David Pardo

Posting about my Colorado-based CLT plex-building company again www.woodhaus-co.com

This, right here, is YIMBYism.

Why do people get mad at new apartments for being expensive, but are totally fine with the city creating entire mansion-only neighborhoods? If you think an expensive apartment isn't helping you, a poor renter, that can only be more true for a $10 million mansion.

Limiting housing construction in walkable central neighbourhoods means pushing more people out to live in car-oriented suburbs.

When housing supply is fixed, a rich newcomer causes a demand cascade: they bid more for high-end housing at the top of the ladder, pushing everyone else down one rung, until the person at the bottom is priced out.

Only a quarter of New York City residents today lived in the city on 9/11 www.vitalcitynyc.org/how-nyc-chan...

things are not going great

Working on small scale incremental housing legislation is fun because I get to have a huge impact on what actually gets built and nobody really notices because the NIMBYs are too busy flipping out about the transit oriented development bills.

It's a shame we don't have 3D Google Maps imagery for almost any cities in Latin America. I think it would surprise a lot of North Americans to see how much more built up a lot of much poor countries are then their own.

"For the first time ever, more people are employed by remodeling companies than by single-family and multifamily developers combined." (h/t @josephpolitano.bsky.social) www.theargumentmag.com/p/americas-e...

My blog post on building code reform went up on YIMBY Action's main blog. yimbyaction.org/blog/beyond-... Many thanks to @kevinrmatthews.bsky.social, @robertagreer.bsky.social, and @stephenjacobsmith.com for your assistance on this!

We can't solve a housing crisis without building more housing. Today we broke ground on the Casanova Residence, which will soon be nearly 100 affordable and supportive homes with on-site services for New Yorkers. Every new home is a step toward a City that everyone can afford.

Over the course of both my carpentry and HVAC career probably 90% of my work has been renovation or repair of existing homes. People often don't fully grasp the level of difficulty these entail relative to new construction

It’s important to build enough housing to bring the market price down, not just take some units off the market. Why? The market price is the price anyone can reliably get. No lotteries, knowing the right person, lucking into a cheap rent-controlled unit a decade ago.

We need a building code between the IRC and the IBC. Something that can accommodate 3-12 units in 3-4 story structures, uses only P2904 sprinklers or automatic fire extinguishers, allows 1st floor commercial (but not restaurants), and lends itself to reproducibility without the complexity of the IBC

Genius Machine says: 1. Universal Basic Income 2. Universal Basic Services 3. Land Value Tax 4. Annually rising Carbon Tax 5. Proportional representation via ranked choice voting and multi-winner districts 6. Publicly-funded elections 7. Nonpartisan primaries 8. 4-day 32-hr weeks *unplugs machine*

I know his term only has 6 months left, but Colorado Dems should impeach and remove Polis anyway

I especially love this diagram.

From now on I will refer to road charges not as tolls but rather as environmental, navigation and security fees, and I will impose them on every road in this country

NIMBYs claim to care about displacement of renters when it's a new apartment building being proposed, but have nothing to say when displacement is caused by new detached houses.

How do I capture this populist zeitgeist for banning private equity from building rental homes & redirect it to banning private equity from building oversized, expensive fire trucks so they finally deliver the right-sized, affordable trucks Americans actually need?

YIMBY should be doing more youth outreach www.nytimes.com/2026/06/07/n...

Beyond passenger elevators, Europe has way more freight elevators than us. On the left, a dumbwaiter at a small Tibetan restaurant in Paris. On the right, a NYC worker about to carry the better part of a ton of beer down into a basement by hand. High elevator costs are a worker safety problem.

This applies equally in Denver

Great video about how moving chains work, with a real example youtu.be/QQYMUMTI7fk?...

NIMBYs who claim "zoning is not a constraint" don't actually believe it.

Unfunded inclusionary zoning mandates are a tax on new housing that crush housing production without creating broad affordability. Blue cities and states need to admit that this policy is counterproductive and abandon it entirely.

Obeseboy Slim

Left-NIMBYs think that blocking new apartments stops gentrification. What actually happens: new demand is redirected to the existing housing stock. Instead of living in new apartments, rich newcomers buy up old homes and displace renters.

it’s simple. Dems need to 1. prepare retaliatory gerrymanders in every blue state now that the VRA has been overturned 2. pack the court (and prosecute Thomas/alito) in 2029 I will only even *consider* primary candidates who support both of the above going forward

One of the things that stuck with me from one of the many UBI pilots is how people started talking with each other more in person in the community, and the reason was because people felt they would no longer be asked for money. And so UBI increased social cohesion by making sure everyone had money.

Disney World employs about twice as many people as the entire coal industry. Lighting the climate on fire, ruining the environment, and making people sick so that 39,000 Manly Men can stay employed in a dying industry is so dumb.

10/ The reason most people don't want to attend public meetings isn't because they can't secure childcare, or they can't make it to the meeting venue, or whatever. The overwhelming, biggest-by-far reason is that they simply don't want to go. They have better things to do--and that's fine.

Is making public transport free “effective?” “…the relatively small difference between Victoria and NSW suggests price is not the main constraint on mode shift. Access, travel time, service reliability and the ability to make specific trips appear to matter more.” Via @theconversation.com

We certainly have to reckon with *The Car* as a dangerous machine that needs to be regulated, but a bigger problem is that cars have been over-deployed as a mobility tool, especially in places where other tools such as transit, cycling, and walking make more sense.

“Every $1,300 New York City invested in building bike lanes in 2015 provided benefits equivalent to one additional year of life at full health over the lifetime of all city residents, according to a new economic assessment.” That’s a better return on investment than some direct health treatments…”

So the idea that "developers make very large homes because they make more money that way" really means "developers make homes for Gen X and Boomers, rather than for Millennials and Gen Z, because they make more money that way."

the ironic thing about California’s insanely strict fire codes is that they make it significantly harder to build multifamily housing, resulting in more exurban sprawl into fire zones. on net, the overly strict fire codes result in more fire deaths

here’s a crazy fact: more Americans have been killed in disputes over parking spots than on the NYC subway this year

Great video for anyone who cares about the intersection of history, building design, and building science. youtu.be/-zP4zwvttxA?...

Sometimes I use AI to help write prefab housing jokes

This is beyond problematic. www.denverpost.com/2026/03/04/b...

1946: Freedom is being able to drive anywhere. 2026: Freedom is not having to drive everywhere. (above text suggested to us by @harrisongibbons.bsky.social)

Rep. Ansari Statement on United States Attack on Iran.

seeing firefighters oppose safe, international best practice building codes purely out of misplaced inertia and resistance to change has made me appreciate that many urban issues have unexpected villains and you should be skeptical of anyone trying to blame it all on private equity or whatever

Another awesome urban planning video from @justineunderhill.bsky.social this time about Avatar/Legend of Kora www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1_X...