Steve Zekany

The PTP folks simply refuse to confront the issue of affordability in any meaningful way beyond performative hand-wringing.

The purpose of a city is not to be a museum-piece of nostalgia for people who moved in decades ago. It’s to suit the needs of those who live and work there today.

Being a student (undergrad and later grad) I watched housing affordability deteriorate.

- In the 2000s I knew grad students who bought condos or small houses
- By mid-2010s, finding a small apartment on a grad student stipend was difficult
- Today you need a roommate or personal savings

#a2council

Super glad to see More Neighbors advocating for my hometown of Ann Arbor to be a place where normal people can live instead of becoming a boutique college town.

A 21% decrease in under-18 residents over 20 years shows the city was on the wrong path, and it’s time to correct that.

Also, incoherent NIMBY confusion over basic economics. Erin is worried that The Developers will cram “unlimited” units into four story buildings like the Weasleys’ car from Harry Potter; meanwhile Kitty thinks the housing supply is a zero-sum game where homes can only be replaced, never added. 🤦‍♂️

We’ve seen this movie before. Refusal to build is a choice to create an in-place retirement community.

First step will be school closings and “where did all the trick-or-treaters go”? Then it’ll be “why are so many restaurants closing” and finally “I guess I’ll retire to Atlanta where my kids live”

If you want a world class university in your city but you don’t want housing that employees and students can afford, then you are an unserious person who is advocating for traffic creation.

And for a competitive disadvantage where faculty and students will simply choose to go elsewhere. #a2council

My vision for Ann Arbor‘s future: vibrant neighborhoods with bustling sidewalks, density that supports transit, and local businesses thriving because their workers can afford to be both customers and residents.

The choice of growth over fear, abundance over scarcity, and opportunity over exclusion.

I currently live in Sunnyvale, California, which is like Ann Arbor’s Ghost of Christmas future: aging, dilapidated housing stock where teardowns start at $1 million, next-door neighbors have a 10x difference in taxes thanks to Prop 13, and the local schools can’t even afford school buses.

Such a sharp contrast to many of those who spoke in favor, articulating things like enabling their children to bike to school, their friends (even those not married to business professors) being able to afford a home, and wanting their children to not be priced out of their hometown.

What struck me most about the “pause the plan” folks is the lack of interest in a positive future.

Just so sad to see a group of such fortunate people, each with a zero-sum, dismal view of the world as it is, endlessly catastrophizing about how any change will be even worse. #a2council

The skeleton key to understanding most of the Bay Area’s dysfunction is the deeply internalized idea that cars and parking lots, rather than housing, are the correct mechanisms by which to achieve class equality.

Tried for hours (on Monday morning when I had work to do) to get an in-network provider appointment. Gave up, went to Target, signed 1 sheet of paper, used Apple Pay, and was out in 20 minutes. Ordered glasses from a place w/ overnight delivery. $350 total compared to waiting weeks.

As an illustration of this, I broke my glasses over the weekend and am currently relying on a pair from 2018 that make all distant light sources look like large glowing blurry orbs (antiglare coating is worn out). Can’t get my last prescription because the optometrist went out of business.

I’m like two weeks late to this but my personal theory is Americans’ anger at insurance companies is mostly b/c it turns healthcare into a 3-body-problem: placing substantial administrative burden on you while also limiting your negotiating power, rather than the profit/denial-of-care explanations.

Winter in the northeast will do this to you but it tends to burn out by mid January GL

A “free parking” sign in a surface lot in Mountain View, CA with a Cybertruck in the background.

Much of California’s housing and transit dysfunction is explained by the endemic idea that free parking is equivalent to equality.

Decades of thinking “no need to build more homes when people can just drive here” is how you end up with free parking for Cybertrucks next to $3M homes.

The Democrats Are Committing Partycide In the future, even winning the former “Blue Wall” states won’t be enough for the party’s presidential nominees.

Screenshot from Jerusalem Demsas’ excellent article

www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

I can’t stop thinking about how blue cities’ failure to build is creating a Malthusianist society. The median NYTimes reader now believes the solution to the housing crisis is to accept that homeownership is impossible, or wait for a fraction of society to die off. Just completely bleak stuff.

Man, the comments on that article are so bleak. Beyond the usual blaming of immigrants, wealthy homeowners, the Fed, and Airbnb, we have insightful ideas like “actually wanting a home is bad for the environment” and one person openly advocating for a large fraction of the population to die 😬

Inference-time scaling marks the twilight of the “write better than ChatGPT” assignment paradigm, which is (ironically) a good example of goal misspecification in an adversarial multi-agent environment.

A chart in three parts showing data on child mortality to make the points that "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time."

The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.

All three statements are true at the same time. Understanding this is key to solving big global problems.

We believe data & research can help us understand both the problems we face & the progress that’s possible. 🧵

In fairness to the high school kids it’s tough to grasp the humor while hitting all the key changes and trying to remember whether this “I wiiiiiish… t’g’t’the FESTival” is the one that switches to 7/31 time.

Lot of people dunking on this but it illustrates why Democrats need to get serious about improving local governance; plus permitting reform and overhauled comms strategies at the national level.

If you accomplish things but don’t talk about them, the median voter won’t know.

A screenshot of an airline seating map showing almost entirely empty seats, except for a single person sitting in seat 18 B, a middle seat in the leftmost column of three seats.

I know booking my flight to London six months out reveals my pathological obsession for meticulous planning, but I’m genuinely curious about this person in 18B who booked even further in advance just to ensure they would have a middle seat.

I’m sorry but if a random resident during a community input session has better ideas for locating a driveway than the designers, traffic engineers, and other city staff, that suggests that some other process is broken, not that community input sessions are good.

this talking point was annoying 5 years ago but is straight-up infuriating in 2024. COVID saw the largest outflux of economic activity from cities in decades, and CHIPS/IRA spent billions to move jobs out of the coasts. When is it OK to say the problem is a lack of homebuilding?

Cinnupdate: baking went OK-ish, there was definitely some butter leakage and a couple fell apart, but the texture and taste is pretty good!

I suspect the recipe is a solid 9 out of 10 when done correctly. I’d grade mine at about 7.5 (some of the filling leaked and overcooked).

Croissupdate: had some minor dough tearing on the third lamination, and the cinnamon-butter mixture was too thick to spread all the way to the edge without risking more dough tearing. But we push onward regardless!

Thanksgiving dinner host is sick with a fever, so I’m making croissant cinnamon rolls instead. (No I have not done this before. Yes it will probably end in disaster.) 😅

Had a friend do something similar once (dropped his wallet while we were deplaning). Aside from the embarrassment it wasn’t a big deal, we just had to wait around for a few minutes until a ground crew guy could retrieve it.