I want a brighter and more abundant future (than I had) for my son and others of his generation.
That means building a lot more stuff in the highest opportunity places in the country.
This thread is such a perfect encapsulation of the "lead paint caucus" mindset: "When I was young, I had to choose between living in a lead paint filled shithole, moving to a sprawlburg, or uprooting my life and relocating to another city. And so should you!"
I’ve fallen into HVAC YouTube and a lot of it is from the UK. Holy moly their housing is in rough shape. These people consume insane amounts of energy for heating. I think they might actually build their homes without walls.
I heard
@PodSaveAmerica
talking this week about how “migrant bussing” by red states worked and made Dems more hostile to immigration, and I can’t think of a more damning indictment of liberal/progressive housing and infrastructure politics.
Imagine how expensive cars would be if every city and town in the country had a distinct 2,000 manual detailing exactly how each type of car has to be uniquely built to match the other cars in the neighborhood, but also the existing models of cars are illegal to build too.
You know what aren't scarce in the United States? Cars.
You know why cars aren't scarce? Because we build 16 million of them per year.
You know how many homes we build per year? About 1.4 million.
Don't tell me the United States is a country. We're a car company.
Just wild that the US in the 20th century collectively decided to let all its cities rot and now we have almost no ability to build anything other than highways (at affordable prices).
It took 10 days to erect this building. 10 days! Just getting the permits in Seattle could take 1-2 years—if it were even legal to build.
If we were serious about the housing crisis, we’d be cranking these out in a WA factory.
single stair, no setbacks, buildings touching.
all illegal in the united states or canada, but legal everywhere else. they also win international awards.
maybe our codes suck?
NPR just did a segment on the evils of gentrification of international cities and it included an American university professor complaining that she couldn’t get a table at her preferred restaurant in Mexico City and I am going to become the joker.
If only we knew the cause of this pernicious labor shortage.
Oh well, I guess we’ll never know. Let’s just raise interest rates until businesses fail and people are tossed out of work.
In most cases, it’s looking like having a high likelihood of getting caught is an effective deterrent (to the extent preventative measures don’t work), whereas harsh punishments rarely meted are not.
The tell here is that we historically preserve a ton of buildings that don’t look anything like this, while simultaneously making it illegal to build the exact same style brand new.
Argue about prices all you want, but if 100 people show up to put in an application on a single apartment, the only way to house them all is build 99 more apartments.
I was already a YIMBY (obviously), but dealing with the NYC housing shortage first-hand by trying to find a place to live and facing dozens of people lined up to tour every apartment really shows just how badly the city needs way more housing
There was, like, 10 people in sport coats at
@costco
just lolligaging down the asiles. Stuck behind them for a minute, I’m like, “are y’all from corporate or something?” Guy looks at me surprised, “yes,” me: “then get out of my way, I’m buying things.” Operational awareness guys.
It's amazing and sad how the build, baby build folks just don't give a damn about the history of protest, resistance, and public space. It's all about smashing people into units. What a dreary non-vision. I support BOTH
#PeoplesPark
AND housing for UCB students.
This passage from
@IDoTheThinking
’s substack is why most YIMBYs are so singularly focused on zoning most of the time. You can get more housing faster at all levels—including low income—just by allowing private development than you could ever hope to get through public spending.
This is an interesting map from
@aei
, of all places, showing homes within a 10-min walk of at least 6 different amenities (e.g. restaurants, stores, etc).
Some really interesting things pop out. A quick 🧵
The people who would have lived in those 6 homes aren’t incinerated. They’re going to have to find new homes somewhere else, like the urban growth exurbs where one home requires cutting a few hundred trees. 🙄
@mattyglesias
@daveweigel
Ben Huh pointed out that if you have an 80" hole in your wall, it's cheaper to patch it with a television than it is drywall.
@mateosfo
@Cgoinggal
I’ve had criminals drive a car through my building five times at my shop in Redmond, WA in the last year and this is exactly one of the excuses the city gave me for why they wouldn’t allow me to place bollards between the road and the sidewalk to prevent it. 🫠
Here's me asking
@GovInslee
about this session's housing accountability bills and Lt. Gov. Heck's comments that "NIMBY attitudes and some local governments" are stymieing progress on housing.
I kinda hope this passes and the Supreme Court rules it unconstitutional.
Cities especially are increasingly not governing and just foisting their responsibilities onto private citizens and businesses. It’s unjust, but even more importantly, it’s ineffective.
A little more about the initiative that would require all L.A. hotels to call into the city and report the number of vacant rooms every evening, and then accept homeless guests paying with city vouchers for "fair market value." On the March 5 ballot, City of L.A., for real.
It’s been eye opening to me to see how almost all city policy is about banning and prohibiting things, and rarely, if ever, do they get around to proactively allowing or encouraging things.
It’s a fundamentally broken form of governance if you believe change brings prosperity.
My issue with Airbnb bans is that short term rentals fill important niches:
- If you need a 3-6 month rental, maybe between buying and selling a home, there aren't enough short term leases available.
- If you're traveling with younger kids, hotels don't work at all.
I honestly don’t understand California. The electricity prices are so high (2.5x Seattle’s) that I don’t see how it’s economical to have an EV. Is this all just status? Subsidy? Idk.
@BBolander
DQ has a cat door and can go out by himself whenever he wants, but he still runs to the front door whenever he thinks I’m going out because he prefers walks together.
If he knows of a bunny hideout, he gets big mad if I don’t go there with him (attacks my leg).
@skaushik100
@cruickshank
Look, this is a transit line. It’s hard. It requires lots of planning and outreach. It’s not something easy we can do in 9 years, like going to the moon.
Kinda wild how the pejorative “tech bros” to mean “all tech workers” has just slipped into casual usage in Seattle’s social justice chattering class.
It’s othering, a little xenophobic, erases women in tech, and is bad politics in a city that’s ~15% tech workers. 🤷🏽♂️
In 2019, the New Zealand’s federal government took action to seriously liberalize zoning laws in major cities.
Not to do it in theory, they made the math work. And despite “Labour Crises”, starts have boomed even as prices and rents have begun to fall.
Cities force new construction to pay for public improvements. It translates straight into higher house prices. Incumbent owners gain from the higher prices, renters pay for it.
For every $1 in city improvements extracted this way, renters pay~$10 to incumbents in higher rents.
Sadly, we pulled the plug on the Spokane Four. We couldn’t get the construction budget to where it needed to be. The biggest line item extra was 87k in alley improvement.
Until we can find a better site and better financing options, the design will be available as a stock plan.
Planning for the last 70 years has been:
- freezing whatever was there in 1950
- build shopping centers on wetlands for the tax revenue
- separating uses for maximum car dependency
- historically preserving old buildings while mandating new ones look completely different
Okay
What's so viscerally objectionable about
@EastSolanoPlan
is the complete disregard for the expertise and knowledge that goes into every single aspect of what makes a city function. 🧵
This guy is where he should be. Issaquah is a policy failure of sprawl because cities like Seattle (or even Bellevue) didn't allow new housing, so development sprawled out and took this bear's home.
The idea that making our living conditions better—including modern ventilation, increasing insulation, and getting rid of toxins like lead—is somehow bad because poor people should be living in these worse conditions, is one of the most classist takes I’ve ever seen.
In Logan Square a developer bought a 4-flat for $820k. Gut rehabbed it. He was given, under the ADU pilot, another unit as of right. The ADU asking rent is $2,600. The other units are $3,700. One year later, the building is for sale for $2.3million. This is gentrification.
@smuggly_ugly
I think that since the structure of these AIs is that the input streams from the attacker and the host are commingled, and also that the machine itself is probabilistic, suggests this attack vector will structurally exist forever. (But probably get harder with time)
The thing is that if this LA Councilmember just upzoned the city and allowed market rate apartments to be built, the city could buy used apartments for, like, half of the cost they spend publicly contracting to build it themselves.
Plus, millions of middle class families would
When there isn’t enough housing, it gets allocated to the highest bidder, so people exit the city roughly in order of income.
The solution to a diverse and equitable city is enough housing for everyone.
I’ve mentioned this few times before, but rapidly widening inequity in many areas of Seattle happening right before my eyes is really starting to shock me — even just within few mile radius around. I’m having real hard time reconciling things I’m seeing, hearing, & experiencing.
How it started / How it’s going
That first map passed the Senate 40 - 8, and the butchering that is the second map was 100% the work of the House Dems.
Legislative caucuses are reticent to let the public know how decisions get made. But it's important that we find out. Which legislators demanded places like Mercer Island and Bellevue and Northeast Seattle get exempted from TOD? Without knowing, accountability is difficult.
Senior White House Adviser John Podesta:
“These delays are pervasive at every level of government — federal, state and local.
We got so good at stopping projects that we forgot how to build things in America.”
Which is why we need permitting reform at every level of gov’t…
Look, this is a transit line. It’s hard. It requires lots of planning and outreach. It’s not something easy we can do in 9 years, like going to the moon.
@cruickshank
I mean, this official timeline is an absurdist joke. NINE FUCKING YEARS of planning?!?!??!!! Followed by FOUR FUCKING YEARS of design, and then 12 FUCKING YEARS of construction?!?!??!!! To get to FUCKING BALLARD?!?!??!!! Like, what is wrong with us as a region?
Wow this is terrible. This Dem bill turns every project into a hostage negotiation.
It’s infuriating that the people who ostensibly care about the environment actually use the crisis as a cudgel for unrelated political leverage. It’s unserious is discrediting.
Whoa, the NEPA provisions tucked into the new "Clean Electricity & Transmission Acceleration Act" are like a wish list for greenmailers.
There's lots of good in the bill (⤵️), but the NEPA stuff is stunning. Come take a look.
🧵. 1/14.
Recall that 13 people are going to move out of used homes to live in these new ones. Other people will move out of other used homes to move into those and so on.
After about 6 hops (~2 years), this development will create about 7 vacancies in Seattle’s cheapest neighborhoods.
one house becomes 13 homes in seattle's queen anne neighborhood.
the single home sold for $3.7 million
the new homes are selling for $1 million to $1.6 million.
no, not affordable, but certainly cheaper than what was there before. density makes things cheaper.
@sf_mills
So, if we could rewind time to lower educational achievements, which year would go back to? Like, 1900 when most kids barely learned the three Rs? Or is it just that right now in this moment we’ve achieved the ideal level and pace of educational attainment?
I feel like as an elected official it is actually literally your job to explain the positions you take to the people who elect you.
If that is too onerous for you, maybe you should choose a different career?
There is not a single constituent who was reasonable and polite that I was sarcastic to. Not one. There’s a lot that I owe constituents. Free labor on demand explaining positions outside my legislative reach is not on that list. Find other folks to tone-police. I’m not the one.
Yep. Folks pretend NIMBYism is a right-wing concept, but housing costs are overwhelmingly a problem of cities with near unbroken streaks of center-left and left leadership.
Conservative areas aren’t exactly great, but they’re objectively much higher growth for over 20 years.
Today’s housing crisis is mostly the responsibility of elected Democrats to fix, but they often choose to *make the crisis worse.* It’s an invitation to Republicans to capitalize on Americans’ desire for homeownership or affordable rental opportunities that Democrats deny them.
Lmao, this sets a minimum tax of 4% on the sale of apartment buildings.
Developers, roughly, aren’t landlords. They build it, then sell it. If their profit margin is 10-15%, this eats ~1/3rd to 1/2 the profit.
WA Dems just going full 🤡 on housing.
Backers of a bill that would hike taxes on real estate sales to fund low-income housing are prodding WA lawmakers to take action and ripping a biz group over a TV ad attacking the bill, which could raise billions of $ in the coming years. (w/
@vizscience
)
@ChrisMommsen
@WatsonLadd
@PodSaveAmerica
They were allowed to work, they were allowed to build homes, and the cities rolled out subway and transit lines left and right, opening up more areas to housing and employment.
California Republicans have introduced a half-billion-dollar bill that would give tax credits to homeowners if they live in fire zones. Also it's non-refundable. Also it has a welfare cliff. And a marriage penalty for parents.
Not a single councilmember willing to go to bat for housing in Seattle.
I think that’s instructive for anyone who cares about housing as the defining issue of our era.
Cities destroy their public spaces because rather than deal with homelessness by building housing, they instead try to make the streets so miserable to spend any time on that homeless people go elsewhere.
This is my area neighbor who suffers from chronic pain prohibiting him from bending his legs and he just got surgery. Now hes sitting on the ground in downtown berkeley because
@CityofBerkeley
and
@rideact
dont have benches at their bus stops.
When we had our third child I bought a Borg Cube. It’s very safe and built like resistance is futile.
We always had all-terrain assault walkers like the AT-AT that are no match for the rebel alliance.
The lives of my children are too important to risk to another driver.
When we had our third child I bought an AT-AT. It’s very safe and built like an all-terrain armored transport.
We always had tanks like Abrams' which have no chance against speeders and laser batteries.
The lives of my children are too important to risk to another driver.
Yep. Cars aren’t going away, over half of households own cars in Tokyo. In Seattle, most of the gains to be made are making transit good enough that households choose to go from 2 cars -> 1 car.
25% of Manhattan households and 50% of Brooklyn households own a car, which should tell you that people *really* like owning a car and those who can afford to will do it even when 1) it's maximally inconvenient and 2) the transit alternatives are maximally convenient
@scottm00re
@typewriteralley
If we don’t want Clyde Hill residents in our city because they’re a bunch of freeloaders who don’t pull their weight, can we disconnect all the roads to Clyde Hill and you can have your town on its own?
We have completely eliminated single family zoning and costly parking mandates citywide. Sorry Seattle, but we are
#1
in terms of pro-housing policy. We have done the work on the policy side, we are doing the work on the permitting side. We really need a federal partner that will
This adds somewhere around $10,000 to $15,000 in cost per home and is a direct assault on middle class and working class residents. Just full-on NIMBY policy.
this housing killer is going to pass because council members Tammy Morales, Kshama Sawant, Debora Juarez, Lisa Herbold and Alex Pedersen believe we should tax the hell out of new housing in a shortage. 4 of them aren’t seeking reelection
appalling
No matter how you slice it, this is indicative of Blue State policies being phenomenally detrimental to millions of Americans.
Feels like that deserves more self-reflection.
As people talk about the path to 270 this year, worth remembering that by 2032 (two elections away) the path could look very different thanks to the next reappointment.
@lancesalyers
@mrianleslie
It is actually substantially easier to persuade voters who already care about politics than it is to turn out voters who do not care about politics.
This is why most changes election-to-election are driven by persuasion and not turnout!
Yet another DSA L.
Here in Seattle, DSA member & Councilmember Sawant voted against allowing development w/on-site affordable units to skip the often weaponized & expensive Design Review process.
There’s no limit to the number of people she’ll make homeless for the revolution.
The SB5466 “TOD” bill is a NIMBY dream. A mandatory 20% halts all development near light rail now and forever into the future.
This freezes wealthy neighborhoods in
@RepJuliaReed
’s 36th LD as SFH. This doesn’t protect poorer neighborhoods in 37th LD that are already upzoned.
@duckvalentine
@MinisterofDOOM
They get to deduct the loss in value against their profits when computing their corporate tax payment.
One possibility is the tax write-off saves them more money than they think they make by keeping it on the service.
@bugfush
@mldunham
Flammable refrigerants are not allowed except in unusably small quantities. R290 (propane) performs better, achieves higher temperatures, and is more environmentally friendly than what we use in the US now (R410a) or in the near future (R32).
OMG how did this suburb get so based? Bothell shows what actual leadership is like, compared to whatever the f*** you want to call what we have in Seattle.
The Pop Shops on Main provide space for local entrepreneurs to try their hand at operating a brick and mortar retail space, growing their businesses locally, while activating the edge of a parking lot along Main Street.
📷
@GordonOfSeattle
📍 Bothell, WA
@erichdelang
Right now you’d need to add six or seven states to get the median-mean of the senate to where it was in 2012 (which at current levels of ticket splitting would still put us at a big disadvantage)
This is why it’s so important to focus on quantities rather than prices.
Like, there simply aren’t enough 3+bd homes in Seattle for it to have a normal number of families with kids. No amount of subsidy, rent control, or tax rebate changes that.
Mom graduated Berkeley in ‘69 and was there the first time they tried to build dorms. These will be built maybe in time for her grandson to attend. Meanwhile 50,000 or so kids missed out on housing in the intervening years.
These politicians make our lives worse.
Deeply saddened by the CA Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of construction on People’s Park. While affordable housing is a pressing need, this project will not create it. We cannot stand by as the UC, the biggest landlord in the state, destroys a historic and cultural landmark.
@conjurial
@nextdoorsv
@PodSaveAmerica
Totally! We need to and can do better.
And yet, places like Texas are leading the nation in renewable energy.
The reality is that no party has a lock on small-c conservatism.
Rep Bateman’s legacy will be literal millions of people getting housing in WA where they otherwise would be displaced or living in their parent’s basement. 👏👏👏
“Man, all these teams of professionals who run retail stores for a living are so stupid and full of shit” —guy who has thought about their problem space for five minutes
1. Last week,
@Target
announced it was closing 9 stores due to theft, generating an avalanche of credulous coverage from nearly every major media outlet
One thing that was missing from all these stories: DATA
So Popular Information tracked it down
🧵
Developer 1: I’d like to redevelop this lot.
Planning: you have to spend unlimited money to preserve the historic facade!
Dev 2: I’d like to make a new building with a historic-looking facade.
Planning: Absolutely not!
No American city has enough scale to make custom-built anything be cost effective. We live in an age where our incredibly high living standards come from standardization and mass production.
"After 5 years of debates, studies, surveys, hearings, prototypes & test runs, the process to replace San Francisco’s trash cans with bespoke models just hit another delay: costs.
The department has spent more than $500,000 on the project"
5 years, for trash cans.
Seattle was founded on the lands of the Duwamish _Tribe_ and is named after their leader at the time.
It’s deeply disappointing the Seattle School District and the school board decided to let them be written out of our locally taught history.
This f***ing guy wants to force a State agency to sign off on every tree removal over 12" to ensure that it's not "culturally modified"—altered by indigenous tribes prior to the formation of Seattle.
What freaking 12" tree is over 150 years old?
CA is spilling enough electricity on the ground to power something like 20% of Seattle. In a sane world, we’d build another transmission line, like yesterday, to utilize this literally free energy.
Instead, we spend decades “planning” and doing “environmental” reviews.
It's complicated, but when the grid's noon solar power peaks are so high that CAISO has to curtail solar...it no longer makes sense to pay retail rates for wholesale solar power!
The incremental solar panel in CA no longer produces usable electricity without a battery attached
Offshore wind energy might be the clearest example of how broken the permitting process has become.
The United States has 42 megawatts of offshore wind capacity in operation.
But there is more than 20,000 megawatts (!) of potential capacity stuck waiting for permits...
To a first order approximation, anti-change left ratcheted up NEPA review so nothing happens. Conservatives exempted stuff they care about (oil drilling and pipelines), so environmental review only applies to things liberals and progressives want to do (clean energy, trains)
“one estimation says US energy would be 80% carbon free by 2030 if we didnt have all the environmental review and red tape. the wind farm in wyoming took 18 years to get approval”
@billmaher
nails it here
They just added about $10,000/apartment to cost of this building by delaying 9 months, and will add another $2,500/apartment to put brick on a wall facing another property.
Pointing that out was deemed "off-topic." Your city hard at work.
440 home owners paid an extra $40,000 each so that 5 local architects could see what this building looked like with a different kind of “partly cloudy” day.
In what world is this not a bats*** crazy?
The assumptions he makes in this graphic aren’t true, land values don’t go up 4x just because you can build 4 homes.
But imagine believing this and then still thinking it’s terrible if 4x more people are housed and bad if the city gets 4x the tax revenue.
@Mlondon83
There’s already nothing for them to steal, no money in the tills or ATM, only a small amount of display project out.
The ease with which the cars are stolen has made the level of criminal much dumber. Career criminals mostly know it’s not worth it!
Inclusionary zoning so prohibitive and without exception still in the bill. This measure blocks all new construction near transit in Seattle. Fucking incredible.