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Max Dubler 🏳️🌈
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈
@maxdubler.com
AICP certified urban planner doing housing policy stuff at California YIMBY. I used to be much cooler. Tradeoffs are real. he/him 📍 San Francisco
21.1K followers1.9K following11.9K posts
I’ll believe the kids are into “y2k fashion” when they bring back the puka shell necklace with gelled and cap-highlighted faux hawks. Also leave trans kids alone.
In 2005, Time Magazine did a cover story on “The Battle Over Gay Teens.” It’s the same handwringing we see now from “concerned” adults on behalf of young people. “Kids are disclosing their homosexuality with unprecedented regularity–and they are doing so much younger.” time.com/archive/6596...
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
Beyond being counterproductive for housing affordability, this system is inherently more likely to result in favoritism, clientelism, and, at times, corruption
Boston’s chief planner is a true believer in the San Francisco model, in which you make it impossible to profitably build apartments by-right so developers are forced into a politicized discretionary negotiation with the city, which relaxes the rules in exchange for below-market units.
So-called “inclusionary zoning” is an attempt to outsource a key state responsibility—providing subsidized housing to poor people—to private for-profit actors so the state does not have to raise and spend tax money. It is profoundly neoliberal policy.
It is also weird how ardently this incredibly neoliberal model is championed by otherwise leftist activists
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
This is why 99% of existing homes in Boston are illegal according to the city's own zoning code. Making it impossible to build anything - even the type of homes that already exist - strengthens the city's leverage in these negotiations.
Boston’s chief planner is a true believer in the San Francisco model, in which you make it impossible to profitably build apartments by-right so developers are forced into a politicized discretionary negotiation with the city, which relaxes the rules in exchange for below-market units.
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
i can never tell if these people know they are creating a corrupt system of influence peddling or they really are unable to think a single step ahead to the obvious outcome of their ideas
Boston’s chief planner is a true believer in the San Francisco model, in which you make it impossible to profitably build apartments by-right so developers are forced into a politicized discretionary negotiation with the city, which relaxes the rules in exchange for below-market units.
"The rule of law, but for land use" remains an *profoundly* radical position.
looked at in longer perspective, it's striking how much this resembles the premodern system of exclusion, rents, and personalist connections, which was--and this part's important--radically worse than the modern system of impersonal rules and general taxation
This is one of the best analyses of left anti-development politics that I’ve read. While the specifics refer to California in 2025, the broad outlines characterize housing opposition in most deep blue states and cities.
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
I have YIMBY planner friends who swear up and down that these views are anything but hegemonic in planning but they’re not. The planning profession by-and-large believes the San Francisco model works. It’s near a consensus position.
Boston’s chief planner is a true believer in the San Francisco model, in which you make it impossible to profitably build apartments by-right so developers are forced into a politicized discretionary negotiation with the city, which relaxes the rules in exchange for below-market units.
This may be controversial but I think that people who work in public sector urban planning should understand how the real estate development business actually works. bankerandtradesman.com/planning-chi...
Boston’s chief planner is a true believer in the San Francisco model, in which you make it impossible to profitably build apartments by-right so developers are forced into a politicized discretionary negotiation with the city, which relaxes the rules in exchange for below-market units.
Because the rents that poor people can afford are too low to pay off the cost of building new homes for them, these requirements act as a stealth tax on new housing. Taxing new homes means that only the highest-end projects get built and each subsidized unit costs tenants $800,000 in excess rent.
Boston’s chief planner is a true believer in the San Francisco model, in which you make it impossible to profitably build apartments by-right so developers are forced into a politicized discretionary negotiation with the city, which relaxes the rules in exchange for below-market units.
While this system does pretty effectively maximize the percentage of new apartments that are set aside as below market housing for low income people in new buildings, it does so at TREMENDOUS cost to broad housing affordability. cayimby.org/blog/califor...
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
Democracy is when a couple dozen tenants who don’t want to move can prevent thousands of their neighbors in decrepit, mold-choked old buildings from getting brand new apartments at the same rents.
This is just insane NIMBY framing right here. Framing the Zohran administration as “political elites” while sympathizing with millionaire NIMBYs is crazy. And handwaving away the $80B NYCHA capital backlog is absurd. this guy lives in a fantasyland where tradeoffs do not exist
This story is about the tiny minority of tenants who oppose the city’s plan to replace their crumbling old buildings with new ones—with zero tenant displacement!—because they want the city to spend money it does not have and will not get to renovate the old buildings instead.
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
Every aspect of life as a gay man is unimaginably better than it was when I was born in the mid 80s. We beat the plague that was killing us by the hundreds of thousands and then won broad social and civic equality.
Social media loves talking about how everything is getting worse. But what’s something that you’ve seen get _better_ in your lifetime?
Great to see TODCO getting back into the business of building housing. www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
We need to crush these people to restore a basic sense that moral behavior actually means anything at all. That is what is at stake here.
NEW: Vivek Ramaswamy says Amy Acton being a victim of childhood sexual abuse makes her “flawed” while defending his ad featuring her estranged mother. “In politics sometimes it's a tough sport.”
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
The California Insurance Commissioner’s choices affect every homeowner and driver in the state. Jane Kim is an incompetent political climber who would blow up California’s already-in-crisis insurance market if elected. It is VITALLY IMPORTANT that every Californian vote for Ben Allen.
In my opinion, progressives like Sanders should not be endorsing hardcore NIMBYs like Kim. And hardcore NIMBYs like Kim should not be allowed to call themselves progressives.
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
funnily enough, the Oklahoma chapter of the National Fire Sprinkler Association (NFSA) was one of the proponents for the single-stair code proposal in OK. You know who supported efforts to waterdown Seattle’s single-stair provisions 40 years ago? The NFSA.
Oklahoma is advancing major building code reforms to unlock middle housing; 🪜 allow single-stair up to 4 stories, 🏘️ 4-unit homes can be built under the residential building code rather than the commercial code, 🧯scale sprinkler requirements to small apartments. housingforwardok.org/news/oubcc-a...
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
this is the really maddening part because like, somehow everyone has decided to pretend that publicly traded companies are the personal property of the CEO, american capitalism has just voluntarily surrendered itself to feudalism, it’s just insane
Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 reposted
this is an insane way to frame this attempted murder. i hope that chud rots
It's a choice (a bad one) to tell readers this driver "passed too close to cyclists" when there's video evidence showing he drove his car into them, made contact and hurt someone. Fellow journalists: we can explore the nuances of punishment for drivers without obfuscating their dangerous behavior.