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Stephen Jacob Smith

@stephenjacobsmith.com
13K followers 1K following 24K posts

Executive director of the Center for Building in North America (centerforbuilding.org), stephen@centerforbuilding.org. Personal account. Brooklyn, NY.

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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 3h
But I also think you’re exaggerating how often e-bikes are faster in a city with good transit. I will grant you that for non-CBD commutes this is more likely to be true, although then we get into whether speed is always people’s #1 decision making input.
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 4h
@paulbarter.bsky.social has noted that as countries develop, cities shift from being oriented around motorcycles to transit. Unfortunately NYC is backsliding: people are shifting to e-micro-mobility because transit options are poor, and with that sometimes comes death www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/n...
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 5h
Wow, El Diario has a big visual feature basically showing exactly this – the rental aspect of Spain’s housing crisis is largely a transfer of wealth from immigrants to individual older, wealthy-but-often-not-filthy-rich Spanish apartment owners, not corporations bsky.app/profile/eldi...
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 22h
The firefighter air replenishment system manufacturers' astroturf group is clearly on the free tier of ChatGPT mailchi.mp/aircoalition...
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 29/09/2026
This is the problem with the urban left: they base housing policy on how they "feel" about developers' "pain." This is not about feelings, it's about building housing! www.bostonglobe.com/2026/09/24/b...
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 28/09/2026
What on earth does a food bank need with 10 acres of land??
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 28/09/2026
One ADA suit in NYC has undone another: in installing the audible ped signal for blind people as part of the latest judgement, they ripped up the street and created more unevenness in the roadbed for people in wheelchairs than the curb ramp deficiency that the prior $1.5bn ADA settlement “corrected”
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 28/09/2026
Funny bit to get upset about a lack of alt text on an Instagram post by a bar located down a literal flight of stairs
Last Ditch, a basement bar down a set of concrete steps, beneath a Mexican restaurant, drew news coverage in Europe and the United States this week after a Boston Globe story about the bar's plan to lift its Covid mask requirement on Saturday
nights went viral.
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 27/09/2026
The whole sidewalk has had its pavers destroyed by cars loading and stopping on the curb because the politics of NYC are unable to tell a street of townhouse owners that their street is too narrow for parking
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 27/09/2026
Well at least they all comply with the 2% cross-slope standard
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 27/09/2026
And they don’t bother covering up the sign here either!
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 27/09/2026
Janno Lieber likes to blame Mamdani’s free bus campaign and Covid for muddying the waters and worsening bus fare evasion. Meanwhile, Lieber’s own buses are confusing riders in multiple ways (this bus is not going to Court Sq!) by flashing a “FARE REQUIRED” message on a free subway replacement bus
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 25/09/2026
I actually don’t want random institutions to pay ex-FBI officers to do this every time there’s a semi-high-profile speaker? Americans – notably including Charlie Kirk – decided that we should all be a trigger-pull away from death every time we step into public, and so we are. So what’s the issue?
The school also ceded key decisions to Kirk's organization, Turning Point USA, and didn't properly assess the likelihood of a rooftop shooter, according to an independent security review released Friday. The university commissioned the review of security procedures at its campus in Orem, Utah, which hosted Kirk the day he was assassinated.
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 25/09/2026
“[T]he fire service resists and even denigrates efforts to collect data about the fire problem and firefighting efforts.” —a firefighter
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 25/09/2026
What are these statistics on the SFFD website? Calls per month? Per year? Weird to put such exact data with no description in such a prominent place. sf-fire.org/fire-station...
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 24/09/2026
…or younger shrinks. And idk what planning can possibly be done for a population pyramid that looks like this…plan our 2070-2079 euthanization strategy? Like do we do it explicitly with injections or implicitly by letting people with dementia starve?
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 24/09/2026
Text vs. citations. I think I was meant to be a law professor.
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 23/09/2026
I suspect the issue here is that the South Stair doesn’t count as acceptable egress beyond a few feet from the outer railings, and Trump doesn’t want to add intermediate handrails. I have some sympathy…the monumental syairay rules are persnickety. And those senators are going to die soon anyway.
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 23/09/2026
Mexico’s fertility rate is in absolute free fall, with its TFR down from 1.9 children per woman in 2019 to 1.2 in 2024 www.inegi.org.mx/contenidos/s...
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 23/09/2026
It’s so annoying…your whole bike shakes every time you go over one, and you spend all of your attention trying to swerve around and between them to avoid getting jostled every two seconds
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 23/09/2026
It even says it above the door
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 22/09/2026
NIMBYism destroys your commercial property tax base: “Occupied space has climbed in parts of Dallas, Atlanta and Miami along with growing populations…On the flipside, Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland…are among the metro areas where vacancies continue to grow.” www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 22/09/2026
Meanwhile, in Spain:
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 20/09/2026
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 20/09/2026
“Ahahahaha. Mexico City can tell you all about building metros.”
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 20/09/2026
There’s been a ton of logistics investment to serve Brooklyn on the west shore of Staten Island (Amazon’s JFK8 facility) and just across the bridges in West Carteret, etc.
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 20/09/2026
Brooklyn’s Prospect Expy (highlighted; to the east is not actually a highway, it’s just a street) would be a good candidate if Albany would actually let the MTA improve service on the F and G trains after the signaling improvement is done by upgrading to one-person train ops and higher frequencies
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 19/09/2026
It’s pretty galling how Satmar got a major Brooklyn bike lane removed for, supposedly, children’s safety, meanwhile these massive structures get erected in the public right of way without any permits or approvals
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 19/09/2026
FDNY tower ladder outriggers, both sides (this one’s ladder isn’t extended but the other’s was and the outriggers were the same). Doesn’t looked like they need anywhere near the IFC Appendix D’s 26 ft. of clear road width.
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 19/09/2026
Do they get some kind of formal or informal signoff from FDNY or DOT or whatever for these giant sukkahs in the middle of streets? They are…massive.
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 19/09/2026
Minimum depth at the narrowest point is 6”, which makes them impractical
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 18/09/2026
I’m super into street trees so the +61% tree planting number stood out. Turns out: 1. Fiscal years, not actual years, so it takes credit for 6 mos. of the Adams admin 2. Almost all of the increase came from two idiosyncratic Parks projects started long ago, far from city streets Amazing PR though!
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 18/09/2026
Of course it is also single-stair and, being Sweden, the stairway likely has winder treads. Not sure if it’s this building exactly but this is probably roughly what the floor plan looks like. www.kaminsky.se/projekt/tolv...
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 16/09/2026
And let’s leave categorical words like “residents” to refer to NIMBYs back in woke 1.0. Not everybody – or even most people – are complaining about street trees. “Some residents” or “the city council woman who was charged with biting a police offer during a NIMBY protest” is more accurate.
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 16/09/2026
…stable/up slightly despite national headwinds with rates, tariffs, and mass deportation of the construction workforce)
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 16/09/2026
Looks like they are taking advantage of the street configuration, maybe shift some travel lanes slightly
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 15/09/2026
Here’s an exurb north of Dallas that is so aspirational that they named it Prosper (fun fact: they first tried to name it Richland but were informed that that was already taken). Literally the first house that pops up on Redfin. This is the kind of wealth that middle-class Americans aspire to.
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 15/09/2026
It’s here, there’s a subdivision of them, it’s not even a one-off
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 15/09/2026
Of all the reasons to hate cars, this one did not occur to me until I bought an Aranet4: they suffocate you with CO2! No readings ever come in as high as when you’re riding in a car (or packed bus – that first spike on September 13). No wonder long (and even short) drives are so tiring.
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 15/09/2026
cdn.ymaws.com/nfrccommunit...
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 15/09/2026
Hard to capture so many NYC streets pathologies in one image. You could teach a whole PhD program based on it.
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 13/09/2026
There are so many of these, and they’re even bigger than the ones in NYC (which are generally single-stair, so max 2,000 sq. ft. per floor)! And they use a loophole to the Fair Housing Act to avoid providing even an accessible ground floor (there’s an exception if the “ground floor” is bilevel)
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 12/09/2026
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 12/09/2026
I have stumbled upon Chicago’s four-story new construction walk-up district: N. Sheffield Ave. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I will fix this one day.
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 11/09/2026
Anybody know how far over a sidewalk balconies are allowed to project in Chicago? Looks like it’s more than NYC’s 2’6”
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 09/09/2026
My question was ruled out of order, presumably due to CP 50-21, which forbids us from talking about pricing. Well how are we supposed to talk about the cost impact of a proposal to allow a product manufactured by a single manufacturer without talking about that price? www.iccsafe.org/wp-content/u...
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 09/09/2026
His company is the only one who makes the product. Their cost proposal is to require it. He said the cost is $150/unit. His website says $250/unit – I asked what’s up with that. He said $150/unit is the bulk pricing. I went to the website and requested bulk pricing…it said $250-$375/unit.
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 09/09/2026
@willskud.bsky.social is currently putting his life on the line to experience it personally
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 09/09/2026
Something that you’ll notice that the chair never disclosed when he made his oral introduction is that he’s representing a data center vendor. I suspect that has something to do with why this has moved so much faster than G13 (multifam committee).
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Stephen Jacob Smith @stephenjacobsmith.com · 09/09/2026
The article blatantly contradicts itself about the unit sizes
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