MF

I don't think there's anything wrong with talking about the state of the housing market as a "market failure" but if you are a skeptical of well functioning markets, as many of us are, here's an alternative: the housing market is working as designed, and we should design it to work differently

New Lewis Center at UCLA report by Paavo Monkkonen on French social housing.

Is the cost rental and financing model upstream of France’s ability to build large number of units without deep subsidies?

escholarship.org/content/qt8d...

YouTube video by Radio-Canada Info Le tronçon Deux-Montagnes du REM devrait être mis en service le 17 novembre

I think we underestimate how appreciated the existence of non-car alternatives is for the layperson. The mayor of Deux-Montagnes says that he loves the REM, and recognizes that mobility has changed, that car- & bike-sharing are picking up even in his far-flung suburb.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCxW...

Climate disasters now consume 35% of all US GDP growth.

If the car industry gets its way, and we keep mandating carsprawl into climate disaster zones, I bet we can make the former U.S. one giant disaster fund.

Who wants to bet Confederate states get more funds? www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

Housing Development Economic Feasibility and Implementation Analysis prepared for the City of Palo Alto

Table explaining development cost results for various types of projects.

Palo Alto just released a financial feasibility analysis of development in its downtown. Key takeaways:

-Nothing is feasible under current market conditions

-Removing impact fees—which are over $100/square foot and ~15% of TOTAL cost for midrise housing—would have a huge impact

I had never encounter this piece of internet lore before and I appreciate you bringing it to my attention.

Books are very readable but there’s an essential hollowness,
the ultimate punchline to all of them is just “nothing matters, the government is corrupt” which for me sort of deflates any drama and makes it boring

Crazy table from this paper. If I'm reading this right, **22%** of the urban core and about 14% of the rest of Downtown Los Angeles is parking.

Why Are So Many Pedestrians Killed by Cars in the US? It’s unfortunately not uncommon for pedestrians to be killed by cars in the US.

Deep dive into the surge in US pedestrian deaths:

"It’s not that more pedestrians are getting hit by vehicles; it’s that the ones that are getting hit are more likely to die."

"[That] seems like fairly strong evidence for the theory that the rise in large SUVs is behind the uptick in ped deaths."

lol
Lmao even

lol at this nimby bop

yeah the development radius around stations was halved unfortunately under the 35k threshold

South Pasadena, Beverly hills, etc did get a bit of a carve-out, the 35,000 population threshold added to the bill among the final amendments limits the development radius around stations to half the size (.5mile -> 0.25 mile)

[VICTORY ALERT] Governor Newsom has signed SB 79, which will make it legal to build multi-family housing near high quality transit!

Our statement:
cayimby.org/news-events/...

thank you for your service 🫡

No, there are not 28 vacant homes for every homeless person The claim rests of two wildly misleading statistics

There really is not, 60% of vacancies last less than 6 months, in most cities its even higher.

No, there are not 28 vacant homes for every homeless person The claim rests of two wildly misleading statistics

I implore you to do some reading on the topic

Which book?

Love this new report on buildings' relative fire safety from @alexhrwtz.bsky.social and Pew colleagues.

www.pew.org/en/research-...

One-third of Angelenos do not drive Walking back the "car-free" games promise is unconscionable in a city where the people who don't drive are also the most vulnerable users of our streets

Reflections on last week's #WeekWithoutDriving in a city that still refuses to acknowledge the existence of its nondrivers — which a comprehensive new report claims make up one-third of LA's population

MR. LAWRENCE VEILLER, Secretary, National Housing As- sociation, New York City: Digitized by Google

212 NATIONAL HOUSING ASSOCIATION we can answer that we must be sure that we want to keep them out. If we put it to a vote in any one of your cities, I think we would find it very difficult to get a vote against an apartment house. I am not for it —don't misunderstand me — but I do recognize that it provides a very convenient way of living, and because of the servant question, which Mr. Davis alluded to, a great many people prefer it. Per-sonally, I think it indicates a very bad tendency and will have a very bad effect on American life and upon our political and social conditions. I don't think you can have proper homes in an apartment house of the highest type.

The question is, " How are we going to stop it?" I think there is a way; at least, I have tried it and I think it is going to work. In framing our laws to regulate the construction of dwellings of all kinds, do everything possible in our laws to encourage the construction of private dwellings and even two-family dwellings, because the two-family house is the next least objectionable type, and penalize so far as we can in our statute, the multiple dwelling of any kind, whether it is flat, apartment house or tenement house.

As brought to my attention by a Strong Towns article by @dpherriges.bsky.social and posts by @dereksagehorn.bsky.social, this is Lawrence Veiller talking about the idea behind using the building code to incentivize single-family houses and discourage apartment buildings, from 1913:

It’s hard to use LA Metro’s ridership dashboard. We built a new one. Visualize, filter, and download LA Metro ridership data with our new dashboard. We made it easy see how bus and rail lines have changed over time - a significant improvement over Metro's antiquated do...

Ooooh! @streetsforall.org built a handsome new interface for viewing graphs of Metro ridership data data.streetsforall.org/blog/ridersh...

Sacramento is building more housing than any other city on the west coast — and third in the west overall behind only the sprawl kings, Vegas and Phoenix. @sacyimby.bsky.social

yes nationally 58% these vacancies last less than 6 months, and in major cities usually about 66% of vacancies are under 6 months.

No, there are not 28 vacant homes for every homeless person The claim rests of two wildly misleading statistics

Please do some reading on the topic

housingmyths.substack.com/p/no-there-a...

No, there are not 28 vacant homes for every homeless person The claim rests of two wildly misleading statistics

I implore you to do some basic reading on the subject
housingmyths.substack.com/p/no-there-a...

When the supply of available homes goes down relative to demand, prices increase. This is one of the best established findings in housing policy, and policymakers who don't center this aren't going to fix the housing crisis.

A lot,
But this is quite sophisticated compared to most of the landlord fraud I see