a really funny phenomenon is that landlords and investors will just straight up write what their risks are in disclosure statements and the financial press and a certain segment of the left will still go 'no, they are wrong, the key to housing affordability is _______'

Just in: President Biden is planning to reclassify marijuana, a historic move that will set the drug on a path to nationwide legalization.

nbcnews.com/politics/joe-b…

At the ⁦APTA⁩ conference in Portland, ⁦TriMet⁩ is showing that you can do beautiful, artistic wraps without covering the windows. People don't like to enter a room that they can't see into. It's why we have a glass walled conference rooms.

Interesting! Low importance ratings for reducing parking minimums and increasing market-rate infill strike me as good. They're not popular policies, but they're essential for affordability; low salience means state officials can do what's necessary w/o being punished at the polls

🥳New papers! A cornucopia! (well, 3).🎆

#1: 'What State Housing Policies Do Voters Want? Evidence from a Platform-Choice Experiment' (w/Clayton Nall & Stan Oklobdzija)

written for a JPIPE symposium on political economy of housing

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

🧵/21

Since when is it the Coastal Commission's job to ensure affordable housing, or to decide which housing is good and bad, especially outside of environmental concerns? We have other agencies for that — people who actually have expertise in the field.

*stares intently at Holmby Hills*

As an Angeleno/Californian, the scale of new development in Montpellier (pop. ~300,000) is incredible. It’s the fastest growing city in France, and at least a good percentage of that growth is happening at higher densities. This is the Higher Roch Tower, Brenac & Gonzalez, 2022.

Other views of Port Marianne, where most of the new apartments/condos are being built. It’s like a mega Playa Vista (for LA folks). All of this built in the past decade and a half. And so much more on the way.

CBIA (whose members mostly build detached SFHs and a small amount of condos in urban brownfields) stated that current construction defect law is working for their members and didn't want to rock the boat.

For context, 3% of new MFH in California is owner-occupied.

Housing shortages are actually housing spillovers.

Everyone needs a home. So when we don't build, demand doesn't evaporate—it floods into other neighborhoods, other cities, other metro areas or even whole regions. 🧵

The “Kosciusko Stub” is bad & illustrative of low-hanging fruit in DTLA. This exists to allow motorists to avoid a couple turns; it isolates a transit stop near DTLA’s Cultural Mecca & instead of a welcoming tourist/ped plaza w/ coffee carts, food trucks & seating we get… this.

There's a strange dichotomy in tweets like this, and the perspective more generally. In the world envisioned, rich people are highly mobile, but no one else moves at all. Rich people therefore can't move into middle- and lower-tier homes when other people move out of them.

Photo of the 'unique character' that must be 'protected,' which is somehow always the same as the unique character seen in every other city

It's incredible watching leadership in high-cost, low-supply cities continue opposing state housing reforms on the argument that local governments are best suited to solving the problem. You've been saying the same thing for 10+ years! Show me the evidence! We're done waiting.

Less than 1,400 units of housing were permitted in the San Francisco metro area last quarter, the lowest amount since Q1 2012. Total disaster

For context, metro Austin permitted 8,400 units and metro DC permitted 5,600 over the same time period. Even metro Omaha permitted 1,900.

I was in Osaka only a few days, but saw a lot more bicyclists than in Tokyo. My intuition about this is that it's because Tokyo a) has a better transit network, and b) is denser, such that even bicycles take up too much space. Am I on the right track? And what are other reasons?