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Brandon Istenes

@bistenes.bsky.social
195 followers 178 following 309 posts

Economist and data guy. Research & organizing around the housing crisis. Socialist 🌹 urbanist 🚲 . Newsletter: rentrentier.com

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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
"they're just building luxury condos for rich people to keep vacant!" no, you just have very selective attention
Plot of average building vacancy vs building age. >40% in year 0, ~15% in year 1, ~8% thereafter.
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Vacant luxury condos are the "waste fraud and abuse" of housing discourse
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Joe Fish @sadbusdriver.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
the thing with luxury condos is that they're mostly a myth. 1. within the same county, condos sell for 35% less than single family homes 2. within the same neighborhood, they sell for 43% less 3. within the same neighborhood and adjusting for some quality characteristics, they sell for 21% less
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Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
We “fixed” that in California with catastrophic consequences.
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Hoping that Europe ditching Microsoft + AI coding means that finally LibreOffice will become good tech-insider.org/france-ditch...
tech-insider.org
France Ditches Windows for Linux on 2.5M PCs [2026]
France is migrating 2.5 million government devices from Windows to Linux. See why they made the switch, the costs involved, and what it means for open-source adoption in Europe.
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
The article has the wrong framing. There's no shortage of inexpensive cars. Rather, the middle+upper class is growing, has increasing discretionary income, and chooses to spend it on huge luxury vehicles. The bleak reality is that Americans are choosing to burn the earth as quickly as possible
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Ryan Packer @typewriteralley.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
It's SEPA all the way down, folks. www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf...
CONCLUSION
We affirm the SHB and KCSC’s grants of summary judgment to the
Coalition. The Missing Link is not categorically SEPA-exempt, and the City must
meet SEPA requirements if it moves forward with the Missing Link. The Coalition
had standing to make its challenges, and Cascade’s jurisdictional challenge is
now moot. Finally, the KCSC did not violate the separation of powers in its order
requiring the City to comply with SEPA.
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Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 @maxdubler.com · 06/07/2026
I think environmental protection laws should actually protect the environment instead of encouraging habitat-destroying urban sprawl.
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Ryan Packer @typewriteralley.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
What people think SEPA is: Erin Brockovich codified into state law What SEPA actually is: is this new hospital spoiling the view from a different neighborhood
Page from the Harborview DEIS showing different views from Jose Rizal viewpoint
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
www.tiktok.com/@raphliy/vid...
tiktok.com
DSA? How honorable. #dsa #Mamdani #clairevaldez #democraticsocialism
TikTok video by Raphael
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
"The top decile spent roughly 3 times as much per child as the bottom quartile in the early 1980s but more than 13 times as much by 2024." osf.io/preprints/so...
Chart showing increasing spending on children by rich people
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
Fable was nuts for like the three days before it got assassinated
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 07/06/2026
Declining facial recognition at the airport was so easy I'm almost embarrassed I didn't do it before. The guy behind the glass almost seemed happy that I declined, didn't miss a beat, and it might have been quicker than waiting for the camera
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Alex Armlovich @aarmlovi.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
One part of Single Stair's unbelievably fast success since 2021 is that it re-legalizes everyone's favorite old buildings. New "break-up-the-massing" double loaded buildings so often try to emulate them with fake facade divisions and other visual deception But we can just legalize the real thing
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Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
publiccomment.blog/p/hyperfascism
I would like to suggest that Trumpism is best understood as a species of what I’m going to call hyperfascism. By “hyperfascism,” I don’t mean “superfascism” or anything like that. Instead, I’m using the hyper- prefix in a way similar to how Baudrillard deploys it in his definition of hyperreality as a sort of representation that is more “real” than whatever it was originally meant to represent. (He uses Disneyland as an example of the paradigmatic hyperreal space.) I’m also influenced by Anton Jäger’s suggestion that “hyperpolitics”—or constant and frenetic political activity in the absence of any structures that might convert this activity into real institutional change—is the dominant political register in 21st-century Western democracies.

So what is hyperfascism? It is hyperreal, hyperpolitical fascism. It’s a dramatic reenactment of totalitarian domination in a time and place where the infrastructure for real totalitarianism is nowhere to be found. It’s the signs and symbols of fascism detached from the machinery of the Nazi war economy or the large-scale, organized street violence of the Italian blackshirts.

Make no mistake: hyperfascism is still fascism. But it is a shallow sort of fascism, obsessed with outward appearances and completely uninterested in everything else. It is as if the architects of the Trump regime had cribbed their entire governing agenda from cheap cyberpunk thrillers about fascist dystopias. They certainly haven’t given much thought to how authoritarian regimes consolidate popular consent; in fact, they’re acting like the 2024 election represented the end of politics, and therefore the end of any need on their part to modulate their behavior in order to ensure regime stability.
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
this can be especially clarifying in housing, where the gap between current production and available supply is 18+ months
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
damn i was cooking here
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
oil crisis, climate crisis, road fatality crisis, yet petromasculinity rises unabated the US is not a serious country
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
left abundance lives
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Yonah Freemark @yonahfreemark.com · 01/06/2026
The inability of US cities to expand their rail networks is becoming increasingly shocking www.urban.org/urban-wire/r...
US has fewer per capita rail miles than other wealthy countries
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Great piece by @mnolangray.bsky.social on cities turned into museums. Pertinent to just about every small town in the US mnolangray.substack.com/p/saving-the...
mnolangray.substack.com
Saving the Buildings, Losing the Character
On the strange, slow death of a hometown.
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
Created this tutorial for anyone interested in learning how building costs and rents work: rentrentier.com/housing-fina...
rentrentier.com
Interactive Social Housing Finance Tutorial
My favorite thing about the belief that developers regularly make huge profits is that it suggests an immediate and obvious solution to the housing crisis: you! That's right, you can simply build affo...
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 26/05/2026
Mayor Mamdani has announced the Affordable & Efficient Code Reform task force, to convene later this year. The housing plan says that among other things, elevator and plumbing reform will be considered. www.nyc.gov/content/dam/... (pgs. 98-99)
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Kevin Erdmann @kevinerdmann.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
In cities across the country we can all see the encampments on sidewalks and in parks that are a new blight on our cities. This problem is mostly an expression of distribution. The housing shortage creates highly regressive stresses. These conditions can coincide with averages that seem fine. 2/
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tammymorales.bsky.social @tammymorales.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
From dream to fruition in 5 years. Congrats to @houseourneighbors.bsky.social and @seasocialhousing.bsky.social on your first acquisition for social housing! I'm honored to have played a small part in this historic move toward publicly owned, permanently affordable housing in Seattle.
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
🥲
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
Correct take that no one will accept until like 2060
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Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
'passivhaus and social housing as key climate solutions' you love to see it, folks
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
wonderful lovely very fun thread here
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Phil BuildTheFutureNow @philsustainability.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
A 20-point increase in a neighborhood's Walk Score (on a scale of 0-100) is associated with a 12.1% reduction in hospital treatment costs and 12.5% fewer hospital admissions
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
normatively and socially a technology I have deep qualms about, technologically and empirically it's clearly only getting better, and at this point the belief that it's all a scam or fake is a belief in the religious sense, not one backed by actual events.
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Mike Konczal @mtkonczal.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Powell's legacy is weird: on one hand, the inflation wave was global across peer countries, but, on the other, so was the soft landing. So how should we understand what he did? Some thoughts, plus the macroeconomics tattoo I got after the soft landing. newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/the-weirdn...
newsletter.mikekonczal.com
The Weirdness of Jay Powell's Legacy
Plus my favorite video of him, and the tattoo I got in response to the soft landing.
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
I pray daily for the death of the automobile
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
cool chart alert
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
www.denverpost.com/2026/05/12/d...
denverpost.com
Affordable units in Denver more vacant than market-rate apartments
Denver’s income restricted apartments are more vacant than market-rate ones, according to data from Colorado’s primary sponsor of new low-income housing developments.
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It's Jamie @sjamieit.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Latest from Rent & Rentier is out—about "affordable" housing, affordable housing, and unleashing the public sector rentrentier.com/a-better-way...
rentrentier.com
A better way to produce affordable housing
In 1937, affordable housing was invented. It wouldn't be called "affordable housing" until the 1980s, and lots of housing had been affordable before then, but that was the year that the United States ...
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
"Greedy developer" discourse is immune to the fact that market rents will barely cover construction costs
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Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
There’s an analogy here to anti-”greedy developers” housing slopulism, where a populist campaign against the elites of one industry just ends up enriching other wealthy elites (in the housing case, rentiers) at the expense of everyone else.
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
I am a "housing theory of everything, including the climate" guy and am vindicated every day www.sightline.org/apartments-a...
sightline.org
Apartments Are the Climate Solution Hiding in Plain Sight
US climate policy is blocked. Housing isn’t.
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Phil McDuff @mcduff.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
I've said before the best way to understand America is that most people are basically freelancers, in European terms. Higher wages, higher costs, much less time off, and a steeper cliff edge if you lose your job. If you're fortunate, it works out well for you. But many people are not fortunate.
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California Transit Nerd @catransitnerd.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
Asking commuter railroads to hold 325-400M in insurance is crazy, class 1 railroads generally self insure given their size. We let road vehicles get away with basically nothing and people scream if you suggest at least 100k for personal Autos and 2.5M for trucks (both of which are still too low)
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Common Wealth Canada @commonwealthcanada.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
so many housing policies, so little affordability
Meme comparing many housing taxes vs “Just tax land,” with two Olympic shooters aiming pistols in split screen.
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
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Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 @maxdubler.com · 27/04/2026
Focusing on affordability *in the new buildings* is a mistake because brand new housing is only a very small subset of the market. Building lots of new supply serves poorer people by driving down the price of existing older housing. www.pew.org/en/research-...
Pie chart of new construction vs existing housing.
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Surprised Eel Historian, PhD @greenleejw.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
You've probably been wondering: "How many eels is a cottage worth in 14th C. England?" This is a reasonable question. I get it. And happily, I'm here to help! I included a chart showing this kind of equivalence in an article I wrote for HistoryExtra , but here's an excerpt! 🗃️🧪
Table showing cost of items in the 14th C., and the equivalent value in eels. The table has 3 columns: "You want to buy", "It Costs", and "But in eels?" The table shows you that:

2 doz. eggs costs 1d, or 6 eels
A gallon of the best ale costs 1.25d or 8 eels
1 sheep costs 1s 5d, or 106 eels
1 cow costs 9s 5d, or 706 eels
A 2-story cottage costs £2, or 3,000 eels

The d. here means penny, from the latin "denarius." There were 12 d. to a shilling (s), and 20 shillings to a pound (£).

As far as I know, no one was buying cottages with eels. This is more to give you a sense of relative costs. But wouldn't it be interesting if you could buy a house with eels?

This chart leaves unanswered the question: "What about the next-best ale?" and suggests and entire spectrum of ale gradations. Which makes good sense, of course. But also, you certainly wouldn't want to spend your eels on inferior ale!
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The LPE Project @lpeproject.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
As Socrates said, "All my haters become my waiters when I sit down at the table of success."
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Eric Panzer @ericpanzer.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
I think my single worst architectural take is that I semi-unironically love this stupid building and think that we should have more stupid buildings
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Brandon Istenes @bistenes.bsky.social · 23/04/2026
THAT'S MY MAYOR
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Regional Plan Association @rpa.org · 19/04/2026
As we head toward the end of budget season in Albany, a reminder that SEQRA reform isn't just about housing — it's about protecting forest land, too. rpa.org/news/lab/the-land-conservat…
rpa.org
The Land Conservation Benefits of Modernizing New York’s SEQRA Process
Modernizing the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) isn’t just about building more; it’s about building smarter while protecting our environment.
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