POPULARITY
5 episodes with yimbyism
2 episodes with yimbyism
2 episodes with yimbyism
Learn how the Regional Housing Alliance plans to strategize and relieve the affordable housing challenge in La Plata County at the 2nd annual Southwest Housing Summit. By Sadie Smith.Watch this story at www.durangolocal.news/newsstories/2nd-annual-southwest-housing-summit-returns-to-durango This story is sponsored by FLC Center for Innovation and Durango Gelato, Coffee & Tea.Support the show
Ryder Kessler and Catherine Vaughan, co-founders of Abundance New York, joined the show to discuss the "abundance" wave washing over the national political discourse (in part inspired by the new book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson), what their vision for abundance in New York is, how to achieve it, NIMBYism vs YIMBYism, and much more. Their group is a relatively new nonprofit group (501c4) creating a new political community and working to influence politics and policy to increase the supply of housing, transit, public space, and clean energy. (Ep 491)
Subscribe to Bad Faith on Patreon to instantly unlock our full premium episode library: http://patreon.com/badfaithpodcast Political economist David Fields joins Bad Faith for a conversation that goes beyond housing policy to unpack the very roots of why the Democratic Party seems unable to provide basic improvements for working people -- even when they're in power. He clarifies the YIMBY vs. NIMBY debate, how YIMBYism has been appropriated by corporate developers, and how false economic narratives (e.g. the supply/demand curve) have been weaponized to justify real-estate lobby-approved solutions to the housing crisis. Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube for video of this episode. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod). Produced by Armand Aviram. Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).
If NIMBY is the classist rejection of affordable housing ("Not in my back yard”), then YIMBY is sold as the progressive counter to it: “Yes, in my back yard; because I believe affordable housing should be widely available, even in my own neighborhood.” But of course, housing development has nothing to do with the needs of the poor or the working class. It has nothing to do with the public purpose. Steve's guest, political economist David Fields, explains: “YIMBY is yes to housing in my backyard, but housing for developers to extract profit from land value. So build as much as possible within a given area and, in the end, extract as much as possible through rent extraction and land value appreciation. It's not, in my view, yes to actual affordable housing in my backyard to house working class folks. No, it's yes to luxury skyscrapers, luxury this, luxury that. Build as cheaply as possible for vested interests to maximize gain.” YIMBY's want us to believe that sheer quantity will bring prices down, because that's how the market works. Those who object are accused of NIMBYism. In addition, “They're economically illiterate, they're economically stupid, they don't know, they don't pay attention, and they're not letting the magic do its magic. Which, anybody who knows a modicum of economics and knows that supply and demand is institutionally configurated - not natural - should be flabbergasted and say, how did this get to be so popular, so celebrated? Well, there are vested interests involved.” The episode explores the misleading narratives of YIMBYism and compares the market-driven approach to housing to trickle-down economics, emphasizing the constructed scarcity and profit motives behind urban planning. David points out the misuse of economic models like the Marshallian Cross, highlighting flaws in the market logic often used to justify YIMBY policies. David and Steve talk about the broader neoliberal agenda of privatization and deregulation, and its stranglehold on government policies. Awareness and organization are needed to combat systemic class inequality in housing and beyond. David Fields is from a critical realist and genetic structuralist ontology and epistemology. His work centers on the intricacies concerning the interactions of foreign exchanges and capital flows, with economic growth, fiscal and monetary policy and distribution, whereby critical attention is paid to the notion of endogenous money. He also delves into the political economy of regional development to study patterns with respect to the nature of housing, social stratification, and community planning. @ProfDavidFields on Twitter
Tom Tugendhat has served as a Member of Parliament since 2015, holding roles such as Security Minister and chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Before entering Parliament, Tom served in in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also worked for the Foreign Office, helped establish the National Security Council of Afghanistan, and served as military assistant and principal adviser to the Chief of the Defense Staff. Tyler and Tom examine the evolving landscape of governance and leadership in the UK today, touching on the challenges of managing London under the UK's centralized system, why England remains economically unbalanced, his most controversial view on London's architecture, whether YIMBYism in England can succeed, the unique politics and history of Kent, whether the system of private schools needs reform, his pick for the greatest unselected prime minister, whether Brexit revealed a defect in the parliamentary system, whether the House of Lords should be abolished, why the British monarchy continues to captivate the world, devolution in Scotland and Northern Ireland, how learning Arabic in Yemen affected his life trajectory, his read on the Middle East and Russia, the Tom Tugendhat production function, his pitch for why a talented young person should work in the British Civil Service, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded October 9th, 2024. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Tom on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here. Photo Credit: This photo is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.
Kyla Scanlon has made it her personal mission to bring economics education to a larger audience through social media. She publishes daily content across TikTok, YouTube, Substack, LinkedIn and more, explaining what is happening in the economy and why it is happening. Tyler calls her first book In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work a “good and bracing shock to those who have trained their memories on some weighted average of the more distant past.” Tyler and Kyla dive into the modern state of economics education and a whole range of topics like if fantasy world building can help you understand economics, what she learned trading options at 16, why she opted for a state school over the Ivy League, lessons from selling 38 cars over summer break, introversion as an ingredient for social media success, if she believes in any conspiracy theories, Instagram scrolling vs TikTok scrolling, the decline of print culture, why people are seeking out cults, modern nihilism, how perspective can help with optimism, the death of celebrity and the rise of influencers, why econ education has gone backward, improving mainstream media, YIMBYism and real estate, nuclear pragmatism versus utopian geothermalists, investing advice for young people, why she thinks about the Great Depression more than Rome, creating the next Free to Choose, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded July 8th, 2024. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Kyla on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here. Photo Credit: Rachel Woolf
We're exploring how zoning, regulations, and NIMBYism have impacted America's cities in this episode featuring M. Nolan Gray, Senior Director at California YIMBY and author of Arbitrary Lines. Topics covered include: Why are housing costs skyrocketing across the country? How have zoning laws broken American cities, and what reforms could fix them? How should the YIMBY movement engage with communities resistant to new development? What are the best policy solutions for addressing the housing affordability crisis? How has YIMBYism gained traction within the Democratic Party?Join Project Liberal founder Joshua Eakle and steering committee member Shawn Huckabay as they engage in a timely conversation with Nolan Gray on the future of housing policy.Follow Nolan at https://x.com/mnolangray
"‘The moment has come': pro-building Labour YIMBYs are set to raise the roof" was the title of a piece in the Observer ahead of the Labour Party Conference (link below). For many of the most ambitious of the new cohort of Labour MPs, this is the fashionable campaign of the moment, not for economic growth but as a social justice movement – and one that many of the new millennials entering parliament hope to stake their careers on. Inside Labour it is not a left-right divide, but some of its champions are prepared for it to mean internal party conflict between those who are radicalised on the housing crisis, and more nervous colleagues in rural or suburban seats won for the first time by Labour who might be tempted to retreat into nimbyism on local issues as a way of trying to keep their seats. The point about first time Labour MPs retreating into NIMBYism is interesting in the context of the proposed changes to the standard method that is currently being consulted upon, but it was the point about YIMBYism not being a left-right divide inside Labour that Sam Stafford found most interesting because of a piece in the New Statesman back in April called ‘Not all YIMBYs are your friends - the pro-housing coalition is less united than it seems' (link also below). As it so happens, Sam approached the people quoted in the New Statesmen piece about recording a chat about the politics of housing and met four of them recently to do just that. The four are John Myers, co-founder of the YIMBY Alliance; Robert Colville, columnist and Director of the Centre for Policy Studies; Jonn Elledge, journalist, author and fan of local government reorganisation; and Aydin Dikerdem, Cabinet Member for housing on the London Borough of Wandsworth. They were going to talk about whether Kier Starmer's self-declaration as a YIMBY marks the movements arrival into the political mainstream; whether the ends, more housing, is more important than the means; and who should get a say over what goes where and why. Some of that they did, but the remainder of the conversation, as Listeners will hear, goes off in all kinds of directions. Some accompanying reading. ‘The moment has come': pro-building Labour YIMBYs are set to raise the roof https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/15/the-moment-has-come-pro-building-labour-yimbys-are-set-to-raise-the-roof Not all YIMBYs are your friends https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/04/no-not-every-yimby-your-mate-housing All hail the ‘MIMBYs': the open-minded voters who might just save Labour's housing plans https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/05/labour-housing-plans-keir-starmer-houses By Sam: YIMBYs and NIMBYs. Is planning becoming a new front in the culture war? https://samuelstafford.blogspot.com/2021/06/yimbys-versus-nimbys-is-planning-new.html By Aydin: The sky pool is a symbol of a greater housing scandal https://www.huckmag.com/article/the-sky-pool-is-a-symbol-of-a-greater-housing-scandal By Robert: The (not so) green belt — and why we should build on it (£) https://www.thetimes.com/article/c7049594-3836-4563-ae4e-caa27eb5409e?shareToken=631cd93bdff30c14ac98a86bd21b483b Some accompanying listening. The In Crowd – Dobie Gray https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOWO--z1S8A 50 Shades T-Shirts! If you have listened to Episode 45 of the 50 Shades of Planning you will have heard Clive Betts say that... 'In the Netherlands planning is seen as part of the solution. In the UK, too often, planning is seen as part of the problem'. Sam said in reply that that would look good on a t-shirt and it does. Further details can be found here: http://samuelstafford.blogspot.com/2021/07/50-shades-of-planning-t-shirts.html Any other business. Sam is on Bluesky (@samuelstafford.bsky.social) and Instagram (@samuel__stafford). He shares bits and pieces of planning-related interest on Instagram (@50shadesofplanning) and LinkedIn so please follow those accounts as well.
When Cody Fischer decided to get into real estate development, he had a vision. He wanted to build affordable, energy efficient apartments in Minneapolis, not far from where he grew up.His vision was well-timed because, in 2019, Minneapolis's city council passed one of the most ambitious housing plans in the nation. One aim of that plan was to alleviate the city's housing shortage by encouraging developers like Cody to build, build, build.But when Cody tried to build, he ran into problems. The kinds of problems that arise all over the country when cities confront a short supply of housing, and try to build their way out.Today on the show, NIMBYism, YIMBYism and why it's so hard to fix the housing shortage. Told through the story of two apartment buildings in Minneapolis.This episode was hosted by Amanda Aronczyk and Kenny Malone. It was produced by Emma Peaslee and Sofia Shchukina, and edited by Molly Messick. It was engineered by James Willets and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Blanket rezoning sparked controversy in Calgary as shouts of “not in my backyard” became louder, but how can we change that narrative to address the housing crisis and turn NIMBY into YIMBY? Joining us to discuss is Leslie Legge - Assistant Professor of Department of Marketing Consumer Studies at the University of Guelph.
Send us a Text Message.Hey, Legends! Welcome to this week's episode of The Building Talks Podcast! Today, we're delving into the world of YIMBYism with Jonathan O'Brien, Lead Organiser of YIMBY Melbourne. YIMBY, or "Yes In My Backyard," offers proactive solutions to Australia's housing crisis, exploring planning regulations, heritage overlays, and the "missing middle" housing concept. Jonathan discusses how increasing urban density near CBDs can expand housing options.We also explore ideological debates on urban development, from left-wing to right-wing perspectives, balancing progress and preservation. Jonathan's insights on city living and community planning make this episode essential for urban development enthusiasts. Join us for an engaging conversation on housing solutions and the future of our cities!Key Takeaways from the conversation:How the YIMBY movement aims to support more housing development in desirable areasHow zoning laws limit housing development, contributing to the affordable housing shortage.How and why higher density is important for economic growth, social connections, and sustainable cities.Understanding how heritage preservation can hinder housing development; regulations need to balance preservation and progress.A shift in mindset and policy is needed to increase housing options and address affordability. Social and affordable housing provide safe homes for those in need.Government funding and support are crucial for building social and affordable housing, but financing and labour challenges exist.Policy changes should make it easier to build various types of housing and increase supply, including higher density near rail infrastructure and ending single-family zoning.The YIMBY movement seeks to create a more inclusive and affordable housing market.ChaptersThe Impact of Zoning Regulations on Housing DevelopmentThe Importance of Density for Economic and Social BenefitsRethinking Mindsets and Policies for Housing AffordabilityUnderstanding Affordable Housing and the Housing CrisisChallenges in Building and Funding Social and Affordable HousingPolicy Changes to Increase Housing Supply and DensityThe YIMBY Movement: Advocating for More Housing DevelopmentThe Future of the Housing Crisis and the YIMBY MovementHope you enjoy the podcast!The Building Talks Podcast is brought to you by Building Environs Recruitment - providing recruitment solutions to the property, construction, and related industries, here in Melbourne and Southeast Queensland. For an overview of our service, visit:www.buildingenvirons.com.auDon't forget to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and subscribe to The Building Talks podcast so you don't miss any updates.#TheBuildingTalksPodcast #YIMBYism #YIMBYMelbourne #HousingCrisisSolutions #PlanningRegulations #HeritageOverlays #MissingMiddleHousing #UrbanDensity #CBDHousing #UrbanDevelopment #HousingAffordability #SocialHousing #AffordableHousing #GovernmentFunding #ZoningRegulations #EconomicGrowth #SocialBenefits #HousingPolicy #InclusiveHousing #NIMBYResistance #SustainableCities Contact The Building Talks Podcast Follow us on Linkedin, Facebook, and Instagram Visit us on our website Email us at info@buildingenvirons.com.au
This episode features a livestream the Center for New Liberalism hosted with Congressman Scott Peters of San Diego. CNL director Colin Mortimer and Rep. Peters discuss how to build green energy more quickly, the ins and outs of permitting reform, why focusing on transmission and the electrical grid is so important, housing and YIMBYism, and much more! To get bonus episodes, support us at patreon.com/newliberalpodcast or https://cnliberalism.org/become-a-member Got questions? Send us a note at mailbag@cnliberalism.org. Follow us at: https://twitter.com/CNLiberalism https://cnliberalism.org/ Join a local chapter at https://cnliberalism.org/become-a-member/
In 2020, U.S. census data analysis revealed that, for the first time, Native Hawai'ians living in the continental U.S. outnumbered those living in Hawaii. Redfin reports that the median home list price is currently $825,000. High cost of living and a lack of affordable homes have continued to be huge challenges for natives and transplants living in Hawai'i. Listen to this episode of Infill to hear what advocates are doing to make homes more affordable.This year in honor of AAPI Heritage Month, we wanted to highlight all of the amazing work that our Hawai'i YIMBY chapter is doing and how it is impacting native Hawai'ians on the islands.Listen in to hear our conversation with Hawai'i YIMBY volunteer leaders Damien Waikaloa and Matt Popovich. We spoke about how they got started in the YIMBY movement, the missing middle housing policies they're organizing around now, and why they think YIMBYism is so important to uplift Hawai'ians. Learn more about YIMBY Action: https://yimbyaction.org/Follow YIMBY Action on Twitter: https://twitter.com/yimbyaction/Follow YIMBY Action on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yimbyaction/Follow YIMBY Action on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yimbyaction/Learn more about Hawai'i YIMBY: https://hawaiiyimby.com/Follow Hawai'i YIMBY on Twitter: https://x.com/hiyimby/Follow Hawai'i YIMBY on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hawaiiyimby/
We can all agree that being lonely is bad. But apparently, science shows it's really, really bad. Indeed, being lonely is so dangerous to your health that its equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. And it gets worse: we're in the middle of a loneliness epidemic, meaning that the health of millions is at risk.In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart ask two questions: is there actually a loneliness epidemic? And does it make sense to compare loneliness to something as bad for you as smoking cigarettes?The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. Click here to see the latest issue, packed with essays on YIMBYism, clinical research, Russian history, railway tunnels, and more.Show notes* The US Surgeon General's report into “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation”* Articles on the loneliness epidemic from the BBC, NPR, the BBC again, the New York Times, the New York Times again, and Science magazine* 2023 article in The Times (London) that makes the 15-cigarettes-a-day comparison* The 2017 Jo Cox report on “Combatting Loneliness”* 2010 meta-analysis of social relationships and mortality risk* American Time Use Survey, 2003-2020* Meta-Gallup poll from 2022 on “The Global State of Social Connections”* Are US older adults getting lonelier (2019 study)? What about “emerging adults” (2021 meta-analysis)?* Comparison between younger-old people and older-old people on their loneliness levels* 2017 review study on the health effects of loneliness* 2023: systematic review no.1, systematic review no.2, both into the effects of loneliness on health* 2005 study on the health effects of smoking tobaccoCredits* The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe
The Strong Towns approach to housing has some obvious tensions with NIMBYism, but what about YIMBYism? That's the topic for discussion on the table for today's episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, because while our approach has more in common with the YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) crowd than differences, there are some nuances that are worth addressing. And if you want to take a serious deep dive into the Strong Towns approach to housing, then you'll be glad to know that Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis is going to be released tomorrow—so order your copy now! ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES Order your copy of Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis today! Chuck Marohn (Twitter/X).
On this week's Depgrogrammed, hosts Harrison Pitt & Evan Riggs are joined by Dr. Kristian Niemietz, Head of Political Economy at the Institute of Economic Affairs and author of Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Dies: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Socialism-Failed-Idea-That-Never/dp/0255367708 --------------- SUBSCRIBE: If you are enjoying the show, please subscribe to our channel on YouTube (click the Subscribe Button underneath the video and then Click on the Bell icon next to it to make sure you Receive All Notifications) AUDIO: If you prefer Audio you can subscribe on iTunes or Soundcloud. Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-923838732 itunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/s... SUPPORT/DONATE: PAYPAL/ CARD PAYMENTS - ONE TIME & MONTHLY: You can donate in a variety of ways via our website: http://www.newcultureforum.org.uk/#do... It is set up to accept one time and monthly donations. JOIN US ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Web: http://www.newcultureforum.org.uk F: https://www.facebook.com/NCultureForum/ Y: http://www.youtube.com/c/NewCultureForum T: http://www.twitter.com/NewCultureForum (@NewCultureForum)
Noah Smith guests on the Moment of Zen podcast (hosted by his Econ 102 co-host Erik Torenberg and founder Dan Romero) to discuss California land use, housing, politics, policing, and more. Subscribe to listen to Moment of Zen, a weekly show about tech, business, and culture, wherever you listen to podcasts: https://link.chtbl.com/moz -- SPONSOR: NetSuite provides financial software for all your business needs. More than thirty-six thousand companies have already upgraded to NetSuite, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/turpentine and defer payments of a FULL NetSuite implementation for six months. -- Econ 102 and Moment of Zen are part of the Turpentine podcast network. To learn more: www.turpentine.co -- RECOMMENDED PODCAST: Every week investor and writer of the popular newsletter The Diff, Byrne Hobart, and co-host Erik Torenberg discuss today's major inflection points in technology, business, and markets – and help listeners build a diversified portfolio of trends and ideas for the future. Subscribe to “The Riff” with Byrne Hobart and Erik Torenberg: https://link.chtbl.com/theriff RECOMMENDED PODCAST: LIVE PLAYERS Join host Samo Burja and Erik Torenberg as they analyze the mindsets of today's most intriguing business leaders, investors, and innovators through the lens of their bold actions and contrarian worldviews. You'll come away with a deeper understanding of the development of technology, business, political power, culture and more. LIsten and subscribe everywhere you get your podcasts: https://link.chtbl.com/liveplayers. -- TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Episode Preview (01:07) Antonio as Dennis Rodman (02:05) The left and right version of “it's time to build” i.e. Ezra Klein vs Marc Andreessen (04:50) California skewed political identities (07:00) California vs Texas GOP stance on immigration (09:30) Should Gary Tan strategize from the left or the right, structurally (11:11) Can the Asian block become a machine in SF? In California? (12:50) Is LA better run than SF? (17:40) What's the best run city in the US? (22:15) Best format for affordable housing in cities (26:30) California is a class society based on land (28:40) House-rich progressives in California (31:00) Prop 13, property tax, and SALT debates (39:30) The tide of YIMBYism (51:10) Effective building in Japan (58:00) YIMBY movement in SF lost because of crime (59:00) The future of San Francisco (01:09:00) Policing (01:16:00) WWII and the atom bomb (01:22:00) Will patriotism come back? (01:25:00) Biggest misconception about Japan? -- LINKS: Noah's Substack https://www.noahpinion.blog/ Book Recommendation on Prop 13: Golden Gates https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America/dp/0525560211 -- X / TWITTER: @noahpinion (Noah) @dwr (Dan) @eriktorenberg (Erik) @moz_podcast
Economist and writer Noah Smith returns to the podcast to talk to Dan Romero and Erik Torenberg about housing, politics, land use, and policing in California and beyond. Moment of Zen is part of the Turpentine podcast network. Learn more at www.turpentine.co or email Erik@turpentine.co RECOMMENDED PODCAST: The HR industry is at a crossroads. What will it take to construct the next generation of incredible businesses – and where can people leaders have the most business impact? Hosts Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich have been through it all, the highs and the lows – IPOs, layoffs, executive turnover, board meetings, culture changes, and more. With a lineup of industry vets and experts, Nolan and Kelli break down the nitty-gritty details, trade offs, and dynamics of constructing high performing companies. Through unfiltered conversations that can only happen between seasoned practitioners, Kelli and Nolan dive deep into the kind of leadership-level strategy that often happens behind closed doors. Check out the first episode with the architect of Netflix's culture deck Patty McCord. https://link.chtbl.com/hrheretics TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Episode Preview (01:07) Antonio is the Dennis Rodman (01:42) Noah's new podcast with Turpentine: Econ 102 (02:05) The left and right version of “it's time to build” i.e. Ezra Klein vs Marc Andreessen (04:50) California skewed political identities (07:00) California vs Texas GOP stance on immigration (09:30) Should Gary Tan strategize from the left or the right, structurally (11:11) Can the Asian block become a machine in SF? In California? (12:50) Is LA better run than SF? (17:40) What's the best-run city in the US (20:58) Sponsor: NetSuite (22:15) Best format for affordable housing in cities (26:30) California is a class society based on land (28:40) House-rich progressives in California (31:00) Prop 13, property tax, and SALT debates (39:30) The tide of YIMBYism (51:10) Effective building in Japan (58:00) YIMBY movement in SF lost because of crime (59:00) The future of San Francisco (01:09:00) Policing (01:16:00) WWII and the atom bomb (01:22:00) Will patriotism come back? (01:25:00) Biggest misconception about Japan? LINKS: Noah's Substack https://www.noahpinion.blog/ Book Recommendation on Prop 13: Golden Gates https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America/dp/0525560211 X / TWITTER: @noahpinion (Noah) @dwr (Dan) @eriktorenberg (Erik) @moz_podcast SPONSOR: NetSuite provides financial software for all your business needs. More than thirty-six thousand companies have already upgraded to NetSuite, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/zen and defer payments of a FULL NetSuite implementation for six months.
Urmi talks to Eric Lombardi in the third interview in our series on the supply-side zoning, planning, social and political issues that are cited as being one of the key drivers of the Toronto Area's housing affordability crisis. As a young professional who works in a non-housing industry or related capacity in the financial sector in Toronto, Eric is a passionate citizen about housing issues, and importantly, part of the very generation that many worry are being squeezed out of market housing due to lack of affordability. As a key leader in Toronto's YIMBY (the “Yes, in My Backyard”) movement and the “More Neighbours Toronto” volunteer organization, Eric is very knowledgeable and thoughtful about how things need to change if we are to build the number of homes experts say are required to make a dent in easing our housing availability and affordability crisis in all sectors — market, affordable and shelter, a view embodied by the ‘More Neighbours Toronto' call to action that “Every Level of Government Can Do More.” Eric and Urmi talk about what needs to be done at all levels of government, what solutions Eric thinks are most promising and how he responds to criticisms of these approaches. Follow Eric on Twitter: @EricDLombardi More Neighbours Toronto: https://www.moreneighbours.ca You can also watch this interview on our Move Smartly YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/movesmartly Follow us and send us your questions and feedback via Twitter @MoveSmartly, Instagram @move.smartly, or email: editor@movesmartly.com And if you find this show useful, please rate and, even better, leave us a written review on Apple podcasts, so that more people can benefit from this information. It's very much appreciated!
The second episode in our state by state YIMBYism series! We're looking at places where YIMBYs have succeeded and places where they haven't - and trying to figure out which approaches to YIMBYism work. Mallory Phillips, Nathan Dugan and Ellie McMann are the founders of ShelterWF, Montana's largest YIMBY organization. They join the show to discuss YIMBYism in Montana. We talk about the history of Montana's housing crisis, how big states like California influence small states like Montana, and how to get things done in a heavily Republican state. Got questions for the Neoliberal Podcast? Send them to mailbag@cnliberalism.org Follow us at: https://twitter.com/ne0liberal https://www.twitch.tv/neoliberalproject https://cnliberalism.org/ Join a local chapter at https://cnliberalism.org/become-a-member/
The first episode in a new series! We're going state by state - looking at places where YIMBYs have succeeded and places where they haven't - and trying to figure out which approaches to YIMBYism work. Ned Resnikoff, policy director of California YIMBY, joins the show to discuss YIMBYism in California. We talk about the history of California's housing crisis, how California YIMBYs battled their way to successfully passing bills, and how California's one-party status changes the politics of housing. Got questions for the Neoliberal Podcast? Send them to mailbag@cnliberalism.org Follow us at: https://twitter.com/ne0liberal https://www.twitch.tv/neoliberalproject https://cnliberalism.org/ Join a local chapter at https://cnliberalism.org/become-a-member/
For some time, Nathan has been critical of the "YIMBY" (Yes In My Backyard) movement, which takes stances on housing policy that are sometimes classified as "market fundamentalist" or "trickle-down." Nathan's article "The Only Thing Worse Than a NIMBY is a YIMBY" is scathing, and Current Affairs has published a public service announcement discouraging people from letting their friends become YIMBYs. For their part, online YIMBYs generally do not care for Nathan, and he has been branded a leader of the "Left NIMBYs." But does this fight make sense? Darrell Owens of the group CA YIMBY argued recently in Jacobin that those who think YIMBYs advocate "Reaganomics" in housing policy are mistaken, and that the movement has been misunderstood by its critics. Owens said:"The overall YIMBY movement understands that we need more market-rate and public housing, more subsidies for housing, zoning reform, and stronger tenant protections, especially around eviction. And while there are some moderates and neoliberals that don't support rent control, they're in the minority. For example, the majority of local YIMBY groups across California endorsed the repeal of the ban on statewide rent control in 2020."Darrell and Nathan have clashed on social media before, and Nathan was listed as a major "Left NIMBY" on Darrell's Discourse Lounge Substack, so today Darrell and Nathan meet for the first time to hash out their differences and figure out whether Nathan is a NIMBY and whether YIMBYism has been treated unfairly by its critics. The title of this episode is intentionally misleading clickbait, because the conversation is polite and respectful and Nathan and Darrell both have positive things to say about each other's work and significant points of common ground. But they discuss such questions as:What is a YIMBY? What is a NIMBY? Are the NIMBY-YIMBY labels even useful? Isn't everyone a little bit of both?Is historic preservation just a NIMBY thing?How much of the YIMBY movement is "market fundamentalist"? Is it funded by dark money?Can we at least all agree that cars are terrible and trees are great?Do leftists tend to oppose building new housing? Are they "vacancy truthers"?Is AOC a YIMBY? Is Reason magazine YIMBY?If architects made new buildings less ugly would this whole debate become a lot less contentious?What does a comprehensive left housing agenda look like?Does Darrell regret making fun of Nathan's clothes?
Brian Potter is the author of the excellent Construction Physics blog, where he discusses why the construction industry has been slow to industrialize and innovate.He explains why:* Construction isn't getting cheaper and faster,* We should have mile-high buildings and multi-layer non-intersecting roads,* “Ugly” modern buildings are simply the result of better architecture,* China is so great at building things,* Saudi Arabia's Line is a waste of resources,* Environmental review makes new construction expensive and delayed,* and much much more!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.More really cool guests coming up; subscribe to find out about future episodes!You may also enjoy my interviews with Tyler Cowen (about talent, collapse, & pessimism of sex). Charles Mann (about the Americas before Columbus & scientific wizardry), and Austin Vernon about (Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you share it, post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast and Mia Aiyana for producing its transcript.Timestamps(0:00) - Why Saudi Arabia's Line is Insane, Unrealistic, and Never going to Exist (06:54) - Designer Clothes & eBay Arbitrage Adventures (10:10) - Unique Woes of The Construction Industry (19:28) - The Problems of Prefabrication (26:27) - If Building Regulations didn't exist… (32:20) - China's Real Estate Bubble, Unbound Technocrats, & Japan(44:45) - Automation and Revolutionary Future Technologies (1:00:51) - 3D Printer Pessimism & The Rising Cost of Labour(1:08:02) - AI's Impact on Construction Productivity(1:17:53) - Brian Dreams of Building a Mile High Skyscraper(1:23:43) - Deep Dive into Environmentalism and NEPA(1:42:04) - Software is Stealing Talent from Physical Engineering(1:47:13) - Gaps in the Blog Marketplace of Ideas(1:50:56) - Why is Modern Architecture So Ugly?(2:19:58) - Advice for Aspiring Architects and Young Construction PhysicistsTranscriptWhy Saudi Arabia's Line is Insane, Unrealistic, and Never going to Exist Dwarkesh Patel Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Brian Potter, who is an engineer and the author of the excellent Construction Physics blog, where he writes about how the construction industry works and why it has been slow to industrialize and innovate. It's one of my favorite blogs on the internet, and I highly, highly recommend that people check it out. Brian, my first question is about The Line project in Saudi Arabia. What are your opinions? Brian Potter It's interesting how Saudi Arabia and countries in the Middle East, in general, are willing to do these big, crazy, ambitious building projects and pour huge amounts of money into constructing this infrastructure in a way that you don't see a huge amount in the modern world. China obviously does this too in huge amounts, some other minor places do as well, but in general, you don't see a whole lot of countries building these big, massive, incredibly ambitious projects. So on that level, it's interesting, and it's like, “Yes, I'm glad to see that you're doing this,” but the actual project is clearly insane and makes no sense. Look at the physical arrangement layout–– there's a reason cities grow in two dimensions. A one-dimensional city is the worst possible arrangement for transportation. It's the maximum amount of distance between any two points. So just from that perspective, it's clearly crazy, and there's no real benefit to it other than perhaps some weird hypothetical transportation situation where you had really fast point-to-point transportation. It would probably be some weird bullet train setup; maybe that would make sense. But in general, there's no reason to build a city like that. Even if you wanted to build an entirely enclosed thing (which again doesn't make a huge amount of sense), you would save so much material and effort if you just made it a cube. I would be more interested in the cube than the line. [laughs] But yeah, those are my initial thoughts on it. I will be surprised if it ever gets built. Dwarkesh Patel Are you talking about the cube from the meme about how you can put all the humans in the world in a cube the size of Manhattan? Brian Potter Something like that. If you're just going to build this big, giant megastructure, at least take advantage of what that gets you, which is minimum surface area to volume ratio.Dwarkesh Patel Why is that important? Would it be important for temperature or perhaps other features? Brian Potter This is actually interesting because I'm actually not sure how sure it would work with a giant single city. In general, a lot of economies of scale come from geometric effects. When something gets bigger, your volume increases a lot faster than your surface area does. So for something enclosed, like a tank or a pipe, the cost goes down per thing of unit you're transporting because you can carry a larger amount or a smaller amount of material. It applies to some extent with buildings and construction because the exterior wall assembly is a really burdensome, complicated, and expensive assembly. A building with a really big floor plate, for instance, can get more area per unit, per amount of exterior wall. I'm not sure how that actually works with a single giant enclosed structure because, theoretically, on a small level, it would apply the same way. Your climate control is a function of your exterior surface, at some level, and you get more efficient climate control if you have a larger volume and less area that it can escape from. But for a giant city, I actually don't know if that works, and it may be worse because you're generating so much heat that it's now harder to pump out. For examples like the urban heat island effect, where these cities generate massive amounts of waste heat, I don't know if that would work if it didn't apply the same way. I'm trying to reach back to my physics classes in college, so I'm not sure about the actual mechanics of that. Generally though, that's why you'd want to perhaps build something of this size and shape. Dwarkesh Patel What was the thought process behind designing this thing? Because Scott Alexander had a good blog post about The Line where he said, presumably, that The Line is designed to take up less space and to use less fuel because you can just use the same transportation across. But the only thing that Saudi Arabia has is space and fuel. So what is the thought process behind this construction project? Brian PotterI get the sense that a lot of committees have some amount of success in building big, impressive, physical construction projects that are an attraction just by virtue of their size and impressiveness. A huge amount of stuff in Dubai is something in this category, and they have that giant clock tower in Jeddah, the biggest giant clock building and one of the biggest buildings in the world, or something like that. I think, on some level, they're expecting that you would just see a return from building something that's really impressive or “the biggest thing on some particular axis”. So to some extent, I think they're just optimizing for big and impressive and maybe not diving into it more than that. There's this theory that I think about every so often. It's called the garbage can theory of organizational decision-making, which basically talks about how the choices that organizations make are not the result of any particular recent process. They are the result of how, whenever a problem comes up, people reach into the garbage can of potential solutions. Then whatever they pull out of the garbage can, that's the decision that they end up going with, regardless of how much sense it makes. It was a theory that was invented by academics to describe decision-making in academia. I think about that a lot, especially with reference to big bureaucracies and governments. You can just imagine the draining process of how these decisions evolve. Any random decision can be made, especially when there's such a disconnect between the decision-makers and technical knowledge.Designer Clothes & eBay Arbitrage Adventures Dwarkesh PatelTell me about your eBay arbitrage with designer clothes. Brian Potter Oh man, you really did dive deep. Yeah, so this was a small business that I ran seven or eight years ago at this point. A hobby of mine was high-end men's fashion for a while, which is a very strange hobby for an engineer to have, but there you go. That hobby centers around finding cheap designer stuff, because buying new can be overwhelmingly expensive. However, a lot of times, you can get clothes for a very cheap price if you're even a little bit motivated. Either it shows up on eBay, or it shows up in thrift stores if you know what to look for. A lot of these clothes can last because they're well-made. They last a super, super, super long time–– even if somebody wore it for 10 years or something, it could be fine. So a lot of this hobby centered around finding ways to get really nice clothes cheaply. Majority of it was based around eBay, but it was really tedious to find really nice stuff on eBay. You had to manually search for a bunch of different brands, filter out the obviously bad ones, search for typos in brands, put in titles, and stuff like that. I was in the process of doing this, and I thought, “Oh, this is really annoying. I should figure out a way to automate this process.” So I made a very simple web app where when you searched for shoes or something, it would automatically search the very nice brands of shoes and all the typos of the brand name. Then it would just filter out all the junk and let you search through the good stuff. I set up an affiliate system, basically. So anybody else that used it, I would get a kick of the sales. While I was interested in that hobby, I ran this website for a few years, and it was reasonably successful. It was one of the first things I did that got any real traction on the internet, but it was never successful in proportion to how much effort it took to maintain and update it. So as I moved away from the hobby, I eventually stopped putting time and effort into maintaining the website. I'm curious as to how you even dug that up. Dwarkesh Patel I have a friend who was with you at the Oxford Refugees Conference, Connor Tabarrok. I don't know if you remember him. Brian Potter Nice. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. Finding other information about you on the internet was quite difficult actually. You've somehow managed to maintain your anonymity. If you're willing to reveal, what was the P&L of this project? Brian Potter Oh, it made maybe a few hundred dollars a month for a few years, but I only ever ran it as a side hobby business, basically. So in terms of time per my effort or whatever, I'm sure it was very low. Pennies to an hour or something like that. Unique Woes of The Construction Industry Dwarkesh Patel A broad theme that I've gotten from your post is that the construction industry is plagued with these lossy feedback loops, a lack of strong economies of scale, regulation, and mistakes being very costly. Do you think that this is a general characteristic of many industries in our world today, or is there something unique about construction? Brian Potter Interesting question. One thing you think of is that there are a lot of individual factors that are not unique at all. Construction is highly regulated, but it's not necessarily more regulated than medical devices or jet travel, or even probably cars, to some extent, which have a whole vat of performance criteria they need to hit. With a couple of things like land use, for example, people say, “Oh, the land requirements, could you build it on-site,” explaining how those kinds of things make it difficult. But there is a lot that falls into this category that doesn't really share the same structure of how the construction industry works.I think it's the interaction of all those effects. One thing that I think is perhaps underappreciated is that the systems of a building are really highly coupled in a way that a lot of other things are. If you're manufacturing a computer, the hard drive is somewhat independent from the display and somewhat independent from the power supply. These things are coupled, but they can be built by independent people who don't necessarily even talk to each other before being assembled into one structured thing. A building is not really like that at all. Every single part affects every single other part. In some ways, it's like biology. So it's very hard to change something that doesn't end up disrupting something else. Part of that is because a job's building is to create a controlled interior environment, meaning, every single system has to run through and around the surfaces that are creating that controlled interior. Everything is touching each other. Again, that's not unique. Anything really highly engineered, like a plane or an iPhone, share those characteristics to some extent. In terms of the size of it and the relatively small amount you're paying in terms of unit size or unit mass, however, it's quite low. Dwarkesh Patel Is transportation cost the fundamental reason you can't have as much specialization and modularity?Brian Potter Yeah, I think it's really more about just the way a building is. An example of this would be how for the electrical system of your house, you can't have a separate box where if you needed to replace the electrical system, you could take the whole box out and put the new box in. The electrical system runs through the entire house. Same with plumbing. Same with the insulation. Same with the interior finishes and stuff like that. There's not a lot of modularity in a physical sense. Dwarkesh Patel Gotcha. Ben Kuhn had this interesting comment on your article where he pointed out that many of the reasons you give for why it's hard to innovate in construction, like sequential dependencies and the highly variable delivery timelines are also common in software where Ben Koon works. So why do you think that the same sort of stagnation has not hit other industries that have superficially similar characteristics, like software? Brian Potter How I think about that is that you kind of see a similar structure in anything that's project-based or anything where there's an element of figuring out what you're doing while you're doing it. Compared to a large-scale manufacturing option where you spend a lot of time figuring out what exactly it is that you're building. You spend a lot of time designing it to be built and do your first number of runs through it, then you tweak your process to make it more efficient. There's always an element of tweaking it to make it better, but to some extent, the process of figuring out what you're doing is largely separate from the actual doing of it yourself. For a project-based industry, it's not quite like that. You have to build your process on the fly. Of course, there are best practices that shape it, right? For somebody writing a new software project or anything project-based, like making a movie, they have a rough idea for how it's going to go together. But there's going to be a lot of unforeseen things that kind of come up like that. The biggest difference is that either those things can often scale in a way that you can't with a building. Once you're done with the software project, you can deploy it to 1,000 or 100,000, or 1 million people, right? Once you finish making a movie, 100 million people can watch it or whatever. It doesn't quite look the same with a building. You don't really have the ability to spend a lot of time upfront figuring out how this thing needs to go. You kind of need to figure out a way to get this thing together without spending a huge amount of time that would be justified by the sheer size of it. I was able to dig up a few references for software projects and how often they just have these big, long tails. Sometimes they just go massively, massively over budget. A lot of times, they just don't get completed at all, which is shocking, but because of how many people it can then be deployed to after it's done, the economics of it are slightly different. Dwarkesh Patel I see, yeah. There's a famous law in software that says that a project will take longer than you expect even after you recount for the fact that it will take longer than you expect. Brian Potter Yeah. Hofstadter's law or something like that is what I think it is. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. I'm curious about what the lack of skill in construction implies for startups. Famously, in software, the fact that there's zero marginal cost to scaling to the next customer is a huge boon to a startup, right? The entire point of which is scaling exponentially. Does that fundamentally constrain the size and quantity of startups you can have in construction if the same scaling is not available?Brian Potter Yeah, that's a really good question. The obvious first part of the answer is that for software, obviously, if you have a construction software company, you can scale it just like any other software business. For physical things, it is a lot more difficult. This lack of zero marginal cost has tended to fight a lot of startups, not just construction ones. But yeah, it's definitely a thing. Construction is particularly brutal because the margins are so low. The empirical fact is that trying what would be a more efficient method of building doesn't actually allow you to do it cheaper and get better margins. The startup that I used to work at, Katerra, their whole business model was basically predicated on that. “Oh, we'll just build all our buildings in these big factories, get huge economies of scale, reduce our costs, and then recoup the billions of dollars that we're pumping into this industry or business.” The math just does not work out. You can't build. In general, you can't build cheap enough to kind of recoup those giant upfront costs. A lot of businesses have been burned that way. The most success you see in prefabrication type of stuff is on the higher end of things where you can get higher margins. A lot of these prefab companies and stuff like that tend to target the higher end of the market, and you see a few different premiums for that. Obviously, if you're targeting the higher end, you're more likely to have higher margins. If you're building to a higher level of quality, that's easier to do in a factory environment. So the delta is a lot different, less enormous than it would be. Building a high level of quality is easier to do in a factory than it is in the field, so a lot of buildings or houses that are built to a really high level of energy performance, for instance, need a really, really high level of air sealing to minimize how much energy this house uses. You tend to see a lot more houses like that built out of prefab construction and other factory-built methods because it's just physically more difficult to achieve that on-site. The Problems of Prefabrication Dwarkesh Patel Can you say more about why you can't use prefabrication in a factory to get economies of scale? Is it just that the transportation costs will eat away any gains you get? What is going on? Brian PotterThere's a combination of effects. I haven't worked through all this, we'll have to save this for the next time. I'll figure it out more by then. At a high level, it's that basically the savings that you get from like using less labor or whatever is not quite enough to offset your increased transportation costs. One thing about construction, especially single-family home construction, is that a huge percentage of your costs are just the materials that you're using, right? A single-family home is roughly 50% labor and 50% materials for the construction costs. Then you have development costs, land costs, and things like that. So a big chunk of that, you just can't move to the factory at all, right? You can't really build a foundation in a factory. You could prefab the foundation, but it doesn't gain you anything. Your excavation still has to be done on-site, obviously. So a big chunk can't move to the factory at all. For ones that can, you still basically have to pay the same amount for materials. Theoretically, if you're building truly huge volume, you could get material volume discounts, but even then, it's probably not looking at things like asset savings. So you can cut out a big chunk of your labor costs, and you do see that in factory-built construction, right? These prefab companies are like mobile home companies. They have a small fraction of labor as their costs, which is typical of a factory in general, but then they take out all that labor cost while they still have their high material costs, and then they have overhead costs of whatever the factory has cost them. Then you have your additional overhead cost of just transporting it to site, which is pretty limited. The math does not really work out in favor of prefab, in terms of being able to make the cost of building dramatically cheaper. You can obviously build a building in a prefab using prefab-free methods and build a successful construction business, right? Many people do. But in terms of dramatically lowering your costs, you don't really see that. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, yeah. Austin Vernon has an interesting blog post about why there's not more prefabricated homes. The two things he points out were transportation costs, and the other one was that people prefer to have homes that have unique designs or unique features. When I was reading it, it actually occurred to me that maybe they're actually both the result of the same phenomenon. I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but have you heard of the Alchian-Allen theorem in economics? Brian Potter Maybe, but I don't think so. Dwarkesh Patel Basically, it's the idea that if you increase the cost of some category of goods in a fixed way––let's say you tax oranges and added a $1 tax to all oranges, or transportation for oranges gets $1 more expensive for all oranges––people will shift consumption towards the higher grade variety because now, the ratio of the cost between the higher, the more expensive orange and the less expensive orange has decreased because of the increase in fixed costs. It seems like you could use that argument to also explain why people have strong preferences for uniqueness and all kinds of design in manufactured houses. Since transportation costs are so high, that's basically a fixed cost, and that fixed cost has the effect of making people shift consumption towards higher-grade options. I definitely think that's true. Brian PotterI would maybe phrase this as, “The construction industry makes it relatively comparatively cheap to deliver a highly customized option compared to a really repetitive option.” So yeah, the ratio between a highly customized one and just a commodity one is relatively small. So you see a kind of industry built around delivering somewhat more customized options. I do think that this is a pretty broad intuition that people just desire too much customization from their homes. That really prevents you from having a mass-produced offering. I do think that is true to some extent. One example is the Levittown houses, which were originally built in huge numbers–– exactly the same model over and over again. Eventually, they had to change their business model to be able to deliver more customized options because the market shipped it. I do think that the effect of that is basically pretty overstated. Empirically, you see that in practice, home builders and developers will deliver fairly repetitive housing. They don't seem to have a really hard time doing that. As an example, I'm living in a new housing development that is just like three or four different houses copy-pasted over and over again in a group of 50. The developer is building a whole bunch of other developments that are very similar in this area. My in-laws live in a very similar development in a whole different state. If you just look like multi-family or apartment housing, it's identical apartments, you know, copy-pasted over and over again in the same building or a bunch of different buildings in the same development. You're not seeing huge amounts of uniqueness in these things. People are clearly willing to just live in these basically copy-pasted apartments. It's also quite possible to get a pretty high amount of product variety using a relatively small number of factors that you vary, right? I mean, the car industry is like this, where there are enough customization options. I was reading this book a while ago that was basically pushing back against the idea that the car industry pre-fifties and sixties we just offering a very uniform product. They basically did the math, and the number of customization options on their car was more than the atoms in the universe. Basically just, there are so many different options. All the permutations, you know, leather seats and this type of stereo and this type of engine, if you add it all up, there's just a huge, massive number of different combinations. Yeah, you can obviously customize the house a huge amount, just by the appliances that you have and the finishes that are in there and the paint colors that you choose and the fixtures and stuff like that. It would not really theoretically change the underlying way the building comes together. So regarding the idea that the fundamental demand for variety is a major obstruction, I don't think there's a whole lot of evidence for that in the construction industry. If Construction Regulation Vanished… Dwarkesh Patel I asked Twitter about what I should ask you, and usually, I don't get interesting responses but the quality of the people and the audience that knows who you are was so high that actually, all the questions I got were fascinating. So I'm going to ask you some questions from Twitter. Brian Potter Okay. Dwarkesh Patel 0:26:45Connor Tabarrok asks, “What is the most unique thing that would or should get built in the absence of construction regulation?”Brian Potter Unique is an interesting qualifier. There are a lot of things that just like should get built, right? Massive amounts of additional housing and creating more lands in these really dense urban environments where we need it, in places like San Francisco–– just fill in a big chunk of that bay. It's basically just mud flat and we should put more housing on it. “Unique thing” is more tricky. One idea that I really like (I read this in the book, The Book Where's My Flying Car), is that it's basically crazy that our cities are designed with roads that all intersect with each other. That's an insane way to structure a material flow problem. Any sane city would be built with multiple layers of like transportation where each one went in a different direction so your flows would just be massively, massively improved. That just seems like a very obvious one.If you're building your cities from scratch and had your druthers, you would clearly want to build them and know how big they were gonna get, right? So you could plan very long-term in a way that so these transportation systems didn't intersect with each other, which, again, almost no cities did. You'd have the space to scale them or run as much throughput through them as you need without bringing the whole system to a halt. There's a lot of evidence saying that cities tend to scale based on how much you can move from point A to point B through them. I do wonder whether if you changed the way they went together, you could unlock massively different cities. Even if you didn't unlock massive ones, you could perhaps change the agglomeration effects that you see in cities if people could move from point A to point B much quicker than they currently can. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, I did an episode about the book, where's my flying car with Rohit Krishnan. I don't know if we discussed this, but an interesting part of the book is where he talks about transistor design. If you design transistors this way, can you imagine how slow they would be? [laughs] Okay, so Simon Grimm asks, “What countries are the best at building things?”Brian Potter This is a good question. I'm going to sort of cheat a little bit and do it in terms of space and time, because I think most countries that are doing a good job at building massive amounts of stuff are not ones that are basically doing it currently.The current answer is like China, where they just keep building–– more concrete was used in the last 20 years or so than the entire world used in the time before that, right? They've accomplished massive amounts of urbanization, and built a lot of really interesting buildings and construction. In terms of like raw output, I would also put Japan in the late 20th century on there. At the peak of the concern and wonder of “Is Japan gonna take over the world?”, they were really interested in building stuff quite quickly. They spent a lot of time and effort trying to use their robotics expertise to try to figure out how to build buildings a lot more quickly. They had these like really interesting factories that were designed to basically extrude an entire skyscraper just going up vertically.All these big giant companies and many different factories were trying to develop and trying to do this with robotics. It was a really interesting system that did not end up ever making economic sense, but it is very cool. I think big industrial policy organs of the government basically encouraged a lot of these industrial companies to basically develop prefabricated housing systems. So you see a lot of really interesting systems developed from these sort of industrial companies in a way that you don't see in a lot of other places. From 1850 to maybe 1970 (like a hundred years or something), the US was building huge massive amounts of stuff in a way that lifted up huge parts of the economy, right? I don't know how many thousands of miles of railroad track the US built between like 1850 and 1900, but it was many, many, many thousands of miles of it. Ofcourse, needing to lay all this track and build all these locomotives really sort of forced the development of the machine tool industry, which then led to the development of like better manufacturing methods and interchangeable parts, which of course then led to the development of the automotive industry. Then ofcourse, that explosion just led to even more big giant construction projects. So you really see that this ability to build just big massive amounts of stuff in this virtuous cycle with the US really advanced a lot of technology to raise the standard of development for a super long period of time. So those are my three answers. China's Real Estate Bubble, Unbound Technocrats, and JapanDwarkesh Patel Those three bring up three additional questions, one for each of them! That's really interesting. Have you read The Power Broker, the book about Robert Moses? Brian Potter I think I got a 10th of the way through it. Dwarkesh Patel That's basically a whole book in itself, a 10th of the way. [laughs] I'm a half of the way through, and so far it's basically about the story of how this one guy built a startup within the New York state government that was just so much more effective at building things, didn't have the same corruption and clientelism incompetence. Maybe it turns into tragedy in the second half, but so far it's it seems like we need this guy. Where do we get a second Robert Moses? Do you think that if you had more people like that in government or in construction industries, public works would be more effectively built or is the stagnation there just a result of like other bigger factors? Brian Potter That's an interesting question. I remember reading this article a while ago that was complaining about how horrible Penn Station is in New York. They're basically saying, “Yeah, it would be nice to return to the era of like the sort of unbound technocrat” when these technical experts in high positions of power in government could essentially do whatever they wanted to some extent. If they thought something should be built somewhere, they basically had the power to do it. It's a facet of this problem of how it's really, really hard to get stuff built in the US currently. I'm sure that a part of it is that you don't see these really talented technocrats occupy high positions of government where they can get stuff done. But it's not super obvious to me whether that's the limiting factor. I kind of get the sense that they would end up being bottlenecked by some other part of the process. The whole sort of interlocking set of institutions has just become so risk averse that they would end up just being blocked in a way that they wouldn't when they were operating in the 1950s or 1960s.Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. All right, so speaking of Japan, I just recently learned about the construction there and how they just keep tearing stuff down every 30 to 40 years and rebuilding it. So you have an interesting series of posts on how you would go about building a house or a building that lasts for a thousand years. But I'm curious, how would you build a house or a building that only lasts for 30 or 40 years? If you're building in Japan and you know they're gonna tear it down soon, what changes about the construction process? Brian Potter Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I'm not an expert on Japanese construction, but I think like a lot of their interior walls are basically just paper and stuff like that. I actually think it's kind of surprising that last time I looked, for a lot of their homes, they use a surprising post and beam construction method, which is actually somewhat labor-intensive to do. The US in the early 1800s used a pretty similar method. Then once we started mass producing conventional lumber, we stopped doing that because it was much cheaper to build out of two-by-fours than it was to build big heavy posts. I think the boring answer to that question is that we'd build like how we build mobile homes–– essentially just using pretty thin walls, pretty low-end materials that are put together in a minimal way. This ends up not being that different from the actual construction method that single-family homes use. It just even further economizes and tightens the use of materials–– where a single-family home might use a half inch plywood, they might try to use three-sixteenths or even an eighth inch plywood or something like that. So we'd probably build a pretty similar way to the way most single-family homes and multi-family homes are built currently, but just with even tighter use of materials which perhaps is something that's not super nice about the way that you guys build your homes. But... [laughs]Dwarkesh Patel Okay, so China is the third one here. There's been a lot of talk about a potential real estate bubble in China because they're building housing in places where people don't really need it. Of course, maybe the demographics aren't there to support the demand. What do you think of all this talk? I don't know if you're familiar with it, but is there a real estate bubble that's created by all this competence in building? Brian PotterOh, gosh, yeah, I have no idea. Like you, I've definitely heard talk of it and I've seen the little YouTube clips of them knocking down all these towers that it turns out they didn't need or the developer couldn't, finish or whatever. I don't know a huge amount about that. In general, I wish I knew a lot more about how things are built in China, but the information is in general, so opaque. I generally kind of assume that any particular piece of data that comes out of China has giant error bars on it as to whether it's true or not or what the context surrounding it is. So in general, I do not have a hard opinion about that. Dwarkesh Patel This is the second part of Simon's question, does greater competence and being able to build stuff translate into other good outcomes for these countries like higher GDP or lower rents or other kinds of foreign outcomes? Brian Potter That's a good question. Japan is an interesting place where basically people point to it as an example of, “Here's a country that builds huge amounts of housing and they don't have housing cost increases.” In general, we should expect that dynamic to be true. Right? There's no reason to not think that housing costs are essentially a supply-demand problem where if you built as much as people wanted, the cost would drop. I have no reason to not think that's true. There is a little bit of evidence that sort of suggests that it's impossible to build housing enough to overcome this sort of mechanical obstacle where the cost of it tends to match and rise to whatever people's income level are. The peak and the sort of flattening of housing costs in Japan also parallel when people basically stopped getting raises and income stopped rising in Japan. So I don't have a good sense of, if it ends up being just more driven by some sort of other factors. Generally though I expect the very basic answer of “If you build a lot more houses, the housing will become cheaper.”Dwarkesh PatelRight. Speaking of how the land keeps gaining value as people's income go up, what is your opinion on Georgism? Does that kind of try and make you think that housing is a special asset that needs to be more heavily taxed because you're not inherently doing something productive just by owning land the way you would be if you like built a company or something similar?Brian Potter I don't have any special deep knowledge of Georgism. It's on my list of topics to read more deeply about. I do think in general, taxing encourages you to produce less of something for something that you can't produce less of. It's a good avenue for something to tax more heavily. And yeah, obviously if you had a really high land value tax in these places that have a lot of single-family homes in dense urban areas, like Seattle or San Francisco, that would probably encourage people to use the land a lot more efficiently. So it makes sense to me, but I don't have a ton of special knowledge about it. Dwarkesh Patel All right, Ben Kuhn asked on Twitter, “What construction-related advice would you give to somebody building a new charter city?”Brian Potter That is interesting. I mean, just off the top of my head, I would be interested in whether you could really figure out a way to build using a method that had really high upfront costs. I think it could otherwise be justified, but if you're gonna build 10,000 buildings or whatever all at once, you could really take advantage of that. One kind of thing that you see in the sort of post-World War II era is that we're building huge massive amounts of housing, and a lot of times we're building them all in one place, right? A lot of town builders were building thousands and thousands of houses in one big development all at once. In California, it's the same thing, you just built like 6 or 10 or 15,000 houses in one big massive development. You end up seeing something like that where they basically build this like little factory on their construction site, and then use that to like fabricate all these things. Then you have something that's almost like a reverse assembly line where a crew will go to one house and install the walls or whatever, and then go to the next house and do the same thing. Following right behind them would be the guys doing the electrical system, plumbing, and stuff like that. So this reverse assembly line system would allow you to sort of get these things up really, really fast, in 30 days or something like that. Then you could have a whole house or just thousands and thousands of houses at once. You would want to be able to do something similar where you could just not do the instruction the way that the normal construction is done, but that's hard, right? Centrally planned cities or top-down planned cities never seem to do particularly well, right? For example, the city of Brasilia, the one that was supposed to be a planned city— the age it goes back to the unfettered technocrat who can sort of build whatever he wants. A lot of times, what you want is something that will respond at a low level and organically sort out the factories as they develop. You don't want something that's totally planned from the top-down, that's disconnected from all the sorts of cases on the ground. A lot of the opposition to Robert Moses ended up being that in a certain form, right? He's bulldozing through these cities that are these buildings and neighborhoods that he's not paying attention to at all. So I think, just to go back to the question, trying to plan your city from the top down doesn't have a super, super great track record. In general, you want your city to develop a little bit more organically. I guess I would think to have a good sort of land-use rules that are really thought through well and encourage the things that you want to encourage and not discourage the things that you don't want to discourage. Don't have equity in zoning and allow a lot of mixed-use construction and stuff like that. I guess that's a somewhat boring answer, but I'd probably do something along those lines. Dwarkesh Patel Interesting, interesting. I guess that implies that there would be high upfront costs to building a city because if you need to build 10,000 homes at once to achieve these economies of scale, then you would need to raise like tens of billions of dollars before you could build a charter city. Brian Potter Yeah, if you were trying to lower your costs of construction, but again, if you have the setup to do that, you wouldn't necessarily need to raise it. These other big developments were built by developers that essentially saw an opportunity. They didn't require public funding to do it. They did in the form of loan guarantees for veterans and things like that, but they didn't have the government go and buy the land. Automation and Revolutionary Future Technologies Dwarkesh Patel Right, okay, so the next question is from Austin Vernon. To be honest, I don't understand the question, you two are too smart for me, but hopefully, you'll be able to explain the question and then also answer it. What are your power rankings for technologies that can tighten construction tolerances? Then he gives examples like ARVR, CNC cutting, and synthetic wood products. Brian Potter Yeah, so this is a very interesting question. Basically, because buildings are built manually on site by hand, there's just a lot of variation in what ends up being built, right? There's only so accurately that a person can put something in place if they don't have any sort of age or stuff like that. Just the placement itself of materials tends to have a lot of variation in it and the materials themselves also have a lot of variation in them. The obvious example is wood, right? Where one two by four is not gonna be exactly the same as another two by four. It may be warped, it may have knots in it, it may be split or something like that. Then also because these materials are sitting just outside in the elements, they sort of end up getting a lot of distortion, they either absorb moisture and sort of expand and contract, or they grow and shrink because of the heat. So there's just a lot of variation that goes into putting a building up.To some extent, it probably constrains what you are able to build and how effectively you're able to build it. I kind of gave an example before of really energy efficient buildings and they're really hard to build on-site using conventional methods because the air ceiling is quite difficult to do. You have to build it in a much more precise way than what is typically done and is really easily achieved on-site. So I guess in terms of examples of things that would make that easier, he gives some good ones like engineered lumber, which is where you take lumber and then grind it up into strands or chips or whatever and basically glue them back together–– which does a couple of things. It spreads all the knots and the defects out so they are concentrated and everything tends to be a lot more uniform when it's made like that. So that's a very obvious one that's already in widespread use. I don't really see that making a substantial change.I guess the one exception to that would be this engineered lumber product called mass timber elements, CLT, which is like a super plywood. Plywood is made from tiny little sheet thin strips of wood, right? But CLT is made from two-by-four-dimensional lumber glued across laminated layers. So instead of a 4 by 9 sheet of plywood, you have a 12 by 40 sheet of dimensional lumber glued together. You end up with a lot of the properties of engineered material where it's really dimensionally stable. It can be produced very, very accurately. It's actually funny that a lot of times, the CLT is the most accurate part of the building. So if you're building a building with it, you tend to run into problems where the rest of the building is not accurate enough for it. So even with something like steel, if you're building a steel building, the steel is not gonna be like dead-on accurate, it's gonna be an inch or so off in terms of where any given component is. The CLT, which is built much more accurately, actually tends to show all these errors that have to be corrected. So in some sense, accuracy or precision is a little bit of like a tricky thing because you can't just make one part of the process more precise. In some ways that actually makes things more difficult because if one part is really precise, then a lot of the time, it means that you can't make adjustments to it easily. So if you have this one really precise thing, it usually means you have to go and compensate for something else that is not built quite as precisely. It actually makes advancing precision quite a bit more complicated. AR VR, is something I'm very bullish on. A big caveat of that is assuming that they can just get the basic technology working. The basic intuition there is that right now the way that pieces are, when a building is put together on site, somebody is looking at a set of paper plans, or an iPad or something that tells them where everything needs to go. So they figure that out and then they take a tape measure or use some other method and go figure out where that's marked on the ground. There's all this set-up time that is really quite time consuming and error prone. Again, there's only so much accuracy that a guy dragging a tape 40 feet across site being held by another guy can attain, there's a limit to how accurate that process can be. It's very easy for me to imagine that AR would just project exactly where the components of your building need to go. That would A, allow you a much higher level of accuracy that you can easily get using manual methods. And then B, just reduce all that time it takes to manually measure things. I can imagine it being much, much, much faster as well, so I'm quite bullish on that. At a high level and a slightly lower level, it's not obvious to me if they will be able to get to the level where it just projects it with perfect accuracy right in front of you. It may be the case that a person moving their head around and constantly changing their point of view wont ever be able to project these things with millimeter precision––it's always gonna be a little bit jumpy or you're gonna end up with some sort of hard limit in terms of like how precisely you can project it. My sense is that locator technology will get good enough, but I don't have any principle reason believing that. The other thing is that being able to take advantage of that technology would require you to have a really, really accurate model of your building that locates where every single element is precisely and exactly what its tolerances are. Right now, buildings aren't designed like that, they are built using a comparatively sparse set of drawings that leaves a lot to sort of be interpreted by the people on site doing the work and efforts that have tried to make these models really, really, really precise, have not really paid off a lot of times. You can get returns on it if you're building something really, really complex where there's a much higher premium to being able to make sure you don't make any error, but for like a simple building like a house, the returns just aren't there. So you see really comparatively sparse drawings. Whether it's gonna be able to work worth this upfront cost of developing this really complex, very precise model of where exactly every component is still has to be determined. There's some interesting companies that are trying to move in this direction where they're making it a lot easier to draw these things really, really precisely and whave every single component exactly where it is. So I'm optimistic about that as well, but it's a little bit TBD. Dwarkesh Patel This raises a question that I actually wanted to ask you, which is in your post about why there aren't automatic brick layers. It was a really interesting post. Somebody left in an interesting comment saying that bricks were designed to be handled and assembled by humans. Then you left a response to that, which I thought was really interesting. You said, “The example I always reach for is with steam power and electricity, where replacing a steam engine with an electric motor in your factory didn't do much for productivity. Improving factory output required totally redesigning the factory around the capabilities of electric motors.” So I was kind of curious about if you apply that analogy to construction, then what does that look like for construction? What is a house building process or building building process that takes automation and these other kinds of tools into account? How would that change how buildings are built and how they end up looking in the end? Brian Potter I think that's a good question. One big component of the lack of construction productivity is everything was designed and has evolved over 100 years or 200 years to be easy for a guy or person on the site to manipulate by hand. Bricks are roughly the size and shape and weight that a person can move it easily around. Dimensional lumber is the same. It's the size and shape and weight that a person can move around easily. And all construction materials are like this and the way that they attach together and stuff is the same. It's all designed so that a person on site can sort of put it all together with as comparatively little effort as possible. But what is easy for a person to do is usually not what is easy for a machine or a robot to do, right? You typically need to redesign and think about what your end goal is and then redesign the mechanism for accomplishing that in terms of what is easy to get to make a machine to do. The obvious example here is how it's way easier to build a wagon or a cart that pulls than it is to build a mechanical set of legs that mimics a human's movement. That's just way, way, way easier. I do think that a big part of advancing construction productivity is to basically figure out how to redesign these building elements in a way that is really easy for a machine to produce and a machine to put together. One reason that we haven't seen it is that a lot of the mechanization you see is people trying to mechanize exactly what a person does. You'd need a really expensive industrial robot that can move exactly the way that a human moves more or less. What that might look like is basically something that can be really easily extruded by a machine in a continuous process that wouldn't require a lot of finicky mechanical movements. A good example of this technology is technology that's called insulated metal panels, which is perhaps one of the cheapest and easiest ways to build an exterior wall. What it is, is it's just like a thin layer of steel. Then on top of that is a layer of insulation. Then on top of that is another layer of steel. Then at the end, the steel is extruded in such a way that it can like these inner panels can like lock together as they go. It's basically the simplest possible method of constructing a wall that you can imagine. But that has the structural system and the water barrier, air barrier, and insulation all in this one really simple assembly. Then when you put it together on site, it just locks together. Of course there are a lot of limitations to this. Like if you want to do anything on top of like add windows, all of a sudden it starts to look quite a bit less good. I think things that are really easy for a machine to do can be put together without a lot of persistent measurement or stuff like that in-field. They can just kind of snap together and actually want to fit together. I think that's kind of what it looks like. 3D Printer Pessimism & The Rising Cost of LabourDwarkesh Patel What would the houses or the buildings that are built using this physically look like? Maybe in 50 to 100 years, we'll look back on the houses we have today and say, “Oh, look at that artisanal creation made by humans.” What is a machine that is like designed for robots first or for automation first? In more interesting ways, would it differ from today's buildings? Brian Potter That's a good question. I'm not especially bullish on 3D building printing in general, but this is another example of a building using an extrusion process that is relatively easy to mechanize. What's interesting there is that when you start doing that, a lot of these other bottlenecks become unlocked a little bit. It's very difficult to build a building using a lot of curved exterior surfaces using conventional methods. You can do it, it's quite expensive to do, but there's a relatively straightforward way for a 3D-printed building to do that. They can build that as easily as if it was a straight wall. So you see a lot of interesting curved architecture on these creations and in a few other areas. There's a company that can build this cool undulating facade that people kind of like. So yeah, it unlocks a lot of options. Machines are more constrained in some things that they can do, but they don't have a lot of the other constraints that you would otherwise see. So I think you'll kind of see a larger variety of aesthetic things like that. That said, at the end of the day, I think a lot of the ways a house goes together is pretty well shaped to just the way that a person living inside it would like to use. I think Stewart Brand makes this point in––Dwarkesh Patel Oh, How Buildings Learn. Brian Potter There we go. He basically makes the point that a lot of people try to use dome-shaped houses or octagon-shaped houses, which are good because, again, going back to surface area volume, they include lots of space using the least amount of material possible. So in some theoretical sense, they're quite efficient, but it's actually quite inconvenient to live inside of a building with a really curved wall, right? Furniture doesn't fit up against it nicely, and pictures are hard to hang on a really curved wall. So I think you would see less variation than maybe you might expect. Dwarkesh Patel Interesting. So why are you pessimistic about 3D printers? For construction, I mean. Brian Potter Yeah, for construction. Oh God, so many reasons. Not pessimistic, but just there's a lot of other interesting questions. I mean, so the big obvious one is like right now a 3D printer can basically print the walls of a building. That is a pretty small amount of the value in a building, right? It's maybe 7% or 8%, something like that. Probably not more than 10% of the value in a building. Because you're not printing the foundation, you're not printing like the overhead vertical, or the overhead spanning structure of the building. You're basically just printing the walls. You're not even really printing the second story walls that you have in multiple stories. I don't think they've quite figured that out yet. So it's a pretty small amount of value added to the building. It's frankly a task that is relatively easy to do by manual labor. It's really pretty easy for a crew to basically put up the structure of a house. This is kind of a recurring theme in mechanization or it goes back to what I was talking about to our previous lead. Where it takes a lot of mechanization and a lot of expensive equipment to replace what basically like two or three guys can do in a day or something like that. The economics of it are pretty brutal. So right now it produces a pretty small value. I think that the value of 3D printing is basically entirely predicated on how successful they are at figuring out how to like deliver more components of the building using their system. There are companies that are trying to do this. There's one that got funded not too long ago called Black Diamond, where they have this crazy system that is like a series of 3D printers that would act simultaneously, like each one building a separate house. Then as you progress, you switch out the print head for like a robot arm. Cause a 3D printer is basically like a robot arm with just a particular manipulator at the end, right?So they switch out their print head for like a robot arm, and the robot arm goes and installs different other systems like the windows or the mechanical systems. So you can figure out how to do that reliably where your print head or your printing system is installing a large fraction of the value of the building. It's not clear to me that it's gonna be economic, but it obviously needs to reach that point. It's not obvious to me that they have gotten there yet. It's really quite hard to get a robot to do a lot of these tasks. For a lot of these players, it seems like they're actually moving away from that. I think in ICON is the biggest construction 3D printer company in the US, as far as I know. And as far as I know, they've moved away from trying to install lots of systems in their walls as they get printed. They've kind of moved on to having that installed separately, which I think has made their job a little bit easier, but again, not quite, it's hard to see how the 3D printer can fulfill its promises if it can't do anything just beyond the vertical elements, whichare really, for most construction, quite cheap and simple to build. Dwarkesh Patel Now, if you take a step back and talk how expensive construction is overall, how much of it can just be explained by the Baumol cost effect? As in labor costs are increasing because labor is more productive than other industries and therefore construction is getting more expensive. Brian Potter I think that's a huge, huge chunk of it. The labor fraction hasn't changed appreciably enough. I haven't actually verified that and I need to, but I remember somebody that said that they used to be much different. You sent me some literature related to it. So let's add a slight asterisk on that. But in general the labor cost has remained a huge fraction of the overall cost of the building. Reliably seeing their costs continue to rise, I think there's no reason to believe that that's not a big part of it. Dwarkesh Patel Now, I know this sounds like a question with an obvious answer, but in your post comparing the prices of construction in different countries, you mentioned how the cost of labor and the cost of materials is not as big a determiner of how expensive it is to construct in different places. But what does matter? Is it the amount of government involvement and administrative overhead? I'm curious why those things (government involvement and administrative overhead) have such a high consequence on the cost of construction. Brian Potter Yeah, that's a good question. I don't actually know if I have a unified theory for that. I mean, basically with any heavily regulated thing, any particular task that you're doing takes longer and is less reliable than it would be if it was not done right. You can't just do it as fast as on your own schedule, right? You end up being bottlenecked by government processes and it reduces and narrows your options. So yeah, in general, I would expect that to kind of be the case, but I actually don't know if I have a unified theory of how that works beyond just, it's a bunch of additional steps at any given part of the process, each of which adds cost. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah. Now, one interesting trend we have in the United States with construction is that a lot of it is done by Latino workers and especially by undocumented Latino workers. What is the effect of this on the price and the quality of construction? If you have a bunch of hardworking undocumented workers who are working for below-market rates in the US, will this dampen the cost of construction over time? What do you think is going to happen? Brian Potter I suspect that's probably one of the reasons why the US has comparatively low construction costs compared to other parts of the world. Well, I'll caveat that. Residential construction, which is single-family homes and multi-family apartment buildings all built in the US and have light framed wood and are put together, like you said, by a lot of like immigrant workers. Because of that, it would not surprise me if those wages are a lot lower than the equivalent wage for like a carpenter in Germany or something like that. I suspect that's a factor in why our cost of residential construction are quite low. AI's Impact on Construction ProductivityDwarkesh Patel Overall, it seems from your blog post that you're kind of pessimistic, or you don't think that different improvements in industrialization have transferred over to construction yet. But what do you think is a prospect of future advances in AI having a big impact on construction? With computer vision and with advances in robotics, do you think we'll finally see some carry-over into construction productivity or is it gonna be more of the same? Brian Potter Yeah, I think there's definitely gonna be progress on that axis. If you can wire up your computer vision systems, robotic systems, and your AI in such a way that your capabilities for a robot system are more expanded, then I kind of foresee robotics being able to take a larger and larger fraction of the tasks done on a typical construction site. I kind of see it being kind of done in narrow avenues that gradually expand outward. You're starting to see a lot of companies that have some robotic system that can do one particular task, but do that task quite well. There's a couple of different robot companies that have these little robots for like drawing wall layouts on like concrete slabs or whatever. So you know exactly where to build your walls, which you would think would not be like a difficult problem in construction, but it turns out that a lot of times people put the walls in the wrong spot and then you have to go back and move them later or just basically deal with it. So yeah, it's basically a little Roomba type device that just draws the wall layout to the concrete slab and all the other systems as well–– for example, where the lines need to run through the slab and things like that. I suspect that you're just gonna start to see robotics and systems like that take a larger and larger share of the tasks on the construction site over time. Dwarkesh Patel Yeah, it's still very far away. It's still very far away. What do you think of Flow? That's Adam Neumann's newest startup and backed with $350 million from Andreeseen Horowitz.Brian Potter I do not have any strong opinions about that other than, “Wow, they've really given him another 350M”. I do not have any particularly strong opinions about this. They made a lot they make a lot of investments that don't make sense to me, but I'm out of venture capital. So there's no reason that my judgment would be any good in this situation–– so I'm just presuming they know something I do not. Dwarkesh Patel I'm going to be interviewing Andreeseen later this month, and I'm hoping I can ask him about that.Brian Potter You know, it may be as simple as he “sees all” about really high variance bets. There's nobody higher variance in the engine than Adam Neumann so, maybe just on those terms, it makes sense. Dwarkesh Patel You had an interesting post about like how a bunch of a lot of the knowledge in the construction industry is informal and contained within best practices or between relationships and expectations that are not articulated all the time. It seems to me that this is also true of software in many cases but software seems much more legible and open source than these other physical disciplines like construction despite having a lot of th
Simon Alvey, Will Cooling and Dr Luke Middup return to talk about how Will correctly predicting that Liz Truss would have resigned by the next podcast. Well done Will. They also touch upon how Simon was very early to highlight George Canning's record as shortest reigning Prime Minister. Bravo Simon. Luke then talks about what he got wrong about Liz Truss. Very of honest of you Luke. We also discuss how to get more houses built in Britain, the last days of Liz Truss's premiership, and the opening stages of the Tory Leadership election.
In this episode we're joined by Noah Smith to talk about Georgism, why we need abundant energy, housing, heathcare and dignity, and the success of the YIMBY movement. Noah Smith is an economist who blogs at https://noahpinion.substack.com/ This episode was co-hosted by Lars Doucet.
Blake Hall joins us for a Discussion on the recent road diet proposal for North Limestone, and then tries to tell us two blockheads how private development works. Jenry calls for the Division of Planning to carry out a protracted people's war in accordance with the mass line to establish a protected bike lane for 3 city blocks. Suggested reading from this episode: The Birth of a Building by Ben Stevens Das Kapital Legistar The Death and Life of Great American Cities The Lexington Urbanist Forum (FB group i know) The bus schedule
Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew is joined by Max Holleran, author of Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing. Max Holleran is an Urban Studies Foundation Research Fellow and lecturer in sociology at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A Visit to the Idea Machine Fair, published by Étienne Fortier-Dubois on June 3, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. With love to all the intellectual movements depicted below. You hear the buzz of a thousand conversations as you enter the convention center. The building is one of those weird postmodern complexes that is somehow both ancient Greek and brutalist. It looks as if the architects couldn't agree on a single style, or even on what the point of this building was. A fitting venue for such an event. You get your badge from the registration desk. It comes with a bunch of goodies in a tote bag. A pen, shaped like a hammer, with the slogan “IT'S TIME TO BUILD.” A voucher for vegan food at the cafeteria. A QR code to register your attendance on a blockchain. A watch that just tells the current year, with five digits: 02022. A slip of paper that says, “Instead of giving you a cheap keychain or whatever, we have donated part of our convention budget to GiveWell.” There's also a map of the convention. At the top it says WELCOME TO THE FIRST IDEA MACHINE FAIR. You look at the layout of the main exhibition hall. You don't have that much time, so you'll only visit the stalls you're most familiar with as a heavy Twitter user: Rationality Effective Altruism Progress Studies The Sovereign Charter City of Good Governance some amorphous cluster of booths that is charted as The DAO-verse Archeofuturism Metascience. You look up from the map, past the Art Nouveau / ancient Egyptian / 1960s modernist doors of the main hall. So many brilliant minds are in there, discussing what could be the most influential ideas of the near future. You walk in. An idea machine, according to Nadia Asparouhova, is a subculture or a community that forms around an ideology in order to achieve some outcome. Idea machines are wider than movements (like YIMBYism), but not as wide as paradigm shifts (like crypto as a whole). But also, no one knows what an idea machine exactly is, or which real-life idea machines exist, or what the boundaries between them are. This convention is meant to clarify all of that. You're not sure it's helping. You stand in the alley between the Rationality and Effective Altruism stalls, listening to some guy in basic shorts and a gray t-shirt explaining the differences between the two to a few visitors. “See, rationality is about thinking well. Whereas EA is about optimization to do the most good. The focus is different.” “But what's the point of thinking well?” someone asks. “Isn't it so that you can do good?” “And how do you optimize for good,” someone else says, “if not by thinking well?” “I mean, sure, there's a lot of overlap,” the gray t-shirt guy says. “But they're distinct communities. You could say that EA was born from combining rationality and the work of a bunch of Oxford philosophers. Rationality didn't come from Oxford philosophers. See, big difference!” You turn your attention to the Rationality table. Two nice but slightly awkward guys start giving you books. “Yeah, the best way to engage with rational thinking is reading the main texts,” one of them, a long-haired man wearing a space-themed leotard says as he hands you a nicely bound collection of essays. “Rationality: A-Z by Eliezer Yudkowsky is the main one. But a lot of people, myself included, have been introduced to us by a Harry Potter fanfiction: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It's long but really good.” He gives you a custom printed paperback. “This is the first fifth of the story or so. You may also want to read some essays by Scott Alexander.” He gives you another pile of papers. “Oh, we have a bunch of copies of Superintelligence to give out too, if you want to know about AI risk.” He reaches beneath the table and adds a book with a picture of an owl to your pile. “There are more boo...
Dean Preston represents District 5 on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. A tenants' rights attorney and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he was the first democratic socialist elected to the board in 40 years. Recently, a campaign by a group called the "YIMBYs" has accused Preston of denying housing to thousands of people. In this episode, we talk about why San Francisco has a housing crisis and how to solve it. We also talk about how pro-developer groups produce propaganda that portrays affordable housing activists as "opposed to affordable housing." Dean responds to the YIMBY charges and shows how corporate disinformation against socialists works. We discuss:- Why rent control is actually a very good thing - How the hypocrisy of San Francisco rich people has driven inequality spiraling out of control in the city- How the "YIMBY movement" paints anyone who opposes developers' interests as an anti-housing "NIMBY"- The things cities need to actually be affordable - How elected officials can use their positions to exact concessions from developers (and why this shouldn't be considered "opposing the development of housing")- How disinformation campaigns try to massage the facts to manipulate voters (and why voters are often too smart to be fooled) Nathan's article on YIMBYism is here. '
On Tuesday, November 2nd, 2021, The War on Cars recorded a live show at Caveat on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Our special guest for the evening was Choire Sicha, an editor at large at New York Magazine, who joined us to talk about YIMBYism, "bike fascism" and life in the suburbs. Plus, why does Eric Adams, the newly elected mayor of New York City, need to fix his bike's front fork? This episode is sponsored by Rad Power Bikes and Cleverhood. For 20% off the purchase of Cleverhood rain gear, use code HOLIDAYRAIN at checkout through December 31st. Become a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars and get access to the full-length video of our live show along with all of our exclusive content. Get official War on Cars merch at our store. SHOW NOTES: Yes, Build the Windowless, Bathroomless Dorm in My Backyard (Choire Sicha at Curbed) How to Ride the Bus (Choire Sicha at Curbed) Eric Adams' Fork is Backwards (reddit.com/r/NYCbike/) Curtis Sliwa Hit By Cab, Does Radio Show Before Going to Hospital (NBC 4) Curtis Sliwa vows to end the "war on vehicles." (New York Post) This episode was edited by Ali Lemer. It was recorded live at Caveat. Theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Logo is by Dani Finkel of Crucial D. thewaroncars.org
Warning to all Marys everywhere: YIMBYs are a front for the real estate industry, and they are coming to evict you. MORE: James Baldwin's 'Take this Hammer' film, on racist gentrification in San Francisco, 1974 - https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/sfbatv/bundles/187041 Unhoused Folks Deserve All These Vacant Condos and More - https://www.instagram.com/tv/CKnd2NSh8pr/ 'YIMBYs: The Alt-Right Darlings of the Real Estate Industry,' Truthout - https://truthout.org/articles/yimbys-the-alt-right-darlings-of-the-real-estate-industry/ 'The Racial Contours of YIMBY/NIMBY Bay Area Gentrification,' Berkeley Planning Journal - https://escholarship.org/content/qt4sw2g485/qt4sw2g485.pdf?t=qb8x8c 'YIMBYs Exposed: The Techies Hawking Free Market “Solutions” to the Nation's Housing Crisis,' In These Times - https://inthesetimes.com/features/yimbys_activists_san_francisco_housing_crisis.html 'Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space' - https://www.versobooks.com/books/2163-extrastatecraft Video depicting YIMBYs being YIMBYs by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project - Facebook video: https://fb.watch/5gAYay0iFW/ (archived at https://gayshame.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/sonja-trauss-vincent-woo-city-hall.mp4) 'Take This Hammer,' LA Tenants Union on their action against the Hammer Museum holding a pro-YIMBY event - https://latenantsunion.medium.com/dropping-the-hammer-on-yimbyism-97724dfdb6a9 @shooktwinks deconstructs the YIMBY myth that building more luxury condos will solve San Francisco's affordable housing crisis - https://www.instagram.com/p/COXI1BmBIAi/ This jester - https://www.instagram.com/tv/CN-qwbvBoIR/ --- More on conservatorship -> Gay Shame Podcast Episode 3: 'FreeBritney, Free Them All' - https://gayshame.net/index.php/gay-shame-the-podcast/gay-shame-podcast-episode-3-freebritney-free-them-all-october-15-2020/ Recorded May 3, 2021. Transcripts and resources at gayshame.net/index.php/gay-shame-the-podcast/.
“NIMBY” is an acronym standing for “not in my backyard”. This term, and its associated movement, NIMBYism, is characterized by residents' opposition to a certain development in their community, with a general consensus that the development in principle is sound of logic, just not in their locality. The YIMBY movement, meaning "yes in my backyard" is in direct opposition to NIMBYism and originated to show support for increases in housing supply and developments matching community needs. It is particularly popular in cities facing a scarcity of housing and high cost of living. Within PEI, NIMBYism has gained traction over these last few weeks when discussing the relocation of the Community Outreach Centre, which provides essential services to PEI's homeless population, to a new area. To discuss YIMBYism with us today is our panel: Matt Pelletier is an urban planning and policy enthusiast, and Sarah MacEachern is a front-line worker at the Community Outreach Centre, as well as the originator of the YIMBY t-shirt fundraising campaign.
One of the arguments against YIMBYism—YIMBY stands for “Yes in My Backyard,” a response to NIMBY (“Not in My Backyard”)—is that adding housing units in a neighborhood will actually increase housing scarcity, because, in the words of journalist Nathan J. Robinson, “we’re luring rich people from elsewhere to our city.” This scenario would be the housing equivalent of the “induced demand” phenomenon seen with traffic, whereby expanding road capacity induces more people to drive, quickly negating the benefits of the expansion. In an article last month, Matthew Yglesias, took on the induced demand objection against YIMBYism. (Yglesias was also a guest on the Strong Towns podcast last month.) He says the induced demand critique “fails on four scores”: It is empirically false, at least most of the time. Accepting its logic would counsel against all efforts to improve quality of life. If it were true, it still wouldn’t follow that new construction is bad. It misconstrues what the YIMBY proposal is in the first place. Yglesias’s article is the topic of this week’s episode of Upzoned, with host Abby Kinney, an urban planner in Kansas City, and regular co-host Chuck Marohn, the founder and president of Strong Towns. Abby and Chuck discuss the argument that increased housing worsens housing scarcity, where Strong Towns aligns with YIMBYism (and where it may diverge), and the problem with approaching the “wicked problem” of housing with a Suburban Experiment mindset: big solutions, big developers, big development. They also talk about why the fundamental problem of scale is crowding out the possibility of a city shaped by many hands. Then in the Downzone, Chuck discusses reading “On the Shortness of Life,” by Stoic philosopher Lucius Seneca. (He referenced it in his Monday article too.) And Abby talks about rewatching Breaking Bad and rediscovering just how good it is. Additional Show Notes “The ‘induced demand’ case against YIMBYism is wrong,” by Matthew Yglesias Matthew Yglesias on the Strong Towns podcast: Part 1, Part 2 “How to Talk to a NIMBY” (Webcast) Abby Kinney (Twitter) Charles Marohn (Twitter) Gould Evans Studio for City Design Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom (Soundcloud) Strong Towns content related to this episode: “Unleash the Swarm,” by Daniel Herriges “Why Housing Is the Wickedest of ‘Wicked Problems’” (Podcast) “Is Strong Towns NIMBY, YIMBY, or What?” by Charles Marohn “What Can Hives and Barnacles Teach Us About Solving a Housing Crisis?” by Patrick Condon “Here's What Happens When a Handful of Developers Control the Housing Market,” by Daniel Herriges “Gentrification and Cataclysmic Money,” by Daniel Herriges “The Trickle or the Fire Hose,” by Daniel Herriges
0:12 – New York Times economics reporter Conor Dougherty (@ConorDougherty) has written an extensive portrait and history of the movement swarming local governments to demand they build more development — known as YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard). His new book is Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America. He argues that when the U.S. built the suburbs, it didn't just create sprawl, it created a political problem: fragmented political power among spread-out homeowners who agitated to protect their style of living and neighborhood property values. 1:08 – A new book, Migrating to Prison: America's Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants, traces U.S. discrimination and efforts to criminalize immigrants across history, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to today's “baby jails” and deportations under Democratic and Republican administrations. We talk with César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández (@crimmigration). 1:53 – How did the Indian state of Kerala, which has nearly the population of California, contain the coronavirus without leaving its poor and vulnerable residents stranded? Just four people in Kerala have died from Covid-19. Reporter Jasvinder Sehgal looks at what drove the strong health and social welfare response in the region. The post Explaining America's obsession with locking up immigrants; plus, a history of YIMBYism; and how Kerala, India is beating Covid-19 appeared first on KPFA.
An ongoing segment here on the Politicast involves taking a closer look at development issues, and this week's timely entry of the series will look at the under-appreciated cousin of NIMBYism, YIMBYism! NIMBY, or "Not in MY Backyard," dates back to the 80s, and has become a controversial term when it comes to growth in Ontario's cities, but one group in Waterloo Region is now trying to turn the tables. "Yes in My Backyard" is more than just a statement, it's now an advocacy group out of Kitchener-Waterloo that’s seeking to be the opposite of the widely recognized NIMBY. They see NIMBYism as an impediment to the development of more affordable housing, and have taken it upon themselves to advocate for changes that will allow the construction of more housing, and more types of housing, which will hopefully address homelessness in Waterloo Region. This episode of the show arrives a little over a week after a planning meeting of Guelph City Council where a 25-storey tower downtown, and another proposal for nearly 700-unit development in the west end, both got stern and full-throated opposition. It was for the usual reasons: more traffic, ugly buildings, ruining the character of the area. Only a few had the gall to make the point that many of these proposed units were intended for rentals, which is a market that desperately needs more capacity. That's speaking the language of YIMBY! On this week's podcast we're going to hear from YIMBY co-founder Martin Asling about the creation of Waterloo Region YIMBY, and what he thinks his group can do to promote affordable housing where others have failed. He also talka about the challenges of NIMBYism, and what talking points work best in trying to combat it. And he will discuss the roadblocks in the system, the goals of Waterloo Region YIMBY, and how sometimes, in planning, perfect becomes the enemy of the good. So let's talk about the proverbial backyard on this week's Guelph Politicast! To learn more about his group, Waterloo Region Yes In My Backyard, you can join their Facebook group here. If you would like to get involved, you can also follow WR-YIMBY on Meetup by clicking here. The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here, or download them on your favourite podcast app at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify. Also, when you subscribe to the Guelph Politicast channel and you will also get an episode of Open Sources Guelph every Monday, and an episode of End Credits every Friday.
CCC's Yaël Ossowski stops by The Big Talker 106.7 FM to discuss the benefits of upzoning and YIMBYism to solve affordable housing issues. http://consumerchoicecenter.org
This episode of Neoliberal Podcast is our first mailbag episode. Jeremiah answers your questions on foreign policy, 2020 candidates, charter schools, YIMBYism, ordoliberalism, healthcare, factory farms, voting systems, and much, much more. Got more questions? Send them to mailbag@neoliberalproject.org and they might end up on the show! If you enjoy the podcast, please consider supporting us at Patreon.com/neoliberalproject. Patrons get access to exclusive bonus episodes, newsletters, and our sticker-of-the-month club and community Slack.
What's mightier, redistributing land vs building more housing? Are these ideologies necessarily at ends, and what's their respective roles in the current housing scene? Sonja Trauss of SFBARF/SF YIMBY/CaRLA makes the case that georgists are too focused on taxing the land to see that zoning needs reformed. Other topics are broached, from property rights, political orgs, and whether sweeping wealth redistribution is needed (we quickly agree it is).
New York City Libertarian Party leaders Devin and Ilya discuss New York City politics, libertarianism, the intersection of the two, and the lack thereof. In this episode, we discuss: fast food regulations, ThriveNYC, the Mayor's Renewal Program, the Public Advocate election, sex work, YIMBYism and more!
Devon Zuegel (@devonzuegel) joins Michael Gibson (@WilliamBlake) to discuss urbanism, the life and death of great cities, NIMBYism vs. YIMBYism, and why cities like San Francisco make it hard to build new housing.
Get updates about the Change Order podcast eepurl.com/gfT0aT In this episode of the Change Order podcast, host David Friedlander (https://twitter.com/dfriedlander) sits down with Ben Carlos Thypin (https://twitter.com/sobendito) and Stephen Smith (https://twitter.com/marketurbanism) of Open New York (https://twitter.com/OpenNYForAll), the city's main YIMBY (yes in my backyard), pro-housing advocacy organization. They talk about the state of land use policy activism and reform, the role of innovation in solving the housing crisis (small), and more. Show guide: :00 Intros and discussing Extell One Manhattan Square and YIMBYism 4:00 Why Ben thinks anti-development activists are focusing on the wrong thing. 7:40 What is Open New York? 8:30 Elizabeth Street Gardens 12:00 Why the YIMBYism is having its moment 14:25 Steven Smith joins conversation 17:25 The difference between tenant and YIMBY activism 23:45 YIMBY Politics and politicians 33:30 Understanding the NIMBY mind 36:20 What constitutes success for Open New York 41:00 The role of innovation, tech, and alternative operating models such as SROs and micro-apartments for solving the housing crisis 51:00 Outro Find Open New York at https://opennewyork.city/ Email me, David Friedlander, at david at hothouse dot co.
Chris Spoke founded Housing Matters, a Toronto advocacy group for increasing housing supply to address the affordability crisis in the city. The group is part of the Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) global housing movement that shares the same values. We hear about how zoning laws prevent an adequate supply of housing from being built,... The post YIMBYism with Chris Spoke of Housing Matters appeared first on Commercial Real Estate Podcast.
[Epistemic status: very unsure. I sympathize with many YIMBY ideas and might support them on net; this post is me exaggerating the NIMBY parts of my brain to a degree I’m not sure I honestly support. This focuses on San Francisco to make it easier, but other cities exist too. Thanks to Nintil for some of the bright-line argument in part four. Conflict of interest notice: I live in a lower-density part of Oakland] Everyone I know is a YIMBY – ie “Yes In My Back Yard” – ie somebody who wants cities (usually San Francisco dominates the discussion) to build more and denser housing. This is a reasonable position, and is held by apparently-reasonable people – centrists, rationalists, economists, self-proclaimed neoliberals. Since everyone involved holds reason and civility as an important value, I would expect the discourse around housing to be unusually reasonable and civil. I have a weird habit of encountering the best parts of some movements and the worst parts of other movements, in a way that doesn’t match other people’s experiences. And certainly I know many YIMBYs who are amazing people who I love. But as for the movement as a whole, I feel like apparently-reasonable people have dropped the ball on this one. Sorry for having to say this, but YIMBYism is one of the most tribal, most emotional, most closed-minded movements I have ever seen this side of a college campus. So much so that even though I agree with much of what it says, I cannot resist writing a 5,000 word steelman of their enemies just to piss them off. So here are some YIMBY claims and why I cannot be entirely on board with them.
Affordability advocate Laura Loe interrupts a date (!) to swing by the bookstore and gave Ian a brief history of YIMBYism in Seattle; discussed why housing and urbanist advocates can so often be very lonely in their work; and painted a picture of the challenges facing density advocates so often torn between the two "poles" of the political left. Then she went back to her date.
Sonja Trauss discusses her campaign for the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco, YIMBYism and how her Economics education influenced her political views.
UNLOCKED The gang takes a break in the middle of their West Coast tour to talk urban housing with Shanti Singh (@uhshanti), co-chair of the DSA SF Housing Committee and steering committee member. While Will cooks up a banquet they discuss the sanctity of the Atlantic’s op/ed roster, Baseball Crank’s mpreg fantasy, Silicon Valley’s Pinkerton-patrolled company towns, candidate cities for Chapo’s new content factory, and YIMBYism, the hot new fad among poorly socialized free market liberals. sfrighttocounsel.com - DSA SF's campaign to give tenants facing eviction a universal right to counsel
Madeline Kovacs is the program director of Portland for Everyone a coalition of community organizations, individuals, and local businesses that support those land use policies that will help provide abundant, diverse & affordable housing options in all of Portland's neighborhoods. Calendar 2nd Friday of Every Month Boston Bike Party Also 2nd friday of Every Month … Continue reading E388 – Madeline talks YIMBYism →
What does "affordable housing" mean in California, especially when only 30 percent of state residents can afford the median-priced home? What will it take to make housing affordable -- build more of it, pass some more laws, repeal some others? And with the crazy supply-and-demand status of housing here these days, can it even be done? Listen to our panelists talk about the current options and potential opportunities for the affordable-housing market in California -- and who, if anyone, will benefit from it. PANELISTS * Melinda Coy, policy specialist for the California Department of Housing and Community Development * Rachel Iskow, CEO of the nonprofit homebuilder Mutual Housing * Todd Leon, development director at Capitol Area Development Authority * Darryl Rutherford, executive director of the Sacramento Housing Alliance * Sonja Trauss, founder of Bay Area Renters Federation, and leader of the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) movement to build high-density housing * Daniel Weisfeld, a consultant at McKinsey & Company's San Francisco office who authored the McKinsey Global Institute’s report “A Tool Kit to Close California’s Housing Gap." PODCAST TIMEFRAME * 0 to 5:30 min - Intro to California Groundbreakers * 5:35 min - Panelists introduce themselves * 25:30 min - How housing goals, planning and regulations get started on the state level, and move on down to the counties/cities level * 31: 25 min - What makes certain affordable housing projects successful (i.e., the Warehouse Artist Lofts on R St. in Sacramento), and what forces other affordable housing projects to fall through (i.e., Westminster Presbyterian Church's mixed-use project, also in downtown Sacramento) * 36:20 min - What the "new breed" of affordable housing looks like, and what it will take to get it built * 44:45 min - Connecting the dots between Sacramento's homelessness situation and an affordable-housing solution - what's the status? * 55:10 min - How the Bay Area Renters Federation (a.k.a. BARF) wants to increase YIMBYism and housing density -- which includes suing a city in the East Bay to force it to build more housing * 1 hr, 3:20 min - Where are California's "housing hot spots" that we can build in, and how much can we build there? * 1 hr, 7:45 min - Many affordable housing-focused bills are going through the state legislature right now - which ones have the most promise of passing, and which have the most potential for working? * 1 hr, 18:50 min - How people as individuals can help to get the bills they like passed * 1 hr, 21:30 min - What residents can do on the local level to address affordable housing * 1 hr, 25:45 min - What's the definition of "affordability" today, and can we change the clock back to make that truly be affordable for most Californians? * 1 hr, 31:30 min - How can we replicate the success of the Warehouse Artists Lofts? * 1 hr, 34:45 min - Are the city and county of Sacramento helping to replicate that success? * 1 hr, 40:20 min - The Sacramento version of BARF is starting! Plus, what are examples of affordable housing projects done right in California? * 1 hr, 44:10 min - How can we move housing development from being consumer-focused to community-focused? * 1 hr, 48:33 min - Is it time to revisit Proposition 13, and how would that affect affordable housing? * 1 hr, 55:20 min - A home developer voices her concerns about doing affordable housing and "making it pencil" * 1 hr, 58:50 min - The big deal about Assembly Bill 199 * 2 hr - The Legislative Analyst's Office states that the only way to make housing affordable will come from residents and communities changing the way they view housing. How do we convince them to change -- and how do we get them to convince their legislators to make the change?
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
