Call for bureaucrats, A Cure for NIMBYism revisited, and Why I remain skeptical about Tesla Robotaxis

Odds and Ends 01.07.2025

Hey folks, this is more of a quick hits post today. We’ll be back to deep dives, hot takes, and interviews later in the week.

Are you a Treasury Official or City Manager?

I’m currently researching the way we finance American cities and thinking through the implications of a U.S. sovereign default.

Operative Question: what happens if (when?) the federal government can’t keep putting money into local budgets across the country?

I’ve got the broad strokes, but there are a lot of details to verify and dots to connect. If you, or someone you know, is willing to chat (off the record) I’d be eternally grateful.

Curing NIMBYism

Last month, I made the case that status quo bias is the proximal cause of NIMBYism.

How Missing Middle Housing Cures NIMBYism

If I’m correct, we can re-anchor ourselves as a society on the idea that growth is good and change is normal. That implies a cultural upside from re-legalizing missing middle housing (duplexes, triplexes, row houses, etc) and allowing consistent, ongoing development in the places we live. From the post:

It’s about re-acclimating our society to the idea that it’s good, normal, and healthy for the places we live to change over time. We need to embrace the idea that as the world changes, as our hopes and dreams and wants and needs shift over time, those changes become reflected in the built environment. The places we live need to be ongoing projects, not finished products.

This led to an interesting back and forth on r/yimby. Some folks took the article (or maybe just the title) to mean that missing middle reforms are easy to pass or inherently more acceptable to homeowners.

To clarify, I wasn’t trying to make the point that missing middle is easier to get past NIMBY voters. In fact, I’ve seen examples of NIMBYs — faced with an either/or situation — opt for more aggressively up-zoning a downtown area instead of allowing more modest reforms across entire single-family districts.

That said, I still believe certain types of missing middle reforms can force a wedge in the NIMBY land use cartel.

Anything that allows a homeowner to begin monetizing their land value provides an individual incentive to defect in favor of pro-housing reform. The best example is ADU policy in California. Tens of thousands of ADUs are now built every year across the state and I don’t think it would be politically feasible to walk back those reforms.

Did those reform bills pass easily? No. Did state-level law still require implementation and enforcement after the fact? Yes. But, now that the reforms are implemented and individual homeowners are taking advantage of them, ADUs are insulated from voter backlash.

On to Tesla’s robotaxi network (and why it’s not real)