benmaritz

@loganb Honestly, I think that as a reason, we are very lucky to have Bellevue. It’s like the research that shows the countries that have more than one major city always do better because there is competition.

@benmaritz Yuuuuuup. I hate to say it, but Factoria is blowing up too.

This is so bleak.

@asher_971 @Qagggy It’s looking so good too

This project has been public knowledge for like 10 years now. The funding is mostly going towards utility, water, sewer upgrades plus a full road rebuild. The addition of protected bike lanes is a drop in the bucket compared to those.

@otter401 @HenryForLA Nothing a little subsidy can’t fix

I'm an LA developer who each and every day deals with the capital markets throughout the US to finance my projects. You're a tenants rights atty who has zero interaction with the capital markets and therefore zero knowledge about the capital markets. The capital markets have redlined LA largely because of policies that you support and would enhance. You would be a total disaster for housing in LA.

Kind of wild that I’m running mostly on eliminating Single-Family Zoning and permitting reform, allowing for more home construction than anything the incumbent has ever even dared advocate for, and still get accused of “destroying the capital markets that enable home building.”

@spokanerising In WA at least, the big headline 10% marginal rate isn’t helping. A broader 1% tax would have felt much milder while still being progressive, or at least this tax coupled with a bit tax cut for middle class

The second is that Americans feel they aren’t receiving adequate value for their tax dollar. Solving this would require Democrats to confront a lot of unspoken rules about how their party operates, with consultants and nonprofits driving policy decisions.

There are two reasonable explanations for the increasing perception that federal income tax are two too high.

@spokanerising @loganb Younger people in general tend to be renters, and renters tend to have a very good grasp of housing economics (except in rent controlled apartments…. So we will see!)

@loganb @benmaritz I think it really depends on who you’re talking to. IMO the younger progressive politicians are a lot more pragmatic on these things that increase cost than the older “liberal” progressives. Jamie Pedersen is a good example where replacing him might yield more pragmatism.

The really dumb thing is that the places with the mildest climates have the strictest energy requirements, driving up home prices for no reason other than activist groups patting themselves on the back.

@loganb @spokanerising I disagree on this. I think the current progressive leadership recognizes that a lot of seattles energy code has NImby roots and is open to fixing it

@spokanerising Every single progressive group would come at you with their pitchforks if you tried to back out Seattle’s or WA’s energy code?

@buildhomez @arpitrage Taxing dead people is good economic policy

@arpitrage Washington's going the other way, they just passed lowering the estate tax from 35% to 20%

Mamdani proposes lowering the NY estate tax threshold from 7m to 750k, and raising the top rate from 16% to 50%. We have some prior work from Moretti and Wilson who find substantial billionaire sensitivity to estate taxes increasing with age. Despite the migration tax sensitivity, they do find we are still on the left side of the Laffer curve for most states; but at 16%, not 50%. Maybe this is a negotiating ploy rather than a serious policy; but at 50% estate taxes I'd expect to see much more migration and evasion. nber.org/papers/w26387 bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

@_colemurray I’ve been trying to do something like this can you share more details?

setup a nightly OpenInspect automation in a clients code to run a “bug search” on the last 24 hours of code changes woke up to PRs of fix it’s a nice workflow sir

@danielmwarwick Politics over principles, always

It's easy to hate landlords but do you have the courage to hate renters? 89 US Senators do!

@TechLayoffLover Not even Opus. Replaced by a discount model. Brutal.

Block just confirmed 4,000 layoffs but I'm hearing the real number is closer to 4,800 when you count contractors and the "voluntary separation" packages pushed through yesterday Sources inside are saying Jack Dorsey walked into the all-hands with a 47-slide deck titled "Building Tomorrow's Block" Slide 23 showed current org chart: 10,200 people. Slide 24 showed target org: 5,900 people by July The brutal part: they've been screen recording every engineering session for 6 months. Called it "knowledge capture for AI training" Senior engineers thought they were helping build internal tools. They were actually training their replacements I'm told the offshore team in Bangalore already has access to the entire codebase documentation, decision trees, and architectural reasoning - all extracted from those recordings One L7 architect realized yesterday that his "AI pair programming" sessions were being fed directly into training data for automated code generation The team that built their payment processing infrastructure? All gone. Replaced by 3 contractors with Claude Sonnet and the complete prompt library of the guy they just walked out Word is they're planning to cut another 2,000 in Q2 once the AI agents can handle customer support escalations But sure, keep telling people that AI will "augment" their jobs instead of erasing them The knowledge extraction is complete

@NickSattele I hope so! But so far there has been no discussion of using the massive pools of funding we have for housing for the purpose of shelter

@benmaritz It does seem like the current mayor is way more focused on cheaper, temporary shelter tho than past admins

Affordability is the top issue for voters and while I’m no pollster, I think it comes down to two concerns 1. It’s impossible to buy a house for normal people 2. There is a ton of homeless people on the streets. Our huge spending on housing does nothing for either

@resetbasis @acquisizioni Housing is a human right

@acquisizioni Greedy landlord. Go to hell. Rent should be free anyway

I am watching a Bluey episode that is demonizing change, highlighting NIMBYism and encouraging being a holdout - and it’s trigging to me. Daughter never watching this 🗑️ again.

Other forms of real estate are exempt from capital gains tax in WA. But condos are not taxes as capital gains under federal law.

I wonder if under the new millionaires tax in WA short term income from condo development will be exempt. I know the leg is also doing work on reducing condo liability. But if gets with a 10% tax…

@loganb @NickSattele Missing middle will have a modest impact over time. Where one house was built, now there will be 2-4. But very little infill single family houses are built each year.

The most improvements make all housing better, but doesn’t fix the relative standing between housing types, so only small units get built. IZ and MHA are family unit killers because of course families can’t afford to pay that. Also, energy code and labor requirements greatly privilege SFH over MF, so they choose to pay off constituents rather than make family housing possible.

Even the nominally pro-housing legislators in WA are making it _worse_ for families because the only unifying impetus they have for more housing is as homelessness mitigation.

@loganb @NickSattele Single stair has been legal in seattle for ages and hardly ever used. Hard to see how this particular reform got so popular. I know a lot of great architects love it, but it doesn’t actually make financial sense to build that way. You have a lot more stairs and elevator per unit

Homeownership affordability is tied entirely to the cost and speed of production of houses. Seattle in particular has more or less shut down townhouse construction with its MHA tax on every new unit.

Homeless housing is a totally different problem, and much harder. We do spend some money on it (PSH, etc) but we are still way to focused on high cost unsalable solutions. We are not acting like it’s a crisis.