Jacob Felson

YIMBY. Architecture enthusiast. Build baby build.

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Sam Harris has written the best thing you’ll read today.

https://t.co/gI0wZZNH4m

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

When the city is a bad landlord, its properties should be privatized.

[Charles C. W. Cooke @charlescwcooke]

Tom Steyer keeps running around saying that it’s unfair that billionaires like him can buy our democracy, then spending hundreds of millions dollars to do just that, then failing to get elected, and then repeating all the same lines the next time around. It’s extremely funny.

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

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.

[Nikki Haley @NikkiHaley]

This week, the UN placed Israel on a shame list with Hamas, ISIS, and Boko Haram.

Meanwhile, 1,500 UN employees in Gaza are under investigation for terror ties to Hamas. Nothing has been done.

Once again, the UN totally ignores its own mission to bully a democratic nation and embolden terrorists.

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Apollo’s Chief Economist: Zero Evidence of AI-Related Job Losses

[David Frum @davidfrum]

At this rate, the next story may be that the DSA tried to foist on the Democratic party a candidate outright linked to al Qaida

[Ari Fleischer @AriFleischer]

Mamdani said he will break with decades long precedence in NYC and not march in the annual Israel parade due to his “views about the Israeli government.”

What BS.

He won’t march, not because the Netanyahu government exists, but because Israel exists.

He opposes the existence of Israel. It’s that simple.

https://t.co/MSFRgp7BAQ

[Alice Smith @TheAliceSmith]

“We should have a communist area and a capitalist area beside each other to see who wins.”

North Korea vs South Korea

East Germany vs West Germany

South America vs North American

We’ve already run this test.

Communism always loses.

[David Frum @davidfrum]

Margaret Thatcher famously said that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.

On the other hand, there may be just enough other people's money in New York City to sustain a program of confiscation past one mayor's re-election date.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Every time I fly to New York, I'm struck by how many trees there are in the densely-populated areas around the city. (Coming from the West Coast, one arrives over the Garden State, and the suitability of the sobriquet is quite apparent from the air.) It feels like this degree of tree cover in highly populated areas is atypical (the environs of places like Paris, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Tokyo, etc., look very different), so I asked the LLM to investigate.

It found GHSL 2020 population and ESA WorldCover 2021 10m land-cover data, and concluded that New York is in fact quite unusual.

As far as I can tell, it's because of some combination of:

* A very favorable climate. (Trees grow quickly without irrigation.)
* Marginal farmland. (Readily outcompeted by the Midwest in the 19th century.)
* Together yielding reforestation before the advent of suburbs.
* And a preference for development patterns that include trees. (Japan's climate is very hospitable, but one sees far fewer trees in the populated areas around the major cities -- forest and habitation are more disjoint.)

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

What makes Zohran Mamdani dangerous isn't that he's economically literate and wrong. It's that he's economically illiterate and politically skilled.

He can sell policies that sound compassionate, mobilize resentment, and win support, while the economic consequences arrive long after the applause. That's a far more dangerous combination than being merely mistaken.

[Jay Martin 🏠 🏢🏚️🌇 @jaymart222]

No disagreement from me

BUT

They also share a very key similarity everyone wants to skip over as a huge part of what’s broken NYs housing supply for decades.

NO
RENT
CONTROL

[Jacob Felson @felsonj]

@MistaBubonic @PhilSustainable Basic logical fallacy - ad hominem attack — when you can’t debate the argument, attack the person.

[Richard Hanania @RichardHanania]

On Polymarket, 0.1% of the accounts make 67% of the profits. Nearly three-quarters of the accounts lose money.

Call it the Chud Tax. Uninformed highly partisan voters are subsidizing knowledge by letting more sophisticated actors take their money.

[Coby @Cobylefko]

It's pretty frustrating that building beautiful cities is very easy and cheap, yet so many places spend billions of dollars discovering new ways to repel people.

A gray day in Haarlem is far more pleasing than a sunny one in Nine Elms (London), and is a fraction of the cost

[Austin Berg @Austin__Berg]

My take on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s budget in @WSJopinion.

The single largest line item in Mayor Mamdani’s deficit reduction plan is not a new funding stream from the state.

Nor is it a new tax on the rich.

It is simply cutting the city’s planned contribution to its pension funds by $2.3 billion.

This move was made possible by extraordinary returns from the Mag 7, which buoyed those pension funds.

More on the budget and the growing contradiction between democratic socialist electeds (Mamdani, Wilson, Johnson) and the economic growth required to achieve their aims in the full piece.

[Sar Haribhakti @sarthakgh]

No one could have predicted this

“Jersey City was one of the busiest apartment-construction markets in the entire New York metro region, adding thousands of new units as developers chased the post-pandemic demand surge. When all that inventory came online at once, landlords had to compete on price to fill the units, which pulled rents down from their 2024 peak. The building boom is why renters are getting a break now."

[Phil BuildTheFutureNow 🇺🇸🦅🌲💙 @PhilSustainable]

Sounds crazy but it’s how towns shadow ban multifamily homes

[Will Ricciardella @WillRicci]

I had a professor at Cal State Long Beach who constantly trashed America as racist, oppressive, and irredeemable. He mocked the Constitution, capitalism, and virtually every American institution.

At the end of the semester, he gave an emotional story about how his mother crawled through sewer pipes to reach America.

So I raised my hand and asked: if America is this irredeemable, oppressive country, why did she risk everything to come here? And why are neither of you interested in going back?

He didn’t answer the question. Instead he called me disrespectful.

That’s because much of this ideology is not rooted in reality testing. It’s institutional theater rewarded by academia, media, and activism.

The system incentivizes moral denunciation of America while simultaneously depending on the opportunities America uniquely provides.