Mike English

1/3 There will always be some tension between advocates that primarily focus on the need for more housing and those that focus on tenant protections. Still, as someone in both spaces, we could all benefit from remembering we’re all fighting for tenants to have more leverage

📣 Take Action for ADUs! MoCo's Bill 41-26 would make it easier for more people to build ADUs, and waive some fees for those who provide ADUs for rent at affordable levels. It tackles a major barrier—the owner-occupancy requirement—that has long discouraged ADU production. Email the Council now! ✉️

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NIMBYs have long claimed their resistance to other types of housing was not about “the people.” But now they unabashedly insist that only fellow homeowners should be allowed to live in those single family houses. It was about “the people” all along.

Please read this whole thread

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The sheer fact that this might come as a surprise to some folks - including many homeowners - demonstrates that the presence of renters doesn't "erode" neighborhoods. These are the very same neighborhoods that homeowners often praise as wonderful places to live

Correct, and overzealous bans against “investor ownership” could well make it so all rentals are banned, which would be terrible

Sounds basic but a lot of people fuck this up when they say things like renters “don’t have a vested interest in the community” or they would rather homes be owner occupied

Exactly

When I first moved to MoCo with my fam, we rented a house in a "single family neighborhood", and the owner lived somewhere else As far as I could tell, the neighborhood didn't start to "function differently" after we arrived

Normalize getting to know all of your neighbors, nor none of them, both are valid ways to go through life, even for the extroverts, freaks that they are

God is this deeply true

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Our cities and towns need more homes people actually want to downsize into.

My “I don’t dislike renters I just consider them transients” shirt is prompting a lot of questions answered by my “I don’t dislike renters I just consider them transients” shirt.

Biggest barriers to housing in HoCo? 1)APFO 2) Zoning. “We’re not making it easy for folks who want to better their lives & the lives of their kids to take advantage of what we have here in Howard Co because our housing is so expensive & we don’t have enough” 1/ www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/ne...

Far too much of this going on in the neighbourhood chats at election time

Amen

A familiar story. Tens of thousands of households will apply. If like other cities, a lottery will decide which of those people get to be on the waiting list. Then the wait will be years. It doesnt have to be like this. The US can afford to offer a voucher to all who are eligible & in need.

Housing First is not housing w/o treatment. It is treatment maximized by the stable base of safe housing. And it works.

This is very true and way too widely ignored, and yet another reason why treating owner occupied homes as more desirable than renter occupied ones, even when well intentioned, can do a lot of harm.

Single-family rentals get a bad rap, but they also provide distinct benefits. The same home often rents for a lot less than it would cost to buy it, so rentals can serve less people. In our latest episode, we talk about how that matters for access to good schools: lewis.ucla.edu/2026/10/14/1...

The way the housing shortage and hostility to immigration work together is the blackest of pills

Here’s what’s going on. Baby boomers bought houses for cheap and then spent decades showing up to meetings demanding nothing else could be built in their neighborhoods so that their houses would see exponential increases in value, and now they don’t want that value taxed.

Revolting against property taxes will hollow out your state and turn it into a retirement community that drives out young people who weren’t lucky enough to buy in because they weren’t born 50 years earlier - signed, a Californian

Amen

We live in a society and we have responsibilities to each other, damn it.

i have a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach that eventually the boomer property tax revolt will foment a reverse-polarity version in young people ("well then why should i keep paying Social Security taxes?") and the entire concept of cooperative public goods disintegrates

Love to see it.

The social harms of sports betting vastly outweigh its benefits. It should be much harder to access and we should have strict limits on how much sportsbooks can take from any one bettor each year.

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a tax revolt fueled by stupid people who don’t understand escrow payments www.politico.com/news/magazin...

The generation that got to buy cheap houses thanks to a postwar construction boom, then blocked new housing construction to juice their asset values is now whining that they have to pay taxes on their unearned wealth. Just breathtaking selfishness.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!

If it gives you any idea how much the prospect of a Diaz win worries me, I, with all my social anxiety and autistic hatred of change to my routine and small talk, have signed up for a poll shift about this race. Just look for the guy who looks like he’s screaming (hopefully only) internally

Austin grew its housing stock by 10.5% from 2021 to 2025, versus 3.2% nationally. Rents fell from above $1,600 to about $1,300, with the biggest drops in older, cheaper buildings.

TOMORROW Oct 17th at 11am in Wheaton!🔥🔥 #WheatonBBQfest

A thousand times this

I still get mad about this