Benjamin Ross

Transit advocate. Social Democrat. Author of Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism. Searchable.

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Last Notes

2025-08-28 12:40:33 UTC

Key takeaway is at end of this article [gift link].
Sales of new exurban houses are falling, but there's unmet demand for urban infill. If cities & inner suburbs repeal offstreet parking mandates & cut minimum lot sizes, builders will keep building.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/business/housing-market-builders-demand.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hk8.QJVW.-vaetwO_mMSv&smid=url-share

2025-07-09 19:57:17 UTC

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Yes, because eligibilty for a child allowance is involuntary. But the argument doesn't apply to libraries or transit fares.

2025-07-09 19:43:33 UTC

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I don't buy this argument. It assumes the means-tested service is used involuntarily. You can't equivalently tax eg a library user fee or a bus fare because use is unpredictable & even depends on the fee.
The political argument (which goes back way before 1998) is the real one. It also guides you in cases like bus fares where it's not clear which alternative constitutes means-testing.
https://bsky.app/profile/benrosstransit.bsky.social/post/3ltkcmkqtv22o

2025-07-01 23:33:35 UTC

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The "Delphi method" was out in front of you by decades.

2025-05-07 12:56:13 UTC

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Me too.

2025-05-04 14:50:38 UTC

State-wide yimby zoning reforms are regulation, not deregulation.
The US system of land-use governance is not planning. It is a system of chaotic competition in which localities seek higher status and/or financial gain at the expense of each other & the wider public.
Yimby zoning reforms regulate the competition to limit its anti-social features. 1/2

2025-05-03 17:46:25 UTC

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The problem is so big, and has been built up over 100 years, that any solution will only work out over decades.

2025-05-03 17:45:08 UTC

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There are a whole lot of obstacles that need to be cleared away, like off-street parking requirements and legalizing single-stair construction. But the economics are so overwhelming that I think they would largely replace mansionizations in cities with half-decent transit. The most expensive suburbs, where the old houses are so big that there's little mansionization, would not change much.

2025-05-03 17:22:48 UTC

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Apartment zones limit sq ft but don't limit # of units. So each sq ft in a unit has same cost.
Builders with this cost structure face, where most housing is 1-family (most of US), a market in which the price per square foot declines rapidly with increasing unit size. They have an overwhelming incentive to build small units.
Legalizing 6 1000-sq-ft apts in place of a 6000-sq-ft McMansion would, over time, shift the price structure so you'd see bigger apts. 2/2

2025-05-03 17:15:23 UTC

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Remove the thumb that is now very heavily on the scale for small apartments: single-family zoning.
Most land is zoned for 1 unit & 5000+ sq ft floor area per lot. Marginal land/entitlement cost of added bedroom is zero, so in high-land-value areas (where housing is most in demand) new houses have many bedrooms. Result is a surplus of big units & shortage of small units, relative to demand. (People who'd like their own apartments living in group houses is a sign of this.) 1/2

2025-04-06 18:36:27 UTC

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Hopefully the people in the other faction would like to wall off those crazies too. But in my experience, they often need encouragement. There's much too much of a no-enemies-to-the-left attitude floating around, and people who feel discomfort with their own crazies tend to shy away from discomfiting them and instead just drop out.
If you clearly state a positive program that distinguishes you from the crazies, things usually won't evolve into a need to confront them directly.

2025-04-06 16:41:39 UTC

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It's not enough to just ignore them. You need to define your own objectives & the objectives of your action in clear, positive terms that distinguish yourselves from the crazies. Unwillingness to offend them ultimately drives away more people than it attracts.

2025-03-28 13:38:55 UTC

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This is way off-base. The US non-governmental standard-setting system marginalizes non-business actors such as unions & environmental groups. Business lobbies regularly promote "self-regulation" via standards as a way to fend off real regulation.
It's fine to set pipe diameters & thread pitches so that all pipes screw together, but awful to set public policy. Historically, by the way, the original standard-setting organization was the Pennsylvania Railroad Purchasing Department.

2025-03-11 22:40:29 UTC

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This uses a single measure of ideology. For Democrats, there's lots of evidence that populist positions on economics are *more* persuasive than moderate positions, while the opposite is true for cultural issues. Using a single scale for ideology in this situation yields no useful guidance and risks misidentifying turnout & persuasion effects.

2025-02-27 15:38:38 UTC

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The coding shifted in the late 60s and 70s due to combined effect of (1) revelation of the very real distortions of official science by powerful public & private actors (eg, lead toxicology, pesticide science, A-bomb testing fallout) & (2) hostility to science as such in the 1960s counterculture and "new age" movements (coded left). 2/2

2025-02-27 15:31:56 UTC

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In the 1950s & 60s, hostility to modern medicine was strongly coded right-wing. The far right led a very active anti-fluoridation movement. There was a widely listened-to quack medicine talk show on the radio in NY. Recall the line in Dr Strangelove about "the international communist conspiracy to sap and destroy all of our precious bodily fluids." 1/2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KvgtEnABY

2025-02-19 14:35:47 UTC

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Failing to draw distinctions within the Democratic party & blaming the whole party for the sins of its right wing, is a giant problem. Primarying the non-timid & ignoring primaries between mainstream Democrats & No-Labels types (or worse, running spoiler candidates) disincentivizes courage & elects more candidates from the party's right.
Example: Jake Auchincloss who won his first primary over a liberal due to a left spoiler. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jake-auchincloss.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yE4._n4v.9bQ9pLQWcbql&smid=url-share

2025-02-19 14:11:54 UTC

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Why the liberal-bashing here? "Establishing the Founder’s intent, or simply repeating the way the existing institutions function, often suffices to establish the legitimacy of a particular outcome" is not "in the minds of many liberals." Original intent is a doctrine made up by conservatives to overturn the work of the New Deal and Warren courts. The legalist Democrats in Congresss aren't the liberals, they are the pro-corporate right wing of the party.

2025-01-31 16:06:26 UTC

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Of course it's punishment when you primary an incumbent.
The basic question here is: Is the secondary obstacle to progress (the Rs are primary) the center of the Democratic Party, or its right?
I believe it's the right. Were labor law reform passed under Carter, NAFTA defeated under Clinton, and a public option created under Obama, this would be a very, very different country. And those are all votes supported by most Democrats in Congress.

2025-01-31 14:30:03 UTC

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First of all, the ones I listed are almost all in competitive districts.
But more broadly, the strategy of primarying everyone would punish the broad center of the Congressional party, which votes against trade agreements & supports labor rights and force them to turn to people to their right for support. It is a recipe for moving the party to the right.

2025-01-31 14:18:41 UTC

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What I disagree with is the framing of the Squad vs the Democratic Party. The left contradicts itself when it simultaneously tells Democrats that populist economics is the way to win elections and opposes Democrats who win elections with populist economics.
A few examples of such Democrats in the House: Val Hoyle, Josh Riley, Andrea Salinas, Hilary Scholten, Emilia Sykes, Chris Deluzio, Johnny Olszewski, John Mannion, Gabe Vasquez. Would you primary them?

2025-01-31 12:44:05 UTC

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This is totally wrong. By attacking the pro-labor mainstream of the congressional party, it aids the pro-corporate right wing that cripples the party's ability to make change when it has a majority.
Concentrating resources on primaries against the really bad actors (eg No Labels types) tells centrists not to drift right, attacking everyone sends opposite message.

2025-01-16 13:43:28 UTC

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My grandmother had another way of saying it: "If enough money passes through your fingers, some of it will stick."

2025-01-12 19:31:12 UTC

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No question Prop 13 is financially motivated. The question is whether it motivates nimbyism. I'm not sure, it pushes both ways. New development (both housing & commercial) pays higher taxes than old. Also homeowners who plan to stay in same house often want house prices kept down* to keep their assessment down, and Prop 13 removes this incentive.
*At least they say they want. I'm skeptical, since these people tend to be very unhappy if their house price goes down.

2025-01-12 19:10:51 UTC

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Don't equate supply restrictions on housing with rent extraction. I believe strongly that financial gain is at most a minor factor in nimbyism. The places with the most vociferous and well-organized advocacy for supply restrictions are the places where house prices would go up most if restrictions were relaxed -- wealthy 1-family neighborhoods close to thriving city downtowns.

2025-01-10 13:28:24 UTC

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Los Angeles is actually where that idea began. First LA zoning ordinance required all non-residential uses in the residential zone to shut down within a few years. Lots of resistance to this, so they grandfathered uses. This was around 1910.

2025-01-08 14:54:37 UTC

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How do you distinguish the two?

2024-12-30 13:12:31 UTC

Waymo (aka Google) admits that it trains its robotaxis to break the law. When WaPo reporter finds robotaxis fail to stop for pedestrians in marked crosswalk 70% of the time, Waymo says it follows "social norms" rather than laws.
Expert explains: When robotaxis obey law, they don't go fast enough to compete successfully with Uber, so Google execs ordered engineers to ignore laws.
https://wapo.st/3ZZDifm

2024-12-07 14:41:00 UTC

Why is this media malpractice so common?
Headline & first half of article basically argues that people like sprawl because housing is cheaper there. Then at the end they admit that the opposite is true - high price of walkable housing shows that demand for it exceeds supply.
(Not wasting a gift link on this.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2024/walkable-neighborhoods-suburban-sprawl-pollution/

2024-10-31 01:37:51 UTC

How Wall Street hedge funds are ripping off shippers and obstructing American's industrial renaissance. A very clearly written expose of "precision scheduled railroading" and the forces behind it.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2024/10/29/train-drain/

2024-10-15 11:42:39 UTC

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Unleashed by whom? By Sinwar and Hamas, whose war crimes started with the murder & kidnapping of Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, Thais, etc and continue with the use of Palestinians in Gaza as human shields.