Jon Geeting

States Have More Power Than They Think to Fund Sustainable Transportation States have the authority to fund trains, buses, bike lanes, and sidewalks with money that would otherwise be used to build more highways.

On Friday, I'm talking with a transit expert about the authority governors have to shift the final year of Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill funding away from highways, to EVs, transit, & pedestrians. Many governors do not know they have this authority! And this year is a crucial window!

Questions?

I sat in on a couple of the single stair working group meetings. Here's a short thread about how the firefighters are trying to sandbag single stair rules in California.

In short: they're structuring their analysis to make single stair look dangerous while ignoring dangers of the status quo.

Leslie Richards will be our guest for BPN policy lunch this Friday open.substack.com/pub/buildphi...

It’s just one city board, but I’m pumped that Mayor Parker threw down the gauntlet on Turn the Key and replaced some unreliable TTK voters on there. That’s pro-housing political leadership open.substack.com/pub/buildphi...

Important to remember that not only did we pass #SB79, the biggest transit-oriented upzoning bill ever, we also passed a clean CEQA exemption for new multifamily infill housing.

This is, bar none, the biggest year in state action on housing policy reform in California history. Not even close.

Follow The Last Farm @TheLastFarm Eco-socialism, agroecology, degrowth. Subscribe to my very good newsletter Same handle on B*ueS*y •open.substack.com/pub/thelastfar…. # Joined April 2022- 1,441 Following 11.9K Followers

The Last Farm @TheLastFarm Follow Good. Building solar farms in the desert is climate suicide 2,500 years old, while the humble creosote bush can live for over 10,000 years. These plants also sequester carbon in the form of glomalin, a protein secreted around the fungal threads connected to the plants' roots, thought to store a third of the world's soil carbon. "By digging these plants up," says Kobaly, "we are removing the most efficient carbon sequestration units on the planet - and releasing millennia of stored carbon back into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, the solar panels we are Geoderma Volume 361, 1 March 2020, 114104 Desert soil sequesters atmospheric COz by microbial mineral formation Net Ecosystem Exchange Rate kilograms Carbon per hectare per year Sky island conferous forest in southern Calfornia desert 100-year-old chaparral during a wet year 520 100-year-oid chaparral during a drought yoar 180 La Selva tropical rainforest (wet yoar) 5000 La Setva tropical rainforest (dry yoar) 1000 Creosote bajada scrub in California desert sequesters more carbon per hectare per year than boreal forest. carbonate when they die rather than returning it to the atmosphere as a gas product of decay in the short term. Because cacti transfer carbon from the earths biological cycle to its geological cycle through the formation of a mineral, this form of sequestration Is a natural long-term terrestrial equivalent to oceanic sequestration of carbon by corals and shellfish. As a result, presentiv. onlv desert plants and ocean animals H Heatmap News & @heatmap_news • 10h This just in: The Esmeralda 7 Solar Project — which would have generated a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power — has been canceled, the

lol the degrowth “left” is praising Trump for killing solar projects

hard to think of a more embarrassing ideology tbh

If you think about it, it's unbelievably frustrating that the 2nd-poorest big city in the US authorized $800M in bond money for housing and the politicians managing it are basically oblivious to very obvious success stories in peer cities

"If we get this right, a new revolving loan fund could become a feeder for PHA’s widely-celebrated acquisition strategy, creating a steady pipeline of new buildings for them to buy, and a new source of revenue to maintain their scattered site portfolio."

The H.O.M.E. Bond Should Fund a New Revolving Construction Loan Fund Don't just spend the money; recycle it

In this house, we believe in the original Parker campaign pledge to literally build 30,000 new units of housing open.substack.com/pub/buildphi...

The Key To PA’s Power in D.C.? Reapportionment will cost PA another Congressional seat in 2030 if we don’t stanch our population drain. Could the solution be … more housing?

PA should build a lot more housing so PA doesn’t lose out in reapportionment again in 2030. The number we need to hit: 130,000 more homes above-baseline. That’s the same number Gov Shapiro says we need to hit to dig out of the statewide housing shortage thephiladelphiacitizen.org/the-key-to-p...

What's cool about these library–housing projects is that they leverage publicly owned land to:
—Provide the space for dozens to hundreds of new housing units.
—Create brand-new library facilities, absolutely necessary at a time when resources for libraries are declining.

The neighbors who opposed housing because they just wanted to see the library reopened as quickly as possible had a good point. The neighbors who opposed the very idea of housing on top of the library for other reasons did not have a good point

I thought CM Young was off-base trying to graft an affordable housing project onto the ready-to-go Cecil B. Moore library restoration project, but it was purely because of the last-minute timing and how it would have delayed the library project while they chased more funding

Intro to PJM policy lunch this Friday at Pipeline Philly buildphillynow.substack.com/p/policy-lun...

I kinda think this is a low-ball estimate. And doesn’t factor in all the housing we could get from this transforming southeastern PA land markets

it's so blindingly obvious that we should do this. it would instantly transform the Philly area into one of the most accessible metropolitan areas in the country.

and yet our politicians don't even seem to realize it's a possibility...

Does this assume status quo crew levels, or some efficiencies (and if so, what)?

Deeply transformative if they can get the funding to do it right. Would fundamentally change how we get around the city.

Sneak Peek: SEPTA's Reimagining Regional Rail Agenda SEPTA's proposal could increase service by more than 100%, while doubling regional rail ridership

SEPTA released some info about their Reimagining Regional Rail reform proposal on a TRB webinar. Some details on the Build Philly Now Substack buildphillynow.substack.com/p/sneak-peek...

Flyer for Build Philly Now’s 10/3 policy lunch with Christine Knapp

We have a great couple of energy-themed policy lunches coming up starting this Friday 10/3 with Christine Knapp (ex-Biden DOE), and on 10/10 with Zach Greene doing an intro to PJM and energy markets buildphillynow.substack.com/p/policy-lun...

There is so little transparency on how shadow docket decisions are made that I'm tempted to read into Kagan's note that the justices didn't get to deliberate in conference.

Do they get to for some applications? Maybe, maybe not www.courthousenews.com/supreme-cour...

BREAKING: Supreme Court lets Trump unilaterally freeze billions in congressionally appropriated foreign aid money

apparent 6-3 vote with liberals in dissent @courthousenews.bsky.social

The first Chicago River swim in 98 years! The water is now clean enough. Congratulations to the hundreds of swimmers completing the swim this morning!

This guy’s speaking our language! @publicuniversal.bsky.social

Probably the only American city with through-running legacy regional rail and one of the few with a quasi-Stadtbahn though, which is cool

Philly is the classic case of “80% of the infra to be a first-rate transit city aaaaaaand then job sprawl and the 70s-90s happened“

Policy Lunch 9/19: Alix Sullivan, Pew Charitable Trusts Philadelphia's capital budget and State of the City neighborhood data series

One thing we’re doing is moving our two-year-old Philadelphia 3.0 Friday policy lunch series over to Build Philly Now. You can sign up for the email list on the Substack or the RSVP form here. We have lunches coming up about PJM, SEPTA, and more on most Fridays substack.com/@buildphilly...

It’s also our sense that city politics features an excessive undercurrent of negativity about doing what’s required to create more of the material things that everybody needs—housing, transportation, and energy. We’ll be doing our best to inject more positivity about these things into policy debates

Some of this has been borne out of frustration that when the city had a limited opportunity to move more aggressively in pursuit of federal infrastructure grants under Biden, there was a LOT more effort spent on figuring out how to divvy up the pie than on getting more total dollars in the door

One of the premises of this project is that an urbanist agenda of more infill housing, more transit, and more affordable energy needs to reconsider the power map in our local political moment. All these things are more likely to be successfully advanced by a coalition of labor and builder interests