Hello, and I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. In the spirit of the season, I’d like to (belatedly) express a little gratitude. When I left my full-time job in the spring, I took what felt like an enormous leap of faith: I knew I needed time to work on my book (and co-parent a newborn), but I didn’t know if I could piece together a sustainable income as a freelancer. Hanging up my own shingle felt like a particularly high-stakes endeavor given the aforementioned newborn.
My daughter recently turned one year old and my little LLC will hit its own first birthday before too long. And, at least for now, I’m pleased to report that this all feels reasonably sustainable. The consulting and freelance writing/editing work has been reasonably steady for at least the past six months, which means I’ve been able to carve out sufficient time for both the book and fatherhood without too much financial stress.
So I feel tremendously grateful for my consulting clients and for the publications that have commissioned pieces from me over the past year. (More of those coming soon!) I also feel grateful for the modest but engaged and thoughtful readership that has clustered around this newsletter. While Public Comment itself doesn’t produce any income, I’ve found maintaining it to be both professionally valuable and creatively fulfilling.
So thanks to all of you for sticking with me. I’ll probably be taking a longer than usual pause on both the newsletter the consulting work for the next several weeks, while I try to get my book manuscript in shape to send to the publisher. But if any of you might be interested in retaining my services in early 2026, please check out the website for my consulting work.
Recent Work
Speaking of my freelance work, I’ve had a couple of pieces go live since my last newsletter update. The first, for MS NOW (née MSNBC), is about Trump’s plan to offer prospective homebuyers the option of taking on 50-year mortgages. I don’t know if that idea is still in the mix — it seems to have disappeared into the swirling madness that consumes every Trump news cycle — but that’s fine, because my piece was really intended to function as a broader view of how Trump’s policies affect the housing market.
As I write in the piece: “It’s hard to imagine Trump is trying to make the housing crisis worse, but he’s doing virtually everything that a president with that goal would do.”
Here’s a taste:
Houses are not, of course, imported from abroad. But their construction requires many imported raw materials, including steel and lumber. By one measure, tariffs on those and other construction materials may be adding tens of billions of dollars to the cost of homebuilding investments across the country.
On top of those added costs, the administration has worked overtime to exacerbate a preexisting labor shortage in the construction industry. Immigrants constitute nearly one-third of the construction workforce (and an even higher share in, for example, California’s especially unaffordable housing market). Trump’s sadistic deportation campaign — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s decision to specifically target the day laborers who hang out at Home Depot waiting for work — is disappearing builders when the U.S. already didn’t have enough of them.
You can read the whole thing here.
Not long after the MS NOW op-ed went live, Inside Philanthropy published my deep dive into the funding networks that sustain left-NIMBY advocacy in California politics. This piece was based on research provided to me by the Abundance Network (full disclosure, a former client) that traced the hundreds of millions of dollars major foundations have provided to nonprofits that lobby against YIMBY priorities in California.
Here’s an excerpt from that piece:
Strikingly, a lot of the foundation money that ends up supporting anti-YIMBY causes runs through environmental organizations. Examples include the California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA), 350.org, and the Center for Biological Diversity. All three have tried to block pro-housing legislation in California, including multiple YIMBY efforts to reform the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) — despite multiple recent, high-profile cases in which NIMBYs have sued under the law to prevent the construction of multifamily housing in transit-rich areas.
It’s especially noteworthy that 350.org and its California chapters have opposed multiple YIMBY priorities, given that the organization was founded by climate activist Bill McKibben — an outspoken YIMBY who authored a 2023 cover piece for the magazine Mother Jones called “Yes in Our Backyards.” (More recently, McKibben was one of the keynote speakers at the 2025 YIMBYtown conference.) In his Mother Jones article, McKibben noted that allowing “denser housing along transit corridors” was among “the cheapest ways to cut carbon” — yet the group he founded specifically to fight carbon pollution has opposed bills that would enable denser housing construction.
Here again is a link to the whole thing. Unsurprisingly, this one seems to have generated a fair amount of controversy, so I expect I’ll be writing a follow-up before too long.
Other Links
A few more things I wanted to bring to your attention. First, the online journal Liberal Currents has launched a startup fund that will help them expand their work. I’m a Liberal Currents subscriber and admirer: they publish some of the most incisive, morally urgent commentary you’ll find on the fascist threat to American democracy. I particularly enjoy editor Samantha Hancox-Li’s work for the journal; recent favorites from her include “The Present Crisis and the End of the Long '90s,” “Reforging America,” and “We Need to Talk About Pedocon Theory.” (I’m not singling out Samantha for praise just because she had me on her podcast, although of course that does speak to her discernment and superior taste.)
All of which is to say that I hope you’ll join me in donating to the Liberal Currents startup fund. It’s been an especially rough decade for independent media, but the rise of Liberal Currents has been a green shoot amidst the desolation. Let’s help them keep their work going and magnify its impact.
Speaking of independent writing, urbanist wünderkind Darrell Owens has written a post for his newsletter about how local fire departments undermine traffic safety and related urbanist goals:
A firefighter sympathetic to the fire officials argued to me that traffic calming slowed the fire department’s ability to respond to fires. But firefighters and EMT affiliates spend far more time collecting bodies from car accidents enabled by car-oriented road design than they do fighting structural fires. Between 2010 and 2022, structural fires in Berkeley injured an average of 2 people per year, while between just 2017 and 2022, traffic accidents injured or killed an average of 694 people annually. (Report here). This is proportionally true of most cities in the United States. This month, a cyclist was hit and killed on one of the streets fire officials want to keep free of street festivals.
I’ve been waiting for someone to write an essay like this for quite a while, and I’m glad Darrell was the one to do it. Read the whole thing.
Lastly, I’d like to share a video from YouTube essayist Thomas Flight on art and generative AI. Flight does some of my favorite film analysis these days, and this video is among his best. It sharpened some of my own thinking about AI slop, expressing things I have long felt but haven’t been able to systematize, much less articulate so eloquently. The book he relies on in his argument, J.F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, is now high up on my to-read list.
Full video is below. Happy holidays, everyone.