Anna Bokun

demographer & sociologist @nycplanning. all views are my own.

[Anna Bokun @AnnaMBokun]

Hot off the press from our team at @NYCPlanning – the 2026 edition of The Newest New Yorkers!
🧵Sneak peek:
- 3.1M foreign-born residents (~38% of the city) — more than the combined foreign-born populations of the next 4 largest immigrant cities: LA, Houston, Chicago, & San Jose

[Anna Bokun @AnnaMBokun]

New @NewAmerica poll: 81% of Americans (including 76% of conservatives) support gov help paying for child care. But 85% say a candidate's position on child care has *never influenced* their vote. The political equivalent of a 5 star review & never going back to the restaurant?

[Elliot Haspel @ehaspel]

I helped lead a new poll that's out today, asking Americans about their knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes toward child care and home care for older adults. We call the report "The Care Disconnect" because... there's a lot of confusion out there.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

When you hit a wall in math, coding, or any hard skill, do not immediately conclude that you lack talent. Most walls are just prerequisite debt finally coming due. Go back, fill the gaps, make the basics automatic, and the wall often turns into a staircase.

[Maxwell Tabarrok @MTabarrok]

Half the land area of Boston, a quarter of NYC, and 15% of San Francisco were raised from the sea before 1970.

Since then, land values have grown by 30x but land reclamation has ground to a halt.

This failure follows the spread environmental law around the world rather than any geographic, technological, or economic constraint.

Thus, our lack of land reclamation and the severe land constraints in our most important cities are self-imposed and avoidable. We should make more land!
https://t.co/J9zghvLkz2

Land reclamation was common practice in American cities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Charleston, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk, DC, Oakland, and LA all had major land reclamation projects that extended residential living space or infrastructure or both.

The Bay Area alone reclaimed an area of land equivalent to ten Manhattans between 1850 and 1957, at an inflation-adjusted cost of $330,000 per acre. Today, an acre of single-family-zoned land in San Francisco County averages $24 million. Even if the cost of land reclamation grew faster than inflation, despite technological leaps in dredging and construction technology, there should be plenty of room for profitable arbitrage.

And yet, land reclamation is extinct in the Bay Area as well as in every other American city. This isn’t because we ran out of good spots to reclaim: Two thirds of the San Francisco Bay is shallower than Boston’s Back Bay was when it was reclaimed in the 1860s. Nor is it because of better transportation: We’ve used up all of the easy suburban expansions enabled by the train and the automobile so prices are rising even in outlying suburbs.

Instead, land reclamation’s death is due to environmental law. Evidence for this claim shows up in the coincident timing of land reclamation’s demise across dozens of cities in the US and in the environmental compliance process of the few reclamation projects still inching along today, but the best evidence is found internationally.

No country has more experience or more reason to reclaim land than the Netherlands. The Dutch built 5% of their country out of the sea over the first half of the 20th century and by 1975 they had another artificial lake in the Zuiderzee ready to drain at the flip of a switch, which would have made tens of thousands of acres of land just east of Amsterdam. But a 1969 environmental review law, similar to NEPA in the US, stopped the project before it was finished and the site is now a protected bird sanctuary. Their one major reclamation since, the Maasvlakte 2 extension of the port of Rotterdam, took 11 years and 6,000 pages of environmental review before construction began.

Inversely, countries without these laws, like China, Singapore, and Japan have continued major land reclamation projects into the 21st century. China has reclaimed over 5,000 square kilometers since 2000, including a city of half a million outside Shanghai and Singapore has grown by a quarter since 1975.

Every major American city has a land shortage. But we have more than enough shallow water, dredging capacity, and market incentive to make more land, just like we did 150 years ago. The only obstacle is our own choice to make making land illegal. The benefits of more land in our most productive cities are large enough to justify the effort of reforming the laws that currently prevent it. Let’s make more land!

[Joey Politano 🏳️‍🌈 @JosephPolitano]

American Time Use Survey Data, the most detailed look at how the country spends its days, is out today, so here's a quick thread

Time spent socializing in person slipped again to below 35 minutes/day, near record lows and down 10% since 2019 and 25% since 2003🧵

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Claude is 100% right

Destroy the phones

[Lisa @lisathebeauty1]

Nobody wants to admit it, but Google was enough.

[shiv roy's bob @stellamilfburn]

happy father's day

[Bobby Wagner @bwags]

RIP Franklin Delano Roosevelt, you would’ve loved nonstop subway ads for fintech companies that are NOT, I repeat, NOT FDIC-insured banks and thus cannot legally provide banking services

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

I can’t fully explain to younger people how cool the internet used to be. We had open forums, personal websites, weird experimental pages, and chaotic corners of the web, before Amazon, Google, and Meta turned it into a sterile, closed ecosystem of clutter, and commerce.

[Anna Bokun @AnnaMBokun]

@KhoaVuUmn Lolol

[Florian Ederer @florianederer]

The opioid epidemic reshaped the economic geography of the United States.

Places more exposed to OxyContin marketing saw lower population growth, but this was driven less by mortality and more by out-migration, especially among college-educated workers.

[Charlie Clark @clarkcharlie03]

Probably only interesting to a small subset of New Yorkers, but the Carroll Street Bridge in Gowanus reopened this morning after 5 years!

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

This is wonderful. This page turns New York into a massive, zoomable, SimCity-style pixel art map. You can explore the city block by block: streets, skyscrapers, parks, waterfronts, bridges and neighbourhoods. A beautiful rabbit hole for map nerds: https://t.co/aFybaAIvce

[Anna Bokun @AnnaMBokun]

@hallegilb Went here for the first time last month & 💯 decently priced wine bottles & a staff that regaled us about the history of the place (including the murals)!

[Anna Bokun @AnnaMBokun]

+ The full report covers much more, e.g., legal pathways to permanent residence, how immigrant communities are shifting across neighborhoods & boroughs, and the socioeconomic characteristics of the immigrant population

[Anna Bokun @AnnaMBokun]

Hot off the press from our team at @NYCPlanning – the 2026 edition of The Newest New Yorkers!
🧵Sneak peek:
- 3.1M foreign-born residents (~38% of the city) — more than the combined foreign-born populations of the next 4 largest immigrant cities: LA, Houston, Chicago, & San Jose

[Anna Bokun @AnnaMBokun]

@NYCPlanning Executive Summary: https://t.co/I8vKi1pq6G
Report: https://t.co/xdxDb8CrB5

[Anna Bokun @AnnaMBokun]

@NYCPlanning - Yiddish is the 5th most common language among limited English proficient New Yorkers — behind Spanish, Chinese, Russian, & Bengali, but ahead of Haitian Creole, Korean, Arabic, French, & Polish

[Anna Bokun @AnnaMBokun]

@NYCPlanning - Bangladesh: up 45% in a decade — now NYC's largest South Asian immigrant community
- Queens is home to 35% of the city's foreign-born population — more than any other borough

[Anna Bokun @AnnaMBokun]

@NYCPlanning - 43% of the workforce is immigrant
- China joined the Dominican Republic as NYC's largest foreign-born group
- Colombia & Ukraine entered the top 10 for the first time
- Ghana entered the top 20 for the first time in the post-1965 era — the first African country to do so