Utopian political communities are hard to get off the ground, regardless of their ideological underpinnings. Trying to create them out of a drug- and booze-fueled conference in a Mexican resort city doesn’t make the task any easier. That’s the simple lesson of The Anarchists, a new HBO docuseries that follows a fractious community of American expat […]
California’s state government is coming to the aid of an Anaheim-based nonprofit whose plan to open a group home for formerly homeless women was shot down by the city at the behest of NIMBY neighbors. It’s a case that tests the power of California housing officials to set limits on localities’ ability to say no […]
Washington, D.C., zoning officials have a plan to further racially equitable development by making the city’s approval process a little more complicated. The district’s Zoning Commission is currently workshopping a new “racial equity tool” that it will use to guide its decisions when considering changes to zoning code, rezoning properties, and approving some major projects. […]
For many California college students, navigating homelessness or overcrowding has become part of getting the degree. Five percent of University of California (U.C.) students and 10 percent of California State University (CSU) students are homeless during the academic year, according to one state estimate. The two public university systems have a combined 16,000-person waiting list […]
Speculation abounds about who or what could have damaged the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea, a whodunit case that is raising fears about widening the war in Ukraine. The two pipelines—which carry natural gas from their source in Russia to their destinations in Germany—sprung leaks in four separate locations in Swedish- and Danish-controlled […]
The “side deal” that Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.V.) worked out to speed up federal permitting of energy projects in exchange for his vote for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is now dead, and with it the one potential silver lining in Democrats’ $740 billion spending measure. Citing its likely failure, Manchin said Tuesday evening that […]
The nation’s harshest rent control law has become less so after the city council of St. Paul, Minnesota, approved a slew of moderating reforms to a voter-passed ordinance that had initially capped rent increases at 3 percent—no ifs, ands, or buts. The severity of St. Paul’s rent cap saw new building permit applications plunge and […]
The band members have changed. So have their on-stage victims. In every other way, GWAR remains as irrepressibly irreverent as when they were first freed from their mythical Antarctic lair in the late 1980s. The Richmond, Virginia, metal group continues to play basic thrash songs made more exciting by obscenely intricate live shows where the […]
New York City’s rent-stabilized housing stock is being “defunded” by a mix of rising operating costs and insufficient allowable rent increases, putting owners in financial distress and leading to declining housing quality. That’s the conclusion of a new report from The Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP), a trade association representing the owners of rent-stabilized buildings, […]
The White House made a big splash in May 2022 when it announced that its Housing Supply Action plan would use competitive transportation grant programs to reward jurisdictions that remove regulatory barriers to new housing construction. The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, enacted in November 2021, also dramatically boosted funding for these grant […]
