Podcasts about NIMBY

The Accidental Empire: Marmol Radziner on Preservation, Prefab, and Fighting the Tyranny of the Nimby. Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner discuss the 36-year evolution of their design-build firm, tracing its roots in a student co-op to becoming a leader in modern residential architecture, restoration, and the urgent need for sustainable urban density in Los Angeles. The conversation features Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner, co-founders of Marmol Radziner, detailing the firm’s history, their design philosophy, and their views on the current state of preservation and sustainability in LA. Origin Story and The Return to Modernism: The co-founders met as students at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, living in “The Ark,” a condemned co-op. This environment of free rein to alter the building foreshadowed their later design-build approach. They founded their firm in 1989 during the “dying days of postmodernism,” quickly committing to the modernist ideal of clarity, reduction, and the connection between design and craft (Bauhaus). They attribute the firm’s early success to aligning with the eventual return to California modernism, driven by its rich history in the region. Milestone Projects and Preservation: The first major flag-planting project was the Gutentag Studio (a small, pure concrete block and cedar studio), followed by the new Ward Residence. Their watershed moment in preservation was the Kaufmann House restoration (1993) in Palm Springs. At the time, there was virtually no industry for modern restoration, forcing the firm to develop the roadmap for approaching these aging buildings. They view restorations as “classrooms” that inform their new work, maintaining a healthy split of one-third restoration and two-thirds new construction. Preservation Today: The Fetish vs. Functionality: Marmol and Radziner argue they are often at odds with the preservation community because they believe historic properties must evolve to remain functional and relevant, cautioning against a “fetish” that prevents necessary change. They criticize the current situation where every modern building is deemed “sacred,” citing the contentious, successful fight to demolish the Barry Building on San Vicente as an example of overreach where the building’s significance did not rise to the level requiring preservation. The Problem of Scale (“McModerns”) and Efficiency: They express concern over the proliferation of “McModerns” and elephantine houses, driven by high property values and the pressure to “max out the buildable area” on a site. They emphasize that their modern perspective is less about style and more about the fundamental importance of connection—internal open plans and connecting the home to the landscape and exterior rhythm of nature (a concept that is lost when properties are overbuilt). Sustainability and the Nimby Problem: While California leads the country in robust, fire-resilient, and energy-efficient building codes (which have been a success), they gave the state’s housing policy an “F.” Leo Marmol asserted that the greenest thing the city can do is densify and allow more housing in the urban core, calling out the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) mentality as the primary political failure that forces sprawl and long commutes. The Return to Prefabrication (Prefab 2.0): Marmol Radziner initially experimented with prefab from 2004–2012 but stopped after the 2008 crash. They are now returning to prefabrication—Prefab 2.0—as a response to the current “crisis of construction costs” and the need for quick, affordable, and sustainable housing solutions, particularly for fire rebuilds in Altadena and the Palisades. Design-Build Practice Scale: The firm combines Architecture, Construction Services (design-build), Landscape Architecture, and Interior Design under one roof. They support their construction services with their own dedicated cabinet shop and metal shop in El Segundo, allowing for control over craft and execution. Fire Resilience and Landscape: The fires are affecting landscape rules, particularly regarding Zone Zero (the 0–5 feet immediately surrounding the building). They argue against the extreme position of “no planting” in Zone Zero, believing the right, well-irrigated planting can help against embers, which they identify as the biggest culprit in mass fires, more so than direct flame. Home hardening (sealing every vulnerability) is considered the single most important factor, with modern energy codes being an accidental but highly effective form of fire hardening.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comSally is a journalist, columnist, TV commentator, author, wife to Ben Bradlee, and legendary DC hostess. Who better to talk to about the implosion of The Washington Post? She also founded the Post's religion website, “On Faith.” She's the author of six books, including the spiritual memoir Finding Magic, and We're Going to Make You a Star — about her time at “CBS Morning News.” Her latest novel is Silent Retreat, and she's now working on a memoir called Never Invite Sally Quinn. Her energy at 84 is, well, humbling. We had a blast.For two clips of our convo — on Sally's initial impression of Bezos, and the time Bill Clinton called her the b-word — head to our YouTube page.Other topics: born in Savannah, GA, and learning voodoo as a kid; moving as an Army brat; her general dad who captured Göring and helped create the CIA; at Smith College wanting to be an actress; rebelling against Vietnam and the wishes of her dad by marrying Bradlee; the Georgetown party circuit and how it's grown more partisan; throwing a pajama party for Goldwater; dating Hunter S. Thompson; Watergate and Woodstein; the Grahams; Tom Stoppard; Hitchens; Howell Raines; Newt's revolution; Bill's womanizing; Hillary defending her cheater; the Monica frenzy; Obama rising on merit; Barack the introvert; Jerry Brown; the catastrophe of Biden running in 2024; Dr. Jill's complicity and cruelty; Jon Meacham; Maureen Dowd; David Ignatius; Bradlee's dementia; declining trust in journalism; Bezos nixing the Harris endorsement; his life with Lauren Sanchez; sucking up to Trump; the Will Lewis debacle; Sally's spiritual life; silent retreats; Zen meditation; the humor in Buddhism; the denial of death; debating the the Golden Rule; children in Gaza; and the need more than ever for in-person gatherings.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Jeffrey Toobin on the pardon power, Michael Pollan on consciousness, Derek Thompson on abundance, Matt Goodwin on the UK political earthquake, Jonah Goldberg on the state of conservatism, Tom Holland on the Christian roots of liberalism, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy, Adrian Wooldridge on “the lost genius of liberalism,” and Kathryn Paige Harden on the genetics of vice. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. A listener writes:Thanks for all these good episodes. Is Vivek still planning to be a guest soon? I have been looking forward to that episode.He got cold feet. Too bad. On the other hand, I tend to avoid active politicians. Because they're rarely as candid as I'd like a guest to be. Oh well.A fan of last week's pod who lives near Atlanta writes, “The longtime Dishheads on the Mableton cul-de-sac definitely approve of your interview with homegrown talent Zaid Jilani”:I agree with his description of Mableton as a bit like the United Nations; I see that diversity in our grocery stores and local restaurants. He mentioned how he was often the only Pakistani and thus perceived as a nonthreatening minority. It makes me wonder how much the diversity mix affects how people perceive immigration? If a large group from one country arrives, does that seem more like an invasion? If a similar number arrives but from a wide range of locations, does that seem more like the normal American melting pot?After 30 years of living in Mableton, this may partly explain why I am not bothered by immigration in the way that you are, Andrew. I expect to see and hear all sorts of people wherever I go in my neighborhood. Today the teller at the bank spoke accented English. There are regular clerks at my grocery store who are immigrants. Our new HVAC was installed by immigrants. As an Atlanta suburb, there are many people descended from African slaves. European ancestry is merely one possibility off the long colorful menu around here.I think pace and numbers matter. A slower pace and fewer — with no massive homogenous populations arriving at once. And a new emphasis on Americanization over “multiculturalism”.From a listener who wants to “Make Democrats Great Again”:Great conversation with Zaid Jilani last week. I am very concerned that hardly any Democrats are being at all introspective, trying to figure out where they went wrong and how to become a party that can actually win elections — maybe even hearts and minds. They are only defined as anti-Trump, and their only hope is for Trump to go down in flames — which he very well might, but all they aspire to is winning as the least-worst party.The policy directions for reclaiming sanity and moderate voters are obvious (to me, at least). Here are my top three issues:1. AffordabilityThe longest lever to affect affordability is housing. Democrats have been complete failures in this regard, with strongholds like California and NYC being the least affordable places. When they talk about “affordable housing,” they only mean housing that is forced below market rate for the few poor people lucky enough to get it. They offer no solutions for the middle class or young people.The solution is obvious: build more. Plough through the various restrictions that are preventing housing from being built. There is no reason housing can't be cheap, except for NIMBY politics. Scott Weiner in California has been doing great work on this.Health care is the second-longest affordability lever. Obamacare made some progress, but not nearly enough, especially in terms of keeping costs down. But I'm not sure we're ready for another push on this; I say focus on housing.2. ImmigrationObviously there should be some immigration, and obviously we have structured our economy such that many jobs are only done by immigrants. But the Democrats' policy of simply not enforcing immigration law is untenable, especially for a group asking to be put in charge of law enforcement. We need those migrant workers, so find a way for them be here legally. Not through amnesty, but through some sort of bureaucratic process: have the employers fill out a form; have the prospective worker fill out a form in some office in Mexico; have someone process the form; and give them a green card.This is simple stuff! And yes, it would be helpful to admit that open borders, sanctuary cities, and subverting the law were not good ideas.3. CultureEnd wokeness. America is not a country consumed by white supremacy, and the people who voted for Trump are not racists. There are hardly any racists! And drop the other insanities, like the trans stuff.The message needs to be, “We are the Democrats and we want to help anybody from any state who needs help.” Hard to convince struggling white people in the South that you're going to help them when you seem to despise them. Love your brother, for crying out loud. And naturally, today's woke Democrats would be much more accepting of this message if it came from a racial minority candidate.Another wanted to hear more:I wish you had asked Zaid about Josh Shapiro. Also, when Zaid talked about affordability, he never mentioned housing — which is why there are so many ex-Californians in his home state of Georgia and elsewhere. “Build Baby Build” should be the slogan of the Democratic Party, rather than gaslighting Americans into believing housing prices will come down because we are getting rid of immigrants (Vance).Here's a dissent:About 20:30 into your interview with Zaid Jilani, he said that the root of all the Abrahamic faiths is that the meek have rights. You replied that this applied more to Christianity and Islam than to Judaism. I say this neither rhetorically nor to admonish you, but how much do you know about Judaism? Your comment is completely mistaken. Just what do you think Judaism says about the meek?Another has examples:In Genesis, you find that all humans were created b'tzelem Elohim (in the image of God). Moreover, Jewish texts consistently frame care for the poor as a legal obligation and moral imperative, not mere charity. Every Jewish child learns that promoting economic justice is mandated. It is called tzedakah.This religious mandate has manifested itself in the real world. Jews have been disproportionately represented in social justice movements aimed at promoting human equality. It wasn't an accident that two of three civil rights movement activists murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan were Jewish.Points taken. Big generalizations in a chat can be dumb. My quarrel may be semantic: the meek is not merely the weak. It's about the quiet people, those easily trampled upon. Like many of Jesus' innovations, it takes a Jewish idea further.Another listener on the Zaid pod:I wonder if you ever play the game of “which time would you like to go back to”? I do! And only half-jokingly, I often say 1994 in DC. Something about, for example, Christopher Hitchens on CSPAN in a dreary suit jacket discussing such *trivial* aspects of politics in a serious way. How perfect! When I listened to your episode with Zaid Jilani about how the left can win, it seemed dated to about this period in the early ‘90s.Ah yes, the Nineties. They were heady times and I think we all kinda realized it at the time. The economy was booming, crime was plummeting, Annie Leibovitz took my picture, and we had the luxury of an impeachment over a b*****b. Good times.On another episode, a listener says I have a “rose-colored view of President Obama”:In your conversation with Jason Willick, you said that Obama was a stickler for proper procedure and doing things the right way. I might instance, on the other side:* Evading the constitutional requirements on treaties in pursuit of the Iran deal (an evasion that the Republicans were stupid enough to go along with)* Encouraging the regulatory gambit of “sue and settle”* The “Dear Colleague” letter* “I've got a pen and a phone”Points taken. Especially the DACA move. But compared to Biden and Trump? Much better. One more listener email:I've been following you for years, but more recently I became a subscriber, and it's a decision I don't regret! I usually listen to the Dishcast over the weekend, and I always find it extremely stimulating, but there is also something relaxing about the length and scope of your conversations.I want to respond to something you said in your Claire Berlinski episode on the subject of Ukraine. Although I appreciate your position in defence of international law, you implied that Russia's claim to Ukrainian land is somehow “historically legitimate.” This is not only problematic from a logical standpoint (does Sweden have a historically legitimate claim to Finland and Norway, or does the UK have a claim to the Republic of Ireland, the US, and all its former colonies?), but also not based on historical reality.Unfortunately, this is not the first time your comments on Ukraine seem come through the prism of a Russian lens. I am sure it's not intentional; perhaps that's not a subject you have invested much time in, which is legitimate. However, I find it a bit surprising that, as we approach the fifth year of Russia's full-scale invasion, you still don't seem to have had the curiosity to explore this and invite any specialist on Ukraine. If Timothy Snyder is too political these days, I would recommend Serhii Plokhy — possibly the most eminent historian of Ukraine — or Yaroslav Hrytsak. They would each be a very interesting conversation.The Dishcast has featured many guests with expertise on the Ukraine war, including Anne Applebaum (twice), John Mearsheimer, Samuel Ramani (twice), Edward Luttwak, Fiona Hill (twice), Robert Wright, Robert Kaplan, Fareed Zakaria, Douglas Murray, Edward Luce, and Niall Ferguson.A reader responds to last week's column, “The President Of The 0.00001 Percent”:Like you, I'm not against people getting rich. A lot of good is done by a few people who have enough money to seed research and the arts, and pursue things that ordinary worker bees would never have the margin of time or resources to pursue. Good so far.But all strong forces need regulation and/or protective barriers, whether it's the weather, sex, patriotism, or capitalism. What's going on now is obscene. Progressive taxation is a social good: it doesn't stop anyone from getting richer and richer; it doesn't remove the positive motivators for success; it just means that the farther they get, the higher their proportionate contribution to the system that lets them get there. There are various ways to tweak the dials, but there is nothing philosophically wrong with tweaking them in a way the sets some outer limit. Let it be very high, but let it not be infinite.Here's a familiar dissent:You were right to torch the nihilism of the .00001 class. You were right to call out moral evasions. But when you referred to “the IDF's massacre of children in Gaza,” you collapsed a morally and legally distinct reality into a slogan. Words matter. “Massacre” implies intent. It suggests that the deliberate killing of children is policy rather than tragic consequence. That is a serious charge, and it deserves serious evidence.The governing reality in Gaza is not that Israel woke up one morning and decided to target children.

Well, finally Chris Bishop has done the right thing and made the u-turn on the two million new houses he had planned for Auckland. It's not altogether a surprise that he did this and announced it this afternoon, because it's been rumoured for months - for the obvious reason that it's election year. Auckland is a key battleground. Aucklanders are obsessed with houses. Auckland voters who own their homes were already stressed about this plan, and if it turned into a full election issue with proper media coverage, even more of them would've become stressed. That would mean blue Auckland voters heading straight to New Zealand First, ACT or Labour. So it was a political problem for National and Bishop had to back down. But in reality, it's not just politics, is it? It's basic common sense. I think it's reasonable for an Aucklander who has sunk one to two million dollars - maybe more, maybe a bit less, but still a lot of money - into their home to feel stressed at the idea of a multi‑storey apartment block popping up next door, blocking their view, blocking their light, ruining their privacy. Whatever it is. We mock these people as NIMBYs, but actually, I think it's fair for them to want to protect the place they live in. Don't you want to protect the place you live in? This battle, though, is far from won. Anyone looking at this and thinking, “That was a close call, thank God that's over,” - it's not over. All Bishop has done is reduce the number of new houses to the point that it shouldn't impact on suburbs. But whether it does affect suburbs is a decision for Auckland Council, and that decision hasn't been made yet. So while it should, on balance, be okay, nothing is certain until the Auckland maps are released. What this is, then, is one u-turn down, and one more to go. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Portugal has MAGA now, down to even A.I.-generated xenophobic rap videos, and we're sorry. Then we discuss the nationwide widespread pushback against new ICE detention facilities due to an alliance of wokes and the most undefeatable of American political forces, NIMBYs. After that we bring on Corey Ryan Forrester to walk us through a hilarious mayoral scandal that's rocked his small town.This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp makes it easy to get matched online with a qualified therapist. Sign up and get 10%  https://www.betterhelp.com/skews This episode is sponsored by ZBiotics. Go to https://zbiotics.com/SKEW now. You'll get 15% off your first order when you use SKEW at checkout

On this episode, my guest is Leslie Kern, PhD, the author of three books about cities, including Gentrification Is Inevitable And Other Lies and Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. Her work provokes new ways of thinking about and creating cities that are more just, equitable, caring, and sustainable. Leslie was an associate professor of geography and environment and women's and gender studies at Mount Allison University from 2009-2024. Today, she is a public speaker, writer, and career coach for authors and academics.Show Notes* Gentrification and touristification* Naturalization of gentrification* The new colonialism* Intersectionality* Who's to blame: renter or landlord?* The hipster and the safety net* The invisible face behind gentrification and touristifcation* Transactionality or hospitality? The case of Airbnb* Commercial gentrification* The right to stay putHomeworkLeslie Kern - Website - InstagramGentrification Is Inevitable and Other Lies - USA - Canada Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World - USA - CanadaHigher Expectations: How to Survive Academia, Make it Better for Others, and Transform the UniversityThe Tenant Class by Ricardo TranjanTranscriptChris: [00:00:00] Welcome, Leslie, to the End of Tourism Podcast. Thank you for taking time out of your day, to speak with me. Thank you. To begin, I'm wondering if you'd be willing to tell us where you find yourself today and what the world looks like there, for you.Leslie: Sure. I find myself in Cambridge, Ontario.It's a city of about 130,000 people. If I looked out my window right now, I would see a lot of blowing snow. It's about minus 27 Celsius with the windchill, or something hideous like that today, so taking the time to talk to you this morning means I don't have to go out and shovel anything just yet. So.Chris: Well, thank you. Thank you for joining us. it's a great honour and I'm really looking forward to this conversation that bears a great deal of complexity. So, I had invited you on the pod in part to explore your book, Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies. And [00:01:00] in it, Leslie, you write that“Gentrification has come to be used as a metaphor for processes of mainstreaming, commodification, appropriation, and upscaling that are not necessarily or directly connected to cities. In this story about gentrification, gentrification stands in for any sort of change that pulls a thing or a practice out of its original context and increases its popularity, priciness, and profit-making potential.”Given that some of our listeners might not have heard of the term “gentrification” before, although I doubt it, but given that those who have heard it might understand it also to be what you and others refer to as a “chaotic concept,” I'm wondering if you'd be willing to take a stab at defining it for us today?Leslie: Yeah, absolutely. If we [00:02:00] look to, I guess, a kind of typical scholarly definition of gentrification, it would be describing an urban process in which middle or upper class, or in some other way, privileged households start to move into a neighbourhood or area of the city that has historically been more working class, or perhaps an immigrant neighbourhood, perhaps more industrial, and begin to remake that neighbourhood, kind of in their own image, thus driving up housing prices both in the rental and ownership markets, driving up the cost of living in the area, and critically, as part of the definition, resulting in some level of displacement of the older inhabitants of that neighbourhood. “Displacement” meaning they've been kind of priced out or otherwise pushed directly or indirectly to leave and [00:03:00] move to some other neighbourhood.So, typically with gentrification, the definition is centred around it being a class-based process, but in more recent decades, many scholars, myself included, have wanted to broaden that and to acknowledge that other axes of power and privilege, for example, race, gender, ability, age, sexuality, and so on, also play a role in contributing to the kinds of forces that propel gentrification. And we can maybe get into some of that later.So for myself, in the book, I talk about gentrification as “any kind of process of taking over claiming space and remaking it in the image and for the interests and benefit of a more powerful group of people, or perhaps even corporations, to some extent.” So, [00:04:00] gentrification is really the process of taking and claiming space. And I also do include displacement as part of that process, although I also acknowledge that sometimes people can be kind of psychologically displaced, even if they aren't necessarily physically pushed out of their neighbourhoods.Chris: Mean it's something that I was noticing in Toronto before I left and moved and migrated here to Oaxaca. It's something that I think in the last five or ten years has become an unfortunate mainstay of city life in the vast majority of places, of urban places in the world.And this is also something that I've seen quite a bit here in Oaxaca, Mexico in a somewhat prolific tourist destination. And so, in places that have [00:05:00] been deemed “destinations” in this way, there's often a kind of reductionism, here anyways, and in other tourist destinations in which gentrification and what's sometimes called touristification is confused.And so one definition of “touristification” is simply “the process of transformation of a place into a tourist space and its associated effects.” So a kind of very vague and broad definition. But we also understand that gentrification can happen in places that aren't necessarily tourist destinations.And so, we've also discussed in the pod the possibility that a place doesn't necessarily need tourists in it to have touristic qualities or context what we might say. [00:06:00] And so I'm curious for you, do you think it's important to distinguish the two concepts, gentrification and touristification? And if so, why?Leslie: Yeah, great question. I think a distinction, to some extent, is important in that, yeah, there may be elements of touristification, for example, that are somewhat unique to that process, especially in terms of the kind of impact that it might have on local inhabitants who may not necessarily be displaced, but who may see their everyday lives kind of radically altered by the touristification of an area.And as you say, gentrification happens in all kinds of areas, many of which are not geared to tourism, although sometimes that is a kind of later effect of gentrification, is that tourists might be drawn to certain neighbourhoods or places that they would not have otherwise gone to in the past.As [00:07:00] you mentioned in your earlier question, there's been some concern in the gentrification literature that it's a bit of a chaotic concept, by which it is meant that it's maybe too broad of an umbrella [term], and so many different kinds of processes are kind of lumped together under that umbrella. I think it's a useful umbrella, but under that umbrella, we can try to be clear about what we're talking about when we look at particular locations, and try to articulate the impacts that these processes are having on the local community, economy, environment, and so on.Chris: Thank you, Leslie. Thank you for that. So your book is broken up into chapters that reveal the deeper realities behind the tropes or lies sometimes spouted about gentrification. And there are often many. And so I'm curious if after having done the research and writing for this book, and it was published in [00:08:00] 2022, so perhaps there's been some deeper reflection in that regard, I'm curious what you feel might be the most important lie about gentrification that requires our attention and why?Leslie: Ooh, really putting me on the hook to like pick a favorite child there. No, I'm joking. Ultimately, I mean, I guess the most straightforward answer would be the first one that I discuss in the book, which is right there in the book's title, which is the idea that gentrification is inevitable. And we can kind of unpack that a little bit further, as I do in the kind of first main chapter of the book, which is to say that in some accounts of gentrification, it's presented as a sort of natural process, right? As something that is just akin to evolution, for example. So there's this idea that if you kind of start with, for example, a working class or immigrant [00:09:00] neighbourhood, lower income community, with some other kinds of attributes that might not make it seem wealthy or desirable, that over time, just through, I don't know, a kind of mystical series of properties, the way that species evolve or human beings develop from fetus and baby to an adult through this series of difficult to trace impacts, that somehow it just happens. Right. And of course, the problem with that, again, is that if we think it's natural, then we don't really think there's any way to stop it.And also when we describe something as “natural,” we often imbue it with positive qualities. Well, if it's “natural,” it's just meant to happen. It's just the way things are. And why would we want to stand in the way of that process? From a kind of political standpoint, it becomes very problematic, because it means that there's not really a [00:10:00] willingness perhaps on the part of those who have some power and influence to slow down gentrification, to pause it, to use whatever tools they might have in their kind of legislative toolbox to create guardrails around the process happening or to try to prevent it altogether. And from a kind of community response standpoint, it can be very disempowering to believe that gentrification is inevitable, unstoppable, that once you see those first, white, middle-class families move into your neighbourhood, “boom, you're done. It's over. The clock is counting down to the time when it's not your neighbourhood anymore and you'll just have to leave, so why bother to do anything about it?”And as I also try to show in the book, you know, it's hard to fight gentrification, but there are examples around the world of communities that have pushed back and kind of “pumped the brakes on gentrification,” as one [00:11:00] activist described it to me. So, we, I think, don't want to fall into this trap of believing that communities themselves are powerless, or that our politicians and policy-makers have absolutely no tools that they can use to change this.So I would say that is probably the most important kind of first line myth or lie that we need to challenge. And then we can kind of go down the line and pick apart some of the other ones, which is how I've structured the book as you point out. Yeah.Chris: Thank you, Leslie. Yeah, I mean, that was a really jarring chapter for me, in part because of this notion that not only is quote gentrification inevitable or natural, but that the city is, according to different philosophers and thinkers, imbued with this kind of biological life and [00:12:00] and that it follows as you were mentioning certain processes that are “ natural” as far as evolution is concerned.And imediately, this brought me back to my research on what's often referred to as 19th century social evolutionist thought, these notions that were often created or maintained by kind of, elite, wealthy, white men in the 19th century, not all of whom were academics, some of them were bankers, for example, among other things, but essentially promoting this notion that certain races or genders or types of people had evolved along the natural processes of evolution either faster than others or got ahead in certain ways, and that, of course, this was a way for those people, not only the non-academics, but those in academia [00:13:00] to employ hypotheses theories as a way of justifying colonial histories and the ongoing conquests of different people around the world. And so, in that context, I'm curious if you imagine or think that gentrification understood or described as “natural” in this way is a kind of extension, a historical extension of that kind of colonial power play of the 19th century.Leslie: Yeah, I absolutely do. And there are many ways in which the power dynamics and even the language or the vocabulary around gentrification mirrors that around colonialism with all of the problematic tropes there of neighbourhoods or areas of the city being taken over where “there's really nothing there,” right?[It's the] same kind of justification for colonialism. “There's nothing there. [00:14:00] There's nobody there that we need to care about,” so European colonizers are entitled to this land. Similarly, with the way that many developers, for example, I think, rationalize or justify the kind of projects they engage in.“Oh, there's nothing really happening in that part of the city. There's not really a community there. It's just a space of problems or deviation from the norm or disorder. And so we, as developers, as city planners, we're going to bring order and light and civilization, quite frankly, to these neighbourhoods.”So I'm sure you're hearing in this, all those echoes around colonialism. And this point around the social evolution part of it, I think that is the kind of darker, maybe less acknowledged side of gentrification, is that when we start to talk about neighbourhoods as “nothing's happening there, there's nobody there.” [00:15:00] Who's “nobody,” right? Who falls into that category of “nobody,” right? It's poor people. It might be unhoused people, working-class people, people of colour, queer people, disabled people, sex workers, right?“All people who we don't really think of as kind of counting as citizens, people who we don't think have a legitimate voice in the city, people who we don't think have a right to the city or a claim on the city.” And they're just seen as disposable, as easily displaceable, as not really contributing anything to the community or to the city at large. So I think there's definitely a sense of kind of hierarchy in terms of, “who are the seemingly new people who are coming in, right?” And they're viewed as “bringing all of these kind of gifts and benefits to the neighbourhood, and in some ways, perhaps even uplifting the poor [00:16:00] or downtrodden inhabitants of the ghetto or the barrio or whatever. And the locals should somehow be grateful to receive gentrification similarly to the way that people were, say, ‘oh, you should be grateful to receive an education if you're from the lower-classes or working-classes.'”So, yeah, I think there's definitely echoes and traces of that same kind of logic, right? It's a logic of superiority, a logic of dominance, a logic of control that resonates, whether it's colonialism or social evolutionism. Um, yeah.Chris: Wow. Fascinating. Fascinating stuff. I mean, this is, I think, to a large degree culture or what we call culture or what culture might be is made on the tongue, and that the, the kind of unacknowledged ways in which we speak the world into being [00:17:00] is something that's been direly overlooked in our time. So thank you for speaking to that in that way. And I think it's something that we would properly kind of continue to wonder about as we speak and as we think, and perhaps before we speak as well.You know, you mentioned in there the different types of people that are often displaced as a result of gentrification. And this shows up quite a bit in your book. So I wanted to ask you about what you refer to as “intersectionality,” an intersectional approach to gentrification.Some of the conventional critiques that you mentioned in the book, including the economic critique (kind of follow the money), the aesthetic critique (the kind of clean lines and fancy bakeries that show up), as well as the class critique, which you mentioned kind of upward mobility, among others.That said, you focus a good portion of the book, I think, on this neglected importance of intersectionality. And so I'm curious, why do you think an intersectional approach has been ignored in the [00:18:00] past, and why might it be crucial for a cohesive or integral analysis of gentrification?Leslie: Hmm. I think an intersectional approach has been kind of sidelined, if you will, in part because most of the key kind of prominent gentrification scholars of the late 20th century and into the 21st century have been, honestly, white men probably themselves from middle-class backgrounds, or obviously university educated scholars and they've been, like neo-Marxist, or Marxist. That's their theoretical perspective. That's their training. They come from a kind of Marxist, political economy, background. That's the lens of analysis that they bring to whatever kind of problem they're looking at in the world, including gentrification.And they've done brilliant work, right, and created a lot of really foundational [00:19:00] concepts, gone and done really important empirical work so that we can actually see what the impacts of these processes are. And there's nothing I want to take away from that being a key voice within the field of gentrification studies, but I think too often either there's been kind of minimal lip service paid or kind of outright pushing to the side of feminist perspectives, anti-racist perspective, anti-colonial perspectives and more, because it's sort of seemed like, well, “class is the main driver and anything that maybe disproportionately impacts women or people of colour, or queer folks or elderly people, that's like a side effect, right? Like the main driver is class and those people are simply impacted because they also happen to fall into lower income brackets.”So it's a pretty neat and tidy [00:20:00] story and you can kind of see why it has some appeal. So I think, you know, those political economy, neo-Marxist scholars is not that they don't care about race or gender or other factors. They're just like, “well, it's all really rolled up under the umbrella of ‘class.' And if we just figure out the ‘class' piece, then those other things will kind of fall into place.” But for feminist scholars, critical race scholars, anti-colonial scholars and so on, they've wanted to point out that assuming that class is the primary driver behind things is maybe an assumption that we've held onto for too long without questioning it. And instead of seeing racial impacts and so on as something that's just happening off to the side through a class process, maybe we want to also look, especially in something like an American context, but in other places as well, at the deeply foundational layer of race to the development of cities, to the development of the [00:21:00] nation, and we can't kind of sideline the impacts of racial discrimination and the kind of hierarchy of race that has developed over many centuries in these locations and say, “oh, well it's a secondary factor.”For myself, I'm a feminist scholar. My background is in women's and gender studies before I kind of accidentally stumbled into being an urban geographer. And to me it was always kind of obvious, but I think I've had to argue this point so often that processes like gentrification, neoliberalism, urban revitalization, as it's called, doesn't just kind of impact women as a tangential side effect, but that gender inequality or assumptions about gender roles and so on are like part of what drives the process. And so I try to bring that out in the book by looking at different kinds of examples of the ways in which different sorts of [00:22:00] communities or people are impacted to hopefully show, to hopefully make a case for this idea that taking an intersectional perspective doesn't deny the class factor at all, but that it allows us to look at gentrification through a more nuanced lens and one that respects the fact that class is not the only, and not always the most salient marker of hierarchy and status in our societies.Chris: Hmm, hmm. Yeah, I did go to university a long time ago, and it seemed that what was offered up on the proverbial, kind of conceptual, bill, politically speaking was, here are your five major theories or perspectives and kind of like choose one and decide what you like the best and then argue for it or against it.But it does seem that the more apertures that we have onto the world, without necessarily needing [00:23:00] to collapse our considerations into a single one can broaden our understanding of the world deeply, right? Deeply, deeply. And it's something that I see anyways less and less of.I think there's more and more possibilities for experiencing that in our time, but I think there's a lot of processes that are happening in which there's less and less of it that's actually occurring - a kind of collapse of maybe ontological diversity or philosophical diversity.I don't know what to call it, but seems prevalent and at least from this little aperture. So.Leslie: Yeah, I would agree with that, as someone who, just in my own little brief lifetime here on this earth has been peddling my little feminist arguments for 30-plus years. And then we add on to that, the 30 years before that and 30 years before all of the previous generations. It seems like we are, [00:24:00] not just from a feminist perspective, but we are kind of constantly having to make these arguments for that ontological diversity, as you put it, or even just the idea that, oh, you can view things through different lenses and learn different things about whatever kind of process or force or issue that you're interested in.Chris: Hmm. Well, thank you for that. I'd like to, if I can, Leslie, there was something I've been wrestling with for a while and it was very much front and centre, this kind of inner wrestling when I was reading your book.And so, I'd like to share that with you at the moment if I can, and we'll see where it takes us. So part of the reason that I left Toronto a decade ago was that the housing crises, that perhaps for some wasn't yet a crisis in Toronto, has of course ballooned. But in the past five years I've watched that same housing crisis play out here in Oaxaca.[00:25:00] And what arose almost immediately in the, we'll say media sphere, the online world and certainly on the streets as well, was a kind of xenophobic campaign or campaigns blaming tourists, digital nomads, and “expats” for the rising cost of rentals and housing. Now, while not entirely misguided, the percentage of such people is insignificant in comparison to the total population of renters and homeowners here.And then I ask myself, well, “why isn't anyone questioning the role of homeowners and landlords, those who actually decide the price of rental units, those who decide to turn long-term rentals into Airbnbs, and those who are, some of them anyways, more often than not, part and parcel of the political ruling class in many places?” Why not blame them?And so, if you think about this enough, you can [00:26:00] begin to imagine that the willingness to blame specific people, types, classes, races, et cetera, can ignore the cultural, economic and structural elements of society that allow and encourage such dynamics to emerge. And it seems to me that you speak to this, to some degree, in your book writing, how“it is not helpful in a critique of gentrification to get overly stuck on the styles and preferences of a group, when, for many decades now, gentrification has been propelled by much stronger forces than aesthetic trends.”And in another part of the book, you write that “cultural factors cannot be hastily dismissed, not when their power is easily co-opted by capital. Trends in denim and facial hair are not responsible for gentrification, but when large groups of people are redefined as a class based on their tastes, occupations, and aesthetics, they become a market and a justification for urban [00:27:00] interventions.”And so my question has to do with what I might call, I don't know if this is something that shows up in your work or in your research, but a kind of “ecological analysis,” one that doesn't necessarily separate people into essentialist categories, but contends with how maybe the rules of the game produce the player's behaviour and beliefs.And so I'm wondering, you know, in your research, is that something that is tended to, a way of, “okay so, we're not going to only blame or ask the tourists to take responsibility or the digital nomads, et cetera, and we're not only gonna blame or ask the landlords to take responsibility, but understand that they live and inhabit a kind of web of relations that has, for a long time, created the context that allows them or even [00:28:00] encourages them to proceed in a particular way?Leslie: Yes, a hundred percent. I really love the way that you put that there and giving it that kind of label of like an ecological perspective there. I think it's so important to do in the book. You know, the first quote that you read there, I think has to do with this idea that, “oh, you know, hipsters were causing gentrification” kind of thing.And I wanted to kind of, not defend the hipster per se, but to just say, well, in a city like New York, for example, the takeover of midtown Manhattan and the absolute sort of pricing out of regular people, well, from Manhattan as a whole in many cases is not to do with artists and yoga teachers moving into those neighborhoods. It has to do with massive multinational corporations buying up housing, developing condos, like all of these other things that [00:29:00] are going on. And as you say, I mean, I think it is useful to question and critique landlordism for example, and even home ownership itself, but there's a reason why people engage in these practices and as you say, it's because of these all sorts of other like prior sort of conditions and causes this kind of web of possibilities that so much of our... the policy, the legislative world, our national context shapes for us.Like in Canada for example, home ownership is, as you well know, sort of seen as the ultimate goal in the housing market. Renting is seen as very much a kind of transitional stage for people. And the idea is to eventually, sooner rather than later, own your own home.And of course there's all kinds of cultural myths around that, of homeowners being like responsible people and better citizens and all this kind of stuff that is, maybe like [00:30:00] largely nonsense. But why, in this context, do people become homeowners? Well, this is the way that we've been told “you secure your retirement in the absence of a truly kind of robust old age security net.” Yes, we have some. We have pension, old age pension, but for many people, the home is ultimately their social safety net, and government policy has very much been set up to encourage us to treat our homes in that way and to rely on paying off a mortgage and having that home to be the basis of survival into our old age.Right. And there are many other things. That's just one example. So I think, as you say, it's really important to kind of look at that whole ecosystem. And that doesn't mean that we don't say, “well, okay, what are homeowners doing that might be potentially problematic and contributing to the problem?”Well, that could include things like turning units into Airbnbs or acting in NIMBY-ish (Not In My Backyard), kind of ways that limit, for example, the amount of affordable housing that might go up in their neighbourhood and other things. Of course, all of those dynamics have to be critiqued, challenged, pushed back against. But, keeping, at the same time that kind of zoomed out perspective of like what's going on on a larger scale, in the kind of corporate and investment world and the government policy-making world, I think at least helps us to understand why these different groups are kind of positioned in the way that they do and the kind of range of possibilities that they see for themselves within that web.Chris: Mm mm Yeah. Yeah. That reminds me of a moment that I had here in Oaxaca, maybe three or four years ago. There was a student group that had come down from a Canadian university, and they were here for a couple weeks, and I was having dinner with them. Not all of them, but there was maybe four of the women from the student group that I was having dinner with.And one of them was probably in her, I would say [00:32:00] mid-fifties, an indigenous woman from Ontario. And the other three were much younger, probably in their early twenties. And they were suddenly talking about the sudden or at least recent kind of housing crisis in their university town, we'll call it, maybe a small city, but big town. And how in previous years they could afford the rent, but suddenly, and of course this was 2021-2022, when a lot of these dynamics started changing extremely rapidly. And I was kind of moderating the conversation at first. And then it turned out, she wasn't so quick to out herself as a landlord. But the indigenous woman, the 55-year-old kind of alluded to it and then said, “well, you know, for a lot of people, it's a pension plan. “It's my retirement plan, essentially.” And it was this really interesting dynamic about how these four women, who had come to this place and were in the same program, studying the [00:33:00] same thing, that one of them had to perhaps, unbeknownst to her, undermine the economic life and possibilities of those younger women by virtue of requiring a retirement plan.Right. And I think at least in Canada, in countries that are very much still welfare states, that it speaks to a, the incredible degree in which the care that's offered, especially to the elderly, is almost entirely top-down. There's so little, if any, community care.And, you know, of course this is a very kind of small example, a very kind of minute example. I think maybe a common one. But of course you also have other examples of, as you mentioned before, corporations... is it BlackRock this massive mutual fund that I know in, in Europe and places like Barcelona and the major cities there end up buying entire apartment buildings or blocks even, and evicting [00:34:00] the residents and then setting up Airbnb buildings, essentially. So, I mean, there's this incredible kind of degree of difference and diversity in terms of how, as you mentioned landlordism and rent is affecting people.But I just wanted to mention that. It was a really kind of interesting moment for me to see this dynamic and the young women kind of complaining about, you know, I guess the future, the present and the future of their economic lives. And then, this older woman also not necessarily complaining, but very much concerned about her ability to live as well, economically and to thrive economically into her older age.Leslie: Yeah. And there's these kind of ironic situations popping up all over the place where so for example, someone might have a public pension. And as you point out, many public pensions are deeply invested in real estate income trusts. This is like a huge piece for example, in Ontario, of [00:35:00] Ontario public workers' pensions, but around the world as well, and I don't have the details, but a story that was in the news several years ago about a man somewhere in Europe who was being evicted from his apartment because that one of these real estate investment corporations was taking it over and was gonna redevelop it in some way. But his public pension was invested in that very same company. Right?So many people are kind of caught in these loops where it's like, we would very much like to not be like, displacing ourselves or our neighbours or community members, but we don't necessarily have control over how our pension funds are invested, right? Like you might have a choice like, “oh, I'd like to divest from fossil fuels, for example, or from tobacco or military, like arms deals.” Like, sometimes, you can opt out of those things in your pension funds, but there's not really a way to like opt out of real estate investment.My substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.It's such a huge part of those things now. So I think that's an area where there's increasing kind of research and critical perspectives on that in gentrification scholarship and so on that I think is really important to look at, because it's also very hidden, right? This is another aspect I think of contemporary kind of gentrification touristification even, is that there's no face to it, right? There's no face to this process. And maybe that's why it's tempting to take, as you put it a minute ago, that kind of like xenophobic perspective or to blame “expats” in the case of Oaxaca and touristification or in cities to be like, “oh, it's these urban hipsters, maybe these like trust fund kids” or whatever label people might want to put on someone, because there's a face, right? There you can look and be like, “that's the problem.” But the reality is there is no face, right? There's no individual or even group of individuals that's easy to identify. And people doing [00:37:00] research into some of this pension fund stuff that I'm talking about, they hit very opaque walls, even just trying to get the information about how these companies work, the kinds of decisions they make, what their rubrics are around what they call “socially responsible investing.”So it's very deliberately mystified and hidden from us, and I think that is part of the challenge now is like, how do you fight this monster that you can't see, that you can barely name?So yeah, that is I think one of the kind of frightening things, if you will, about, whether we call it “gentrification,” or we think about it in this broader sense of the housing crisis, who's the face of that, the cause of that crisis? Very hard to say in many cases.Chris: Wow. Yeah, I know that these mutual fund companies that end up buying, you know, whole city blocks or buildings, apartment buildings, and then tending to renovictions or whatever they [00:38:00] might use in order to get people out. Once the buildings are “ renovated” as Airbnbs, what happens is those corporations end up outsourcing all of the operational and cleaning duties to companies that they're not involved with at all. So, again, you could have this person who's in front of you, who might be a cleaner or who comes ou in and out of the building or who might run the reservation books or something like that, but they've never met anyone from that mutual fund company. Right. They just get a paycheck.Leslie: Yeah. And it's happening on this kind of global level. The people behind the company that's investing in that building in Oaxaca, like they may have never set foot there, and they may never set foot there. Right? So it's happening from around the world, from thousands of kilometers away from behind these kind of screens of, as you said, these kind of shell companies and these subcontracted, property management companies.I mean the story you were just telling about the woman who's a landlord, like on that small scale, not that [00:39:00] there's nothing problematic about it, but it is also like, you know, she's probably met her tenants, right? She probably occasionally sets foot in the property that she owns and that she rents out, and there's like some aspect of a relationship there. It's still, you know, a problematic power dynamic and all of that, but it's on a very different scale than the investor from London who's has a stake in a condo in Oaxaca. Like, it's a very different web of of relations that goes into that.Chris: Yeah. And even if someone like that, and I've had many, many landlords over the years and I've been blessed to have a number of them who are really incredible people and really incredible in terms of showing up when they're needed in that regard. But it's something, I discussed on a previous episode regarding the Airbnb-ization of the world, a couple years ago. And one of the themes that came up was around hospitality, right? [00:40:00] And even if you have people who are kind of really engaged and really excited and responsible about having a tenant in their home or in a particular building, the kind of transactional nature of that rent almost (and then of course the history of it) precludes, almost by default, the possibility of there being a kind of host-guest relationship, right? Instead of that we are “clients” and and, and “salespeople,” businesspeople to some degree.Right. So another layer of it is this question of like, “well, is it even possible within the dynamic or structure that renting implies and incurs, is it even possible to create a dynamic wherein a person can be understood as a guest in another person's home, and another person can be understood as a host to people who are coming to live in their home? Right? That that same [00:41:00] woman, the 55-year-old landlord said that she had tenants who refused to leave for, I dunno, a year and a half or two years, and once they finally did, left her with a $40,000 damage bill. So, I think there's just layers and layers that are extremely difficult to kind of get into, I shouldn't say in terms of dialogue, in terms of investigation, but in terms of the possibility of creating different dynamics that would maybe represent or produce the kinds of dynamics and worlds that, I think, a lot of people would want to live in.Leslie: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think in a lot of cases, and you honestly don't have to dig very deep, you can open up CBC News and see some poor, sad landlord story most days of the week or listen to kind of corporate or larger scale landlords talk and they often see tenants as a nuisance.“The tenants themselves are a problem,” and if they could invest in real estate and still make [00:42:00] these returns without actually having tenants, that would probably be ideal. And I think that is also part of the push to an Airbnb is that with a temporary guest, you know, a week, a weekend or whatever, you don't have the same responsibility to them as you do to someone with a year lease or perhaps the right to stay there for a longer period of time. So, all you have to do is kind of provide this very basic amenity of the space. You can even impose all these rules on them that you maybe otherwise wouldn't be able to do if it was a longer-term rental.You know, the people who check-in have many fewer rights than actual tenants do. And so in some ways it makes that relationship even more transactional and even more hands off in many cases. And of course there's the quicker profit motive is really the main driving force behind that. But I think there's also this piece of it where it's like, “well, how can I maximize the profit potential of this space with as little actually dealing with other human beings and their needs [00:43:00] as human beings as possible.And yeah, I think that is really, again, from my kind of feminist perspective, that is also interested in thinking about how do we create systems of care in our cities, and what does “care” mean, and what are our responsibilities to one another that, when we look at something like Airbnbification and the touristification and gentrification more generally, those things, in many cases kind of act against the possibility of creating more caring and careful spaces.Chris: Hmm, hmm. Yeah. Thank you for that, Leslie. I have a couple more questions for you, if that's all right?Leslie: Yes, go ahead. Yeah.Chris: All right. Wonderful. So this next question maybe requires a bit of imagination, which I think you have a good amount of, and it has to do with rent.And so one of the lies that you highlight in your book is the belief that gentrification is natural and hence forth inevitable. [00:44:00] And of course, as we've been discussing, nothing is natural nor inevitable and you make an excellent case for that throughout the book. And I feel that there is an equally and perhaps more subtle incarnation of this myth, of this inevitability, in regards to rent, that we as urban people or modern people who grow up in contemporary societies often reinforce and even naturalize a kind of rent slavery that most people rarely see, that most people rarely see their lives as indentured to their landlords.And so, when we talk about gentrification, does this show up at all? Should it? You know, this notion that, “well, if we can come to gentrification and understand that it's in fact not natural and it's not inevitable, can we do the same thing for rent? Because, maybe I haven't read much of the research, but it doesn't seem to be something that [00:45:00] people are so quick to aim their arrows at, we'll say.Leslie: Yeah. I love that question. And I think A, you're right that there hasn't been enough conversation about that. There has not been nearly enough attempts to kind of denaturalize this and B, that that perspective is emerging and growing. If I could recommend a book called The Tenant Class by Ricardo Tranjan. It's also a Toronto-based author, and he does an amazing job in this very short book of basically laying out the case against landlordism, and it totally, as you say, kind of denaturalizing and pushes back on this idea that it's inevitable that there are a class of people that own property and a class of people that rent property, and that this is not inherently a deeply problematic relation. You know, this idea that it's not in some way akin to some kind of indentureship. And he really asks us to look deeply again at this [00:46:00] idea that, if you're a landlord, “well, I have a mortgage to pay, so it's somehow natural that this other person will pay my mortgage for me,” which, when you start to think about it, like it's really messed up in a way. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. So yeah, I think looking more closely at some of these ideas, these kind of statements that come out, and again, you can see it in news articles, these kind of horror stories, and not to diminish, I'm sure, what are very real, like economic and psychological impacts of the so-called kind of nightmare tenant and all of those kinds of things.But you'll hear those kinds of statements: “you know, I have a mortgage to pay.”Well, why is this other person paying your mortgage, then?And then we could probably take a step back and be like, “why do we have mortgages to pay?” But that's maybe another conversation.But yeah, so I definitely recommend that book, The Tenant Class, as a really quick, easy to read, and kind of unforgettable primer on this question. And [00:47:00] I really appreciate you asking it, and I hope your listeners will be like, “oh, yeah, I gotta dig into that a bit more too.”Chris: Yeah.Yeah. I mean, you know, in part because, as prices have risen in most western countries in the last four or five years, there's of course, of course, protests and backlash among people, and “oh, this bakery raised their prices” or “ my rent's going up,” and all these things. But specifically in terms of products and services, you know, people complain or they just accept the fact that prices have risen to a degree that's pricing a lot of people out of their lives, really. But, you know, in the conversations I've had with people and in the literature that I've read, there's no consideration, I think, that the businesses who are raising their prices have had their rents raised, that so much of a business' costs include rent, right? And that very few businesses actually [00:48:00] own the building that they're working out of.Leslie: Yeah, commercial rent is a whole other story because, you know, the protections on residential rent are not what they could be in most places around the world, but there's no protections on commercial rent, like no limitations there. So it's entirely possible that local bakery, their rent could go up by, like double. It could go up from $20,000 a year to $60,000 a year. There's no restrictions on that. There's nowhere to appeal that. There's nothing. So, they are, in some ways, even those small businesses, especially, independent businesses and so on, are very at risk of this. And there's a whole branch of kind of retail gentrification studies as well that kind of looks at the impacts on the local economic landscape of things like this as well. Yeah.Chris: Hmm. Wow. Thank you for unveiling that for us. I mean, uh, so much.So my last question, Leslie, has to do [00:49:00] with what is mentioned in your book, what you refer to as “the right to stay put.”And so,“the right to stay put is a common rallying cry in response to the dangers of displacement. Drawing inspiration from the broader notion of the right to the city, the right to stay put insists that communities are entitled to remain in the places they have contributed to. Furthermore, the right to dwell extends beyond simply having a home in an area, encompassing the right to continue using commercial, community, and public spaces and institutions, as well as the dignity of defending such rights. Importantly, it recognizes that agency is a critical factor. People do not want to be forced to move, nor do they want to be forced to stay in place. Rather, people value choice, the ability to participate in [00:50:00] decisions that affect their communities and the right to resist when they need to.”And so I'm curious what you think it would take for people, say, in urban environments to achieve or enshrine the right to stay put or the right to dwell in their places.Leslie: Yeah, I think we could talk about kind of two main avenues. One would be more of the top-down approach, which is to work to enshrine anti-displacement measures in neighborhoods, which can include everything from rent control or rent stabilization, to the right to return when there are redevelopment projects going on, to deeply affordable housing in new developments, to communities themselves taking on the role of becoming developers, but creating housing within the community for the [00:51:00] community. Not to draw in new residents or not to primarily draw new residents. Again, we're not trying to like, build a fortress around communities or anything, but rather to say, “this is housing that we're earmarking for people from the local community who are struggling with their rent or struggling to find housing, or who need perhaps entry-level home ownership opportunities and to kind of provide that.So there's the kind of top-down approach, really pushing our local governments to have things like community benefit ordinances when new developments are happening that force developers to actually pay attention to what the community needs and to provide those benefits and such.And then, from the kind of ground-up or more grassroots piece, the right to stay put is the the willingness, the ability to organize and come together in some of the places that I mentioned throughout the book. You know, it really [00:52:00] is community-level organization where people have really rallied to make it deeply difficult for planners or developers to kind of roll in and roll out their vision without any pushbacks, to the extent that their neighbourhoods become less of a target for gentrification, because it's like, “oh yeah, we wanna build something there. Oh, that's gonna be a real pain in the butt. The community is not gonna let us get away with what we wanna do.” And that means really making it possible for people to come out to meetings, organizing protests, that kind of right to resist. Sometimes taking... You know, we have long histories in many cities of squatters movements and perhaps we need to revitalize some of that old energy, as well. A kind of refusal to leave. And to find ways, you know, perhaps they don't always have to be kind of in-your-face protest ways, but what are ways to mobilize things like mutual aid to help make sure that our [00:53:00] neighbors are supported, for example, if they have to go before a landlord-tenant board, how can we use community resources and knowledge to actually support one another to stay in place?And that can be everything from addressing food insecurity to having a local rent bank, to partnering with nonprofits, churches, other religious institutions that may have an interest in building social and nonprofit housing to create some of those options.So I think it's about looking at the kind of wide range of alternative forms of housing and housing provision, looking at community mobilizing, community resources, and also tackling the local policy agenda to make staying put as possible, or to enshrine it as a right at a kind of higher level, as well.Chris: Hmm, hmm. Yeah, you go into [00:54:00] great detail about this in the book, and I'm very grateful for that. And the right to stay put kind of jumped out, the text jumped out of the page at me, because living here in Oaxaca, I came to know about this declaration that was created in 2009 by people in a number of communities here in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca who were meeting with their migrant kin who had gone to work in California and the people who had stayed in the community.And the declaration is literally translated as “the right to not migrate.” The way it was translated in English by the author of the book of the same name, was “The Right to Stay Home.” And so while there's a lot of differences between these contexts in terms of rural, indigenous communities here in Mexico and modern urban communities in the global north, there is this sense, [00:55:00] this kind of perhaps shared context wherein the ability to to stay in a place in order so that community can be conjured and maintained and of course enjoyed and lived in, seems to thread its way through these different social movements from the global north into the global south.So, I'm really grateful to see that and to know that there's similar understandings, of course not the same, but similar understandings that are even somewhat unorthodox and unexpected given the political context that sometimes challenge them or preclude something like that from coming up.So that's a little way of saying thank you for your time today, Leslie. On behalf of our listeners, I'd like to thank you for your willingness to join me and to speak to these often complex issues. And on behalf of them, I'd also like to ask you how they might find out more about [00:56:00] your work and your books: Gentrification Is Inevitable And Other Lies, Feminist City: Claiming Space In A Manmade World, and finally Higher Expectations: How To Survive Academia, Make It Better For Others, And Transform The University.Leslie: Yeah, thank you so much for this conversation. People can find out about me and my work at my website, which is just lesliekern.ca.If you just google my name, it will come up easily enough. Feminist City and Gentrification Is Inevitable And Other Lies. For an international audience, you can find those books through Verso books in the US and UK. There's also many translations of both of those books, so you may have the opportunity to read it in your local language if you want to do that as well.The more recent book, Higher Expectations is available from my Canadian publisher Between the Lines Books and in the US [00:57:00] from AK Books, as well. And there's also Epub versions and for the first two books, audiobook versions as well. And I've written lots of articles on these topics as well, in the Guardian and other places.So you can get a little snippet of my thoughts if you, again, Google my name and all of these things will come up in short order. So thank you for letting me share that as well.Chris: Yeah, of course. I'll make sure that the links to all those pages that you mentioned are available on the End of Tourism website and the Substack when the episode launches.And once again, Leslie, a really beautifully revealing conversation today. I think it's something that will not just provoke generally, but provoke a willingness in our listeners to reconsider some of the assumptions that they've had about gentrification.So, once again, thank you for your time today.Leslie: Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation. Appreciate it. Get full access to Chris Christou at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

Is using ChatGPT to pick your next investment suburb a good idea… or a very expensive mistake? John is joined by returning guest data scientist Luke Metcalfe from Microburbs to discuss:

¿Es Europa un gigante económico pero un "chihuahua tecnológico"?. En este vídeo nuestro fundador José Manuel Alarcón analiza junto al experto en geopolítica y economía Óscar Vara la situación crítica de la tecnología en el viejo continente. Los datos son alarmantes: el 66% de las aplicaciones públicas europeas corren en nubes americanas (AWS, Google, Microsoft) y el 90% del software de nuestros servicios públicos pertenece a una única empresa estadounidense. Hablamos sin filtros sobre qué pasaría si mañana hubiera un conflicto comercial y nos "apagaran" el acceso a la tecnología, como ya hemos visto con Starlink en la guerra de Ucrania. Debatimos por qué Europa no es capaz de crear sus propios gigantes tech (Google, SpaceX), el fracaso de iniciativas como Gaia-X o el buscador europeo, y cómo la regulación excesiva y la falta de un mercado único de capitales están frenando la innovación y expulsando a nuestro mejor talento a Estados Unidos.Si eres programador, trabajas en el sector IT o simplemente te interesa conocer el estado del mundo actual (la geopolítica), necesitas entender por qué nos estamos quedando atrás frente a Estados Unidos y el resurgir de China en Inteligencia Artificial. ¿Hay esperanza para una soberanía tecnológica real o estamos condenados a ser una colonia digital (entre otras cosas)?00:00:00 Intro: Europa, ¿un "chihuahua" tecnológico?00:00:50 Presentación de Óscar Vara00:01:28 El fin del sueño europeo: dependencia y geopolítica00:03:12 Regulación vs. innovación: ¿es el RGPD una defensa real?00:07:12 El "efecto Bruselas" y la visión de EE. UU.00:08:48 La falta de unidad política y de mercado en Europa00:14:19 El aviso de Mario Draghi: competitividad o irrelevancia00:17:12 Datos alarmantes: la dependencia de la nube americana00:17:52 Riesgos de soberanía: el caso Starlink en Ucrania y la ley FISA00:21:08 Trump, Putin y la ruptura de la confianza trasatlántica00:22:45 El dilema del gasto: estado del bienestar vs. defensa y tecnología00:27:45 Fracasos europeos: de Gaia-X al "buscador europeo"00:29:40 Lecciones del modelo chino y la iniciativa privada00:34:03 PLD Space vs. SpaceX: el problema de la financiación en Europa00:37:20 ASML: un gigante europeo con tecnología estadounidense00:39:44 La carrera de la inteligencia artificial: el resurgir chino00:43:00 Soluciones y "actos de realismo": reformas necesarias00:47:25 El peso del envejecimiento y las pensiones en el presupuesto00:49:30 Energía y tierras raras: ideología vs. necesidad estratégica00:54:10 Industria y NIMBY: el conflicto social por las fábricas00:59:26 Fuga de cerebros y la desconexión universidad-empresa01:03:50 Conclusión: la necesidad de unos Estados Unidos de Europa

Changing the status quo can be hard for neighbors to accept, and it often drives NIMBY reaction to new development. Smart developers know the value of hiring a Neighborhood Outreach Specialist. Hear how Tom Bilsten navigates community outreach and makes it an early step for development success.

In this episode of Built to Divide we dissect the collision of NIMBY politics, Proposition 13 in California, environmental law, rising construction costs, and cultural status signaling that defined housing in the 2010s. Dimitrius Lynch takes listeners inside the community meeting rooms where projects die quietly, tracing how California's tax revolt rewired local incentives, how CEQA evolved from environmental shield to procedural weapon, and why housing scarcity became fiscally rational—even when socially destructive.This episode connects Thorstein Veblen's leisure class theory to modern zoning fights, explains why new construction skews luxury, and reveals how amenities became financial risk mitigation tools, not indulgences. From Hudson Yards and empty towers as safety-deposit boxes to YIMBY vs. NIMBY power shifts, this episode shows why the middle disappeared from the housing market—and why scarcity today is a policy choice, not a mystery.Episode Extras - Photos, videos, sources and links to additional content found during research.Episode Credits:Production in collaboration with Gābl MediaWritten & Executive Produced by Dimitrius LynchAudio Engineering and Sound Design by Jeff Alvarez

In this episode of The Missing Middle, Mike Moffatt and Sabrina Maddeaux dig into why homeownership for Canadians under 40 has fallen off a cliff. Spoiler: it's not just zoning, NIMBYs, or avocado toast. The federal government plays a much bigger role in today's housing mess than it likes to admit.They break down how rapid population growth collided with a massive slowdown in building family-sized homes, why “dog-crate condos” became the default housing plan, and how taxes, development charges, and investors quietly push prices even higher. They also ask the uncomfortable question: do first-time buyer programs actually help young people — or just lock in high prices?From down payments that feel impossible, to policies that accidentally reward investors over families, this episode gets into what's broken, who benefits, and what Ottawa could actually do if it wanted to bring the dream of homeownership back to life.If you've ever wondered how Canada managed to make buying a home feel impossible — this one's for you.00:00 – Intro: Is the dream of homeownership dead?01:08 – The Federal Role: Debunking the "Provincial Responsibility" trope01:58 – How Federal immigration and monetary policy impact housing04:12 – A Blueprint to Restore Homeownership: The 4 big hurdles06:30 – Not All Units are Equal10:22 – How Population Growth Affects Supply and Demand12:06 – Time to Reduce Taxes on Homes14:05 – Making It Easier for First-Time Buyers16:14 – Will these Policies just Drive Prices Up?17:59 – The "Second-Time Buyer" crisis and downsizing seniors21:09 – Incentivizing Seniors to Downsize22:00 - Getting investors out of single-family homes: The MURB planResearch/LinksA Blueprint to Restore Homeownership for Young Canadianshttps://www.missingmiddleinitiative.ca/p/a-blueprint-to-restore-homeownershipThe Quiet Death of the Investor Condo? MURBs May Change the Gamehttps://www.missingmiddleinitiative.ca/p/the-quiet-death-of-the-investor-condoHow to get single family homes out of the hands of investorshttps://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/this-is-how-the-government-can-get-single-family-homes-out-of-the-hands-of/article_0f92b0f4-e67e-4a84-aa62-2c9316492363.htmlHosted by Mike Moffatt & Cara Stern & Sabrina Maddeaux Produced by Meredith Martin This podcast is funded by the Neptis Foundation and brought to you by the Smart Prosperity Institute.

This episode is sponsored by Leafcloud. For heating networks, property portfolios, and public infrastructure operators, Leafcloud offers decentralised cloud infrastructure designed to align digital workloads with energy and climate goals. Learn more at https://www.leaf.cloud__________________In this episode of CleanTalk, we sit down with Ivo Wakounig, a PhD researcher and active member of the World Energy Council, to unpack why the energy transition is far more than a technical challenge.Starting from a background in physics and astronomy, Ivo explains how he moved toward energy systems research, not in pursuit of status or salary, but impact. From there, the conversation opens up into three deeply interconnected themes: systems thinking, infrastructure, and intergenerational responsibility.We explore why energy systems are often invisible despite shaping everyday life, how Europe's electricity grid reflects decades (and centuries) of political and social decisions, and why renewable integration cannot be solved by engineering alone. Ivo breaks down systems thinking as a lens rather than a solution, a way of understanding complexity, feedback loops, and unintended consequences without pretending the world is simple.A major thread running through the discussion is youth engagement. Not as a branding exercise or slogan, but as a structural necessity. Energy infrastructure lasts for decades; decisions made today will be executed by people who currently have little formal power. Ivo argues that excluding younger and marginalised voices isn't just unjust, it actively weakens the transition.We also tackle uncomfortable but necessary topics:- Why the energy transition is inherently political- Why disagreement and disruption are features, not bugs- Why labelling communities as “NIMBYs” misses deeper justice concerns- Why changing the goal of a system matters more than tweaking its rulesThe episode closes with reflections on learning, career uncertainty, and why inspiration usually follows action, not the other way around.This is a conversation for anyone working in energy, infrastructure, policy, research, or climate communication, especially those who sense that the hardest problems ahead aren't technical, but human.Enjoy!__________________Connect with Ivo on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivo-wakounig/Join the CleanTalk community on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12991627/____________________CleanTalk is produced by Harmer Visuals, a film & media company specialising in brand & case study storytelling for organisations across the renewable energy and clean technology sector. To find out more about how we can help you, visit: https://www.harmervisuals.comMany thanks to...- Leafcloud for sponsoring our recording venue- Our rental suppliers -O'RIORDAN | https://oriordan.io/ | Sunipa Pictures | https://www.sunipapictures.com/____________________Chapters:00:00 – Intro00:55 – From Physics to Energy Systems05:09 – Inside the World Energy Council09:45 – What the Future Energy Leaders Programme Really Does11:34 – Beyond Youth Engagement15:15 – Making An Impact In Infrastructure20:06 – Systems Thinking Explained26:48 – The European Electricity Grid as a Living System28:07 – Ad Break29:42 – Integrating Renewables: Why Balance Is Hard30:48 – Technical Models vs Human Behaviour34:15 – Institutions, People, and the Grid37:13 – Why the Energy Transition Is Political39:44 – Youth, Power, and Changing the Goal of the System44:00 – Disagreement, NIMBYism, and Energy Justice48:09 – Inspiration Comes After Action50:43 – Quickfire Curiosity Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Executive shifts at Carriage, funeral home heroism in Georgia, political drama in Tennessee, the struggle for new crematories, and more.    Click here for complete show notes. 

Join an active community of RE investors here: https://linktr.ee/gabepetersenMASTERING GROUND UP DEVELOPMENT

Today on The LA Food Podcast, we break down the LA food story that set the internet on fire: René Redzepi brings Noma to Silver Lake at $1500 per person. With guest Karen Palmer, we dissect the announcement, the backlash, the economics, and whether the outrage is justified—plus why “reindeer penis” somehow became part of the discourse.Then on Chef's Kiss / Big Miss, we tackle the surprise return of Gourmet Magazine, a Westside restaurant losing its liquor license to NIMBY neighbors, the growing case for anonymous food critics, and whether it's acceptable for couples to order the same entree.In Recent Eats, we run through meals at Little Fish, Electric Blue, Vandell, Bar Etoile, The Mulberry, and an Tacos Entre Amigos.Finally, in Part 2, we sit down with Jason Lee of Expense Account, the breakout new food podcaster published by Feed Me, for a fun conversation on food media, the LA vs NYC rivalry, and what it takes to build a hit food show in 2026.Powered by Acquired Taste.

The West Park Presbyterian Church, a 135-year-old Upper West Side landmark, could soon have its landmark protections strip, allowing developers to turn the lot into luxury housing. Mark Ruffalo, award-winning actor and activist, and Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, discuss the community's effort to save the building from the wrecking ball, and hear from callers about their own connections to the space, which has served as an arts and community center for decades.

If you live in a city in North America or Europe, you almost certainly have had the experience of watching a construction site slowly morph into a building over the course of many years. You might ask, “why's it taking so long” as you traipse through a dirty sidewalk shed, frustrations mounting. You are not wrong, since construction has flatlined on efficiency even as other industries find ever novel ways to maximize productivity.The search for efficiency and its disappearance is at the heart of Brian Potter's new book, The Origins of Efficiency. Through the book by Stripe Press and his popular Substack newsletter Construction Physics, Brian has tried to explain to an angry if curious public how construction actually works in the real world and why it's an industry both ripe for innovation yet also mired in antiquated techniques.With host Danny Crichton, the two talk about the challenges of construction, why the variability of site selection is a huge problem, the lack of economies of scale in construction, and the regulatory burdens plus NIMBYs that make building so difficult. Then the two talk about why Brian doesn't think aesthetic uniformity has improved efficiency over time before talking about his writing process and how he does such in-depth research.

It's that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode we recorded this year, including:Kyle Fish explaining how Anthropic's AI Claude descends into spiritual woo when left to talk to itselfIan Dunt on why the unelected House of Lords is by far the best part of the British governmentSam Bowman's strategy to get NIMBYs to love it when things get built next to their housesBuck Shlegeris on how to get an AI model that wants to seize control to accidentally help you foil its plans…as well as 18 other top observations and arguments from the past year of the show.Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/best25It's been another year of living through history, whether we asked for it or not. Luisa and Rob will be back in 2026 to help you make sense of whatever comes next — as Earth continues its indifferent journey through the cosmos, now accompanied by AI systems that can summarise our meetings and generate adequate birthday messages for colleagues we barely know.Chapters:Cold open (00:00:00)Rob's intro (00:02:35)Helen Toner on whether we're racing China to build AGI (00:03:43)Hugh White on what he'd say to Americans (00:06:09)Buck Shlegeris on convincing AI models they've already escaped (00:12:09)Paul Scharre on a personal experience in Afghanistan that influenced his views on autonomous weapons (00:15:10)Ian Dunt on how unelected septuagenarians are the heroes of UK governance (00:19:06)Beth Barnes on AI companies being locally reasonable, but globally reckless (00:24:27)Tyler Whitmer on one thing the California and Delaware attorneys general forced on the OpenAI for-profit as part of their restructure (00:28:02)Toby Ord on whether rich people will get access to AGI first (00:30:13)Andrew Snyder-Beattie on how the worst biorisks are defence dominant (00:34:24)Eileen Yam on the most eye-watering gaps in opinions about AI between experts and the US public (00:39:41)Will MacAskill on what a century of history crammed into a decade might feel like (00:44:07)Kyle Fish on what happens when two instances of Claude are left to interact with each other (00:49:08)Sam Bowman on where the Not In My Back Yard movement actually has a point (00:56:29)Neel Nanda on how mechanistic interpretability is trying to be the biology of AI (01:03:12)Tom Davidson on the potential to install secret AI loyalties at a very early stage (01:07:19)Luisa and Rob discussing how medicine doesn't take the health burden of pregnancy seriously enough (01:10:53)Marius Hobbhahn on why scheming is a very natural path for AI models — and people (01:16:23)Holden Karnofsky on lessons for AI regulation drawn from successful farm animal welfare advocacy (01:21:29)Allan Dafoe on how AGI is an inescapable idea but one we have to define well (01:26:19)Ryan Greenblatt on the most likely ways for AI to take over (01:29:35)Updates Daniel Kokotajlo has made to his forecasts since writing and publishing the AI 2027 scenario (01:32:47)Dean Ball on why regulation invites path dependency, and that's a major problem (01:37:21)Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon MonsourMusic: CORBITCoordination, transcripts, and web: Katy Moore

We're back with our annual year in review pod with everyones favourite cultural critic Tony Price! In this episode we discuss the spectacle of Cameron Winter and Geese, the rock & roll side of indie sleaze, people dressing like Martin Rev, Jack White, algorithm reactionaries, the inaccuracy of Spotify wrapped, platform capitalism, AI slop, Toronto having its moment, music people vs fashion people, Rick Owens, west end fatigue, "Nimby" vs "Gench", Justin Trudeau dating Katy Perry, Coldplay kiss cam, favourite parties of 2025, performative taste content, the Maximum Exposure newsletter, thinking outside of the internet, 2026 predictions and much more!Tony PriceJosh McIntyreNick Marian----COLD PODJoin us on Patreon to access all episodes and weekly one on one pods!

【聊了什么】 一座占地仅三分之一街区的小花园，为何能让纽约的政客们冲突、登上纽约时报、还惊动马丁·斯科塞斯和罗伯特·德尼罗等名流亲自站台？ 2025年11月，刚刚当选纽约市长的马姆达尼还没上任，即将离任的Eric Adams就抢先签署行政令，将伊丽莎白街花园永久划为公园用地——这被外界解读为一枚"政治毒丸"。这座花园的命运，折射出纽约乃至美国城市治理中的一个核心的矛盾：我们到底应该建更多房子，还是保护现有社区？谁有权决定一个街区的未来？ 本期节目，我们邀请到纽约城市规划师罗雨翔老师，从一座社区花园的十年争议出发，聊聊纽约政治中那些看不见的博弈。罗雨翔此前也做过两期纽约相关的节目《纽约的房价到底为什么这么高》和《纽约地铁为什么这么破》，两期播客都发布在我们的友台《选修课》上，也欢迎大家前去收听，并关注这档播客。如果你对这期节目内容感兴趣，欢迎购买罗雨翔的新书《创造大都会——纽约空间与制度观察》，国内各大平台均有销售，海外用户请使用此链接购买。 【支持我们】 如果喜欢这期节目并希望支持我们将节目继续做下去： 也欢迎加入我们的会员计划： https://theamericanroulette.com/paid-membership/ 会员可以收到每周2-5封newsletter，可以加入会员社群，参加会员活动，并享受更多福利。 合作投稿邮箱：american.roulette.pod@gmail.com 【时间轴】 03:45 马姆达尼当选与Eric Adams的"政治毒丸" 05:40 伊丽莎白街花园的前世今生 09:40 社区的阶层分化：SOHO富人区vs唐人街低收入社区 12:57 花园之争背后的市议会选战 16:01 公园异化法：为什么正式公园用地几乎无法改变 21:17 Adams给马姆达尼的台阶？ 23:41 社区规划与NIMBY现象 30:24 政府的复杂角色：豪华公寓与保障房的平衡术 35:04 Eric Adams的另一面：区划法改革与垃圾革命 42:31 纽约的小政府传统 51:14 Robert Moses vs Jane Jacobs 54:25 为Robert Moses翻案？丰裕议程与当代回响 【我们是谁】 美轮美换是一档深入探讨当今美国政治的中文播客。 我们的主播和嘉宾： 小华：媒体人 罗雨翔：美国注册城市规划师，哈佛大学与伦敦政治经济学院建筑与经济双硕士。现居纽约，参与以及主持北美20余地区的地产开发、区域经济政策与公共领域投资项目。 【 What We Talked About】 How can a tiny garden—barely a third of a city block—spark political battles in New York, make headlines in the New York Times, and rally celebrities like Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro to its defense? In November 2025, just days after Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral race but before he could take office, outgoing Mayor Eric Adams signed an executive order permanently designating Elizabeth Street Garden as parkland—a move widely seen as a "political poison pill." The fate of this garden reflects a core tension in urban governance, not just in New York but across America: Should we build more housing, or protect existing communities? And who gets to decide the future of a neighborhood? In this episode, we're joined by Yuxiang Luo, an urban planner based in New York, to explore ten years of controversy surrounding a single community garden—and the invisible power struggles that shape New York City politics. Yuxiang has previously appeared on two episodes about New York: "Why Is Housing in New York So Expensive?" and "Why Is the New York Subway So Run-Down?", both available on our sister podcast Mo Electives (选修课). We encourage you to check them out and follow that show. If you're interested in this episode's topics, consider picking up Yuxiang's new book, Creating the Metropolis: Observations on Space and Institutions in New York, available on major platforms in China. Overseas readers can purchase it here. 【Support Us】 If you like our show and want to support us, please consider the following: Join our membership program: https://theamericanroulette.com/paid-membership/ Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/americanroulette Business Inquiries and fan mail: american.roulette.pod@gmail.com 【Timeline】 03:45 Mamdani's Election and Eric Adams' "Political Poison Pill" 05:40 The History of Elizabeth Street Garden 09:40 Class Divide: Wealthy SoHo vs. Low-Income Chinatown 12:57 The City Council Race Behind the Garden Battle 16:01 Parkland Alienation Law: Why Official Parkland Is Nearly Untouchable 21:17 An Off-Ramp for Mamdani? 23:41 Community Planning and NIMBYism 30:24 The Government's Balancing Act: Luxury Condos vs. Affordable Housing 35:04 The Other Side of Eric Adams: Zoning Reform and the Trash Revolution 42:31 New York's Small-Government Tradition 51:14 Robert Moses vs. Jane Jacobs 54:25 Rehabilitating Robert Moses? The Abundance Agenda and Its Echoes Today 【Who We Are】 The American Roulette is a podcast dedicated to helping the Chinese-speaking community understand fast-changing U.S. politics. Our Hosts and Guests: 小华 (Xiao Hua): Journalist, political observer Luo Yuxiang: U.S. Registered Urban Planner, holding dual master's degrees in Architecture and Economics from Harvard University and the London School of Economics. Currently residing in New York, he has participated in and led over 20 real estate development, regional economic policy, and public domain investment projects across North America.

Our Thematic and Equity Strategist Michelle Weaver and Power, Utilities, and Clean Tech Analyst David Arcaro discuss how investments in AI data centers are affecting electricity bills for U.S. consumers.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Michelle Weaver: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michelle Weaver, Morgan Stanley's U.S. Thematic and Equity Strategist.David Arcaro: And I'm Dave Arcaro, U.S. Power, Utilities, and Clean Tech Analyst.Michelle Weaver: Today, a hot topic. Are data centers' raising your electricity bills?It's Tuesday, December 23rd at 10am in New York.Most of us have probably noticed our electricity bills have been creeping up. And it's putting pressure on U.S. consumers, especially with higher prices and paychecks not keeping pace. More and more people are pointing to data centers as the reason behind these rising costs, but the story isn't that simple.Regional differences, shifting policies and local utility responses are all at play here. Dave, there's no doubt that data centers are becoming a much bigger part of the story when it comes to U.S. electricity demand. For listeners who might not follow these numbers every day, could you break down how data centers' share of overall electricity use is expected to grow over the next 10 years? And what does that mean for the grid and for the average consumer?David Arcaro: Definitely they're becoming much bigger, much more important and more impactful across the industry in a big way. Data centers were 6 percent of total electricity consumption in the U.S. last year. We're actually forecasting that to triple to 18 percent by 2030, and then hit 20 percent in the early 2030s. So very strong growth, and increasing proportion of the overall utility, electricity use.In aggregate, this is reflecting about 150 gigawatts of new data centers by 2030. Just a very large amount. And this is going to cause a major strain on the electric grid and is going to require substantial build out and upgrading of the transmission system along with construction of new power generation – like gas plants and large-scale renewables, wind, solar, and battery storage across the entire U.S.And generally, when we see utilities investing in additional infrastructure, they need to get that cost recovered. We would typically expect that to lead to higher electric rates for consumers. That's the overall pressure that we're facing right now on the system, from all these data centers coming in.We've got these substantial infrastructure needs. That means utilities will need to charge higher prices to consumers to cover the cost of those investments.Michelle Weaver: What are the main challenges utilities companies face in meeting this rising demand from data centers?David Arcaro: There are a number of challenges. If I were to pick a few of the biggest ones that I see, I think managing affordability is one of the biggest challenges the industry faces right now, because this overall data center growth is absolutely a shock to their business, and it needs to be managed carefully given the political and regulatory challenges that can arise when customer bills are getting are escalating faster than expected. The utility industry faces scrutiny and constant attention from a political and regulatory standpoint, so it's a balance that has to be very carefully managed. There are also reliability challenges that are important.Utilities have to keep the lights on, you know, that's priority number one. The demand for electricity is growing much faster than the supply of new generation that we're seeing; new power plants just aren't being built fast enough. New transmission assets are not being built, as quickly as the data centers are coming on. So, in many areas we're seeing that leads to essentially less of a buffer, and more risk of outages during periods of extreme weather.Michelle Weaver: And you mentioned, companies are thinking about how can they insulate consumers. Can you take us through some of the specifics of what these utility companies are doing? And what regulators are doing to respond, to protect existing customers from rate increases driven by data centers?David Arcaro: Definitely. The industry is getting creative and trying to be proactive in addressing this issue. Many utilities, we're seeing them isolate data centers and charge them higher electric rates, specifically for those data center customers to try to cover all of the grid costs that are attributable to the data center's needs.A couple examples. In Indiana, we're seeing that there's a utility there who's building new power plants, specifically for a very large data center that's coming into the state and they're ring fencing it. They're only charging the data center itself for those costs of the power plants. In Georgia, a utility there is charging a higher rate for the data centers that are coming in to the Atlanta area – such that it actually more than covers the costs and compensates other consumers in the form of bill credits or even bill reductions as those data centers come on.Similarly, then, in Pennsylvania, there's a utility that has excess transmission infrastructure than the state's [infrastructure]. They're better able to absorb data center activity. They're able to lower customer bills as the data centers come on, as they spread their costs over a larger customer base in that case. So, this isn't universal though. There are some areas around the country where there are costs related to data center growth that get socialized across all consumers.One approach I also wanted to mention that we're seeing data centers pursue more and more actively is to power themselves. Essentially bring their own power, and they're using gas turbines, engines, and fuel cells that they're deploying right on site. This is actually in many cases faster than connecting to the grid, but it also avoids any consumer impact. Companies like Solaris Energy and Bloom Energy are two providers of that type of solution. And we're also seeing at a broader industry level. Another approach is the idea of data centers being flexible or turning off and not consuming power from the grid at certain times when the grid is facing stress, in an extreme weather scenario in the winter or summer. And that idea is gaining traction as well. So, we think the industry is looking for approaches that could ease the pressure on the system and on reliability, manage the affordability issues while continuing to enable and build data centers.Michelle Weaver: You mentioned what a few different states are doing on this front. But data centers are not evenly distributed through states or evenly distributed across regions. Are there regional differences in how data center growth is impacting electricity prices?David Arcaro: There are a couple of key differences that we're seeing around the country. Some areas just aren't getting that many data centers, you know, so I'd point out the northeast – in New England, in New York, we're just not seeing that much data center growth. So, it's less of an issue, the impact of data center power demand impacting customer bills in those areas. And then in some regions around the country, the utility structure is important to be aware of. There are some regions where the price of electricity fluctuates based on the supply and demand of power, rather than being directly set and controlled by a regulator. In those markets, data centers can actually more directly impact the price of electricity and there just isn't an easy way in that case to ring fence them and protect consumers from the impact of price increases.So that's where we think unique challenges can arise. And over time, we would expect to see the most meaningful rate impacts to consumers in those areas specifically. And examples would be New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio. Those are a couple of the states where we're seeing those more volatile and directly impacted prices.So, as we look at utilities, we think the state exposure is going to be more and more important. And so, a few companies like NextEra, Sempra and AEP are a few utilities that are in states that have less affordability concerns and less direct exposure to rate impacts from data centers. And then several power companies like Vistra and Talen have more of their power plants that are in states that have excess infrastructure; and as a result, potentially less affordability concerns.So, clearly the energy sector is facing real challenges and changes. So, Michelle, how are rising electricity bills actually affecting U.S. households?Michelle Weaver: It's putting even more pressure on a consumer that's already being stretched thin by multiple years of inflation and elevated price levels, and electricity is a really different type of good. It's very different from gasoline or other consumer goods or staples – in that it's an essential good. You need to have it. And it's a network service that households are structurally locked into. Unlike gas where you could adjust your trip frequency or take a different type of transport, there really aren't good substitutes for electricity.And so this dynamic weighs on consumers. They have to continue paying these bills, and it weighs particularly heavily on lower income consumers where utility bills make up a much larger portion of their household budget.So, it crowds out some of that other potential spending.David Arcaro: That makes a lot of sense. It's an important expense to consider in terms of the impact on consumers. And, you know, as a result, are consumers blaming data center electricity demand for this rise that we're seeing in bills or are they pushing back?Michelle Weaver: Yeah. Data center development is quickly becoming a NIMBY or “not in my backyard” issue with communities pushing back and even getting projects canceled. Companies really need to find ways to address local concerns about environmental and water related externalities. And message that they're able to insulate consumers, or do something to mitigate these potentially higher electricity bills.A recent poll of around 2200 voters found that just over half of respondents attribute overall electricity price increases to AI data centers, at least somewhat. While around another third, consider them very responsible. And these responses are consistent across all regions and across political affiliations. And I think this consistency across regions is really interesting. As we're talking about before, data centers are not impacting bills in every region. But consumers are still blaming them and still attributing bill increases there.It's clear that both the energy sector and U.S. consumers are navigating a complex landscape with data center growth at the center of the conversation. As policy responses evolve and the U.S. midterm elections approach, this issue is only going to gain more attention. And we'll be sure to bring you the latest. Dave, thanks for taking the time to talk.David Arcaro: Great speaking with you, Michelle.Michelle Weaver: And thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today.

Vehicular cycling and Aaron Swanson of League of American Bicyclists' League Certified Instructor's most recent graduating class in Los Angeles https://bikeleague.org/ridesmart/become-instructor/ (4:15). Charlie's News- Streetsblog NYC article on everything wrong with anti Astoria bike lane ruling https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/12/09/heres-everything-wrong-with-the-judges-order-to-rip-up-the-31st-street-protected-bike-lane; are AVs like Waymo cyclists' allies? https://www.wired.com/story/can-bike-riders-and-self-driving-cars-be-friends/ Indianapolis plows bike lanes for first time https://www.wrtv.com/news/local-news/indianapolis-dpw-plows-major-trails-and-protected-bike-lanes-for-first-time; NJ bill would require license and insurance for all ebikes https://www.nj.com/news/2025/12/nj-bill-would-require-licenses-registration-and-insurance-for-all-e-bikes.html; Comebacks to this year's anti-bike arguments https://momentummag.com/your-comeback-guide-to-all-the-anti-cycling-arguments-youll-hear-this-year/ (7:25) Coffee + randonneuring= Coffeeneuring https://chasingmailboxes.com/2025/09/29/coffeeneuring-challenge-2025-youre-only-15-once/. With Karen Canady (15:38). Bike Long Beach on NIMBY opposition to the Orange Avenue Backbone Bikeway https://carlitelb.org/2025/11/16/save-orange-ave-bike-lanes/ (23:55). Biking in winter in Minneapolis with Brett McGraw (36:20). A European bike tour with Craig and Tamara Blett (45:30). Stacey's Bike Thought (55:14).

THE TIM JONES AND CHRIS ARPS SHOW 0:00 SEG 1 Trump will address the nation tomorrow evening 16:26 SEG 2 DAVID STOKES, Director of Municipal Policy at the Show-Me Institute || TOPIC: Historic Black community land sale: A historic Black community in Westland Acres is trying to sell more than 120 acres for redevelopment. A plan could finally move forward, but it faces zoning hurdles || Audit questions nonprofit spending: A city audit found missing documents, unapproved contracts, and unusually high mowing costs in a St. Louis neighborhood cleanup program funded with pandemic aid. || Metrolink is getting new trains. What is David’s take on this since he is famously a bus guy? || Cuts in county spending showmeinstitute.org/author/david-stokes/x.com/DavidCStokes 32:13 SEG 3 Chris’ Corner is about the Vanity Fair article on Susie Wiles https://newstalkstl.com/ FOLLOW TIM - https://twitter.com/SpeakerTimJones FOLLOW CHRIS - https://twitter.com/chris_arps 24/7 LIVESTREAM - http://bit.ly/NEWSTALKSTLSTREAMS RUMBLE - https://rumble.com/NewsTalkSTL See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

THE TIM JONES AND CHRIS ARPS SHOW 0:00 SEG 1 Trump will address the nation tomorrow evening 16:26 SEG 2 DAVID STOKES, Director of Municipal Policy at the Show-Me Institute || TOPIC: Historic Black community land sale: A historic Black community in Westland Acres is trying to sell more than 120 acres for redevelopment. A plan could finally move forward, but it faces zoning hurdles || Audit questions nonprofit spending: A city audit found missing documents, unapproved contracts, and unusually high mowing costs in a St. Louis neighborhood cleanup program funded with pandemic aid. || Metrolink is getting new trains. What is David’s take on this since he is famously a bus guy? || Cuts in county spending showmeinstitute.org/author/david-stokes/x.com/DavidCStokes 32:13 SEG 3 Chris’ Corner is about the Vanity Fair article on Susie Wiles https://newstalkstl.com/ FOLLOW TIM - https://twitter.com/SpeakerTimJones FOLLOW CHRIS - https://twitter.com/chris_arps 24/7 LIVESTREAM - http://bit.ly/NEWSTALKSTLSTREAMS RUMBLE - https://rumble.com/NewsTalkSTL See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you're trying to understand why starter homes have vanished, why marriage and birth rates are falling, or why your kids can't afford to move out, you won't find a clearer guide than Dr. Emily Hamilton. Her latest piece in Governing, “To Support Families, Repair the Housing Ladder,” is a must-read. It makes a simple but devastating point: We've eliminated the low rungs of the housing ladder—and now we're shocked people can't climb it.Starter apartments? Outlawed. Manufactured housing? Zoned out.SROs? Gone. Family-friendly rentals? Blocked by NIMBY politics. And now the U.S. is flirting with population decline for the first time ever. This conversation explains why—and what to do about it.

Everyone is feeling the squeeze of sky-high property prices: At the same time, state governments across Australia are actively encouraging 'densification'. No wonder, more investors are looking at optimising the land value of their homes by building out the back. Financial adviser Nathan Fradley joins Associate Editor - Wealth, James Kirby in this episode. Here's a guide: Beyond the 'granny flat' - how tax benefits flow to intergenerational property Can we get on...who pays for what? How recent planning and tax changes make intergenerational living easier Know your rights...why advice is crucial in this area. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Metrolink was first proposed in 2001. Nearly a quarter of a century later, the diggers still haven't moved. Now, a fresh legal challenge from residents of Dartmouth Square has left the multibillion-euro project with potentially significant delays. Are their concerns justified, or is this a classic case of NIMBYism? Host: Fionnán Sheahan, Guest: Conor Feehan See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Send us a textWant a front-row seat to how billion-dollar location decisions actually get made? We sit down with Ron Starner, executive vice president of Conway Data and a leading voice at Site Selection magazine, to unpack the data, discipline and real-world tradeoffs behind corporate expansion and economic development.Ron traces his path from a scrappy small-town newsroom to steering award-winning coverage for a global C-suite audience. He explains how the Conway Projects Database—built over four decades—anchors every ranking and feature, with clear thresholds for jobs, capital and square footage. No favorites, no spin, just verified projects and credible outside data. We dig into the misconceptions that dog the field, including the myth that editors choose winners, and explore why companies only invest where workers thrive and infrastructure delivers.From the Mountain West's rapid ascent to the Great Lakes' industrial strengths, Florida's Space Coast surge, and Delaware's surprising talent magnetism, we map where capital is flowing and why. Ron also breaks down the growing pushback from NIMBY to BANANA—build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody—and what that means for communities vying for high-wage jobs. Then we look ahead: how AI is reshaping site selection modeling, redefining workforce needs and elevating demand for engineers and AI-ready technicians across sectors.If you work in PR or economic development, you'll hear practical guidance on pitching corporate real estate stories that matter—think outcomes, not hype, and understand the difference between commercial and corporate real estate. If you're an operator or policymaker, you'll learn what moves the needle: policy clarity, talent pipelines, reliable power and water, and a culture that says yes to sustainable, community-friendly investment.Enjoy the conversation? Follow Ron on LinkedIn and subscribe to Site Selection's Investor Watch newsletter. And if this sparked fresh ideas, subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a quick review so more listeners can find the show.

In the first episode of A Developing Story, host Brian Peter Falk introduces the idyllic beach city of Santa Monica, California and explores how a controversial state wide development mandate called "The Housing Element" is forcing the city to allow the construction of nearly 9,000 new apartments.Santa Monica Daily Press Links:https://smdp.com/news/hcd-rejects-citys-housing-element-demands-revisions/https://smdp.com/news/after-housing-element-debacle-implementation-work-begins/https://smdp.com/news/housing-element-becomes-hot-topic-at-local-leader-gathering/

In this episode, Brian examines three housing development projects in Santa Monica – all of which have courted controversy. One is a large development that could replace a beloved grocery store, another is a supportive housing project a block from the city's shopping promenade, and the third is a project that was killed by community activism, with unintended consequences. Santa Monica Daily Press Links:https://smdp.com/news/public-stir-persists-for-gelsons-replacement-project/https://smdp.com/business/development/plans-updated-for-122-unit-affordable-housing-development-at-1318-4th-street/https://smdp.com/business/residents-want-a-reduced-bergamot-transit-village/ 

As California's current high-speed rail fiasco attests, big and ambitious public projects are hard. California's biggest project of all is housing development. Will it suffer the same fate? In this final episode, Brian explores the impediments to success, including the increasingly caustic "backyard brawl" between NIMBYS and YIMBYS, and asks his guests to pitch their versions of a successful housing future. Santa Monica Daily Press Links:https://smdp.com/business/high-speed-rail-2/https://smdp.com/news/fresh-batch-of-yimby-housing-bills-clash-with-coastal-protections-again/https://smdp.com/government-politics-2/abundance-meets-resistance-are-democrats-finally-ready-to-go-all-in-on-building-housing/    

If you want to understand data centers, the power grid crisis, and the real estate race behind the future of AI — this is the episode.Today on Commercially Speaking, we sit down with Simon Enwia, CCIM — a multi-state broker, tech-driven developer, and one of the few people specializing in data center development sites. And what he reveals is wild:Here's what you'll learn in this episode:Why data center vacancy is below 1% nationwideThe reason America will need 2x the power by 2030What makes land “powered land” — and why it's becoming the new goldThe exact criteria hyperscalers (Amazon, Meta, Google, Oracle) look forWhy data centers are now measured in megawatts per acre, not square footageHow the U.S. is locked in an AI arms race with ChinaThe brutal truth about NIMBY pushback and community approvalsWhy some utilities are charging $250,000+ just to get in line for power studiesThe four things every site absolutely must have:Simon breaks down the economics, the pipeline issues, the insane permitting timelines, and why the next decade of CRE may hinge entirely on data center development.This is the deep dive on data centers you've been looking for.

What accounts for the astonishing streak of YIMBY wins this year — and which concessions, if any, should they consider offering to the NIMBYs? Should the center-left Abundance faction be trying to persuade conservatives and not just progressives? Do struggling places need more market-based solutions (high-skilled immigration, tax incentives for investing in low-income communities) or more straightforward redistribution and pubic investment (in infrastructure, job training, internet access)? Are liberals ceding too much ground to anti-immigrant sentiment? And should the most famous museums in the world stop hoarding their artwork? Live on stage at the Economic Innovation Group's annual Power of Place Conference in Washington, DC, Cardiff spoke with Slow Boring author Matt Yglesias about these topics and more. Matt also reflects on how things have changed since his two books, The Rent is Too Damn High and One Billion Americans, were released. They close with their respective picks for best movie of 2025 and the likely winner of the NBA Finals. Related links: Slow Boring The Rent is Too Damn HighOne Billion Americans Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Great Security Debate is *back*! It's been a busy year, but it's time to get this show back on the air (and maybe on the road). Dan takes a break from the rat race, Erik took over the world, and Brian uses Elmer's Glue to splice his network cables.Topics in the show this week: AWS and Microsoft make the best cases for business continuity plans, the AIIs public cloud reliable enough? Should we all move back to local data centres? How can we reliably assess that risk?Want an AI Data Centre on your town? NIMBY vs Innovation!We will be back every 2 weeks on Mondays. Subscribe on YouTube at https://youtube.com/@greatsecuritydebate to see our smiling faces as you watch, or in your favourite podcast application to listen on your commute or with your whole family around the radio.See you on the 17th with more debates! And some entirely new shows coming from Distilling Security very soon, too. Subscribe to the newsletter on our website https://distillingsecurity.com to hear all about themLinks to mentioned articles and topics:AWS Outage - 20 October 2025 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cev1en9077roMicrosoft Azure Outage - https://www.wsj.com/tech/microsoft-hit-with-azure-365-outage-b3ac072437Signals move from AWS to Data Centre - https://world.hey.com/dhh/our-cloud-exit-savings-will-now-top-ten-million-over-five-years-c7d9b5bd100 Years Flood - usgs.gov - https://www.usgs.gov/water-science-school/science/100-year-floodGreat Flood of 1937 - https://www.weather.gov/lmk/flood_37Impact of Jaguar Land Rover Incident - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0qpl0v3gnzoCDK Attack and Outage - https://www.industryweek.com/technology-and-iiot/article/55091142/major-cybersecurity-breach-affects-auto-manufacturersRussian grain blockade against Ukraine - https://www.cfr.org/article/how-ukraine-overcame-russias-grain-blockadeSaline, Michigan OpenAI Data Centre & Pushback - https://apnews.com/article/openai-inc-joi-harris-data-management-and-storage-microsoft-corp-oracle-corp-f25196fca5865ed79d94c972249a272cRacine, Wisconsin Foxconn and Microsoft site failures - https://racinecountyeye.com/2025/10/08/microsoft-abandon-1st-caledonia/Racine, Wisconsin What happened to FoxConn?

In this episode of Energy Newsbeat – Conversations in Energy, Stu Turley hosts Steve Reese (Reese Energy Consulting) and Matthew Hill (fire suppression expert) for a powerful conversation on the future of energy, natural gas demand, AI data center growth, and energy infrastructure. They unpack the collision course between LNG exports and power-hungry data centers, highlight the coming turbine shortage, and explore mobile microgrid and modular refinery innovations. Topics span from CNG applications, geothermal crossover, and battery fire risks, to U.S. refining bottlenecks, regulatory barriers, and California's energy policies as a national security threat. The episode is a dynamic mix of industry insight, policy critique, and forward-looking solutions—driven by a call for energy dominance, regulatory reform, and American innovation. You will want to connect with Steve Reese on LinkedIn: / steve-reese-185a86 ​ And Matthew Hill is a must-connect for safety: / matthewhillknightfires... ​ Check out Reese Energy Consulting at https://reeseenergycon...​ Highlights of the Podcast 00:00​ – Intro 00:00​ – Intro & Guests 01:03​ – Gas Demand: LNG vs. Data Centers 01:53​ – Turbine Shortage & Microgrids 02:43​ – Big Tech's Unreal Gas Expectations 04:05​ – Mobile Data Centers on Well Pads 05:16​ – Frac Firms Becoming Tech Giants 06:41​ – ROI of AI Infrastructure 08:20​ – CNG & Mobile Midstream 09:42​ – Gen Z & ESG Pressure 10:17​ – Failed Solar & Gas Reality 10:52​ – SMRs & Powering AI Boom 12:20​ – Flynn, California, & Business Exodus 15:09​ – Regulation Creep & Safety 18:16​ – Pipeline Delays & Bottlenecks 20:32​ – Illegals & Hydrocarbon Transport Risks 21:30​ – CA Imports Dirty Oil While Shutting Local Supply 23:21​ – U.S. Refinery Gap 24:57​ – NIMBYs & NatSec Risk 26:03​ – Gas Price Outlook 27:40​ – Geothermal's Momentum 29:55​ – New Modular Refineries 31:38​ – Operator vs. Political Disconnect 33:02​ – Reese's AI & LNG Training 33:45​ – CNG/LNG Use on Pads 34:52​ – Battery Fire Safety & BESS 36:47​ – Mobile Power Best Practices 38:34​ – Lithium Battery Threats 39:02​ – Wrap-Up & Outro Full Transcript at https://theenergynewsb...​ #EnergyDominance​ #NaturalGasBoom​ #DataCenterDemand​#MicrogridSolutions​ #EnergyInfrastructure​ #FireSuppressionTech​ #RefiningCrisisn​#GeothermalEnergy​ #RegulatoryReform​ #AmericanLNG​

In this episode of Energy Newsbeat – Conversations in Energy, Stu Turley hosts Steve Reese (Reese Energy Consulting) and Matthew Hill (fire suppression expert) for a powerful conversation on the future of energy, natural gas demand, AI data center growth, and energy infrastructure. They unpack the collision course between LNG exports and power-hungry data centers, highlight the coming turbine shortage, and explore mobile microgrid and modular refinery innovations. Topics span from CNG applications, geothermal crossover, and battery fire risks, to U.S. refining bottlenecks, regulatory barriers, and California's energy policies as a national security threat. The episode is a dynamic mix of industry insight, policy critique, and forward-looking solutions—driven by a call for energy dominance, regulatory reform, and American innovation.You will want to connect with Steve Reese on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-reese-185a86/And Matthew Hill is a must-connect for safety: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewhillknightfirespecialists4055682742/Check out Reese Energy Consulting at https://reeseenergyconsulting.com/Highlights of the Podcast 00:00 – Intro00:00 – Intro & Guests01:03 – Gas Demand: LNG vs. Data Centers01:53 – Turbine Shortage & Microgrids02:43 – Big Tech's Unreal Gas Expectations04:05 – Mobile Data Centers on Well Pads05:16 – Frac Firms Becoming Tech Giants06:41 – ROI of AI Infrastructure08:20 – CNG & Mobile Midstream09:42 – Gen Z & ESG Pressure10:17 – Failed Solar & Gas Reality10:52 – SMRs & Powering AI Boom12:20 – Flynn, California, & Business Exodus15:09 – Regulation Creep & Safety18:16 – Pipeline Delays & Bottlenecks20:32 – Illegals & Hydrocarbon Transport Risks21:30 – CA Imports Dirty Oil While Shutting Local Supply23:21 – U.S. Refinery Gap24:57 – NIMBYs & NatSec Risk26:03 – Gas Price Outlook27:40 – Geothermal's Momentum29:55 – New Modular Refineries31:38 – Operator vs. Political Disconnect33:02 – Reese's AI & LNG Training33:45 – CNG/LNG Use on Pads34:52 – Battery Fire Safety & BESS36:47 – Mobile Power Best Practices38:34 – Lithium Battery Threats39:02 – Wrap-Up & OutroFull Transcript at https://theenergynewsbeat.substack.com/

Power is the new bottleneck, reasoning got real, and the business finally caught up. In this wide-ranging conversation, I sit down with Nathan Benaich, Founder and General Partner at Air Street Capital, to discuss the newly published 2025 State of AI report—what's actually working, what's hype, and where the next edge will come from. We start at the physical layer: energy procurement, PPAs, off-grid builds, and why water and grid constraints are turning power—not GPUs—into the decisive moat.From there, we move into capability: reasoning models acting as AI co-scientists in verifiable domains, and the “chain-of-action” shift in robotics that's taking us from polished demos to dependable deployments. Along the way, we examine the market reality—who's making real revenue, how margins actually behave once tokens and inference meet pricing, and what all of this means for builders and investors.We also zoom out to the ecosystem: NVIDIA's position vs. custom silicon, China's split stack, and the rise of sovereign AI (and the “sovereignty washing” that comes with it). The policy and security picture gets a hard look too—regulation's vibe shift, data-rights realpolitik, and what agents and MCP mean for cyber risk and adoption.Nathan closes with where he's placing bets (bio, defense, robotics, voice) and three predictions for the next 12 months. Nathan BenaichBlog - https://www.nathanbenaich.comX/Twitter - https://x.com/nathanbenaichSource: State of AI Report 2025 (9/10/2025)Air Street CapitalWebsite - https://www.airstreet.comX/Twitter - https://x.com/airstreetMatt Turck (Managing Director)Blog - https://www.mattturck.comLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturckFIRSTMARKWebsite - https://firstmark.comX/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap(0:00) – Cold Open: “Gargantuan money, real reasoning”(0:40) – Intro: State of AI 2025 with Nathan Benaich(02:06) – Reasoning got real: from chain-of-thought to verified math wins(04:11) – AI co-scientist: hypotheses, wet-lab validation, fewer “dumb stochastic parrots” (04:44) – Chain-of-action robotics: plan → act you can audit(05:13) – Humanoids vs. warehouse reality: where robots actually stick first(06:32) – The business caught up: who's making real revenue now(08:26) – Adoption & spend: Ramp stats, retention, and the shadow-AI gap(11:00) – Margins debate: tokens, pricing, and the thin-wrapper trap(14:02) – Bubble or boom? Wall Street vs. SF vibes (and circular deals)(19:54) – Power is the bottleneck: $50B/GW capex and the new moat(21:02) – PPAs, gas turbines, and off-grid builds: the procurement game(23:54) – Water, grids, and NIMBY: sustainability gets political(25:08) – NVIDIA's moat: 90% of papers, Broadcom/AMD, and custom silicon(28:47) – China split-stack: Huawei, Cambricon, and export zigzags(30:30) – Sovereign AI or “sovereignty washing”? Open source as leverage(40:40) – Regulation & safety: from Bletchley to “AI Action”—the vibe shift(44:06) – Safety budgets vs. lab spend; models that game evals(44:46) – Data rights realpolitik: $1.5B signals the new training cost(47:04) – Cyber risk in the agent era: MCP, malware LMs, state actors(50:19) – Agents that convert: search → commerce and the demo flywheel(54:18) – VC lens: where Nathan is investing (bio, defense, robotics, voice)(68:29) – Predictions: power politics, AI neutrality, end-to-end discoveries(1:02:13) – Wrap: what to watch next & where to find the report (stateof.ai)

Cuomo uses racist AI slop in campaign ad. The government shutdown is coming for SNAP and troops. The ballroom defeats NIMBYs. Elections are upon us. And Ireland has a new lefty president.   https://x.com/prem_thakker/status/1981150231174746370?s=46    https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/24/dod-accepts-anonymous-130-million-donation-to-partially-cover-troop-pay-00622219.    https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/watervliet-halloween-curfew-2025-21119806.php   https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/25/ballroom-east-wing-trump-white-house/   https://apnews.com/article/maine-platner-senate-trump-mills-tattoo-collins-fa8328a3c8aa5d5e0f34adb379e977b8    https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/regional-food-bank-fears-food-stamps-shutdown-21116263.php   https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/25/connolly-set-to-be-irelands-next-president-after-rival-concedes-defeat 

While many progressives ⁠have⁠ ⁠been⁠ ⁠upset⁠ with Governor Jared Polis lately, a new national political movement is looking to him for leadership. Inspired by “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, this new strain of liberal politics is focused on cutting red tape, building housing density and transit, and reducing barriers to new technology. So is Polis the perfect posterchild for the Abundance Agenda? And is that what Coloradans want out of their governor? A new group called ⁠Abundance Network⁠ recently invited producer Paul Karolyi to moderate a fireside chat with the governor about housing, transit, energy, and his plans for his final legislative session in January.  What do you think about Governor Jared Polis right now? What has he done well? Where has he gone astray? Text or leave us a voicemail with your name and neighborhood, and you might hear it on the show: 720-500-5418‬ For even more news from around the city, subscribe to our morning newsletter Hey Denver at ⁠denver.citycast.fm⁠. Follow us on Instagram: ⁠@citycastdenver⁠ Chat with other listeners on reddit: ⁠r/CityCastDenver⁠ Support City Cast Denver by becoming a member: ⁠membership.citycast.fm⁠ Learn more about the sponsors of this October 22nd episode: ⁠Arvada Center⁠ ⁠Denver Art Museum⁠ ⁠Denver Health⁠ ⁠Denver Film⁠ Looking to advertise on City Cast Denver? Check out our options for podcast and newsletter ads at ⁠citycast.fm/advertise⁠

Denverites have been protesting Trump all year, but no demonstrations have been bigger than the ‘No Kings' rallies in June and this past weekend. So what does that say about the local fight against Trump? Host Bree Davies and Producer Paul Karolyi are talking about some Giants fans who went viral for the wrong reasons, and everything else they saw and heard at ‘No Kings' — plus, we take some great listener questions and talk about our experience doing four hours on KNUS conservative talk radio, debating issues and fielding calls from people who called us “snowflakes” and worse.  Check out the whole four hours on The Jeff & Bill Show's YouTube page. Bree talked about Costco's inflatable slides. Paul cited Colorado Community Media's Englewood election coverage and discussed the last few years of debate over density in Englewood. Ben Todd from Full Afterburner Calzones linked to this Jon Stewart video.  For even more news from around the city, subscribe to our morning newsletter Hey Denver at denver.citycast.fm. Follow us on Instagram: @citycastdenver Chat with other listeners on reddit: r/CityCastDenver Support City Cast Denver by becoming a member: membership.citycast.fm What do you think? Text or leave us a voicemail with your name and neighborhood, and you might hear it on the show: 720-500-5418 Learn more about the sponsors of this October 21st episode: Arvada Center Denver Art Museum Denver Health Denver Film Cozy Earth - use code COZYDENVER for 40% off best-selling temperature-regulating sheets, apparel, and more Looking to advertise on City Cast Denver? Check out our options for podcast and newsletter ads at citycast.fm/advertise

Please donate to the show!We continue our series on housing with Joyce Mandell, a community organizer and activist who's focused on this very issue. We discuss what zoning is and why it's so important, the structural barriers that NIMBYs and opposition to zoning reforms erect, and what we can do to help fix big problems in our own local communities.You're listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it's so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.To stay informed:Subscribe to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@theincorruptibles6939Subscribe to the podcast at https://incorruptible-mass.buzzsprout.com/Sign up to get updates at http://ww12.incorruptiblemass.org/podcast?usid=18&utid=30927978072Donate to the show at https://secure.actblue.com/donate/impodcast

Everyone has opinions on the Bay Area's problems with housing, transit and public infrastructure, but Darrell Owens digs deep into the historical roots of these issues on his Substack “The Discourse Lounge.” When Darrell is analyzing a topic like gentrification, he doesn't just start in the 1990s or 2000. He'll go back more than a century, because, yes, the origins of our current demographic trends really do stretch that far. He also knows how to grab readers' attention with headlines like “Why new apartments look ugly” and “Bay Area nightlife sucks – here's how to fix it.” In addition to his writing, Darrell has been active with numerous “hands on” projects – from restoring long lost street neighborhood landmarks to installing “guerilla” bus benches at AC Transit stops lacking adequate seating. In this episode, Darrell and I discuss the origins of Nimby and Yimbyism, establishing criteria for historical preservation, the history of public housing, and much more. To see photos and links related to this episode, visit: https://eastbayyesterday.com/episodes/my-neighborhood-looks-the-same-as-it-did-50-years-ago/ Don't forget to follow the East Bay Yesterday Substack for updates on events, boat tours, exhibits, and other local history news: https://substack.com/@eastbayyesterday Donate to keep this show alive: https://www.patreon.com/c/eastbayyesterday Special thanks to the sponsor of this episode: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. To learn more about BAMPFA's current exhibit “Lee ShinJa: Drawing with Thread,” visit: https://bampfa.org/program/lee-shinja-drawing-thread

Boston on the cheap — does it even exist? To answer that rich question, we're joined by Emily Schario (aka Emily.In.Boston) of The B-Side, Boston Globe's newsletter for hidden gems, exciting deals, and things-to-do. She shares her ideal budget date night, the best neighborhoods for affordable fun, and commiserates over the local happy hour ban. Want to learn more about the cost of living issues we discuss in this episode? Check out conversations on local NIMBYs, $600,000 liquor licenses, and why Boston restaurants suck. Pain.  HipHop returns. Kowloon atrocity.  Voyage of the Mimi Explain Boston to Me: Head of the Charles Have feedback on this episode or ideas for upcoming topics? DM me on Instagram, email me, or send a voice memo. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the late 1960s, Denver's business and political leaders were convinced they had secured the ultimate prize in international sport: the 1976 Winter Olympic Games. With the backing of the US Olympic Committee and a successful bid before the International Olympic Committee, Colorado seemed poised to showcase itself on the world stage. But just two years later, that dream collapsed in spectacular fashion — when the state's voters did the unthinkable, and told the Olympics to go elsewhere. This week, we explore the fascinating saga of the “Olympics that never happened” with cultural historian and UNC Greensboro professor Adam Berg, author of "The Olympics That Never Happened: Denver '76 and the Politics of Growth." Berg examines how an elite coalition of boosters and officials promised a glittering event, only to face escalating costs, shaky logistics, environmental concerns, and — most importantly — a grassroots multi-issue opposition movement that united environmentalists, taxpayer advocates, and suburban "NIMBY" homeowners. It's a story that goes far beyond sport — one about power, growth, democracy, and the limits of civic boosterism in a rapidly changing/modernizing Colorado. Berg reveals how the defeat of the Games energized a new political consciousness, launched the career of future governor Richard Lamm, and reshaped how host cities and the IOC think about public consent for mega-events. It's one of the most remarkable “what-ifs” in Olympic history — and a story whose impact still resonates today. + + +   SUPPORT THE SHOW: Buy Us a Coffee: https://ko-fi.com/goodseatsstillavailable The "Good Seats" Store: https://www.teepublic.com/?ref_id=35106 BUY THE BOOK (AND SUPPORT THE SHOW!): "The Olympics That Never Happened: Denver '76 and the Politics of Growth": https://amzn.to/48moE7T SPONSOR THANKS (AND SUPPORT THE SHOW!):  Royal Retros (10% off promo code: SEATS): https://www.503-sports.com?aff=2 Old School Shirts.com (10% off promo code: GOODSEATS): https://oldschoolshirts.com/goodseats FIND AND FOLLOW: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/GoodSeatsStillAvailable Web: https://goodseatsstillavailable.com/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/goodseatsstillavailable.com X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/GoodSeatsStill YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@goodseatsstillavailable Threads: https://www.threads.net/@goodseatsstillavailable Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goodseatsstillavailable/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GoodSeatsStillAvailable/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/good-seats-still-available/

Juliann Edwards is Chief Development Officer at The Nuclear Company. The United States has 93 operating nuclear reactors providing about 20% of the nation's electricity. After decades without new builds, Vogtle Units 3 and 4 in Georgia finally came online—despite cost overruns and delays that nearly derailed the project. Meanwhile, China has dozens of reactors under construction and is on pace to surpass the U.S. as the world's nuclear leader by 2030.At the same time, an energy-demand gap—driven by AI data centers, reshoring of manufacturing, and widespread electrification—has put nuclear back in the conversation. Hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are scrambling for clean, reliable baseload power.The Nuclear Company believes it can crack what's held nuclear back in America. Rather than inventing new reactor designs, they're using proven models like the AP1000 and targeting “the other 88%” of costs—construction, financing, and project management. Their approach is fleet-scale deployment: building multiple reactors at once to drive down costs through repetition and shared learning. They're also partnering with Palantir to build an AI-powered operating system to orchestrate these projects.Beyond her role at The Nuclear Company, Juliann chairs U.S. Women in Nuclear. With 15 years in the industry—from steel commodities to the 2000s nuclear renaissance and the decommissioning wave—she's seen the cycles and why today's interest feels different.MCJ is a multiple-time investor in The Nuclear Company through our venture funds.Episode recorded on Aug 7, 2025 (Published on Oct 7, 2025)In this episode, we cover: [2:57] Juliann's background and path to nuclear[05:30] Women in Nuclear's mission and growth[06:38] Lessons from a six‑state nuclear bus tour[08:22] NIMBY sentiment shifting toward nuclear acceptance[10:25] U.S. build history and why it stalled[18:06] What went wrong and right at Vogtle[24:05] Nuclear reactor ~12% of cost; 88% is everything else[25:42] Workforce gaps and training pipelines[26:40] An overview of nuclear project types[32:59] Timelines: restarts soon; new builds in years[34:42] TNC's executive makeup[37:40] The role of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission[40:35] Palantir and TNC's newly announced partnership[48:35] Solving the nuclear waste problem[50:30] Juliann's predictions for the future of nuclear[53:10] Hyperscalers' evolving nuclear appetite Enjoyed this episode? Please leave us a review! Share feedback or suggest future topics and guests at info@mcj.vc.Connect with MCJ:Cody Simms on LinkedInVisit mcj.vcSubscribe to the MCJ Newsletter*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant

Welcome to Purple Political Breakdown, where we cut through partisan noise to explore the real issues facing America today. Hosted by Radell Lewis, this podcast delivers sharp political analysis, economic insights, and practical solutions that transcend traditional left-right divisions.What You'll Discover:The American Dream Under Fire: Explore how the traditional pathway to successeducation, homeownership, economic mobilityhas been disrupted by inflation, economic inequality, and political polarization. Learn why younger generations are abandoning the conventional dream for materialistic social media fantasies.Housing Crisis Deep Dive: Unpack America's 3-6 million unit housing shortage and why 600,000+ households spend over 70% of income on rent. Discover how NIMBY activism and local political apathy have created a democratic failure that blocks new housing development.Generational Wealth Conflict: Examine why Baby Boomers control the majority of assets, political seats, and policy decisionsand how pension obligations are starving schools and public services of resources needed for current operations.Local Democracy Breakdown: Understand why most Americans can't name their local representatives despite having 27+ elected positions to vote for, and how this apathy empowers unions and wealthy interests to control development decisions.Bipartisan Solutions: Move beyond partisan talking points with practical policy discussions on term limits, national service requirements, education reform, and innovative housing development strategies.Economic & Political Commentary: Deep dives into how inflation, economic inequality, and political polarization are reshaping the American Dream. Host Radell Lewis brings on expert guests like Nick Halariswho's managed over $300 million in real estate investmentsto examine fiscal deficits, monetary policy, and their direct impact on America's growing wealth gap.About Your Host:Radell Lewis brings a unique perspective to political commentary, focusing on bridging divides through substantive conversations with diverse voices across the political spectrum. Through Purple Political Breakdown, Radell creates space for nuanced discussions that move beyond partisan talking points toward practical solutions.Featured Guest Spotlight - Nick Halaris:Nick Halaris exemplifies the type of thoughtful guests you'll hear on Purple Political Breakdown. As a Stanford Law graduate, President of Metros Capital, and civic advocate, Nick brings a unique dual perspective as both a successful entrepreneur and dedicated public servant.His journey from managing hundreds of millions in assets to rebuilding after legal battles shaped his mission: achieving profit with purpose while serving the public good. Featured in the Los Angeles Times, Business Insider, Real Vision, and LA Business Journal, Nick represents a new generation of political commentary that prioritizes practical solutions over partisan divisions.Perfect For:Political junkies seeking nuanced analysis beyond cable newsEntrepreneurs interested in socially responsible business practicesCivic-minded Americans looking for actionable ways to create changeAnyone tired of partisan politics who wants real solutionsInvestors and business leaders concerned about America's economic futureKeywords: Political podcast, American Dream, economic inequality, housing crisis, bipartisan politics, fiscal policy, monetary policy, civic engagement, political polarization, progressive politics, wealth gap, homelessness solutions, NIMBY activism, generational conflict, cross-political dialogue, practical solutions, political commentary, economic analysisCheck out Nick's Newsletter: https://nickhalaris.com/newsletterStandard Resource Links & RecommendationsThe following organizations and platforms represent valuable resources for balanced political discourse and democratic participation: PODCAST NETWORKALIVE Podcast Network - Check out the ALIVE Network where you can catch a lot of great podcasts like my own, led by amazing Black voices. Link: https://alivepodcastnetwork.com/ CONVERSATION PLATFORMSHeadOn - A platform for contentious yet productive conversations. It's a place for hosted and unguided conversations where you can grow a following and enhance your conversations with AI features. Link: https://app.headon.ai/Living Room Conversations - Building bridges through meaningful dialogue across political divides. Link: https://livingroomconversations.org/ BALANCED NEWS & INFORMATIONOtherWeb - An AI-based platform that filters news without paywalls, clickbait, or junk, helping you access diverse, unbiased content. Link: https://otherweb.com/ VOTING REFORM & DEMOCRACYEqual Vote Coalition & STAR Voting - Advocating for voting methods that ensure every vote counts equally, eliminating wasted votes and strategic voting. Link: https://www.equal.vote/starFuture is Now Coalition (FiNC) - A grassroots movement working to restore democracy through transparency, accountability, and innovative technology while empowering citizens and transforming American political discourse FutureisFutureis. Link: https://futureis.org/ POLITICAL ENGAGEMENTIndependent Center - Resources for independent political thinking and civic engagement. Link: https://www.independentcenter.org/ Get Daily News: Text 844-406-INFO (844-406-4636) with code "purple" to receive quick, unbiased, factual news delivered to your phone every morning via Informed ( https://informed.now) All Links: https://linktr.ee/purplepoliticalbreakdownThe Purple Political Breakdown is committed to fostering productive political dialogue that transcends partisan divides. We believe in the power of conversation, balanced information, and democratic participation to build a stronger society. Our mission: "Political solutions without political bias."Subscribe, rate, and share if you believe in purple politics - where we find common ground in the middle! Also if you want to be apart of the community and the conversation make sure to Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/ptPAsZtHC9

Development fights are often won or lost in the community meeting. And so-called (though some would argue unfairly labeled) NIMBYs are often at the meetings in force, and can kill a project or fight for a compromise. Quinn Myers details some battles he's covered, and Madison Savedra is in the midst of a fight brewing on the North Side over a gigantic zoning change with huge consequences. Host - Jon HansenReporters - Quinn Myers, Madison SavedraRead More Here Want to donate to our non-profit newsroom? CLICK HEREWho we areBlock Club Chicago is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit news organization dedicated to delivering reliable, relevant and nonpartisan coverage of Chicago's diverse neighborhoods. We believe all neighborhoods deserve to be covered in a meaningful way.We amplify positive stories, cover development and local school council meetings and serve as watchdogs in neighborhoods often ostracized by traditional news media.Ground-level coverageOur neighborhood-based reporters don't parachute in once to cover a story. They are in the neighborhoods they cover every day building relationships over time with neighbors. We believe this ground-level approach not only builds community but leads to a more accurate portrayal of a neighborhood.Stories that matter to you — every daySince our launch five years ago, we've published more than 25,000 stories from the neighborhoods, covered hundreds of community meetings and send daily and neighborhood newsletters to more than 130,000 Chicagoans. We've built this loyalty by proving to folks we are not only covering their neighborhoods, we are a part of them. Some of us have internalized the national media's narrative of a broken Chicago. We aim to change that by celebrating our neighborhoods and chronicling the resilience of the people who fight every day to make Chicago a better place for all.

A conversation all about density, on the occasion of the return of an online resource, Visualizing Density, at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy website. Density is in the spotlight as cities and towns seek to build more multifamily housing to help address a stubborn affordability crisis.

Man er egentlig tilhænger af grønne projekter; man vil bare ikke være nabo til dem. "Ikke i min baghave" - eller NIMBY-effekten (Not in my back yard) - har de seneste år vundet momentum. Over hele landet samler vrede borgere sig i protest mod lokale anlægsplaner, og ofte lykkes det dem faktisk at få stoppet projekterne. Baggrunden for modstanden er, at Folketinget for fire år siden besluttede, at Danmarks energiproduktion fra landvind og solceller skal firedobles frem mod 2030. Derfor skal der opføres gigantiske vind- og solcelleparker på flere hundrede hektar - svarende til flere millioner kvadratmeter, og langt de fleste af dem skal ligge i Jylland. Mens mange lokalpolitikere ser muligheder i de grønne projekter, opfatter mange naboer dem som en potentiel altødelæggende trussel for deres lokalmiljø. I dag taler vi med lektor ved Aarhus Universitet, Martin Vinæs Larsen, om hvordan NIMBY-effekten har udviklet sig til et af de mest følelsesladede spørgsmål frem mod de kommende kommunalvalg. Vært: Kaspar Colling Nielsen.

The Industry Relations Podcast is now available on your favorite podcast player! Rob and Greg tackle the pressing issue of housing affordability, reacting to reports that the Trump administration may declare a national housing emergency. They debate potential federal approaches, including deregulation, incentives, zoning reform, and changes to mortgage lending. The conversation also shifts to Zillow's enforcement against exclusive listings and what the data may actually reveal about Compass's inventory. Key Takeaways Reports suggest the Trump administration is considering declaring a national housing emergency. Federal action is constrained by state and local control, but incentives and funding leverage could encourage zoning reform. Deregulation, such as loosening zoning restrictions and NIMBY barriers, could expand housing supply. Debate over mortgage financing: Rob argues government backing of 30-year fixed mortgages inflates housing prices, while Greg stresses the social good of homeownership. Alternative idea: shift federal guarantees from mortgages to construction loans to directly increase housing supply. Tax and regulatory approaches could curb institutional investors buying homes for rentals. Discussion of Mike DelPrete's analysis of Compass's exclusive inventory trends after Zillow's policy enforcement. Conflicting views: Rob sees it as evidence Zillow lost influence; Greg suggests it may simply reflect stale inventory. Links Exclusive Inventory Update and Zillow's Catch-22   Connect with Rob and Greg Rob's Website  Greg's Website    Watch us on YouTube   Our Sponsors: Cotality  Notorious VIP The Giant Steps Job Board    Production and Editing Services by Sunbound Studios