Joey Katzen
@joeykatzen
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Startup storyteller + pitch deck guy. Also, I like affordable, walkable neighborhoods. Managing Director @HawaiiAngels. Lead Mentor @BlueStartups.
Honolulu, HI
Joined May 2008
I continue to be floored that most startups I meet don’t have a “bar pitch”. A single-sentence 25-word opener that quickly drives interested listeners to ask a good follow-up question. Here’s the Bar Pitch storytelling pattern I’ve developed.
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@CollinRugg I’m confused… isn’t it good to punish drivers who endanger people crossing the street?. The point of a marked crosswalk is to (a) channel walkers into visible areas + (b) give them a safe crossing where drivers MUST stop for them. If drivers don’t stop, it defeats the purpose.
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@DemocraticWins Note: it’s a deregulatory playbook. The next decade is going to be marked by a slew of deregulatory wins we haven’t seen since the 1970s/1980s. Most important: removing the regulatory veto noose that planners and politicians and classist rich neighborhoods hold around the necks.
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There’s no downside to this and lots of upside. It’s wild that over the past 60 years, people came to the idea that it should be impossible to walk a block from home to a grocer or flower shop. In Honolulu, dense areas like McCully explicitly ban small shops.
Small mixed-use buildings with shops below and housing above should be legalized in every neighborhood.
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@MattZeitlin The only supposed Americanism that Europeans get wrong at "American" theme parties is the ubiquitous presence of popcorn. They seem to think we're obsessed with the stuff. Yes, we'll eat it at the movie theater. But I can't tell you when the last time I even saw popcorn was.
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@AutismCapital I know this place. I helped get it set up (and designed the logo!). Surfbreak is not an ayahuasca kind of place. It’s mostly remote tech workers wearing Lululemon and doing adventures like hiking and surfing. It’s in Hawaii and PXM because it’s designed for surfers.
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Government city “planners” should be planning public spaces, not micromanaging private spaces. Good planning actions for a productive + abundant society: central visioning for streets, plazas, sidewalks, and parks; adding cafe lighting across alleys; and anything else on public.
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It happened. The first actual pro-housing #YIMBY statewide bill in Hawaii has passed both houses of the state legislature!. What SB3202 does (link to bill in 🧵):. 1. Requires counties to authorize rental triplexes (via ADU) on all residential housing lots statewide, with a.
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@LincolnRestler Such virtue signalling. The harm from a handful of ice cream trucks is tiny compared to anything else that pollutes. The cost to switch will put these small businesses *out* of business!. Why can't the city pay them to switch instead of forcing all the costs on a few families?.
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@Driving_Is_Sin To be fair… don't hate the player, hate the game. In the game, someone buying and combining 3 units if he can afford it should be allowed. Just like buying 1 unit and splitting it into 3 should be allowed. Or buying an empty lot and building 20 units. Ease the game rules.
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@AnechoicMedia_ I don’t think @ezraklein is a huge fan of what US unions have become… nor how US enviro regulations are used as a bludgeon. In 2024, he seems a sort of a centrist utilitarian technocrat with a libertarian edge. Which also lines up with a lot of people who like to build things.
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Today I testified at the Hawaiʻi State Capitol to stop local government from using the power of county law to prevent our working families from building and buying more, smaller homes in our richest residential neighborhoods. Choice snippets of my SB3202 testimony in the🧵:
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@AaronRegunberg Characterizing a murder as “producing … joy and solidarity” is a horrible thing to say. It unnecessarily luxuriates an awful perspective better described as “frothing up a populist mob out for blood.”. And it makes you an accomplice to events that follow.
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@lazarwolfbk @the_transit_guy You don’t “make” people do it any more than you “make” them fly or drive hundreds of miles. When France opened its first TGV line, the flights between Paris and Lyon didn’t disappear… they just reduced in number by about 90%, because people preferred the train. Virginia has.
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@Blake_Allen13 TBF Google and Meta just closed up shop in China and didn't divest under similar circumstances a decade ago, destroying billions in market value. While I think forced US divestiture of TikTok is a good move, I'm not sure if this is the "tell" you think it is.
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@winag18 @Ndragonawa @the_transit_guy I mean the Texas DOT is famously widening an urban interstate as we speak, knocking down 20-year-old apartment buildings to do it. Seems like eminent domain isn’t an issue for them, especially since the urban land is 10-20x more expensive.
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The irony of the hard-fought legislative battle in Hawaii to (1) allow triplexes in our neighborhoods and (2) allow apartments in business districts…. Is that the discourse that comes next will be… *crickets*. Because neighborhoods will barely look different, and it’ll take.
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We should allow small retail stores everywhere “by right”. It’s the only way to make a place walkable. And of the past 5000 years, it’s only been prohibited for 50. @hnlcitycouncil @HonoluluGov.
If you could pick just one thing about better city-making that you could get your local civic leaders to really understand, and actually do the right things around for your city, what would your one thing be?.
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@KetuAlbrecht Sure, but they also don’t hurt anything. A 50-unit luxury condo building that’s 90% perma-vacant still adds 5 units and takes none away.
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@KetuAlbrecht Pretty common from all forms of media. Most early TV shows are lost.Most early movies are lost.Most early newspapers are lost.Most early books are lost.
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@questionableway True. The problem with gov't isn't, by and large, the workers, who either (1) believe in the mission or (b) have calculated they favor job security over a larger income. The problem is that we've created the byzantine processes in the first place that requires these workers.
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@PattyMurray We’re losing an hour of sunlight because the earth is tilted 23.5° and there are fewer hours of sunlight in the winter. Whether it’s better that the sun rise at 8am in December (in a year-round DST configuration) or at 7am (as in the current model) is a matter of debate. But in.
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@Harutosan2 @KetuAlbrecht !! Seize them??. Good way to ensure no additional housing is ever built again. Doesn’t sound productive to me at all. The best we can do in life is improve things and do no harm. These pencil buildings do no harm and improve things at least a little.
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@CNLiberalism And Assad’s toppling is all traceable to Oct 7th. No Oct 7th ➡️.No Hezbollah moving attention out of Syria toward Israel ➡️.No Assad protection vacuum ➡️.No clear path for HST blitz ➡️.No Assad coup.
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Honolulu’s zoning code is “only” around 550 pages…. And yet it still includes policies that outlaw new corner grocery stores in walkable neighborhoods like McCully and Makiki… only grandfathering the ones that were allowed pre-1980.
seattles zoning code is 1,408 pages. thats more than 200 pages longer than the holy bible. and no, its not for life safety, thats all in the building code which is only 800 pages.
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@ad_mastro Arlington County is barely larger than Dulles Airport and is one of the densest areas in the country lol. And that's with a massive part of the county reserved for an airport (Reagan National) and a military cemetery. Weird hill to die on, even if Arlington *could* be denser.
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@alz_zyd_ American education emphasizes synthesis, argument, and persuasion over rote memorization and rule-following. Identifying patterns + convincing others. Which is maybe surprising b/c we also infantilize our youth, giving them very little personal freedom outside the classroom.
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@EyeElMayo @MattZeitlin My wife has asked for a bowl of popcorn while watching TV at home I think twice. When she was pregnant. Growing up in the 90s, I think we might have made Jiffy Pop on the stove a few times in the decade.
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@ATRightMovies Didn’t even mention how the pilot who flew the seaplane at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark… randomly lived in Hawaii at this time and helped the crew get off Kauai after the hurricane!.
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@JohnRuf6 @alz_zyd_ So. Many. Presentations. From elementary school all the way up. I didn’t realize this was uniquely American. But it makes sense. We had a foreign-raised entrepreneur pitch us his startup, he really struggled, and one of our members remarked to me—in disbelief—“Has he never.
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@lxeagle17 There’s a local term of art in each country to get tap water. In France you have to ask for “une carafe d'eau”. Operative word: “carafe”.
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@nikillinit Cell phones actually have a similar effect compared to old landlines. Since everything turned digital and goes over wireless networks, small millisecond delays have been introduced and it really does subtly change conversation.
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@culturaltutor I’d love to see the spirit of Front Street in Lahaina preserved with at least a partial historicist rebuild.
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If it's really true that e-bikes result in people *choosing* to drive cars in traffic less….And e-bikes are 1/20 the cost of a car….And a bike lane takes up a fraction of a car lane…. Shouldn't encouraging e-bike infrastructure be a no-brainer to maximize our transpo network?.
“Electric bicycles in Denver are replacing an estimated 100,000 vehicle miles per week. There’s this huge hunger, and interest, and demand for this mobility option that allows people to get around, from all different income levels.” 🚴🏼♂️🚴🏾♀️ @TDSskip.
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@mdasilva1563 @yitgordon @rmest0 Normal everyday NIMBY arguments. Too many people, too tall, too much change. And believing keeping things the same is a higher priority for society than providing a roof over more people’s heads.
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@stan_okl 1. Smaller restaurant size (many more intimate establishments with cheaper rent) made possible from massive urban foot traffic rather than giant centralized malls. 2. More family-run restaurants (that don't pay 15yo sons/waiters Henri and Benoit a salary). 3. No healthcare costs.
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@yfreemark Jesus, any initial ideas why this is so expensive?. That’s priced like a modern elevated metro elsewhere in the US.
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@yitgordon So sorry to hear this. That whole stretch needs bump-outs for every intersection. Bump-outs (with trees) and better-marked crosswalks (zebra stripes, texture treatments, etc.) would help a lot.
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@SullyCNBC Pseudoephedrine (even semi-behind the counter) is a dime a pill. The max you can buy at a time is 120 30mg pills. One $12 box will last a family a couple years. Why does anyone buy anything else?.
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@mattyglesias I asked Grok and drilled down 4x and still couldn’t get a non-vague answer. Something something Covid-19, vague deference to China, and something about the US not having veto power commensurate with our $ contribution. Only the last argument is un-weak, and just barely.
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@StatisticUrban In Honolulu, there were twice as many housing units built in the 30 years from 1960–1990 as in the following 30 years from 1990–2020. All mostly traceable to a massive downzoning in 1980. Same story as SF and LA and many other American cities.
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@RichardHanania The argument against Amazon is similar to the arguments against Walmart 20 years ago…. That the intensely asymmetric leverage it has over suppliers will result in (1) consolidation and (2) offshored supply chains as the only practical way for the marketplace to continue to.
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@dylanmatt Hopefully a typo. But where we live in Honolulu, daycare costs barely less than a dedicated nanny… and with lots of restrictive arrival-time requirements and admissions-ass-kissing involved. No thank you. Nanny FTW.
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@StatisticUrban Urban Honolulu is relatively-to-very walkable with one of the best bus systems in the country and a fledgling metro line.
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My dream for Oahu is for more people to be able to live affordably in more of our neighborhoods. Today, our government “protects” our land-rich neighbors in expensive neighborhoods by allowing one rich family to live in a giant 4000sf house… but not 4 families in a same-sized.
It's amazing how most of Auckland, New Zealand's housing production since citywide zoning reform has come from smaller multifamily like townhouses and flats, as compared to larger apartments. This kind of development is absent from most US cities — because it's mostly illegal.
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@ddayen @revolvingdoorDC Any group the "centrists" can get behind sounds like a group likely worth supporting.
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@GDCAndrew Great way to fix this would be to amend the law to change it from a $10k/day fine to $10k/day in *liquidated damages* to the applicant with a private right of action. Nothing would make LA change its tune than being attacked by an army of ADU developers filing lawsuits entitling.
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@EngineerDustin 10ft lanes are much, much safer than 12-14ft lanes. When motorists “feel” that obstacles are closer to them on their sides, they tend to drive with more alertness and at naturally lower speeds.
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Incidentally, what would jumpstart faster slightly denser “missing middle” home construction in Hawaii:. * Permitting reform (esp automatic issuance if departments take longer than a few weeks) because now simple “leaky roof fixing” permits take 2+ years. * Minimum-lot-size.
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@Empty_America Aren’t they moving their capital to a brand new city too because they think Jakarta is too overpopulated?.
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@businessbarista Interesting. I'm assuming it's operating more as a referral business with small-town attorneys' existing practice acting "in partnership" with Morgan & Morgan in exchange for client flow. Those 140 "investors", I think by legal ethics rules, also have to be attorneys in the.
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@imcalshort Too expensive for my small e-commerce site’s blog. $15/mo, cancel anytime, and I’d use it to generate a handful of addl posts a month. I don’t get a time savings to offset the $50 pricetag, because the alternative for me is just writing fewer blog posts, and I’m okay with that.
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@hecubian_devil This is one of the most strawful of strawman arguments I’ve seen recently. Elon’s appeal isn’t wealth… and this should be obvious by taking note that other billionaires barely get any mass attention. It’s that he *builds* cool shit. In multiple arenas. And keeps doing it even.
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@JakeAuch I can't remember the last time both parties were so overtly pro-growth. I love it. Build build build. (Whoever wins).
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@RichardHanania No one seems to mind the profit motive of dairy farmers or anesthesiologists or the scrappy founders who open indoor trampoline parks for the kids. Only the people building homes for people to live in shouldn’t be able to make a living (with the best becoming wealthy from it).
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@Geiger_Capital Zoning didn’t exist, so builders could just build… homes and apartments. The starter-home bans and permitting delays our local governments have since imposed (making new housing scarce and extremely expensive) account for most of the financial struggles the under-40 set face.
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@JESSICARAB58159 @CollinRugg Don’t get me wrong, I’m not giving SF politicians or police a pass for the dumpster fire they’ve let fester there. But dumping on police for targeting really unsafe drivers seems like a weird way to make a point about the other thing.
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@texasrunnerDFW What’s the alternative?. If the government price-caps the insurance below a rate that makes sense for an insurance company to offer, the insurance company will stop offering insurance. Going forward… Arguably people should only rebuild in areas they can afford to absorb the.
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@timhwang Woulda been gangster for the rump to keep the name Virginia and force the larger seceding part to be called East Virginia. (But growing up in Virginia, I honestly didn’t think much about West Virginia at all.).
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@CTourtellotte The car wash was cool-looking… but come on, of course its time had come. People need places to live and cities evolve.
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I would love for the Honolulu planning department to try this “mock project” practice…. An exercise to roleplay as a homebuilder, to see where there might be easy things they could change to speed up the process for people truly trying to build more housing.
To make sure the process worked, the city of Spokane became “their own applicant” and took a project though permitting to identify all the little way the city would obstruct missing middle housing (which is usually not subject to all the exemptions of single family homes).
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@AlecStapp I was part of a team trying to build 150+ affordable homes under @GovJoshGreenMD’s emergency housing proclamation. But we found various people at the city and state governments put up roadblocks at every turn. And everyone in government thought the proc meant something.
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"Our housing crisis is self-imposed. On Oahu there were twice as many housing units in the 30 years leading up to 1990 as in the 30 years since. You can trace a lot of this back to the mass downzoning of the island that was passed by the Honolulu City Council around 1980.".
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Every Honolulu neighborhood should allow small family-run cafés. And barbershops. And little daycares. Yet the government bans these in almost all neighborhoods, killing chances for small businesses and forcing most nearby residents to drive miles to a corporate store.
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@scottswag @MiamiCREGuy What?!. That’s only true in cities w/out high demand (Midwest, smaller Southern markets, etc.). In major cities, the land is 70%+ of the value of a single-family home. Even in 2012 in Arlington, Virginia, my 1000sf rowhouse’s land value was about 75% of its $500k total.
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@byersblake Could the streets of SF accommodate 15k more cars each being used, what, 18 hours a day?. I don’t actually know the answer, maybe it’s yes?.
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@cpurkiser @yfreemark Surface rail LRV should be 1/10 the cost of an elevated metro on a per-mile basis. Austin’s surface light rail is apparently projected as the *same* per-mile cost as Honolulu’s elevated metro. Something absurd is going on.
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These narrow 8-story buildings (3 concrete floors topped by 5 stick-built floors) should be all over Honolulu neighborhoods like McCully, Moilili, and Kapahulu. I feel pretty sure they’d pencil financially if (1) they were allowed “by right” in the zoning and (2) construction.
Housing story time! Recently, Berkeley has rediscovered an apartment building type that’s common in much of the world: the 8-story block on a small lot. Details at link and in thread:.#architecture #housing
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@Tesho13 In most cases, walkable neighborhoods only trend toward more expensive prices (on an interior per-square-foot basis) because they're so rare. It's scarcity. If we had as many walkable blocks as we had culs de sac, not every walkable block would be priced so high.
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@REdebtlawyer Interesting. I’ve never once met a biglaw associate who likes his job. The closest are T&E and tax attorneys because they rarely have to work weekends and so say their lifestyle “isn’t bad”…. But still never one who told me he liked his job.
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@CJLemontea @mnolangray It's set to become all-day regional rail (possibly with connections into Maryland) once the new Long Bridge opens around 2030. Right now the tracks into DC on the current Long Bridge are heavily capacity constrained.
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@Aella_Girl I have a theory that most socially adjusted singles in their 20s/30s will have an avg of 6 partners/year since first losing their virginity. Assume 1/month for the single years averaged against the years in monogamous relationships. 27yo with 10 years experience: 60 partners.
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@kathrynfiona @bustle My wife and I consciously decided not to share locations except on an occasional 1-hour basis. We both share with other family members outside our household so we’re set for emergencies. Trust is not having easy ability to spy on a partner 24/7.
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@StatisticUrban Japan only has NATIONAL level zoning! And it’s a handful of basic categories with minimal micromanaging.
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.@NYTimes changed the Wordle font today. Was Helvetica. Now Franklin Gothic (which the Times uses elsewhere). My mornings are now upside down. #wordle #font #typefaces
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@soc4austin I hope an unintended consequence of this isn’t that cities set aside fewer new lanes for bikeways because of the expense. Paint and flexiposts are close to free to add a new bike lane when otherwise repaving a road. Jersey barriers and medians are not.
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@The_Suburbanist @yhdistyminen Answer: it’s a latent defect. But experienced builders of higher-end units know of it and actively tout it as a differentiator. In a time/place of shortage though, high demand makes “nice to have” less necessary. Best solution is more supply, not additional regulation.
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@beansandbikes @wmata @wmataGM It's remarkable when a good public servant who actually rides transit. runs that transit operation. It's way easier to spot day-to-day opportunities when you actually ride and experience it.
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@StatisticUrban Did anyone ever predict this 30 or 50 years ago?. When I was growing up, everyone was concerned about a Malthusian time bomb.
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I’m not usually one to put an airline on blast, but damn this transatlantic @JetBlue Mint service sucked. The “Suites” seat was great. But our flight attendant was repeatedly the rudest person I’ve met in a long time, damn near ruining the experience. This woman *yelled* at us.
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@CohenSite I'm confused, isn't this the point of a "density bonus incentive"? Are you saying they're not usable in CA as intended?. "If a density bonus incentive can be used to further increase density, development in California is about to radically change".
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@kaseyklimes I guess I’m a naysayer. I found Montreal surprisingly soulless. I found it akin to DC… good urban design by N.A. standards, but lacking joy… like I was always going *through* a neighborhood rather than being in it. Boston, NY, SF, New Orleans, Chicago are all better at this.
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I’m grateful for the 3-day cone-test that @DOTHawaii has been running to show that no major congestion results from converting 1 of 3 Ewa-bound lanes from car use to pedestrian/cyclist use. Now let’s make it permanent to connect the Waikiki and Ala Moana bike networks!
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@MC66627842 @DrJaninaRamirez There seems to be another unwritten rule that, for short 2- or 3-syllable phrases, it’s better to organize the words in a specific order based on vowels: I then A then O. “big bad wolf” is the classic example. This rule trumps the other.
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BUT it. * Is the 1st state action ever to force HI counties to stop banning new affordable n'hood density.* Shows that state is willing to get involved.* Is a 1st step in the path CA started 5 yrs ago. It'll take a few sessions to get to the meat, but I'm excited + hopeful.
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@the_transit_guy These mall redos always seem to leave the ring road intact. I wonder why. It makes it hard to successfully extend the walkable fabric to adjacent parcels for redevelopment when there’s an 80ft-wide orbital barrier. Or maybe that’s the point: so the mall REIT can capture 100%.
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Kapiolani Blvd is being repaved. Does this trigger the Honolulu Complete Streets Ordinance requirement that this massive undivided 7-lane urban speedway be restriped with good bike/pedestrian facilities?. Or is this a state roadway? @hnldts @DOTHawaii
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