Social democrat in the streets, liberal Georgist in the sheets. Mariah Carey stan & Marie Kondo enthusiast. YIMBY/NUMTOT/aspiring DILF. Zillennial (26) | ๐ณ๏ธโ๐
My first Substack post! Vacancy taxes have gotten some more attention in housing policy. Do they work?
The verdict: vacancy taxes have modest benefits, but do not remotely achieve what building new housing does. They are also often poorly targeted! ๐งต
@Elmo_da_emo
Itโs a fumble because they were clearly in each other leagues and rated each other similarly and absolutely could have converted it into a contact/date if he had just said anything else like a normal person
If your child canโt reliably obey the command โquietโ they donโt belong in public spaces where they can bother others. Especially planes.
If you subject the public to them anyway, youโre an inconsiderate person and you donโt deserve to be part of civilized society.
Reminding folks that slavery was **terrible** for economic growth and development; we are absolutely worse off today due to slavery having existed. The origin of economics being labeled โthe dismal scienceโ was for speaking this inconvenient truth to (slave-owning) powers.
Seeing apartments in Chinatown right now
Me: โBrokerโs fee is 15% right?โ
Landlord: โ10% for you because youโre Asian. Also there are four applications ahead of you but itโs yours if you want it because you remind me of my oldest son.โ
God I love racism
Youโre Jewish and eat Chinese food on Christmas. Iโm Chinese and eat Jewish food on Christmas. We are not the same (but weโre alsoโฆexactly the same??).
Itโs not that surprising? Transit-accessible and walkable cities means more drunk nights out with the bois without needing a designated driver or spending too much money on Ubers โ save that for the beers and ladies. Brewskis for all!
@HauntBrown
@stan_okl
The system is designed to ban the solutions (denser housing options, walk/bike/transit-friendly infrastructure) and make these bans difficult to overturn. But it isnโt impossible,l โ even Amsterdam was teeming with cars in the 70s, and some US cities have ended sprawl zoning.
@DogSuffragette
@TurboBurpo
Also taught me SO MUCH VOCABULARY
My favorite instance was when Snicket used less commonly known words to โclarifyโ more commonly known ones.
โโฆfaking โ a word which here means โfeigningโโโฆโ
@lbarsukoff
My train comes every four minutes and I can check my emails or nap while getting where I need to go ๐ Plus beats traffic every single time.
@lawrence_tuchik
I want to say that this was approved for release (recorded and edited, not just some random clip)
Which makes it all the more baffling
Biden winning with Xi's wife. From US official, per pool note: "Biden wished Xiโs wife a happy birthday-- (she) and Biden share the same birthday. Xi said he was embarrassed, had been working so hard and had forgotten that his wifeโs birthday was next week."
I gained 15 pounds in freshman year of college and I lost those 15 pounds the moment I lost access to my dining plan and ceased to pair every single meal with gigantic refills of pink lemonade from the soda fountain. Liquid calories are dangerous
How are you as a protestor doing civil disobedience this worried about getting arrested when the entire point of civil disobedience **is to get arrested**
UPDATE: some of the students seem to be panicking.
They called 9-1-1 because theyโre worried one of them could go into toxic shock.
Theyโre also worried sheโll be arrested if she leaves the building.
People resorting to calling immigrants gentrifiers instead of actually addressing the systemic issue of housing shortage and scarcity is just so sad to watch
One of my favorite videos in existence โ "rightful" land claims are dead end ideology that have no place in the future of co-existence and equal liberation
This weird ass academic naval-gazing is so fucking annoying. Do you want your writing to be accessible or not? What is the purpose of this gate keeping??
(And how is this relevant to โwhiteโ readers when the vast majority of non-whites in the West donโt speak Chinese either??)
Readers, especially white readers, are *not* entitled to footnotes / explanations / direct translations of non-English words that a BIPOC author chooses to use in their books with intentions of not translating.
No senior should have to overpay for life-saving drugs to pad Big Pharmaโs pockets.
My Administration is announcing the first 10 Medicare Part D drugs selected for price negotiation.
We're ending the days of deciding between buying your medicine or putting food on the table.
One of the best arguments in favor of parliamentary systems: they significantly reduce the opportunity for this kind of bullshit which relies entirely on people knowing who the executive that signed the law but not the inner workings of the legislature that wrote it
American children love not paying attention in school (or assuming that everyone elseโs education was the exact same as theirs) and then broadcasting their discovery of historical events out on the internet as if they are the newly anointed Apostle who have just received The Word
White Flight But Make It Woke
(This is the inevitable conclusion of โgentrificationโ discourse. Build enough houses to house everyone in order to not have to deal with this!)
Thereโs such a clear difference between republicans voting no on 2O for nimby reasons and socialists voting no on 2O for anti-developer, gentrification, climate crisis, food desert, environmental racism reasons and if you donโt understand that, itโs bc your brain is pea sized.
Los Angeloids are throwing a hissy fit over the idea that they might have to see some things taller than their single-unit houses. RT the Roosevelt Island Tramway to scare a Los Angeloid
A billionaire in L.A. is trying to build an aerial gondola over one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city so he can develop the parking lots at Dodger Stadium into a retail entertainment complex. Not only will one our most historic parks get consumed by the project, butโฆ
Itโs about to get pretty bad for people living in states without Dem majorities, and if we donโt fix our housing/land use policy **yesterday** we are functionally building the Berlin Wall around Christofascist states from which people will inevitably want to escape.
Frankly I do not see the point in trying to retcon San Francisco as some kind of longstanding bastion of conservativism when the whole focus should be on how an unofficial police strike can cause even the most nominally progressive of cities to break towards reactionary politics
Somewhere
@BarackObama
must be smiling that a 38 year old son of Hindu immigrants running to the right of Trump is cribbing from him! Obamaโs vision for a multiracial democracy is seeping into our politics despite the intense backlash. A slow but satisfying vindication.
Housing consumption costs have been consistently rising for decades now. Blaming โAirBnBโ and โprivate equityโ for current-day housing woes is a very clear attempt by politicians to try to deflect blame for the housing shortages caused by their own governance.
This is me publicly stating that if I were to ever be hit by a car while biking, I would explicitly like my crash to be politicized in the name of demanding safer non-car infrastructure in this city ๐
It's the first year I am renting from a "small landlord" since 2020 instead of from a big corporate one and of course it's the worst experience. Heat hasn't been on since the beginning of heating season on Oct 1 and it was 34ยฐF outside last night. Big landlords are superior
Tokyo added 1.9m people since 2000 (โฌ๏ธ13.7%)
New York added 795k people since 2000
(โฌ๏ธ9.9%)
San Francisco added 97k people since 2000 (โฌ๏ธ11%)
Here is how housing costs have compared between ๆฑไบฌ้ฝ, NYC, and SF:
The Cold War featured a lot of brutality, often due to geopolitical warfare that used ideology as a front โ but reducing the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution down to โtaught people how to readโ is quite ambitious to say the least
I always find this kind of outreach funny, itโs like asking some Chinese Heritage Society about whether they endorse some college student wearing a slutty qipao for an erotic photoshoot. Yes of course the socially/culturally conservative institutions have conservative views
To be clear about this Kansas City
@NFL
team child fanโs get-up, and his parents excusing it by saying his grandfather is a Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indian, I asked the tribe (which is what journalists, not
@FoxNews
, do) and this is the tribeโs response:
I couldnโt put it into words before, but I finally realized what was so entertaining about these videos: the excessive labeling, the smattering of exclamatory slogans, the cornucopia of mashed up imagery on the pageโฆitโs the vertical video version of a Ben Garrison cartoon
I see this map being posted all the time, to which my response is always: can anyone please tell me where the US military base is in Guangzhou, Guangdong? Itโs the city where I grew up, and one would think that theyโd at least offer some tours for school field trips.
US intelligence: China has a spy base in Cuba!
The Pentagon: No they donโt.
Reality: the US has 800+ military bases around the world that regularly spy on other countries.
@nikicaga
We pay people to repairs our ACs, do our roofs, shovel our driveways, mow our lawns, process our food. Scrubbing the floors isnโt any different
Americans! There is a better way to protect your skin while also not feeling gross and slimy: have the FDA approve more Asian chemical sunscreens. I personally use Instree, a Korean brand โ you can find sellers on Amazon and eBay. Youโre welcome!
Iโm reminded of this amazing video where a tourist goes to a Waorani shaman for traditional eye infection treatment and the shaman tells him to get antibiotics
TODAY IN HISTORY - April 29, 1992
Today marks the 30 year anniversary of the 1992 LA uprisings. The city will never forget this and we shall rise up again.
POWER TO LOOTERS. POWER TO RIOTERS.
My friends were complaining about how they were busted and ticketed for not paying the fare on the subway and the bus and all I could think about these equally well-off college-educated libs was โwell you deserved itโ
What is it about the Brits/Euros and being scared of tall buildings. Everyone in Asia knows that tall buildings are workforce/middle class housing and the rich get to live in the low-density mansions. We were โordinary peopleโ who grew up in these environments. It was nice.
YIMBY people your arguments are embarrassing.
You never ask who these homes are for or where, or how our cities are financialised + the repercussions
You fetishise skyscrapers but need to visit (Red) Vienna/Barcelona for how to do proper urban density for ordinary people
Sad!
California and New York Democrats and various self-declared โliberalsโ, โprogressivesโ, โsocialistsโ etc. are getting outflanked on ending housing segregation by state Republicans from Montana. For shame, to be quite honest
There was a hearing in Montana today on a bill sponsored by State Senator Daniel Zolnikov (R - Billings) to legalize multifamily & mixed-use development in commercial zones in Montana's larger cities.
You need to see his answer to a question about neighborhood character.
The term โNIMBYโ was explicitly invented as a form of corporate propagandaโit was coined by the public relations department of a petrochemical company in order to discredit protesters who were demanding that the company stop dumping toxic waste in a working-class residential area
For the absolute record, โlegalizing weedโ is not progressive. Itโs siding with the weed industry, weed farmers and downwardly mobile gentrifiers.
Yikes, unfollowing now! I was a huge fan of Viennaโs social housing model, I had no idea that they were actually YIMBY neoliberal shills in the pockets of Big Housing Developer ๐คข๐คฎ