Brandon Istenes
@bistenes.bsky.social
Economist and data guy. Research & organizing around the housing crisis. Socialist 🌹 urbanist 🚲 . Newsletter: https://rentrentier.com
We “fixed” that in California with catastrophic consequences.
California Dreamin’… 😎@jerasikehorn.bsky.social · 4w agoUnpopular opinion: Property taxes need to be fixed in America… How do you expect retired people to pay the government $10k-$15 yearly to live in their paid off house? How?!
Hoping that Europe ditching Microsoft + AI coding means that finally LibreOffice will become good tech-insider.org/france-ditch...
France Ditches Windows for Linux on 2.5M PCs [2026]
France is migrating 2.5 million government devices from Windows to Linux. See why they made the switch, the costs involved, and what it means for open-source adoption in Europe.
tech-insider.org
The article has the wrong framing. There's no shortage of inexpensive cars. Rather, the middle+upper class is growing, has increasing discretionary income, and chooses to spend it on huge luxury vehicles. The bleak reality is that Americans are choosing to burn the earth as quickly as possible
David Zipper@davidzipper.bsky.social · 4w agoMinicars like the $15k Fiat Toppolino are looking better and better
I think environmental protection laws should actually protect the environment instead of encouraging habitat-destroying urban sprawl.
Michael Hobbes@michaelhobbes.bsky.social · last mo.Three years of "environmental review" to build housing in a major city, fucking kill me www.theurbanist.org/court-of-app...
What people think SEPA is: Erin Brockovich codified into state law What SEPA actually is: is this new hospital spoiling the view from a different neighborhood
"The top decile spent roughly 3 times as much per child as the bottom quartile in the early 1980s but more than 13 times as much by 2024." osf.io/preprints/so...
Fable was nuts for like the three days before it got assassinated
Declining facial recognition at the airport was so easy I'm almost embarrassed I didn't do it before. The guy behind the glass almost seemed happy that I declined, didn't miss a beat, and it might have been quicker than waiting for the camera
One part of Single Stair's unbelievably fast success since 2021 is that it re-legalizes everyone's favorite old buildings. New "break-up-the-massing" double loaded buildings so often try to emulate them with fake facade divisions and other visual deception But we can just legalize the real thing
Protect Bridgeport Bicyclists@stevevance.net · 2mo agoQ: why does single stair matter to Chicagoans? - bring down building costs - build more homes
this can be especially clarifying in housing, where the gap between current production and available supply is 18+ months
alex williams@atwilliams.bsky.social · last yr.yeah, if i could make only one change in the abundance discourse it would be to drop the language of "Supply" and rephrase everything in the language of "Production". instead of taking an interest in "supply" we need to look at "production" which precedes it, and "capacity" which precedes production
oil crisis, climate crisis, road fatality crisis, yet petromasculinity rises unabated the US is not a serious country
Robby DeGraff@robbydegraffap.bsky.social · 2mo agoLatest Experian data on Q1 new vehicle leases/loans is bonkers: -19% of loans >$1k a month (up 17% YoY) -74% of those >$1k monthly loans are for non-luxury makes, particuarliy full-size pickup trucks. -Average monthly payment now $770. -Both 30- and 60-day delinquencieis up. This is wonderful.
The inability of US cities to expand their rail networks is becoming increasingly shocking www.urban.org/urban-wire/r...
Great piece by @mnolangray.bsky.social on cities turned into museums. Pertinent to just about every small town in the US mnolangray.substack.com/p/saving-the...
Saving the Buildings, Losing the Character
On the strange, slow death of a hometown.
mnolangray.substack.com
Created this tutorial for anyone interested in learning how building costs and rents work: rentrentier.com/housing-fina...
Interactive Social Housing Finance Tutorial
My favorite thing about the belief that developers regularly make huge profits is that it suggests an immediate and obvious solution to the housing crisis: you! That's right, you can simply build affo...
rentrentier.com
Mayor Mamdani has announced the Affordable & Efficient Code Reform task force, to convene later this year. The housing plan says that among other things, elevator and plumbing reform will be considered. www.nyc.gov/content/dam/... (pgs. 98-99)
In cities across the country we can all see the encampments on sidewalks and in parks that are a new blight on our cities. This problem is mostly an expression of distribution. The housing shortage creates highly regressive stresses. These conditions can coincide with averages that seem fine. 2/
From dream to fruition in 5 years. Congrats to @houseourneighbors.bsky.social and @seasocialhousing.bsky.social on your first acquisition for social housing! I'm honored to have played a small part in this historic move toward publicly owned, permanently affordable housing in Seattle.
Correct take that no one will accept until like 2060
Jeff Baker@jwbee.bsky.social · 3mo agoUsed houses should always sell at a loss. That's how we can tell the market is functioning.
'passivhaus and social housing as key climate solutions' you love to see it, folks
International Passive House Association (iPHA)@ipha.bsky.social · 3mo agoEnergy efficiency means independence. At the Passive House Conference in Essen, experts highlighted renovation (EnerPHit) and social housing as key climate solutions. 35 years since the first Passive House shows what once seemed radical is now proven. Press release: https://ow.ly/NKrM50Z2K0B
A 20-point increase in a neighborhood's Walk Score (on a scale of 0-100) is associated with a 12.1% reduction in hospital treatment costs and 12.5% fewer hospital admissions
normatively and socially a technology I have deep qualms about, technologically and empirically it's clearly only getting better, and at this point the belief that it's all a scam or fake is a belief in the religious sense, not one backed by actual events.
Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · 3mo agoJune 2024: The latest general-purpose LLMs could not count the r's in strawberry. July 2025: The latest general-purpose LLMs get gold in the International Math Olympiad. May 2026: The latest general-purpose LLM solve an 80 year old problem, one of the "best-known questions in combinatorial geometry"
Powell's legacy is weird: on one hand, the inflation wave was global across peer countries, but, on the other, so was the soft landing. So how should we understand what he did? Some thoughts, plus the macroeconomics tattoo I got after the soft landing. newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/the-weirdn...
The Weirdness of Jay Powell's Legacy
Plus my favorite video of him, and the tattoo I got in response to the soft landing.
newsletter.mikekonczal.com
