iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 14/05/2026

% of Total Single-Family Properties = share of AH4R portfolio

Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 03/05/2026

The Metro Historical Commission was founded pre-Fair Housing Act by Tennessee Civil War Centennial Commission leaders and had to be pried away from Confederate hagiography. Led by an equestrian with a family tree of Nashville street names—Lindsley, McGavock, Lea, etc.—MHZC was founded in 1977. YMMV.

The Nashville Tennessean, Thursday, Nov. 24, 1966

Opening paragraph from The Tennessee Civil War Centennial Commission: Looking to the Past as Tennessee Plans for the Future (James B. Williams)

https://npshistory.com/publications/nha/tennessee-civil-war/tn-cw-cent-commission-rpt.pdf

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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

In addition to the economic imperatives, these autoconstrucciónes are often built floor-by-floor (desarrollo progresivo) with the slab extended for water runoff. When the next floor goes up, the façade goes flush to slab edge. Another fave, the pollo asado spot behind my wife's old family conjunto:

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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 · 30/03/2026

Bro had his LLM trained with clips of David Duke on acid.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 23/03/2026

The best way to alliterate is to simply use the same word over and over again. The Dems will get there, give 'em time.

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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

Folks, we love a shout-out. Shout-out to @jeguth.bsky.social for turning me on to the pod.

Correct text:
In a Nashville Scene article, Alex Pemberton put it best—quote: "Where most cities have a zoning code, the Belle Meade zoning code has a city."

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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 · 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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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 30/01/2026

Nvm found it. Fascinating. This is not one of the floor plans I've studied, which had their heyday pre-WWI, but it appears the two front doors are original. AssessPro says 1929 construction and it was being advertised for duplex use in 1940, which suggests it was designed to do so.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 29/01/2026

Do you know which house number? And do you have more photos of the house?

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

They are saying there will never be a more grotesque decadent-Berlin-expat humblebrag. They are saying it can't be topped.

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

Fascinating that this part never makes it into the official neighborhood history. "The neighborhood was developed and sold as being a respite from urban living and remains such today..."

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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 · 05/12/2025

Olivia Nuzzi couldn't write a paragraph more perfectly designed to drive me insane.

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

Your burden of proof on this one, dude. Show me an email, give me an attributed quote. I'll delete my account if you can prove it. I know you just pulled the first doc from a google or LLM without reading, but the actual HUD regs (as cited in your attachment) state the exact opposite of your claim.

"If models are used in display advertising campaigns, the models should be clearly definable as reasonably representing majority and minority groups in the metropolitan area, both sexes, and, when appropriate, families with children."

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

It's unclear what "guidance" this jackass references. In fact, FHEO in September issued guidance that *weakens* Affirmative Fair Housing Marketing Plan enforcement, which *guided developers to market to families with children* See here: www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles...

D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development Affirmative Fair Housing Marketing Plan for the Affordable Dwelling Unit Program/Inclusionary Zoning Program.

In the lower right corner, the form directs housing developers to identify groups which may require special outreach efforts; one such option is "Families with Children"

This is the primary mechanism by which the Fair Housing Act promotes marketing to families with children. The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity in September weakened the guidance supporting this FHA enforcement element.

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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 · 15/11/2025

Sorry, Neil. I'm still going to be Restoring Western Culture by learning how to write the worst prose anyone has ever read at that time. Please in the future try to schedule around events which change the course of human history.

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

Sorry, I'm going to be rebuilding Western Culture through art, community, and curated live experiences at that time.

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

The making of a UNESCO World Heritage site, Kontorhausviertel. Little remains of Hamburg's Gängeviertel. Now they're the most beloved districts in the city: Speicherstadt, Portugiesenviertel, Mönckebergstraße. The exception: Neustadt, which the Nazis cleared to run out the Communists, sucks bad.

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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 · 05/11/2025

I thought he did better when he characterized zoning reform as an example of the continued post-Civil Rights Acts efforts toward the dissolution of segregation.

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

I mean, imagine being afraid of this absolute dork. @rollinhorton.bsky.social

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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 · 22/10/2025

2. Furthermore, to extend the example of the SE Nashville apartments, many are themselves zoned 1-/2-unit. Here's Gazebo Apartment Homes next to Glencliff Elementary/High—R8 zoned. This is a legacy of a zoning system which historically allowed apartments in SFZs explicitly to promote integration.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 15/10/2025

When planners promote DADUs while preserving provisions that make them unfinanceable—owner-occupancy requirements, separate-sale prohibitions, etc.—they are planning for a wider privilege gap. Only rich households can benefit from DADU income, giving their kids a leg up, saving on elder care, etc.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 13/10/2025

The historical record is very clear on this.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 03/10/2025

You're way behind. This is how this position is being advertised on the USCIS website.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 13/09/2025

Pack it up, y'all. Nobody will do it better.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 20/08/2025

If a tweet falls in the Fashion House and no one understands the reference, it's irrelevant.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 20/08/2025

Wow, I can't believe @seanforfive.bsky.social threatened to email the zoning administrator to find out if eating ass is a permitted use in the RM40 zoning district

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 06/08/2025

Residence B allowed residential buildings up to 45 feet high—ten feet taller than the baseline height limit in this proposal. Public buildings were allowed 75+ feet in six stories—more than the maximum under this modern proposal. Also allowed boarding houses and dorms.

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Alex Pemberton @yellowbrickurban.com · 31/07/2025

The view is the best in the city 😍

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