Dungeon Master Tim

Fatal shooting of San Antonio man by federal agents raising serious transparency concerns AUSTIN, Texas — Rep. Ray Lopez, a San Antonio Democrat, invoked a new Texas House rule to force a public hearing into the killing of 23-year-old American citize

According to Texas authorities, video evidence calls into question ICE's own accounting of the fatal shooting of Ruben Ray Martinez. A US citizen was shot and killed by ICE agents and then ICE and DPS attempted to cover it up for nearly a year. news4sanantonio.com/news/local/f...

Transit funding should always come with mandatory rezonings.

I am incredibly lucky that there are folks like @carfreekeith.bsky.social out there who are very skilled at doing short-form video about Chicagoland transit history and policy (and who is kind enough to include #BuildTheTunnel content from time to time)

It’s a real problem that code development has been totally outsourced to the ICC! Talk about a whittling away of state capacity. Building codes and standards are LAWS, and we don’t even have the staff to write them? Yikes.

Asm. Alex Lee, who passed California's single-stair study bill in 2024, has a spot (placeholder) bill, AB 2252, to enact the reform. The state fire marshal was supposed to release their single-stair report almost two months ago, but has not. leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNa...

seeing firefighters oppose safe, international best practice building codes purely out of misplaced inertia and resistance to change has made me appreciate that many urban issues have unexpected villains and you should be skeptical of anyone trying to blame it all on private equity or whatever

Are preapproved plans for common housing types a major (or even minor) part of development in any country?

It's Official: the Cybertruck is More Explosive than the Ford Pinto - FuelArc News We now have a full year of data for the Cybertruck, and a strange preponderance of headlines about Cybertrucks exploding into flames, including several fatalities. That’s more than enough data to comp...

The Ford Pinto had a death rate of 85 people for 10 million cars sold. The Cybertruck hasn't sold 10 million, but the fatality rate so far maths out to 1,452 people killed per 10 million sold.

The Cybertruck may be the deadliest road car, for the occupants, ever sold.

fuelarc.com/evs/its-offi...

South Bend are for infill too. We have a few SFH's, two townhomes, two duplexes, a garage apartment, and a six plex.
3-5 units don't pencil in our market due to Indiana treating 3+ unit buildings as commercial and make them have sprinklers.

Also "students have too much to carry" came up as the 12th-most significant obstacle to walking and cycling.
The real problem? Cars. Parents are worried that their kids will be run over on their way to school. And I get that, because my kids walk and bike to school, and I am worried about it!!

"The leading political news outlets of our time should not be sourcing their reporting from scammy, obviously partisan websites with no mastheads."

this is a damning report worth reading in full

zohran increased the number of snow shovelers from 500 to 1,400 for this blizzard, paying them $30/hour to shovel sidewalks with at least a four-foot berth so that wheelchairs and strollers can get through. he didn't overhaul city government to do it, he just used the power given to him and did it!

A BETTER BILLION, AMA: This is the latest report from the Transit Costs Project. It sought to take all the work we've done on subway construction and push it forward into a vision of what could/should be possible in NYC with a steady source of funding -- transitcosts.com/a-better-bil...

Another update, the BRT hater has proposed amendments that would require the first sale of a single family home to be to a family to use as a residence. (There are 9 other amendments too, but this was a dumb one)

I don't agree with all of Michael's takes but it's notable that he's willing to stand on an island when the data shows him something that contradicts the governing praxis of his ostensible ideological peers (center, center-right). Indianapolis (D) still often struggles to accept the truth of it.

world-historical levels of wholesomeness

Huge new paper out today finds that developers in Los Angeles are willing to pay 50% more for land with building permits in place

(The paper's author, Evan Soltas, doesn't appear to be on bsky, so read the screenshots of his tweets below)

evansoltas.com/papers/Permi...

People that have had ADUs built on their property, what were some of the bigger surprises you experienced?
(Mine will be a detached 600 sf garage apartment with electric from the alley, and running sewer and water from the house)

In Portland, much of our ability to fund new below-market homes indeed depends on construction of new market rate homes.

Property tax growth on existing homes doesn’t even keep pace with growth of our police and fire pension obligations.

(I was trying to avoid referencing that individual in my description)

The yuppies will not leave this neighborhood often. All these features combine into being called a yuppy fishbowl.

Essentially if you permit a high amount of density and nonresidential uses in an area, a lot of capital will flow into it. These residential units are often with a lot of glass on the exterior and ground floor commercial. These often absorb the Yuppies rather than more developed neighborhoods.

Using detailed address-level microdata, we trace movement chains originating with the initial residents of The Central and document three main findings. First, we show the building generated a substantial number of local vacancies. We identify 180 specific addresses that became vacant because of moves into The Central. Scaling to account for data coverage suggests the new tower induced more than 500 local vacancies in the three years after construction, by setting off chains of moves. Second, while The Central units were expensive on a per-square-foot basis, the homes vacated by movers were significantly cheaper. Homes left behind by those moving into The Central were about 40% less expensive. Unlike much of the prior literature, which track the changing neighborhood characteristics of movers

Even more evidence that building new housing decreases rents: Researchers tracked the residents of a newly built luxury condo building and found that they freed up less expensive apartments nearby.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

We did "affordable for whomst" a decade ago, these people need to catch up.

in public, the men's hockey team has been supportive of the women's team, going to games, cheering them on, saying they were inspired by the OT golden goal
must be gutting to feel that support and then get first-hand evidence that behind closed doors, when it's just The Boys, they're laughing at you

The Fishbowl works, you just need to be willing to let it happen.

If you want poor people to have decent housing, you have to support building new condos for yuppies.

It remains amazing that filtering is a 100 year old theory at this point and people continue to deny its existence.

Tapping the sign:

Right-wingers calling every single Generic Democrat a deranged socialist has done more to normalize actual socialism than practically anything else