buildmore🔰

it’s genuinely fascinating how establishment democratic politics in big cities has become so ossified and incompetent that they’ve created a huge lane for the left to embrace good government reforms and build a broad coalition of socialists and technocrats

Maybe if we ban RealPage a second time…

These are the people who have controlled land-use policy in California for the last 50+ years. This is why we have a housing crisis. This is everything wrong with blue city/state governance distilled down to its essence. www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

There should be housing on top of every single grocery store in every major city.

You can't get a clearer example of the geometric trade-off between cars and homes than this: BART is trading 240 parking spots for 760 homes. The 240 drivers who use those parking spots would argue that's a bad deal. What about the 760 *families* who get homes? Cars are undemocratic, full stop.

New AGF blog: Transit-Oriented Development is a surprisingly underrated way to end America’s housing problems Physically realistic capacity near rail alone is >30M homes. Financially plausible capacity is ~6M to 13M. TOD is not just a boutique or niche idea! open.substack.com/pub/abundanc...

it is pretty remarkable how Daniel Lurie, despite his reputation as a moderate technocrat, keeps pushing NIMBY policies. quite a contrast to Zohran who has governed as an unabashed YIMBY

New York could raise billions of dollars for the Interborough Express by taxing the increase in property values from the new rail line.

SB 79 at one month: 1) Very encouraging signs of developer interest in actually using the law 2) New projects are all in high resource areas with exclusionary histories 3) We won’t see the full impact in most of the state’s biggest cities for another 5 year 4) Beverly Hills is on some bullshit

Calling @nextdoorsv.bsky.social

I often think about the Los Feliz towers that no one cares about now. They fit in perfectly in the neighborhood of multimillion dollar homes.

There is no compelling urban planning reason to concentrate apartment buildings on loud, polluted, dangerous main streets. This is solely a political strategy by planners trying to avoid NIMBY backlash to proposed apartments. This political strategy DOES NOT WORK. Homeowners oppose housing anyway!

In the past, this would have been a once-in-generation growth year for permitting in Palo Alto, one of the most expensive cities in the US. Thanks to YIMBY laws like SB 79, it could soon be the new norm. Just look at extrapolated 2026 permits based on monthly permitting so far:

Charging new housing developments a giant fee to fund the production of a small number of income-restricted units is the housing policy equivalent of responding to a hangover with a shot of vodka. www.seattletimes.com/business/rea...

They did it. Michigan passed single-stair code reform!

Scaling back housing a block from a major rail station is a terrible idea. We need so much more housing, particularly near transit. This continual pressure to scale back housing is a key reason why we have such a deep housing shortage.

Incredible chart from @propublica.org. If you don’t follow enviro stuff closely, your instinct might be that the hold-your-nose solution (carbon capture from fossil fuels) would be the “pragmatic” one versus covering Earth in solar panels, which seems utopian. In fact it’s the opposite

Kind of a funny bit in r/Sacramento where a post praises the NYC rent freeze only for someone to point out the rent peaked in 2022 and has dropped every year since. The status quo in Sacramento is literally better than a rent freeze! Rents down almost double digits in real terms!

Apartment residents use electric heat and drive less, meaning they produce one-third the climate pollution as residents of detached homes. Less regulation blocking apartment construction means more housing, lower costs, and reduced pollution. www.motherjones.com/environment/...

It's widely recognized that the total lack of housing construction on the west side of SF is unsustainable and unfair. Less talked about is the fact that those neighborhoods are missing out on a lot of good stuff! It was great to chat with @thgoetz.bsky.social about a favorite topic:

As it looks like Steyer isn't going to make it, @nithyaforthecity.bsky.social's race is the most important race in California by far. Most of California's housing crisis is driven by LA being awful and it'd be a massive victory if suddenly they weren't.

BOOM

From a housing perspective, I actually think the LA mayoral race might be more important than the governor’s race. The pro-housing momentum at the state level has always been in the legislature, but Los Angeles NEEDS a pro housing mayor.

Zohran just cited Minneapolis, Austin, and Auckland as cities that lowered housing costs via upzoning certified ball knowledge, Auckland is a deep YIMBY cut

this is incredible

Mayor Mamdani's housing plan is live! There's big sweeping YIMBY stuff: -Aggressive TOD upzoning -Major permitting reform -Rescuing & transforming NYCHA They're also looking at finer details, like fixing the FDNY inspections that so often delay CofO issuance (& invite petty corruption)

Wow! Unanimous support for AB 1903, which aims to end the onslaught of frivolous litigation that makes it impossible to build condos in California—key to reviving homeownership. Still a ways to go, but @buffywicks.bsky.social has a way of making the impossible seem inevitable.

MASSIVE fan of this one:

San Diego fell from 5th to 12th most expensive rental market by building more multifamily housing per capita than any other California city. This is what happens when you actually build. The lesson isn't complicated. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/05/13/s...

Why does California have 123,974 people sleeping on the street? I hate to break this to you, but it's not because of billionaires, private equity, or venture capital. It's because of your neighbor Frank -- who is big mad at a 5 story apartment for low income senior farmers.

We recently ran a massive natural experiment on this. Covid 19 collapsed demand for urban housing in 2020, sending vacancy rates over 10% in new York and San Francisco for the first time in decades. Landlords desperate to fill their units slashed asking rents and loaded on concessions.

I like to check the prop. 13 discounts of the anti-upzoning crowd. This guy, an author, is upset that the council is upzoning commercial streets.

the best way for California to tax the rich is to simply abolish prop 13

Edmonton, like Auckland, seems to be proving that in many North American/Australasian contexts if you legalize townhouses in lots of places, they will meet a lot of housing demand. Dispersed rowhomes reduce pressure on how much housing you need to get out of larger apartment buildings

Lately, there has been a lot of frank discourse about what YIMBYism has accomplished in California. I think this impatience, even after big wins, is good and healthy—but it misses the early signs of success in front of us. In a new post, I offer a YIMBY hopepill: open.substack.com/pub/mnolangr...

Just five years ago, Nithya Raman opposed SB 9, a bill that made it legal to split single-family lots into 2-4 plexes, because it didn't mandate subsidized units for low-income households. What an incredible transformation. Total YIMBY cultural victory.

A Terner Center roundtable with homebuilders found that rezoning alone doesn't produce missing-middle housing — design standards, lot rules, and approval processes must also follow. Builders reported that 8- to 12-home buildings are where projects start to make sense. cayimby.org/blog/wheres-...

This is a INCREDIBLY pro-housing bill. Passing this would completely unlock the condo market, making homeownership affordable for hundreds of thousands - maybe millions - of California families who can’t afford to buy today. Best bill of the year by a mile.

Sadly the current right-wing coalition government in Finland has foolishly cut the funding for the nation’s “Housing First” success story, and homelessness is predictably now on the rise again. That just reinforces the fact that such programs work, if lazy political ideology doesn’t get in the way.

oh look at that www.pew.org/en/research-...

Yes it has. www.pew.org/en/research-...

Wow, that market rent data in Austin. The oldest/cheapest apartment buildings have almost completely reversed their post-pandemic rent spike, without even adjusting for inflation

Another reason we need mode shift to rail - with steel wheels, not tires. Fewer cars and trucks on the road = less plastic in your lungs.