Zak Yudhishthu
@zyudhishthu.bsky.social
Sidewalk enthusiast and adopted Midwesterner (Twin Cities, Chicago). I like to write and research about housing and cities. PhD student at UW-Madison. https://pencillingout.substack.com/
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.
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
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 agoCalifornians, 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 · 2mo agoOne 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 agoBy popular demand housing-developer-game.dhertz.workers.dev
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
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 agoMinneapolis 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.
I’m actually starting to have a hard time reading this book. It’s insanely stressful, which is the last thing I want on the train ride home from work
Zak Yudhishthu@zyudhishthu.bsky.social · 3mo agoContinuing my Chicago reads: this book is incredible and propulsive, and one of those books where you can’t look away from the disasters unfolding no matter how terrible they are
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.
Continuing my Chicago reads: this book is incredible and propulsive, and one of those books where you can’t look away from the disasters unfolding no matter how terrible they are
Preapproved plans are most important for small projects and basic dwellings, where soft costs can mean the difference between a project that pencils or a lot that remains underutilized. 2/
