In my experience, a lot of elected officials who get the case for YIMBYism theoretically still worry that it’s bad politics.
I hope everyone takes note that @Scott_Wiener, probably the single best-known YIMBY champion around, just won his race handily.
The triple decker might be the most Massachusetts thing there is. It's also illegal to build in almost every city and town.
Look around your block. Most of what you see couldn't be built today.
In Cambridge, 85% of our buildings were illegal until I helped fix it last year.
San Francisco, a city of 412,000 housing units, has completed 377 of them so far this year---but a leading candidate for Congress, Connie Chan, thinks that is too many
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." That's the story of the mbta and how it went awry.
The T runs on a state tax that's always short, set by legislators whose voters don't ride it. LA faced the identical broken incentive in 2008 and fixed it. Montreal did too
My favorite weird Ken Paxton story: H-E-B donated a Christmas cake for his office to share. Paxton allegedly claimed it was for his birthday, then walked out carrying the cake box.
He stole cake from his own staff.
https://t.co/0Vos7GG6fZ
something like 99%+ of economists agree that building market rate housing reduces rents. Connie Chan's views on housing are equivalent to believing the world is flat
vote @Scott_Wiener
The House just passed a new version of the ROAD to Housing package by 396 votes to 13! This version preserves build-to-rent housing supply.
Every House Democrat and almost every Republican stood up for the idea that we should build more homes for renters.
Within one 24 hour period, Trump:
- got out of a $100 million IRS fine
- secured "immunity" from all future tax investigations for his family and friends
- created a $1.8 billion slush fund for lawbreaking supporters
- was reported for likely insider trading worth nearly $1 billion
All of the obvious things to say about this are true. It's bad. Nobody even tries to defend it. The closest thing to a defense you get is something about how "but Democrats suck" and "woke was also bad," which is not a defense, but rather a kind of moral blank check made out to the administration to give them the right to do anything.
But what I'm most curious about is whether this sort of lurid corruption creates a countermovement that successfully returns government to rule of law or whether it's establishing a norm of executive imperialism that every future administration will use to achieve its ends, which can always be justified by the moral blank check of "the other side is worse, so let us do whatever we want."
Midtown Atlanta, served by three heavy rail stations, is one of America's most successful examples of TOD.
25k people have moved into the district since 2000 w/ pop. density approaching New York City.
Turns out Sun Belt cities can change fast with trains under tall buildings.
Everyone in this race is progressive and says the T needs more funding. That's true, but not enough.
GLX opened after 32 years, then shut down almost immediately because the $2.3B track was built too narrow.
We need to build gov capacity and show liberals can deliver.