Alex Barnhart

AAA estimates the average cost of owning a car is $12,297 a year, and recommends drivers spend no more than 10 percent of their income on car costs. This means you should make 120K to afford the average cost. Median *household* income in the US is $77K. The math just doesn't work.

Best thing to do is to write to your local leaders (city council, mayor, etc) about changing city code to allow for things like Single Stair Apartment buildings, upzoning R1 areas to allow for townhomes/duplexs/triplexes, abolishing parking minimums, etc and speeding up permitting for new housing

Picture of large apartment complex in Austin

Today's affordable housing is the market rate housing that was built 20+ years ago etc. To make affordable housing now and in the future, we need to build housing period. That includes the kind of housing that's pissing you off. Most of Austin's housing that is driving rents down is this type

YouTube video by About Here The Problem with "Luxury Housing"

Here's a good video about specifically that idea. TLDR: Essentially higher income folks move into the "luxury" housing leaving vacancies for folks to move into the cheaper housing they currently live and so on and so on

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbQA...

Lack of diversity in housing options in what's being built is definitely a problem. A lot of that is in zoning codes and regulations (parking minimums etc). That being said, all of those apartments open up cheaper, older housing that otherwise would be taken by folks with the money to afford them

Anyways, that's my rant. Feel free to call me a developer shill or landlord sympathizer or something I guess. I just want more walkable cities and cheaper rents/mortgages

Screenshot of an article that reads: The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market.

Fix the supply issue and companies like Blackrock have much less reason to buy and hold housing. Cities like Austin have been building and showing by example that building housing, even market rate housing, brings rents down for everyone.

Is corporate ownership an issue? Hell yeah and we should do something about it. Do companies like Blackrock explicitly say to investors the reason they are buying houses and apartments is because the US doesn't build enough supply thus making it a desirable commodity for them to invest in

Overhead shot of Vienna showing many multistory apartment buildings as far as the eye can see

Overhead shot of LA showing single family homes as far as the eye can see

Vienna is the classic example from the left of social housing done right and they deserve praise. The problem with that though is they actually built dense housing compared to cities like in the USA. Single family homes are the true luxury housing

Rent control is a great stop gap for stopping the immediate bleeding but long term all it does is trap people into staying in there current housing as the market around them skyrockets and makes it unfeasible to leave meaning the supply of rent controlled housing dwindles fast

I love affordable, non-market, social housing like the next lefty. I will always advocate for that. The problem is without removing the constraints that make it hard to build housing, there will never be enough housing to go around and only the luckiest or people who wait the longest get housing

YouTube video by Oh The Urbanity! The Problem With Left-Wing NIMBYism

As a self described lefty, getting out of the all new housing is luxury housing and that's bad mindset was pretty hard and took a while. This is a pretty rad video that describes why lefty NIMBY-ism is still bad even though it's more caring and understanding

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvTa...

Today, Secretary Duffy said he wouldn't fund high-speed rail projects due to them "not having the means to go the distance".

Hours later, he announced plans to build a nuclear reactor on the moon.

Skill issue 😂

It's so messed up that it's genuinely difficult to just bike around and eat croissants in American cities

Single family zoning effectively mandates McMansionization and economic displacement in high-demand neighborhoods by making it illegal to replace older single family houses with several smaller, less-expensive homes.

When four homes replace a SFH, each new home is about the same price as the original, and at 5 units or more, the new homes tend to be more affordable. But the critical comparison is to the 1-for-1 replacement — a mansionization, in other words.

Frozen | Ice Sound Effects Library | asoundeffect.com 809 Ice sound effects / recordings: Frozen is a collection of ice impacts, scrapes, debris, slides and more taken during a miserably cold winter in the arctic tundra of Massachusetts. These recordings...

My library is on sale!
www.asoundeffect.com/sound-librar...

Hayao Miyazaki, stroking his head, glasses off, cigarette in his mouth, looking entirely done with everything.

Getting that "I should move to Japan" feeling again today

Looking at the cross sections just makes me wish they'd continue to remove a lot of that space for cars after they close it back up and build out some world class bike facilities on top. Maybe less feasible since they ideally shouldn't be in the center but one can dream

If you're gonna keep firing graphic designers and copy writers for AI, you're gonna find out the hard way...

I'm really tired of almost dying on LA streets because some asshole wants to drive to a red light just a little faster

Today is an awful day. Some of the best people I've worked with have been let go

This

The Austin City Council voted 10-1 to allow up to 5-story, single-stair buildings. Austin joins a growing list of North American cities & states bringing back the once popular building type and allowing more flexibility in the types of housing produced in the City.

📍Austin, TX

In the Dallas metropolitan area, housing + transportation costs account for 45% of income, of which 27% is spent on housing and 18% on transportation.

In the New York metropolitan area, housing + transportation costs account for 43% of income, of which 30% is spent on housing and 13% on transportation.

Transportation costs are a huge problem! Housing costs in regions like New York City are, definitely, very high. But transportation costs are much lower! That's what makes it possible for NYC region to have lower overall housing + transportation costs than the Dallas region. htaindex.cnt.org/map/

America Needs More Sprawl to Fix Its Housing Crisis The word has become an epithet for garish, reckless growth — but to fix the housing crisis, the country needs more of it.

Not a single time in this article glorifying the need for sprawl to address the US's affordable housing crisis is there a mention of the vast transportation costs of sprawling living patterns. Nor is there mention of the fact that sprawl is directly linked to disinvestment in urban cores.

Rare W for the USA right now

I’ve previously described abundance liberalism as an attempt to recover elements of the New Deal political economy, and I’d say Trump is setting us up for that pretty well by first recreating the Hoover economy.