@bobbyfijan Is there an equivalent of a "True Shooting %" from the NBA that accounts for the fixed per unit costs and the variable square footage in a blended way to normalize comparisons like this?
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Phil Levin
957 posts
Phil Levin
@levin_phil
All about happier / healthier / funner ways to live. Founder @livenearfriends. Founding team @Culdesac. Lives @ Radish in Oakland Writes Supernuclear
Bay Area Katılım Aralık 2018
356 Takip Edilen1.9K Takipçiler
This is an example of why I dislike "per unit" metrics in housing discourse & policy
$827K/per unit sounds really really bad ... and it's not GOOD
BUT ... when you take unit mix, and size, into account it gets a little better. 25% of the units are 3BR.
m. stanfield@resetbasis
Here are the project costs for Jubilo Village, a 95-unit affordable housing development in Culver City, CA. $827,242 per unit, and per the developer, only $365,799 per unit is hard cost. No state incinerates capital quite like California. Truly remarkable work, guys.
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Phil Levin retweetledi
The art of making the bus bus stop, condensed into 20 seconds.
Zach Molzer@molzer
Introducing the Bus Bus Stop 🚏 You can just do things.
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Phil Levin retweetledi
@BenBear Local media has always beat out national for us in terms of driving real customer interest.
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Phil Levin retweetledi
Over the past 20 years, America has basically stopped building condos. Owing to a mix of restrictive financing regulations and endless defect litigation, the most viable path to urban homeownership has largely disapprared. In my latest for @TheAtlantic, we explain why.
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@amrevveejnas @BayAreaREMatt we are mostly boring married couples who don't tend to multigerm.
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@levin_phil @BayAreaREMatt technically Radish do not grow in clusters...Beets would have made more sense since they multigerm and fuse together
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Interesting compound for sale in Oakland!
7 unit co living community on a 14k lot called "Radish" is currently for sale near Temescal.
A group of friends currently lives there and the property consists of a 7 units comprised of 1, 2 and 4+ bedroom homes, a communal kitchen, office, gym and shared outdoor spaces.
The whole compound is being sold together and they are anticipating a sales price between 4 and 6M.
Link to the website in comments
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@realmatt_re @BayAreaREMatt @realmatt_re we are working on this actually ... some of the new CA housing laws allow for mini lot subdivisions with separate ownership. Agree it's important!
happy to chat about it..
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@BayAreaREMatt This is @levin_phil place. I hope their plans are to relocate together elsewhere! My wife and I have always said that we need the 55+ retirement community concept for millennials. Separate ownership is important though.
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@amrevveejnas @BayAreaREMatt 3 new compounds actually (the group is all staying togehter but expanding)
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@BayAreaREMatt ah the classic "we're leaving for a bigger better compound" ...only in CA baby!
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Phil Levin retweetledi
The best tax is a land tax.
The second best tax is a property tax.
All else is slop.
Rishi | ഋഷി | 🌐🗽🥥🔰🏙@RishiJoeSanu
Most literature on optimal taxation suggests that corporate taxes are among the worst kinds of taxes behind tariffs but progressives gave up on evidence-based policies over a decade ago.
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@pitdesi best housing plan i've ever seen from a candidate
(haven't done the research on his other positions)
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Housing is the biggest reason that California is so expensive, and the pain is self-inflicted- through taxes, red tape, and lawsuit exposure.
We make it hard to build -> people can't afford to live here -> we subsidize some people -> that makes it more expensive for everyone...
These are common-sense good policies:
Cut costs: Slash local fees (up to $150K/unit today), cap taxes on new infill housing, modernize building codes.
Speed up permitting: Require 30-day permit processing, public dashboards, third-party inspectors if cities miss deadlines.
Industrialize construction: Factory-built homes like Sweden (50%+ of new homes), with state incentives and fast-tracked permits for housing factories.
Stop lawsuit abuse: Reform condo defect laws killing starter home construction. End CEQA abuse on infill near transit.
Stretch affordable housing dollars: Buy existing apartments ($300K/unit) instead of only building new ($800K+/unit). Recycle funds as loans.
Expand homeownership: Scale shared-equity down payment programs where the state gets repaid on sale.
The next thing to tackle is insurance. He mentions wildfire hardening and some other stuff but I think there is more there.
Mayor Matt Mahan@MattMahanSJ
We can fix California's broken housing market, but we must be bold. This is my plan to lower fees, cut red tape, and dramatically lower the cost of construction so we start building housing Californians can afford. mahanforcalifornia.com/housing/
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Phil Levin retweetledi
I just picked my kids up from grandma's house.
They were playing doctor's office. Checking in their stuffed animals as patients, scheduling them for follow-up appointments, writing down their vitals on paper, etc.
Little did they know, all of this could be automated with AI. I sat them on the couch and immediately got to work.
I spun up a Mac Mini M4 Pro in the corner to run OpenClaw, automating their entire marketing function. This doubled their leads overnight.
Next, I set up voice-enabled check-in and scheduling with Hello Patient. This enabled their admins to focus on higher value work, like providing higher touch service to their patients.
I set up an AI scribe to eliminate documentation time during patient visits, and downloaded OpenEvidence on all their devices for their physicians to instantly access evidence-based, peer-reviewed medical research at the point of care.
I upgraded their radiology department to the latest AI-native software. This automatically flags suspected diagnoses and reduced turnaround time on new patients by 40%.
I also got them on an AI-native revenue cycle management platform. This syncs with their back office to automatically detect billing codes and reduce insurance errors.
Finally, we synthesized all their EHR data to create personized treatment plans and post-visit recommendations for each patient.
It's important to teach your kids how to use new technology so they don't get stuck in the permanent underclass.
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Phil Levin retweetledi
California has reinvented feudalism from first principles
wsj.com/economy/housin…
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Phil Levin retweetledi
The older I get the more I want a family compound.
Family is everything!
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Phil Levin retweetledi
Phil Levin retweetledi
As Putnam pointed out in Bowling Alone, the kinds of third places that are actually declining are the ones that form thick attachments -- churches, fraternal clubs, bowling leagues, local political groups, unions, etc.
But discourse about third place decline centers on the consumer economy, because people want there to be someone to blame (greedy capitalists tearing out the coffee shop seating, neoliberal austerity minded governments closing the libraries) rather than their own behavior.
Much easier to blame the man for your problems than to put down the phone and go out and form community with like-minded people.
Dion@2024dion
You hear all the time that third places are disappearing, but are they? Consider: -The number of coffee shops and indie bookstores in the US has grown consistently for at least 20 years -Library operating hours have generally ticked up throughout the same period -Growth in investment in parks in US cities has outpaced inflation since at least 2007, and downtown & suburban parks in particular have become better programmed -We're in a golden age for restaurants (the frequently-viral observation that food quality and diversity in small cities has improved is 100% correct). Americans eat out more than ever before and have many more restaurant options -Recreational trails, which hardly existed fifty years ago, continue to grow in mileage and quality at a rapid pace everywhere in the country To the extent that people do less socializing at these places, I think it's a demand problem, not supply. There's plenty of places to hang, we'd just rather be on our phones.
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Phil Levin retweetledi
The New York Times just mentioned @JoinEdgeCity and the new town we're helping build, Esmeralda, in a piece called "Maybe America Needs Some New Cities."
It's exciting to see the Overton window shift on new city projects. For a long time this was exclusively the realm of libertarians and billionaires. Now mainstream news is writing about it as serious urban policy. My opinion on this topic has shifted quite a bit over the last couple of years, to now seeing new cities as one of the biggest levers of interesting experiments and progress.
It's surprisingly doable - the articles make the obvious point that every current city was a new city, and some very recently.
Also, a cool example from Elle Griffin's Elysian Newsletter today about how the Cadbury brothers built Bournville in the 1890s for their factory workers: Arts and Crafts cottages, gardens, swimming pools, pensions, paid holidays.
The best part is that they gave the whole estate to a village trust so residents would own it forever. They gave ownership of it to the people actually living there.
Basically, a chocolate company did more thoughtful city planning than most governments.
The field is wide open. I'd love to see (and collaborate with) lots of new town and city projects over the next decade.
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@gillianim She talks about our life at Radis living "baby monitor distance' from our friends.
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@gillianim wrote an excellent OpEd for the NYTimes about living near friends to help with parenting
(Why the NYT editorial team chose to represent this with a sink of dirty dishes, I am not sure)
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@levelsio @_TurboHome is a great alternative
Expertise where you need it (e.g. price negotiation) for a lower fee. But you do the Zillow-ing on your own like everyone already does.
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I'm so done with real estate agents
What an absolutely useless profession in 2026
Nowadays when I go visit houses to buy you get the construction company guy tell you everything anyway, and they actually know their stuff
And then you have some literally low IQ shady car salesman guy hovering around you in the back with NO added information and NO added service
"Yes this house is great because it's north-facing"
And then for doing absolutely nothing zilch nada, they deserve 5% of the house price in commission???
And you can't visit the house direct because real estate agents cover each other asses so the selling agent will tell you to find a buyer agent to be able to visit it
A complete racket 100%
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Phil Levin retweetledi
This is us @americanhousing
The American Dream has had 2 parts:
1) Own a house
2) Your kids will have a better life than you
Both of these things are imperiled for younger folks. Who aren’t buying homes and aren’t having kids
We want to address this by building housing for young people *in the places where they want to live*
Since 2000, young people have moved to cities and major metros. But there has been a lack of housing for the change in life stage from being single, living with roommates or maybe having a partner.
The choice has been between doing the “American Dream” or continuing to live in the neighrbhoods where they’d built careers and lives
We want to build housing so they don’t have to make that choice. We want young ambitious people to just … feel OKAY having kids. Or buying a starter home. Maybe they have to move later. (Hopefully not). But either way they can continue on the demographic journey.
It’s a huge problem. But we’re committed to trying to solve it. In every City in the USA
We are going to win
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
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