Emily Hamilton

Is the solution the parents have to daintily hold the bucket for the night?

I think 1 bucket well outlasted my years of trick or treating. The ones I bought this year lasted 30 seconds after handing them over to the kids. Where can I buy a c. 1990 pumpkin bucket?

Sorry to be extremely “back in my day,” but wtf has happened to the quality of Halloween candy buckets?

Thrilled to see @parkingreform.org tackling such a critical issue with an all star line up. @bsky.app was awash in Back to School transportation horror stories - hopefully this discussion will offer solid solutions for parents & schools to beat the dreaded car line!

How School Transportation Broke (And How to Fix It) · Zoom · Luma The U.S. has witnessed a long, steep decline in the share of kids who walk or ride a bike to school. And today even school bus systems increasingly face…

I'm excited to talk about why kids can't get themselves to school anymore with Natasha Riveron and THE @coachbalto.bsky.social!

You can join our @parkingreform.org discussion on Zoom on Monday at 3:00 eastern: luma.com/85bkwa2l

I love Jon Klassen! We Found a Hat is probably in my top 10 picture books.

And another great hat, iykyk

Love this!! How does he hold up from an engineering perspective?

Yeah there are a few classics I looove, like Goodnight Moon and The Cat in the Hat. But there are lots of great contemporary books too.

Let the pigeon drive!

Also a lot of bikes and scooters

That pigeon slaps

Yeah the Berenstain Bears are not my favorites to read or look at, but my boys really like them.

Richard Scarry is a favorite of this trad-ish set. But I have to say I think *plenty* of children's books from the 1980s through today have stories, language, and illustrations that are objectively better than his books.

This led me to purchase two Richard Scarry anthologies. Our family really enjoyed both, and I will say that he was on to something with writing about quotidian things that young kids are super interested in, like water pipes, firefighters, grocery shopping etc.

I got sucked into a little hole of takes by trad-ish parents who lament the low quality of children's books today compared to those published when the baby boomers were children or earlier.

For me, Stuck is by far the best

That's right!

There's great coverage of the exclusionary history of building codes in Stuck!, the book I cannot shut up about

Haha maybe the average parental response reflects teen parents wanting super commutes!

I'm skeptical of the claim that family-friendly housing is scarce relative to small units.

I think we need more housing of every type, but I think the biggest deficit is of the smallest, least expensive types of housing.

More to come from me on this.

There's lots of cool survey data in @bobbyfijan.bsky.social and @lymanstoneky.bsky.social's new report on family-friendly apartments. Most surprising to me is the parents do not place a huge premium on a short commute compared to non-parents. ifstudies.org/report-brief...

Pew finds something that everybody in codes and standards knows but few will say out loud: we apply far stricter fire safety standards to apartments than to houses. www.pew.org/en/research-...

I would say allow the submitter to choose, or maybe localities selects plans that they think work especially well and then they pay those submitters enough that the architects want to make them public domain.

Cities Developing Pre-Approved ADU Plans Program Cities Developing Pre-Approved ADU Plans Program - ADU Magazine.

I like that some California cities are taking the logical next step of making buying these plans and making them freely available for ADUs: adumagazine.com/cities-free-...

Lots of people in building permit streamlining world are interested in pre-approved plans, but sometimes the pre-approved plans are still proprietary.

Modern Multifamily Buildings Provide the Most Fire Protection A large body of research has demonstrated that apartment buildings and other types of multifamily housing can provide many benefits to a community, especially when built in high-demand areas where hou...

Newer apartments are SIX TIMES safer from fire deaths than older housing, and FOUR TIMES safer from fire than even new detached houses.
www.pew.org/en/research-...

Yes, Amtrak and VRE, right?

✨ Topical Zoning Trivia ✨

Quantico has a zoning ordinance, but they don't publish a zoning map, and after multiple requests to the locality we weren't able to get our hands on it. So it's a little hole in the National Zoning Atlas: www.mercatus.org/research/pol...

A new datapoint is in favoring plaster over drywall after little boys have made a hole in our dining room wall

Housing Reform in the States: A Menu of Options for 2026 Although state legislatures took unprecedented strides toward releasing the housing supply from its regulatory straitjacket in 2025, most pro-housing policies have not yet been adopted in most states....

Tireless Mercatus team @salimfurth.bsky.social @ebwhamilton.bsky.social @charlescgardner.bsky.social just dropped 18 (!) strategies for state govts to increase housing supply. Love the ideas to limit "lawsuits of questionable merit" [ahem, Virginia]. www.mercatus.org/research/pol...