Ned Resnikoff

this is what's so insulting about the obama bros or yglesias or grim claiming that this is just normal working class rough guy culture, it's not! i've had more wage jobs than all these dudes combined and have more tattoos than all of them combined, and i've only *ever* seen this on out-and-out nazis

The DSA (Democratic Shoupistas of America) mayor

People keep acting like Democrats need to tolerate a little dash of paranoid antisemitism if they want to reach the salt of the earth hoi polloi, but the reality is that paranoid antisemitism is more natively the politics of downwardly mobile scions of privilege, like Platner for example.

We need a complete and total moratorium on new Kennedys

CHOTINER: So I'm clear, you ate two burritos in one sitting?

ME: Absolutely not. No. I ate a burrito for lunch yesterday and another one today.

C: But you ordered them both simultaneously?

ME: Naturally I wanted the other one in reserve just in case.

C: Naturally. Just in case.

I think about this all the time. I think we'd be much further along the road to a durable autocratic regime but on the other hand we'd have dodged any number of other cataclysms.

Thank god we have the NYPD and New York Post to remind everyone that if someone in an SUV kills a child, it's definitely the child's fault.

Odds and Ends 3.6.26 Some links and other recommendations

This week in the newsletter roundup: My response to some recent anti-YIMBY papers, Henry Grabar on luxury housing, Rachel Aviv on Gisèle Pelicot and her family, and Steely Dan's lost masterpiece. publiccomment.blog/p/odds-and-e...

There Is No Housing Affordability Without Building More Housing If we make it easier to build dense housing in cities, then the resulting supply boost will ease the cost burden on renters and put homeownership within closer reach for millions of households.

Every couple of months or so, someone puts out a piece of bad social science meant to undermine the case for more housing. For Roosevelt Institute, I wrote a blog post responding to the two most recent specimens. rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/there-i...

what i think is going on w/ graham platner fwiw: a certain cohort of D pundits & self-appointed leaders, disproportionately male and gentile, have decided that in order to appeal to low-trust men (whose votes they seem to think count more) it's necessary to allow a little antisemitism, as a treat

“The fact remains that boosting supply is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for making sure everyone in the United States has decent, stable housing.”

Our fellow @resnikoff.bsky.social's new piece argues that abundant housing and affordability can—and must—go hand in hand.

His thread ⬇️ 🧵

Second suspect arrested in theft of DHS chief Kristi Noem's purse Noem’s bag was stolen by a masked man last Sunday while she was having dinner with her family in Washington, D.C.

Just remembered we never found out what she was doing walking around with $3,000 in cash. www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...

I'm excited to not have to watch Noem's macabre PSA video the next time I'm in the TSA line.

As @joshtpm.bsky.social says, political power is unitary. Whatever else Noem's defenestration is, it's a sign of Trump's waning power.

Do you know what the filing deadline is? Seems like it's going to be tough for any potential successors to start sprinting now from a dead stop.

A general election technically, but yes there will be an open an open seat, his term was set to end this year and he was running for re-election. The primary is scheduled for June 16

So does this mean there will be a special election for Oklahoma's open Senate seat in November?

Turns out lawlessness is not a winning strategy. See you at Nuremberg 2.0

There Is No Housing Affordability Without Building More Housing If we make it easier to build dense housing in cities, then the resulting supply boost will ease the cost burden on renters and put homeownership within closer reach for millions of households.

It is frustrating to see the same tired arguments and bad methodology being trotted out again and again, and doubly frustrating to see this stuff get circulated so far and wide in the media. I hope this post offers at least a bit of a corrective. rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/there-i...

There Is No Housing Affordability Without Building More Housing If we make it easier to build dense housing in cities, then the resulting supply boost will ease the cost burden on renters and put homeownership within closer reach for millions of households.

That's not a standard that any policy agenda can realistically meet. Further, they apply this standard to their own simple simulation instead of considering the empirical evidence on the link between housing supply and prices. rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/there-i...

At first glance, the LSE paper is more sophisticated, and, therefore, more convincing. By modeling hypothetical housing production scenarios in six high-cost cities, the authors claim to show that “supply restriction is not principally responsible for declining affordability,” and in fact that it could take decades or even more than a century for housing production to make cities like San Francisco and New York become affordable. “The problem lies not in a constrained market but in rising inequality,” the authors conclude. Given the wealth of empirical data on housing production and costs, the authors’ choice to develop an ideal model instead of observing real-world conditions is a strange one. It starts to look even stranger when one considers the assumptions that go into that model. Consider the authors’ “affordability” threshold: They think that a city should only be considered affordable if the median non-college-educated worker can afford the median rent on a one-bedroom apartment. That’s an extraordinarily high standard for affordability. It is one thing to say that an Angeleno who earns $31,000 a year has a right to decent housing and quite another to say that a city where such workers tend to live with roommates in cheaper-than-the-median apartments should be considered prohibitively expensive. In short, the best available evidence still supports a YIMBY approach to housing policy. While both of the above papers attempt to challenge that evidence, neither is able to muster a strong case against YIMBYism. The fact remains that boosting supply is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for making sure everyone in the United States has decent, stable housing. We cannot end the crisis unless we undo the system that produced the housing shortage in the first place.

But where Georgetown Law appears to be merely sloppy, the LSE authors are, in my view, being dishonest. Their metric is that housing reform is futile unless a household in the 20th percentile of income earners can rent a home in the 50th percentile of price. rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/there-i...

The problems with the Georgetown paper are more obvious, so let’s start there. The authors note that low-income households in cities with relatively high rates of housing construction (for example, Houston) still saw their rents go up. But, as researcher Ed Mendoza observes, the report offers no counterfactual: It fails to consider what would have happened to low-income Houstonians if the city built new homes at the rate of a low-growth jurisdiction like, say, San Francisco. It is likely that rents in relatively high-growth cities would have risen by significantly more if they had not added new housing at an above-average clip. Second, the paper’s authors simply wave away the mechanism by which new market-rate housing production helps low-income households. Of course a new apartment is going to have higher rent, for the same reason that a 2026 Toyota Corolla costs more than a used 2006 Corolla. But adding new housing allows higher-income renters to “trade up,” which in turn makes their former domiciles available for occupancy. This creates what researchers call a “chain of moves,” which is a bit like a game of musical chairs in reverse: As more chairs get added to the circle, the competition for a seat becomes less and less intense. The Georgetown paper does not engage with any of the research on chains of moves. The authors do discuss the possibility that older housing can “filter down,” or become more affordable, as it depreciates, but they conclude that “this process has stalled or reversed” without considering why that might be the case. In fact, older housing in many cities has filtered up precisely because it has become more scarce relative to demand. The Georgetown paper declares that market-rate housing construction hasn’t had the desired effect without considering whether that might be because most high-cost cities are still not building at a fast enough clip to end the supply crunch.

Georgetown Law's report looks at rent increases in several cities without even trying to construct a counterfactual in which those cities built less housing. The authors also ignore the best evidence on chain-of-moves filtering. rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/there-i...

There Is No Housing Affordability Without Building More Housing If we make it easier to build dense housing in cities, then the resulting supply boost will ease the cost burden on renters and put homeownership within closer reach for millions of households.

Both Georgetown Law's "Abundance for Who?" report and the latest missive from LSE's Storper & co. received a bunch of uncritical press because they attack the consensus that the U.S. needs to build more housing. Both both of these papers are deeply unsound. rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/there-i...

There Is No Housing Affordability Without Building More Housing If we make it easier to build dense housing in cities, then the resulting supply boost will ease the cost burden on renters and put homeownership within closer reach for millions of households.

Every couple of months or so, someone puts out a piece of bad social science meant to undermine the case for more housing. For Roosevelt Institute, I wrote a blog post responding to the two most recent specimens. rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/there-i...

Also disbarring attorneys who lie to the courts and participate in a conspiracy to systematically deny Black and Brown people of their constitutional rights is the compromise position

Congress should authorize postal banking *and* allow USPS to ground lease its land to multifamily homebuilders (provided any project on a lot holding an operating post office includes a new, renovated post office on the ground floor).

Former Sugar Mill Site Becomes Senior Housing A 140-unit affordable housing community for seniors has opened on the former ‘Āiea Sugar Mill site in Hawaii. | EAH Housing’s latest development delivers affordable homes in Hawaii.

This strikes me as a win-win: more housing within walking distance of third spaces and a potential source of revenue for library systems that are facing budget cuts. www.housingfinance.com/developments...

For most of the history of cars, turning right on red was illegal due to its obvious danger, since drivers looking to their left for oncoming vehicles can't see pedestrians in the crosswalk on their right. It should be again.

‘You’re killing her!’: Witnesses recount horrific Mission Bay crash where 2-year-old died Bystanders tried to lift an SUV after its driver pinned a mother and child in Mission Bay, say witnesses.

Unpopular opinion but turning right at a red light should not be legal in San Francisco (or anywhere else). Right on red makes horrors like this all too possible. sfstandard.com/2026/03/03/m...

Okay well have a good one