iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Alex Pemberton

Matt Edens @scruffycities.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Fascinating piece on how preservation sometimes takes a selective view of the past.

Reposted by Alex Pemberton

Neil Kornutick @neilkornutick.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

When we talk about historic preservation, it’s important to remember whose history we are trying to preserve and whose stories we are trying to tell. MHZC has been doing a horrible job of this and needs to do better. What a story this is.

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Reposted by Alex Pemberton

Betsy Phillips @betsyphillips.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

I was prepared to be mad about this in one direction, but I ended up being gobsmacked in the other direction. Good work, @yellowbrickurban.com.

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Reposted by Alex Pemberton

Nashville Scene @nashvillescene.com · 11/06/2026

This week’s cover story: The historic zoning commission wrote a whitewashed story of a 100-year-old model home in Green Hills East. The history lives deeper. www.nashvillescene.com/news/coverst…

Nashville Scene cover for 6/11/26: A building plan with title "Veneers of History in Green Hills East"

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 11/06/2026

Nashville's historic zoners nominated a conservation district based on a 1927 model home—and they identified the wrong house. The embarrassing error exposes a structural flaw in the historical stories the MHZC writes to promote overlays. I'm back in the @nashvillescene.com with the whole history:

nashvillescene.com

Veneers of History in Green Hills East

The historic zoning commission wrote a whitewashed story of a 100-year-old model home. The history lives a level deeper.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 13/04/2026

Can urbanists be done with confidently wrong cranks? Approximately 3% of U.S. multifamily debt is securitized (CMBS)—over 85% of MF debt is agency or held on bank/insurer balance sheets—and the 25 largest developers account for just a quarter of new units delivered.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 07/04/2026

Bogotá's cultural heritage office created a superb report on self-constructed districts and their social, architectural, construction, and political aspects. Bogotá Hecha a Mano: idpc.gov.co/publicacione... I had Claude Code make an English-translated HTML version: drive.google.com/file/d/12XbE...

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 06/04/2026

Bonkers how often NYT headlines and copy have grammatical errors characteristic of the website transcriptions of Sinclair local news hits.

NYT Headline: Artemis II Astronauts Travel Farthest From Earth Than Ever Before

This is not grammatically correct.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 22/03/2026

Sometimes I believe economists are too cute by half with their models and equations. There are boundary discontinuities everywhere for those with the eyes to see.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 14/03/2026

My HPR paper with @charlescgardner.bsky.social has been free to read for a year and a half. But reading is hard. Footnotes are confusing. Citations are boring. Fortunately, someone took the paper and pivoted to audio for us. Audio appetizer tasty? Full meal here: www.mercatus.org/research/res...

open.spotify.com

Spotify – Web Player

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 12/03/2026

For a century, Americans with wealth could effectively segregate on housing type alone, enforced by a globally anomalous system of land use regulation. In the last decade, technology has enabled efficient management of single-family rentals to end that segregation. This regulation seeks to undo it.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 24/02/2026

ADU Bingo: ✅️ Unconventional financing ✅️ Built on Boomer parents' land ✅️ Leveraged their equity ✅️ Unlocked financial/lifestyle benefits unavailable to those without access to all of the above ADUs are popular with planners and politicians due to their shared mandate to funnel benefits to homeowners.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 17/02/2026

English speakers need to return to our vorgestern/übermorgen origins. The day before yesterday? The day after tomorrow? Grow up.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 10/02/2026

My grandfather-in-law, Jürgen Messer von Santiago, is a builder. Insanely talented. We were in his homeland recently and I asked him what it would cost to build walkable, mixed-use concentration camps today. I'll never forget his answer: "We can't do it. It can't happen here."

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Reposted by Alex Pemberton

Johannes Hillje @jhillje.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

Heute in den USA (links). Vor 100 Jahren in Deutschland (rechts).

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 20/01/2026

Lüften is social engineering to normalize German landlords shifting the blame for painting over black mold to steal security deposits. It relies on Calvinist shame and a Good German sense of order that rejects the great innovations of Americanism. Resist.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 19/01/2026

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Not X, but Y? Wow. AI slop.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 19/01/2026

Every day, MoCo wakes up and looks in the mirror and asks itself a simple question: How can we MoCo harder than we did yesterday?

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 14/01/2026

Tune in to hear Bobby "The Floorplan Fascist" Fijan chat with New Founding, a Christian nationalist project funder building a (Ruby) RidgeRunner compound in Tennessee. No novel Fair Housing Act interpretations, but queue up more of their episodes for Holocaust revisionism, anti-DEI slop, and more!

rollingstone.com

A Company Is Building Communities for Right-Wing Christians. Some Neighbors Aren't Happy

RidgeRunner is building communities for right-wing Christians. Some neighbors aren’t happy about it.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 14/01/2026

I watched Eden (2024) on the Netflix platform. While there are reasons to watch it, not exclusively Ana de Armas-related, the German accents are very bad. The German accents are so bad, I spent the film so puzzled by the premise of the production I created a Letterboxd to work it out. My review:

boxd.it

A ★½ review of Eden (2024)

Eden wants to split the difference. It attempts to balance an auteur vibe with a blockbuster budget and a Hollywood cast with faithful adherence to its period-piece source material. Instead, it split ...

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 10/01/2026

Only in America! (because every other developed country has windows that block sound, rendering this method of protest ineffective)

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 09/01/2026

Man, cities are so beautiful. And there is not another city in the world where this is possible. That is American Exceptionalism and damn if I'm not too jaded yet to believe in an exceptional America.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 05/01/2026

No wars but the 2019 Chicken Sandwich Wars.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 02/01/2026

Approximately one-third of the IFS blog are variations on the "despite what you may reasonably deduce from our publications and entire body of work, we promise we love all babies and are definitely not racists" genre of post. It's just the t-shirt meme with faux-academic lexicon and chart slop.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 24/12/2025

I haven't followed this drama closely enough to know the merits, but it seems instructive that the official university statement is riddled with grammar and style errors. Parallelism problems, subject-verb disagreement, preposition mismatches—nearly every sentence gets redlined at the 100 level.

Poorly written University of Oklahoma statement on a controversy over a poorly written paper.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 19/12/2025

Apropros the discourse: Miniatur Wunderland, the world's largest model railway, used to invite the major political parties to create dioramas of their vision of "Utopia" You need to know nothing of German politics or parties to understand their vibes/agendas. That is an immense power—and the point.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 08/12/2025

There is, within this paragraph, a sixty-three-word sentence comprised of three independent clauses, within which two relative clauses and three adverbial clauses are nested, and which, in that space, employs a dozen commas and twice as many pronouns as common nouns, including three shapeshifter...

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 05/12/2025

This is the best I've read of the genre. Listening to the article via the AI robot voice reader makes it even better.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 05/12/2025

This guy is a jackass. FHA family status protections explicitly prohibit discrimination against families with children, as landlords are wont to do over wear-and-tear and racialized biases (see: Evicted) Using this photo would help insulate managers from FHA family status claims.

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Reposted by Alex Pemberton

Max Berger @maxberger.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries: “Strong floor, no ceiling” Colombian President Gustavo Petro: “A clan of pedophiles wants to destroy our democracy.”

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 03/12/2025

If I was a Davidson County, TN Democrat in a position of authority and saw this map, I would build so much fucking housing.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 24/11/2025

The "health and safety" pretext for zoning is nonsensical today because it was never more than a Jim Crow assertion of Black neighbors as unsafe and unhealthful. It's how zoning was legitimated as a police power after antecedants—segregation ordinances, racial covenants—proved legally ineffectual.

In 1910, Baltimore enacted an ordinance that prohibited residents from purchasing property on a block more than 50% occupied by the opposite race. Mayor J. Barry Mahool supported the law by stating that “Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidents of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby white neighborhoods, and to protect property values among the white majority.”

“That whereas the death rate of persons of African descent is much greater than the death rate of persons of the white race and effects injuriously the health of the town and village communities and as the permanent location of persons of African descent in such places as owners or tenants, constitute an irreparable injury to the value and usefulness of real estate, in the interest of public health and to prevent irreparable injury to the grantor or its successors or assigns, and the owners of adjacent real estate, the grantee his heirs and assigns hereby covenants and agrees with the grantor, its successors and assigns, that he will not sell convey or rent the premises hereby conveyed, the whole or any part thereof, or any structure thereon, to any person of African descent”
— Deed restriction language in the Edgemoor subdivision of Bethesda in Montgomery County, Maryland | 1924

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 17/11/2025

Diagramming this fucking sentence.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 17/11/2025

I am the mouse and the architect of my maze. The giver of my own pleasure and torment. I desire. I desire desiring. I desire being desired. I desire desire itself.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 10/11/2025

Be forewarned: You may also encounter maps of major downzonings. Such is life. Beauty and sorrow coexist. They must.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 10/11/2025

Single-Stair Sickos might like to learn that a lot of European cities used to produce detailed books on their built environment, including complete floor plans. Here's a snippet from Hamburg und Seine Bauten (1914)

Elevations and floor plans of two buildings in Altona, Hamburg, Germany via the 1914 book, Hamburg und Seine Bauten.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 04/11/2025

Right-wingers are afraid of everything except looking stupid in public.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 29/10/2025

The problem with single-stair in the U.S. is that, in all but a fraction of <10 metros, these units would be unmarketable without filling the site with structured parking, which a 2.0 FAR cannot financially support. And 2.0 FAR can't pay for the land in the fraction without huge parking ratios.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 23/10/2025

If only the White House was a mass produced builder-grade ranch house in the 78th most notable mid-century sprawl subdivision in Nashville, Tennessee. USAmerican historic preservation is the fakest thing humans have ever devised.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 22/10/2025

"Urban Planning" has become an exercise in gilding vibes with a veneer of empirics. Just a remarkable lack of rigor in 99% of work product from this industry.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 20/10/2025

More than a century into the American Zoning Experiment, we have the first example of application for its stated purpose: to regulate nuisance land uses.

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Reposted by Alex Pemberton

MeidasTouch @meidastouch.com · 19/10/2025

🚨 NEWS: Colombian President Gustavo Petro accuses U.S. government officials of murder and violating Colombia’s sovereignty and says the Trump-ordered strike of a boat in the Caribbean killed a fisherman named Alejandro Carranza.

Screenshot of a post on X from Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s verified account. The post reads: “US government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters. Fisherman Alejandro Carranza had no ties to the drug trade and his daily activity was fishing. The Colombian boat was adrift and had its distress signal up due to an engine failure. We await explanations from the US government.”

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