Jake's blog
My Thursday event in Brooklyn has been postponed.
The venue owners have decided to do a renovation, so the book talk is postponed until we can get a new date set. I'll post here when there's a new time.
On reaching the natural endpoint of suburban development
Paul Krugman wrote a good post on Substack yesterday about how Atlanta is approaching the limits of sprawl. What I really want to nail down is how this is really a limitation imposed by road capacity more than anything else. If you build your infrastructure and your cities with only drivers in mind, you reach capacity real fast. The gold standard for how many people you can move in any given direction is PPHPD, which stands for "People Per Hour Per Direction," for one specific lane or track. One lane/track of... ...has a capacity of this many people/hour/direction. City...
Let's talk about how the California state government has reformed the California Environmental Quality Act, making it significantly easier to build more housing.
One of the big reasons that California has a housing crisis is, ironically, an environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). CEQA (pronounced SEEK-wha) is a major obstacle to building new housing. Governor Newsom is expected to sign a reform bill on Friday exempting new urban apartments from CEQA. Wait. How could something called the California Environmental Quality Act possibly be bad? Really, it's because of the law of unintended consequences. But to explain why, I'm going to first give some background on what CEQA actually is. CEQA, signed into law by Ronald Reagan in 1970, requires state and...
Jake's endorsements for NYC Mayor
In order of how I think you should rank mayoral candidates them in the Democratic primary: Zellnor Myrie. Brad Lander. Scott Stringer. Adrienne Adams. Zohran Mamdani. Here's my reasoning: Zellnor Myrie is my first choice because his housing policy is the best by far, and if you're following me, you know that I support building as much housing as possible. Brad Lander is quietly competent and also pro-housing. I voted before Trump's ICE agents arrested him on nonsense charges, but good for him for standing up for the rule of law. Scott Stringer and Adrienne Adams are fine, and neither...
A primer on what it takes to publish a book
I ran into a friend a little while ago, and she mentioned she's putting together a manuscript. She wanted to pick my brain about getting a book published, and I figured it'd be about time to make a blog post about this, since I get a lot of requests from would-be authors. Keep in mind, this is going to be about general nonfiction; I have no idea what the market for fiction or academic books look like. If you want a specific timeline, check out this post I wrote two years ago. The first step is to write something really,...