Adam Mongrain
@adammongrain.bsky.social
ED, More and Better Housing Canada Montréal, Québec EN/FR
In which I say what everyone is too afraid to say: knowing about @stephenjacobsmith.com's elevator study is a curse because you won't be able to stop talking about elevators for the rest of your life www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-Pz...
Canada's Inefficient Building Codes #shorts
YouTube video by Missing Middle Podcast
youtube.com
We should have one of those polls where people give their estimate of how much of the total population is made up of X minority, this time with the minority being wonks
Matt Darling@besttrousers.bsky.social · yesterdayLike I think it is a good idea, but I think it's a wonky idea for wonks. I can't see the population being super enthused.
Isaiah is right about this in particular (read the thread) but this specific phrase is something we could yell out up to five times a day
Isaiah Bishop@isaiahbishop.bsky.social · 2d agothese are human problems with human solutions godamn it.
How long until we replicate the "we're a reasonable company with reasonable goals: to drain the ocean so as to find and kill god" tweet unironically.
Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 3d agoANTHROPIC EXEC: “.. I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”
Great episode by @mikepmoffatt.bsky.social and @adammongrain.bsky.social, worth a listen. Standardizing building codes would help. It's also interesting to see how mutual recognition—essentially “one registration, recognized everywhere”—plays out in the future.
Dr. Mike P. Moffatt@mikepmoffatt.bsky.social · 2d agoNew episode! Today I interview Adam Mongrain of More and Better Housing about ways that Canada can build... more and better housing. Watch here: www.youtube.com/watc...
New at the Star! Adam Mongrain ( @adammongrain.bsky.social ) of More and Better Housing and I discuss how the federal government can lower the cost of building social housing through a tweak to the tax code.
This is how we could fix a problem Canada has been overlooking for decades
Social housing has been abandoned in Canada. This is how smart tax breaks could fix it.
thestar.com
[In the midst of a protracted international train wreck] Mike and I are in the paper today with a neat trick to dramatically increase the participation of social and nonprofit housing in the market, and it sure would be cool if you read it. www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...
This is how we could fix a problem Canada has been overlooking for decades
Social housing has been abandoned in Canada. This is how smart tax breaks could fix it.
thestar.com
had to go to the corner store for chips because I didn't plan for labor day and I was reminded of the Twitter classic "guy who thinks airport food is expensive because of minimum wage"
A fantastically large portion of our brain is devoted to auditory processing and language generation. Our entire mouth and throat is built for speech. We were designed - however and whenever you think the designs came from - to negotiate first and fight last. Take the fucking hint.
We grew at an average of 100 households per year so we’re planning to keep building 100 homes per year.
Jens von Bergmann@jensvb.bsky.social · 6d agoPSA: Don't write about housing if you don't understand what a household is. "no major U.S. urban area experienced growth in household formation that exceeded its growth in supply, suggesting there were not significant differences in supply growth between regulated and unregulated regions" 🤡🤡🤡
I will do it. I will be the most influential poster on Bluesky.
If you live outside of the US and Canada and would like to help me with an elevator census I'm doing, please DM me – I want to send you something! Would just involve noting a few items about elevators you encounter in the wild.
This is at best adjacent to the dust-up being debated in the thread but for me figuring out the ins and outs of rent being in all circumstances a monopoly price (because every physical space that can be leased out is non-fungible and has only one seller) has been a real eureka moment.
There’s no place like (your) home
Through many of the same mechanisms as there being no such thing as non-market housing, there’s really no place like home.
medium.com
Mikhail Gorbaechev@mikhailgorbaechev.bsky.social · last wk.Their position appears to be that modifying regulatory regimes to increase market competition and destroy monopoly and monopsony power over workers and consumers is the best approach to achieve justice, except in housing, where it's neoliberal and gay.
*Such* a simple and effective apartment plan!!! Four homes, with 2 stairs and 2 elevators. Each living space is dual aspect and spans the full width of the building, no corridors. Bedrooms in the next bay for privacy, with a mix of 2-and-3 beds Social housing in Spain!
can we get @besttrousers.bsky.social to fight anyone about the average, median or modal opinion it is acceptable to express
None of my real life friends are any degree of online/weeabo so you guys have to find this extra funny to make up
marina grlica 🌱@dovesplants.bsky.social · 2w ago
[In a whisper so soft it could not wake a sleeping mouse:] rent stabilization policies are a type of proto-LVT
Brad Ewing@bradleyewing.bsky.social · 2w ago/r/yimby has never been a great place for housing discourse but it feels like it has really gone downhill the last few months. Too much left-punching and tilting at rent control (if you think rent control is the primary obstacle to more housing you don't know ball)
It's going to take all of us to save all of us.
@lastpositivist.bsky.social · 2w agoYes this has been the main thing that has utterly put me off the populist wing of the left, their embrace of anti-tax sloponomics. (Of course they say they are not this since they want to "tax the rich" but always so defined as to exclude most people.) Libertarians waving red flags, hate it so much.
The blight of stroads in our communities is the legacy of one Barthélemy Stroad.
A fun thing to look up is what the neighborhood looked like when what is now considered "natural" or acceptable density was first built. For instance, here is what it looked like when Montreal's now ubiquitous triplexes were first built in the 1920's.
Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith.com · 3w agoIt would be good to allow this in areas that weren’t already well on their way to apartment housification in the 1950s. You know, some proactive planning, not just reacting to what developers perceived demand as 70 years ago.
When people can buy new things (cars, phones, sneakers, mechanical keyboards, houseplants), they do almost beyond what what we would want to them to. Housing should be just another durable good that people get bored with.
Michael Andersen@andersem.bsky.social · 3w agoThe most remarkable thing about this isn’t that home values fell after upzoning (NZ’s weak job creation since 2020 contributed too), it’s that homebuilding *continued* at a much higher rate even after the price drop
“After an intense building flurry, Auckland’s housing stock is now 618,849 units, which is 101,000 more than a decade ago…Meanwhile Auckland house prices, with a median value of just over NZ$1mn (US$587,000), have lost a quarter of their value in that timeframe.” giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...
If you don’t follow pro wrestling this is a very nice Swiss man whose main move is to swing people in a way that everyone pretends is very painful but often looks kind of fun
Fightful Wrestling @fightful.com · 3w agoClaudio Castagnoli swung Daniel Garcia BY ONE LEG! #AEWCollision
The worst thing about AI is that I like a bunch of people on either side of the issue (the sides being « it’s literally Satan » and « no it’s not ») and I have to watch them fight on Bluesky instead of positing cool and funny stuff
This is a good angle and I’ll add that in ways big and small, a society that is hostile to childhood and parenthood is probably in bad shape.
M. Nolan Gray 🥑@mnolangray.bsky.social · 3w agoThe reason I care care about fertility rates is the gap between preferred and observed fertility. A lot of people, especially women, say they want kids, but far fewer people have them. In general, I think a healthy society is helping people to do the core life things that they say they want to do.
