Brandon Istenes

Taking it back to 1960

Streetmix A collaborative civic engagement platform for urban design. Design, remix, and share your neighborhood street with Streetmix.

Concerned I might get back into gaming now that I have discovered streetmix.net

In 1982 there are cars parked on both sides of the road, including partially on the footway. Today the car parking has been removed, replaced by greenery, cycle parking and outside seating. Two boys play football in the street

Frans Halsstraat , Amsterdam in 1982 and today. Remove through motor traffic and car parking, replace with greenery, bike parking, café seating, and kids playing football in the street

Got a link? My town's planning board requires buildings to have "no e-bike" rules

"residents living outside city limits" seem to expect a lot of public subsidy for a wasteful lifestyle

Kathy Hochul meanwhile trying to kill climate protections, lying about the costs. A cap and trade proposal from the state in 2024 showed cost savings for most households. Hochul/NYSERDA just put forward an intentionally absurd proposal to undermine the idea that we can do anything.

Speaking of which, yesterday the Virginia state legislature passed LVT authorization in Charlottesville, Falls Church, Fredericksburg, and Newport News!

Now it goes to Governor Spanberger's desk, where she is expected to sign!

Which state will be next? :)

🔰🔰🔰🔰

lis.virginia.gov/bill-details...

single-stair housing is affordable housing

“It is difficult to imagine more arbitrary and capricious decisionmaking than that at issue here.”

Sometimes the universe sends us a little reminder to look at actual evidence from actually existing places rather than making a dogshit simulation

The housing crisis has the incredible ability to send 90% of people into a mental tailspin

In places like Kingston, NY where I live, apartments are 20% cheaper than SFH. But every market-rate unit in The Barrel Factory gets called "luxury," and local NIMBYs constantly push for multifamily developments to get downsized to SFH. e.g. Bluestone Court. "more appropriate for the neighborhood"

This is a bizarre feature of housing discourse. All market-rate units are referred to as "luxury," much more expensive single-family homes never are.

Specificity isn't the problem, will isn't the problem

Disintermediation is, in fact, the problem

I think it addresses a gap between
- the Jane Jacobs vision, where older buildings provide diversity in rents that allows a greater diversity of businesses in any neighborhood and
- the reality that in a hot rental market, land values drive rent and compress the distribution

I love my pupuseria

I can't get over this number: in 2007, there were 360,000 newspaper jobs. Now, there are 80,000. "My local paper sucked!" Sure. What sucks even more? The void. "I get all my news from the Guardian!" No, the Guardian doesn't report on your town council, your school board, local cops.

Valuing wildfire smoke–related mortality benefits from climate mitigation | PNAS Human-induced climate change has increased wildfire risks, associated air pollution, and health damages in North America. Despite its large potenti...

🚨🔥 NEW: Increasing mortality from wildfire smoke is directly traceable to greenhouse gas emissions. In our new paper in @pnas.org , we show that every megaton of CO2 emitted costs the US more than 10 million dollars in health costs from wildfire smoke. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

If this destruction were caused by a person on an ebike, city hall would act overnight to clamp down on them.

Yeah I'm assuming that the pupuseria is paying below market rent; that there's a lot of "price discovery" that has not happened and would be encouraged by opex increases. But I don't actually know.

But I don't think it would raise other landlords' opex just as much (granting Georgist assumptions)! Landlords on lower-priced land, outside my gentrifying neighborhood, would see smaller increases. So pupuseria would be pushed to some stroad in a shittier neighborhood. Unless I'm mistaken?

Wouldn't a LVT effectively increase the OpEx costs faced by the landlord, meaning they either need to A) raise rents faster or B) redevelop upwards (evicting the pupuseria in the process)?

Maybe I need to read the guy's book

What I'm worried about in my neighborhood is the loss of the pupuseria. Very modestly priced and pretty popular, esp. along low-income residents, but likely a much less valuable use of the land than e.g. a wine bar or boutique. I don't know the answer

If I'm reading this right, 14% of nonbinary people do not identify as LGBTQ+ ...

Another entry for the "financial capitalists benefit from NIMBYism" file

from www.multifamilydive.com/news/udr-apa...

literally the only formation that's serious about social democrat goals (e.g. universal health care) are in fact democratic socialists

Why do you give these people the time of day? It does work on you because you are replying, you are taking the bait

How much does luxury building matter? The results of this one were a big surprise to me. The question I asked is, are rents high because the new housing that's being built is too expensive? There's a lot of attention on how expensive mark...

Once again rentrentier.com/affordable-l...

Absolutely iconic duo, hammer and sickle emoji poster and boomer eugenics poster, the tweedle dee and tweedle dum of NIMBYism

people give me crazy looks when I tell them NYC isn't a real city