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IIRC the globe ran an interesting interactive piece a few years ago that let people punch in all sorts of policy requirements to a project (IZ, size, energy efficiency, union labor, location, etc.) and it showed that if you wanted the everything-bagel apartment so to speak, the required rents...

I think that's a better way to put it (makes me wonder why it's not more prevalent in comms ngl), but then people would have to ask the same question about banks, why do they need an investment to make X% instead of Y% (where Y > 0), at which point we are back to the situation where most of the...

Slightly off topic but speaking of TSMC I do find it a little funny that much of the public discourse in the 2010s was concerned with companies being too short termist to adequately invest in the infrastructure of the future. Then immediately in the 2020s we jump into the largest private...

Fantastic, thanks for the insight

Whatever their argument was, what I don't support is wholesale government neighborhood planning or single corporate master plans that cater to a small number of peoples' aesthetic-ideological preferences that will be preserved forever. It is precisely because many developers do stupid shit...

For what it's worth, I actually think that characterization is exactly backwards in the sense that urban renewal as it was practiced in the 20th century grew out of utopian social planners that prioritized their aesthetic biases over that of the people living in those urban spaces. Market forces...

Like I said, I only did a quick google search, someone who actually knows something should chime in. Enrollment is in a period of structural decline...

Low key didn't know much about Simmons despite living and working next door for years lol. Reminds me of an article in the WSJ that made the rounds online last week about Syracuse University. From purely the enrollment decline data, it looks like Simmons is in even worse shape than Syracuse...

I think this is why the traditional NIMBY argument that X building should go into an abandoned brownfield parcel instead of a desirable neighborhood fails. By definition that brownfield parcel does not have a track record for desirability, and more than that actively has a record of being a...

I also saw this paper and really liked it, so often we talk about how much arbitrary zoning decisions make otherwise profitable developments not pencil out. It's good to have real quantitative market measures for how much damage they are doing. I would want to see regional or municipal indices...

https://mass.streetsblog.org/2026/08/11/city-hall-is-on-the-verge-of-cancelling-privately-funded-safety-improvements-for-deadly-east-boston-roadway

If puritanism is the fear that someone somewhere is having fun then I think much of leftism is the fear someone somewhere is making a dollar lmao. The same electorate in NYC so opposed to Walmart (because it will put local retailers out of business with low prices) are willing to vote for tax...

I mean their city government was a lot more dysfunctional than ours for much longer, probably creates more demand for technocratic excellence. I like the mayor and the direction the city is headed, but who knows, I don't live there.

Interesting paper about the negative impact of inclusionary zoning in California where they banned IZ in 2009 and then reactivated all previously existing IZ in 2017: https://bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.uci.edu/dist/b/5302/files/2026/06/IZ_Kouchekinia.pdf From the abstract: More units built...

I think land and labor costs probably force a pretty high floor for prices on traditional lunch options. A new group of lower cost food options would generate its own foot traffic into Copley just for lunch. I suspect the barriers are more regulatory than economic, Longwood is like 5x larger...

If not designed for heavy food truck usage, why not food carts. In the middle of the med school campus in New Haven everyday during lunch hours they have 20-30 of these tiny food carts lined up year round. Food isn't half bad and not that expensive. If the economics are workable in a small city...

https://www.wcnc.com/article/money/markets/real-estate/affordable-housing-crisis/north-carolina-ends-mandatory-parking-minimums/275-bc4b1b3e-bd88-452a-9886-fa28b3db274b

at least the updated wood has more units, I also liked the leerink better though

https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/57013c7d-22e2-45f6-a937-4f49104bd5f6 This was an interesting read for someone who knows very little about the state of passenger rail in Germany. I don't know that I would have predicted that the proportion of trains arriving on time has...

Man I wish there were more projects of this scale being built