I sympathize w/ this renter, but there's a structural imbalance: we will never get a Block Club article about the Chicagoans who benefit from these 26 new housing units. It's hard to tell a news-y story about the benefits, even when legit externalities exist... blockclubchicago.org/2026/08/18/a...

A Room Without A View: New Building Goes Up Just Inches From Woman’s Window

Lucia Whalen knew the lot next door to her Wicker Park rental would become a garage. But now, she can't even put an air conditioner in her window.

blockclubchicago.org

Two positive national media stories about Baltimore this week — vacant homes in some areas are starting to become inhabited again, and murders are at an all-time low. It's interesting to see something so positive just 6 years after covid (gift links) www.wsj.com/economy/hous...

New Housing Law Boosts Prospects for Factory-Built Homes

Supporters are cheering a new federal housing law that should make it easier and cheaper to build modular and manufactured homes.

wsj.com

In Madison, here’s a weird, distorted version of courtyard apartments: the homes completely turn their backs on the street for a terrible pedestrian experience, while the strangely landscaped courtyard limits how much you can actually hang out in the there

Spotted in Madison: one perfect Chicago-style two flat

Learning about building codes: before 2021 Chicago had few 5-story buildings, even where zoning allowed. But plenty of 4-story ones. Why? 5-story buildings previously had to use pricey Type I construction instead of cheaper Type III. When that changed, they more than doubled!

Daniel Kay Hertz@danielkayhertz.bsky.social · last wk.

New post, in which I try to coin an awkward new housing typology name (the "III-5"), and describe how what I thought was a parking reform story was actually a building code and parking reform story daniel-kay-hertz.ghost.io/the-birth-of...

Anthony Edwards Minnesota propaganda… let’s go

Been in Minneapolis a mere 15 minutes before getting my first ever fare check on Metro Transit

Chicago is having some serious growth in rents and home values lately. Interestingly, however, bc it had really flat/negative prices after COVID, the cumulative price growth since Jan 2020 is still among the lowest in the Midwest.

Re-legalize Zak’s place

Zak Yudhishthu@zyudhishthu.bsky.social · 2w ago

A fond goodbye to my Avondale apartment, which breaks every part of its RS-3 zoning and could never be built today ❌ 12 units (2 unit max) ❌ 40 ft tall (30 ft max) ❌ 260 sq ft lot area/unit (2,500 min) ❌ 0 ft rear setback (35 ft min) And way above the 0.9 floor-area ratio cap

A fond goodbye to my Avondale apartment, which breaks every part of its RS-3 zoning and could never be built today ❌ 12 units (2 unit max) ❌ 40 ft tall (30 ft max) ❌ 260 sq ft lot area/unit (2,500 min) ❌ 0 ft rear setback (35 ft min) And way above the 0.9 floor-area ratio cap

☹️

Turns out, Chicago has its own Statue of Liberty

California’s elected officials are delusional in thinking they can force insurance companies to insure the uninsurable. You can pass any law you want, but if a house is worth $750k and climate models predict it will almost certainly burn within 20 years what rates would YOU charge them?

Mike Levin@mikelevin.org · 2mo ago

Californians, read this and get angry.  After many in our state lost everything in last year’s fires, insurance companies quietly buried “wildfire deductibles” in their policies. Not the standard deductible. A separate one,

Heard there were some new chairs at Buckingham Fountain. So you know I had to have that #FontanosAtTheFountain

Chicago Tribune@chicagotribune.com · 3mo ago

One hundred green-colored Luxembourg Chairs — manufactured by Fermob in Paris — have arrived to surround Buckingham Fountain in Chicago.

I just kept on hitting more and more financing sources to close my gap, and I was like “wow am I really allowed to add all these?? This seems really complicated” Fortunately, a few years later I did successfully build my 100% affordable housing in Pilsen

Daniel Kay Hertz@danielkayhertz.bsky.social · 2mo ago

By popular demand housing-developer-game.dhertz.workers.dev

By popular demand housing-developer-game.dhertz.workers.dev

Daniel Kay Hertz@danielkayhertz.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Who wants a computer game where you try to finance and entitle a LIHTC building

CPED looking at the 2050 plan as a "minor policy update." Bernard: "We want to focus more on implementation this time around."

Regarding some discourse on the other app: Can we reconcile the ideas that 2008 was a housing bubble, vs. housing costs have been driven by long-run fundamentals? I think that we can!

"Eliminating minimum parking requirements" does not mean "eliminating parking." After Minneapolis removed parking minimums, citywide parking ratios dropped from 1.0 to 0.73 spaces per unit. Walkable areas often built little parking, while others built closer to prior levels.

Can’t believe they put a landlord special on the Schlitz logo

It's common to emphasize affordable housing development in higher-opportunity neighborhoods. This paper raises a nuanced tradeoff: in better n'hoods, LIHTC applicants that are (relatively) better off crowd out other tenants. Households with the highest need benefit less.

These flowering trees are amazing. Enjoy them while you can!

I don’t exactly know what this mural is saying about housing affordability. But I prefer to interpret it as a statement about how migration chains enable new housing to lower prices for homes across the price spectrum

The Loop’s modernist government buildings have been patriot-ified

In the last few years, Chicago has built a lot of new housing, often near transit, with less than 0.5 parking spaces per unit. Made possible by multiple reforms over the past decade-plus elevatedchicago.org/wp-content/u...

Picking up this book 75% because the cover art looks so good

BUILD plan fact of the day: lower income households benefit from new, market rate housing, even if they don’t live in that housing. New middle housing of the types that the plan would unban lowers housing costs for people who don’t live in that housing. 📑 pencillingout.substack.com/p/can-new-st...

You’d think they could figure out a better land use directly next to the red line

Life is flowing in Chicago

Most policymakers would be intrigued to hear about a costless way to make homeownership more affordable. That's minimum lot size reform! While Minneapolis is rightly seen as a zoning reform leader, it still has this low-hanging fruit. New @streets.mn post on the case for lot size reform.

Streets.mn@streets.mn · 3mo ago

Minneapolis needs to reduce minimum lot sizes: https://streets.mn/2026/05/19/minneapolis-needs-to-reduce-minimum-lot-sizes/ How a simple, well-tested zoning change can make homeownership more affordable in the city.