Can you pay off the NIMBYs?
A forthcoming paper by Michael Hankinson, Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Morris Davis surveyed roughly 1,700 residents of expensive areas and found that most people do have a price. Over 80 percent accepted at least…
Nisha Austin
9 blurbs
10,000 pieces of type
One of my favorite 4th of July traditions is to go to the historic fort in town for a reading of the Declaration and firing of the cannons by a historical reenactment group. This year, with the sweltering temperatures, w…
Updates from Congress
The first major federal housing bill in roughly 30 years just took a big step forward. After months of ping-ponging between the House and Senate, all four corners (the chairs and ranking members of the Senate Banking and…
Data center power lines in Loudoun County
Potential routes for transmission lines in Loudon. Source: Dominion Energy, via Bay Journal Last month, Dylan wrote about Loudoun County, Virginia , home of the largest concentration of data centers in the world, and whe…
State abundance agendas
One thing we’ve been tracking is the proliferation of state and local abundance agendas. In the last year, we’ve seen Abundance New York publish a detailed policy roadmap across housing, transit, energy, and governance; …
Dispatches from Marblehead
By now you’ve probably seen the viral clip of Marblehead resident David Modica asking his fellow townspeople the question heard ‘round the internet. Jerusalem Demsas wrote about it in The Argument , making the case that …
Are we kind of being pricks?
“ Are we kind of being pricks? ,” asked a resident at Marblehead’s annual Town Meeting this week in a video that went viral (full disclosure: I live here and serve on the Housing Committee). After four votes over three y…
Serviceberries, Lincoln, and shared abundance
Nisha Austin: Around the time when I started getting into ‘Abundance’ (in the way we all think about it here), my mother-in-law gave me Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry . I think she was trying to piece together ex…
What Alex is reading while Jordan's away
The main thing Alex has been reading this week is the text of the Senate Banking Committee housing reform bill , for which he is deep in the details. It’s encouraging to see bipartisan movement on federal housing policy,…