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A Coalition of Necessity  

The YIMBYs pair winning political strategy with an inclusive program that will bring relief to victims of the housing crisis across the board.

A reply to Jacob Woocher and Shanti Singh.



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A Tangle for the Anti-Development Left  

Housing debates have long been a mess of ideological contradictions. A far-reaching new bill in California, which would allow for denser construction in areas served by transit, begins to unscramble them.



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The Lemming Democrats  

Why do they keep marching off the same cliff? Instead of one doomed, issueless campaign after another, the Democrats need a new class politics.



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Big Philanthropy Takes the Bus  

Since the early 2000s, when the Shell-backed EMBARQ began promoting bus rapid transit (BRT), a wide range of philanthropists and transit advocates have seized on the “technical fix,” which promises to solve a recognized problem without challenging the power relationships that created it.





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Fair Housing Needs More Than Heroes  

At the end of the Yonkers fair housing battle depicted in the new David Simon mini-series Show Me a Hero, 200 poor black and Latino families were housed on the affluent side of the city. But a quarter-century later, a long-standing pattern of residential segregation and concentrated poverty persists nationwide.









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Stuck in Congress’s Pothole  

The federal transportation fund is running out of money, threatening the country with potholes, stopped construction, and economic downturn. Congress, which has kept the program solvent with short-term patches for years, now finds itself unable to do more than buy …



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The Counterculture Looks for Parking  

Nothing, it seems, says anti-establishment these days like the demand for a cheap place to park your car. New York’s last bohemian, the Times tells us, flees a city ruined by gentrification. High on “outlaw artist” Clayton Patterson’s list of complaints, right …



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Washington’s Purple Line and the Risks of Privatization  

Privatization of public infrastructure through “public-private partnerships,” or “P3s,” is the rage in states these days. In Maryland, transportation officials now propose to use this method to build a new light rail line—called the Purple Line—through the suburbs of Washington, …



Revenge of the 47 Percent?  

Monday’s New York Times has a fascinating map that shows how social mobility varies across the United States. Many things can be learned from this map—one of them is about last year’s election. The first thing that strikes your eye …



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Nuclear Twins: Life in a Plutonium Town  

Russian and American nuclear scientists perceived the remarkable similarity of the workings of the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy and the American Department of Energy. Now, as the opening of secret archives and closed cities has since set loose a flood of historical writing about atomic weapons programs, Kate Brown’s Plutopia offers a comparative study.



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The “Ground Game”  

Click here to read the rest of our election symposium. Among the many ways the mass media devalue democratic politics is their habit of talking about a “ground game.” By describing grassroots organization as a top-down effort in manipulation, no …



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