H. Jacob Carlson

New landlord references immigration to push out Fruitvale renters: ‘Are you legal’ Darrick Chavis, a prolific property investor with a history of renter disputes and legal battles, bought the buildings in the spring. The city attorney has demanded he stop any harassment of the rente...

This is absolutely vile
oaklandside.org/2025/07/10/f...

So disappointed in this move from Randi and AFT. This is not the orientation that labor needs to be adopting towards AI. Between this, and the AFL-CIO moving to invest in data center projects in places like Wisconsin, we are removing one of the most effective AI countergovernance institutions.

As a card-carrying AFT member, this is a slippery slope to undermine our power as workers. And its going to be worse for students. The dream of these people have students do all their learning from AI chatbots, and turn us teachers into tech support at best.

Hope and solidarity won tonight, and will win again in November.

Congratulations, @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social

Zohran looking out on a victory night crowd.

In the words of Nelson Mandela: it always seems impossible until it’s done.

My friends, it is done. And you are the ones who did it.

I am honored to be your Democratic nominee for the Mayor of New York City.

The Real Path to Abundance - Boston Review To deliver plentiful housing and clean energy, we have to get the story right about what’s standing in the way.

As a result of significant omissions, Klein and Thompson fail to convey the risks of overcorrecting in the opposite direction: a plain-bagel liberalism that simply hands money over to the private sector with very few or even no conditions at all.

White House Eyes Overhaul of Federal Housing Aid to the Poor The Trump administration has considered sharply curtailing vouchers as part of its budget for the 2026 fiscal year.

More barbaric plans from this administration

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/u...

Rent control and the supply of affordable housing We generate the first cross-city panel dataset of rent control reforms and estimate their effect on the supply of rental housing overall and across va…

Essential new evidence about rent control on cities throughout the US from my colleagues at @urbaninstitute.bsky.social.

Rent control:
—Is associated with a net reduction in rental housing availability
—BUT is also associated with increase in units affordable to extremely low income households

I hope other university alliances start pooling resources and engaging in the kinds of collective action Rutgers is proposing here for the Big Ten.

senate.rutgers.edu/report/resol...

As for the "abundance" discussion, I think it's a variety of things, including zoning laws, building permit regulations, community feedback processes, minimum lot sizes, etc.

The authors of the paper define it in 4 different ways, copying how other economists have defined it - and which found the opposite result. It's usually a composite of many different regulations, boiled down to an index, one prominent example here: real-faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/gyourko/land...

All this blows a big hole in the “Abundance” agenda’s key argument. Perhaps we can’t boil this all down to a problem of regulation.

The problem with claiming you have a silver bullet is that the world isn’t actually filled with werewolves. Turns out, the world is more complicated.

The authors also zero in on a key example used to explain the “abundance” argument: comparing San Francisco and Houston. They argue that the price differences are not due to housing constraints, but likely due to changes in local incomes

That’s not what we see. There’s no difference in the effects of housing constraints on supply. For prices, there’s a gap, which the authors discuss in detail, but there’s no difference in *elasticity* (slopes are the same).

The argument about housing constraints is really an argument about *elasticity*. If constraints mattered, it’s not that prices/supply should be different, but they should *respond different* in unconstrained versus constrained localities. (in a graph, the *slopes* should be different).

This paper argues that’s not enough.

The idea: If we want to understand the effect of regulations, we need to first start from the *baseline* that places that have higher incomes are going to have higher housing prices. People with more money can spend more money on housing.

Others have argued that regulation reduces housing supply and drives up prices, hence why people are so focused on it.

New NBER Working paper on the big housing question (and one at the core of the "Abundance" agenda): Are regulations making housing scarce and unaffordable?

Nope.
www.nber.org/papers/w33576

Can Louisville’s New ‘Anti-Displacement Tool’ Redirect City Funds Toward Affordable Housing? In 2023, Louisville passed a first-of-its-kind bill to make sure no more city subsidies help build new housing that displaces existing residents. Now, the city is rolling out a new tool to implement t...

Our Anti-Displacement Assessment Tool (created w/ @lorettaclees.bsky.social & Andre Comandon) for Louisville Metro was profiled today in @shelterforce.bsky.social & @nextcity.org

@buoncities.bsky.social nextcity.org/urbanist-new...