happen during the bright half of the year
3) There's a 98-day gap from Presidents Day to Memorial Day!

Happy (?) Columbus (???) Day!

This "holiday" (I'm working...you're probably working) is Exhibit A in the case for a federal holiday shakeup.

The program pays the same regardless of land cost and occupancy, a common feature in developing-world housing programs (Mex, ZAF did the same), which is a pretty big incentive for siting them on cheap land.

I've seen a couple of those sites. We had to be taken there by helicopter (!!) because many are built on very cheap land multiple hours' commute from the core of Rio. It's a terrible system and we should not imitate it.

It's like the miracle for the Widow at Zarephath, except with a bottle of Frank's Red Hot that's been Basically Empty since 2022.

Pew finds something that everybody in codes and standards knows but few will say out loud: we apply far stricter fire safety standards to apartments than to houses. www.pew.org/en/research-...

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...

2031? I didn't know that!

I'm a principled defender of local government and participatory democracy. You can tell I'm principled because it runs so hard against my other policy priorities!

A few decades of crappy housing policy isn't worth ending small democracies over.

My wife calls on rows - "would someone in Jon's row tell us..." -as a balance between asking the whole class and calling out an individual.

Minimum Lot-Size Reform Is a Modest Idea with Big Potential A proposed 2026 ballot initiative could seed housing production by making it easier to build more affordable single-family starter homes in Massachusetts.

If it can get 75,000 signatures, Massachusetts voters will be able to vote on a ballot initiative in 2026 limiting minimum residential lot sizes to 5,000 sq. ft. in areas with public water and sewer bankerandtradesman.com/minimum-lot-...

Of all the weaknesses of LLMs, the one I least expected was laziness. But in hindsight it's obvious, given the cost of use.

Me: Please generate a random list of cities and towns in NY
ChatGPT: {thinks...} Amenia, Albion, Poughkeepsie, Albany, Adams, Troy, Allegany, Amsterdam..
Me: What are the odds that 3/4 of your random sample would start with the letter "A"?
ChatGPT: ... 1 in 30 billion

Overheard:
6 y.o.: "The question is, if two self-driving cars crash into each other, whose fault is it?"
10 y.o., thoughtfully: "I dunno."

#raisingthemright