Just some guy. Housing policy, bikes, mass transit, New York City, local politics, finance, software engineering, not necessarily in that order.
New York, NY
Joined June 2012
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Is New York full? No! Most of Manhattan is visibly underbuilt. Let's make it legal to build these missing homes! #YIMBY
Does a pied-a-terre tax have enough juice to drive NYC property tax reform? I bet not, but we should try anyway.
Great article about the Pied-A-Terre a tax and how we'd be defining something like "$5M market value".
The underlying, much bigger story: NYC property taxes and how they often just don't match true market values at all.
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Jake Schmidt retweeted
Your local planning department doesn't need "capacity". They need Ctrl-F+Delete and a paper shredder.
All the best neighborhoods were built before zoning--before the regulatory tools of postwar planning to microregulate the private realm & mandate car use were constitutional
The wonders of adequate housing stock: as the drummer for My Bloody Valentine, you can be homeless while recording Loveless and yet sleep in a house every night.
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Jake Schmidt retweeted
Like, the problem of high-income households struggling to make ends meet is 100% a problem of high housing costs.
Making it about taxation or groceries or whatever else is just obviously wrong and we're going to end up in the same place pursuing the same brain-dead policies in a few years if we don't solve this.
This really doesn't seem like a good project. We don't need to spend $1.75 million per unit to build housing on new artificial land while there's super-tight zoning over the other 99.9% of the city. That only makes sense if you value the cost of loosening zoning at near infinity.
Mamdani is asking Trump for $21 billion in federal grants for the Sunnyside Yards housing development they discussed in their White House meeting today, City Hall finally confirms.
politico.com/news/2026/02/26…
I don't personally think it's vaporware, I think the project could very well get built and that its supporters are sincere. But I think they're underrating the long-term dysfunction from trying to solve the housing shortage like this.
teapawt.net/reihan/status/20274702…
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Jake Schmidt retweeted
I believe most of NYC’s budget issues can be solved with growth, but current discussions seem uninterested in that. Tech and finance should be expanding in NYC , and remote workers should want to move here because NYC is a better place to live than other places
It's pretty bad that so many public and quasi-public entities still have these kinds of signs up, almost 5 years after they were even potentially true.
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I don't know if I would have posted results if that 100% bucket weren't perfect, but luckily I didn't have to learn that about myself today
second order knowledge is basically knowing what you do know vs what you don't know - it's how well calibrated you are
confidence.success-equation.… is a really cool site that tries to measure if you're generally overconfident, under confident, or correctly calibrated in your beliefs!
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