We’re missing a crucial housing type in the U.S.: Housing over small shops Life on the ground floor Starter homes above It creates the backbone of a walkable city. Also known as a Residential-over-Retail, a 15 minute street, and a Livable Community.

We have many hundreds of courtyard apartment blocs in the US - they’re called 5-over-1s. The reason they don’t look like continental versions is because the product can only be financed institutionally. Building codes, the depth of our gridded street, and high construction costs add to it. Townhomes, like what @AustinTunnell & @bobbyfijan are building are the way to do this in the states today.

Never bet against a sicilian when death is on the line

By the 6th generation, your genetic contribution to a descendant is 1.56%. By the 10th, it's below 0.1%. By the 20th, it is dissolved into the collective pool. The obsession with individual lineage is meaningless at civilizational timescales.

Something pretty obvious I was talking about with a Dem strategist the other day: Nobody in the party has a problem celebrating Islam, Hinduism; any faith brought to US via later immigration. But celebrate Christianity loudly and other Dems look at you funny, assume you’re RW.

a federally-ENDANGERED FIN WHALE in front of south brooklyn and staten island today. crazy.

One of the aspects of Texas I find odd is that it has several major cities located within it but from a marketing perspective it seems like it wants to be known more as a pioneer frontier backwater

Amazing how this has become a thing. It really does nothing. But it has become the socialist aka urbanist cheer.

A 17-year-old valedictorian, Leen Hijaz, used her graduation speech to speak for the voiceless: "Millions suffering in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan. Families torn apart by ICE." The school administrator cut her mic. Told her: "If you don't stop, you're not graduating." They withheld her diploma for four days.

There are about 18,000 species of wasps in North America. Roughly 20 of them can hurt you. The wasps people fear are all from one family: Vespidae. They make up less than 1% of wasp species on the continent. They build the visible nests, they defend them aggressively, and they're the ones you remember from a bad encounter. The other 99% live solitary lives and ignore humans entirely. Many can't sting at all. Many more have stingers but never use them on people because they don't have a nest to defend. What they do instead is hunt other insects. A single mud dauber stocks her nest with paralyzed spiders, including widows and recluses. A braconid wasp lays eggs in tomato hornworms. An ichneumon wasp parasitizes wood-boring beetles that kill ash trees. A cuckoo wasp infiltrates the nests of other wasps and bees. Some species control aphids; others control caterpillars, beetle grubs, or flies. Most agricultural pest insects in North America are controlled, in part, by parasitic wasps that almost no human ever sees. There are over 25,000 species of ichneumon wasps alone, and they keep entire orders of insects in check. The five or so wasp species that ruin a picnic in late August are real. The 17,995 species that are running the pest control infrastructure of an entire continent get almost none.

Montreal, Edmonton, Cambridge, Portland, Missoula, Buffalo, Denver, Minneapolis, Austin, Kansas City, Vancouver and Toronto are just some of the hundreds of North American cities that have eliminated arbitrary, minimum parking requirements.

True upzoning has never been tried

They’re gonna pay zero taxes wtf

I can see the DOGE tweet: "We canceled a contract for Panamanian screwworms, saving $165 million dollars!!!" [aphis.usda.gov/news/agency-a…] Meanwhile: "The slightest oversight could undo all the work that came before."