My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.
Recent Work
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a truly terrible idea that had made its way into the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act: the provision that would require all build-to-rent single-family homes be sold to owner-occupiers within seven years. As I wrote then, this single provision could render one important source of rental housing completely unviable and thereby offset everything the bill does to encourage housing production.
But there’s also a lot to like in the legislation! And if the above provision gets amended out during conference committee, then I think the ROAD to Housing Act will rightfully be looked back on as a rare win for this Congress.
This week, I wrote a post for the Roosevelt Institute’s blog on one of the things I actually like about the bill: the provision encouraging local governments to adopt pre-approved building plans.
A preapproved design is pretty much what it sounds like: an architectural outline that the relevant planning authority has signed off on in advance. In cities with preapproved designs, also sometimes referred to as “pattern zoning,” any proposed construction project that follows one of these designs gets fast-tracked for approval to build.
Speeding up the approval process can, in turn, result in small but real cost savings for homebuilders; it cuts down on some of the costs associated with navigating the bureaucratic approval process and sitting on an undeveloped plot of land. This is essentially a win-win-win: Homebuilders get to move more quickly and save a little bit of money, the city doesn’t need to spend finite staff hours on design review, and the city as a whole gets more housing.
Links
Janeese Lewis George for Greater Greater Washington on why she’s running to be the next mayor of the District of Columbia.
Chris Hughes for The New York Times on reforming the Federal Home Loan Bank System.
Marina Bolotnikova for Vox on Austin’s YIMBY success story.
Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman for The New York Times explain why Democrats should ditch the nerds and become a real political party again. (As one of the aforementioned nerds, I generally agree with their point, although I think they’re being a little unfair to the Roosevelt Institute, where I am a fellow. It is fine and good for policy think tanks to put out policy position papers; it’s just that adopting the right set of policies is not the same thing as doing mass politics.)
Max Read for his Substack on journalism and A.I.
Henry Farrell for his Substack on the limits of A.I.
Elias Isquith for his Substack (I’m sensing a trend here) on V for Vendetta.
Molly Young for her Substack on great book dedications.
Elizabeth Spiers for The Nation on anti-intellectual Silicon Valley elites.
And lastly, Vinson Cunningham for The New Yorker on Jason Bateman.
Sounds
A classic from Wayne Shorter and Milton Nascimento: