Jake's blog
Jake's Endorsements, November 2025 NYC general election
I've been asked by a good number of people on Bluesky and elsewhere for my voting endorsements. I've collected my voting recommendations here. CANDIDATES NYC Mayor: Zohran Mamdani. I was publicly skeptical of him in the primary, and I'm still not crazy about a lot of his ideas. But he's the best option in the field because he's correctly identified what NYC's problems are, and he's surrounded himself with competent people. The alternatives are far worse. Andrew Cuomo ran the subways into the ground when he was governor. Curtis Sliwa is an incoherent crank, even though some of his ideas...
HELL YEAH. California finally legalized apartment buildings near transit, statewide. Let's talk about the consequences.
BOTTOM LINE, UP FRONT: The big rezoning bill, SB79, passed the Legislature and it is a big fucking deal for dealing with the housing crisis. Because now it's legal to build apartments near public transit, statewide. Side note before I begin - this post is about LA, but everything about this also applies to the Bay Area. There are two crises that California faces these days. #1 is the housing crisis, because there just isn't enough housing to match the number of jobs. The housing crisis exists because cities have made it nearly impossible to build new housing. Some suburbs,...
new event: september 17, 7pm, cordelia wine bar, brooklyn
the event in brooklyn that was originally cancelled is back on for next week. see you there? note: this is a non-ticketed event; come as you are.
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...