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Logan Bowers
@loganb
Engineer. Father. Tweets on economics, software & urbanism. Ran for city council once, called a Density Basilisk and walking urbanism checklist.
Seattle, WA, USAJoined May 2007
Logan Bowers’s Tweets
The Republican Party has adopted opposing RCV as its #2 item. Despite being a non partisan voting method ’s progressive organization has polarized voting reform.
prod-static.gop.com/media/2-RESOLU
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Has anyone tried getting rid of AirBnBs by allowing hotels to be built anywhere and bigger
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Looks like there wasn’t an explosion. I wonder if some of the delay was because it took time to outfit a missile with a dummy payload.
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If the goal is to quickly increase Seattle housing supply, the single best policy to do that will be to a) eliminate parking minimums and b) increase Multifamily zones to 85’ height. This is because:
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WA Leg has dropped a bill that requires greater education of risk and extra $100 traffic fines related to large SUVs and pickup trucks (4,000+ lbs). It's a small piece of the big pie needed to win the #waroncars.
app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?Bi
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He has literally four cat beds in this room alone and I wanted the chez. AND YET.
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“Once we have a child, there won’t be any time to pamper the cat”
Cat:
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It’s always to put numbers in perspective. Politicians will bail out water with a thimble if they think you don’t know that they should be using a bucket.
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Replying to @LewisforSeattle
if 40% of downtown's 64,000,000 sq ft of offices are empty, and all of it was converted to housing, you're only looking at 30,000 homes.
seattle needs 1 million homes to be planned for in the next 20 years or else we will become even more unaffordable.
it's a very small piece
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Banksy is the modern heir to Warhol's hack throne and he's totally going to do something with AI art and we'll be expected to treat it as some deep commentary on AI art and not just more AI art twitter.com/remy4real23/st
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Seattle, doing its best to kill the golden goose.
LA Housing Twitter take note - when you listen to the non-profit-industrial-housing-complex - you get less housing.
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A woman in Seattle wanted to build housing for her children on her own property so they could stay in the community they grew up in.
Over-regulation made that impossible, so the lot sits empty and her children had to leave.
ij.org/ll/seattles-af
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I’m pleased with all the housing bills in Olympia this year… but the California Builders Remedy is really the only thing that will move the needle.
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For every dunk you do on the attention -seeking anti-NIMBY comedian you need to spend ten minutes talking to a normal homeowner about why increasing the town’s tax base could be useful.
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A lot of public debates on housing policy reveals how hard it is for many folks to grasp scale of things.
Fights over subsidized affordable housing, for example, is a fight over where ~ 10% of *low-income people* will live.
Opposing market-rate housing harms low-income people.
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Replying to @olzhu and @UrbanLandRent
In California, 90% of low-income people live in market-rate housing.
Housers that ignored market-rate housing - or worse - worked to restrict market-rate homebuilding, contributed to the immiseration of many millions of people.
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I’m assembling a team
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Good morning, Bay Area. According to our evaluations, 69 of your 109 local jurisdictions are now subject to the builder's remedy. 
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4. *Construction* costs, however, don't show such a trend. Brian Potter at Construction Physics has a post today asking, "Does Construction Ever Get Cheaper?" The answer is pretty much no.
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This insight needed to get built into housing policy like yesterday.
WA could benefit from Statewide standards and zoning for manufactured housing, even better if we can partner with, like, CA.
Cc:
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1. A short thread on a fundamental trend in economics of physical stuff that's highly relevant to the conversation about nuclear & renewables:
A. Manufacturing things gets cheaper with scale.
B. Constructing things in the field gets more expensive with time.
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To clarify, this tweet is sarcasm. I do not consider it serious thought to moralize idioms, and also a lot of these are both contextually and psychologically facile and misguided.
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Love this and am 100% on board with its adoption. There will be no faster way for unserious people to communicate faster how unserious they are, and will do us all the favor of not having to take them seriously from the start.
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I didn’t even consider my language, I’ve used the phrases on the left too often.
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Calgary is often held up as an example of transit success in a small North American city, with a pre-pandemic LRT ridership of over 300k per day, and hundreds of thousands more on their busses. But how can this be? Land use around C-Train stations is almost universally terrible!
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In practice, we're seeing that inflation can decelerate without the unemployment rate rising.
However, there's still ambiguity about whether that can happen in theory.
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Kinda also says something interesting about gambling. I mean, lefties that choose subsidized high-class access over housing abundance are basically betting they will personally have political clout to get a coveted spot despite historically never having political power.
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Tl;dr: Produce the most housing, or leave some folks out in the cold so others can live in a neighborhood well above their class status?
Time and again folks choose the latter over the former, which says a lot about human psychology and the relative importance of social needs.
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Alright, f*ck it.
Let’s talk about the most painful reality of the affordable housing business. You having a good night so far? Yea? Terrific, because I’m gonna ruin it.
Let’s chop it up.
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Unscientific, but I polled YIMBYs and found that many of the attacks directed at us are simply wrong:
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If you identify as a YIMBY, do you agree or disagree with the following statements:
Blanket upzoning will solve the housing crisis.
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Voters in Washington who care about housing affordability and/or housing affordability--please let your legislators know. Hearing tomorrow.
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WA bill SB 5456 to lift parking mandates near transit has a hearing 2/2 @ 10:30am.
Opposition from cities will be strong, and your support matters.
Testify on Zoom:
app.leg.wa.gov/csi/Testifier/
Log in PRO:
app.leg.wa.gov/csi/Testifier/
Written comments:
app.leg.wa.gov/csi/Testifier/
#Homes4WA
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One thing I've noticed is that it's very hard to predict who the market is for different types of housing. I'm almost always wrong with my assumptions.
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Left NIMBYs, Right NIMBYs, and centrist NIMBYs all share fundamentally one thing:
Disdain for the people they imagine living in the new housing.
The fundamental difference is they all imagine different types people living there.
The thing is, they are all mostly wrong.
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Trying to build in California: Rich neighborhood is concerned with privacy & safety. Poor neighborhood is concerned with gentrification. Minority neighborhood is concerned with character, & a city neighborhood is concerned with traffic. No one is concerned about actual people🤦🏾♂️😢
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The sewers in North America were largely bored by the Scalopus Toiletus mole native to the continent. Such majestic creatures.
Sadly, they went extinct in the 1970s when their habitat was destroyed by pollution from a toxic increase in the production of EIS statements.
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I understand lack of sewer infrastructure is a reason why we can’t build new housing. All the locations where there was magically sewer already before we built housing (Manhattan, Tokyo etc) are now full. It’s too bad.
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Downward nominal wage rigidity, in practice.
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I used to be on the board of a startup that reduced salaries across the board due to the poor economy. Everyone got a 20% salary cut, and the founders/CXOs took a 40% cut. The founders expected this to bring people together - one for all and all for one.
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This passage from ’s substack is why most YIMBYs are so singularly focused on zoning most of the time. You can get more housing faster at all levels—including low income—just by allowing private development than you could ever hope to get through public spending.
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Deep cuts 😬😬😬
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Checking in on the transportation policy conversation on twitter
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France is building an automated 47-mile subway line (M15) with 36 stations for an estimated $10.2 billion dollars, $1 billion dollars cheaper than what it cost to bring the Long Island Railroad to Grand Central. We just really need better cost control and project delivery.
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In case anyone missed it, “affordability mandates” do not lead to more affordable housing. Below market rent housing requires subsidy, and the amount of subsidy available is the limiting factor, not competition for land.
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I would be so thrilled if this was built on my block. How cool would it be to have a little cafe across a low traffic street?
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“The population didn’t grow, so we can’t possibly need more housing units,” has to be one of the most brain dead anti-YIMBY tropes of all time.
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Anyone who looks deeply into the MUTCD or AASTO green guide is gobsmacked by the banality of evil on every page. DOTs require 5 pedestrian deaths/injuries per intersection per year before they can consider inconveniencing a motorist with a stoplight. I am not making this up.
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The way the American built environment is designed to make drinking & driving almost always the path of least resistance is one of those quietly monstrous things you can’t unsee when you realize it. We require bars to build parking lots & act surprised when people die.
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Been a part of communities before that purged the toxic elements and immediately died a quiet death.
Any community needs a few folks to stir the pot to kept it interested. They always proliferate and the community enters a state of decline. It’s the natural order of things.
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Mastodon is Twitter without drama.
And what people staying on Twitter reveals is…we are all fucking addicted to the drama
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Honestly one of the most cowardly and dishonest euphemisms I've ever seen, I can't believe places like the NYT are still doing this
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