Oh I don't have a link but there was a project just like this someone hacked together a while back. I think it used Gemini live or something and as you walked and scanned things it would suggest changed to the map. It was a rough demo but seemed promising.
I've been wanting to do something similar but just by taking photos of menus and updating the POI with new hours/website/phone etc
I don't know about restricting rent but they certainly had a progressive tax on high rents, a 1% income tax to fund housing, and then used that to build a ton of high quality social housing with balconies and amenities for all. I also like to think it helped that they slapped a big sign on each to proudly let people know it was their tax dollars at work.
I didn't stay in social housing while I living there but I never once heard people complain about it. They basically just didn't think much about it at all and felt it was a good system and then would ask me why the US only makes it for poor people.
What makes the problem intractable is that we have a system where for a huge chuck of the country your retirement is based on housing prices appreciating. It's clear if you directly own a home but even if you don't lots of the places you park your money to watch it grow are ultimately investing/speculating on real estate.
Some might call it housing asset based welfare. Even if you don't like that mouthful another simple example is the University of California putting 4 billion into Blackstone's REIT with "a minimum 11.25% annualized net return through January 2028." That REIT is 90% rentals. So probably at least a few people will feel the squeeze from it.
Sounds like you may have read it but the book Winner Takes All is about this topic and pretty enjoyable.
I think there's a case to be made that philanthropy produced the Internet Archive but maybe that's a little different from usual philanthropy since Brewster is very hands on for so long.
I grew up in Florida and that's been a rough situation for a while. Crazy that they haven't been able to figure anything out over the decades it's been going on. I grew up with many citrus trees just around the neighborhood. I wonder if those have got it too.
What cities in the US have the capital to do this at a large scale? Risk management is certainly a part of it but every discussion here in SF and broadly in the CLT movement is about how to get capital access.
A university endowment or a city's tax revenue is legally and structurally earmarked. They can't just liquidate those assets to buy for local real estate. For the non-profits and community land trusts actually doing this work, securing patient, low-cost capital is absolutely the primary bottleneck.
The high leverage of private landlords actually makes them more vulnerable to systemic shocks. Meanwhile, non-market housing models (like land trusts) don't over-leverage their properties, which is exactly why they historically have much lower default rates during crises.
Given the option of landlords making bank for their risk and then getting a government bailout when there's an economic shock or having more housing decommoddified I'd take the latter. There's very little housing in the US that is under these alternative structures so at the very least I'd encourage more experimentation with them.
On a note about addressing housing concerns, it certainly would only help a minority of folks but what do people think about right of first refusal?
Like if a landlord wants to sell their building and someone comes along with an offer for $500k then the current tenants have an option to buy it at that price.
Certainly would be annoying for investors looking to buy quickly but potentially life changing for long term tenants about to get a new landlord.
Vicious cycle. There was a story yesterday about a couple's rent going up 70% after they told the landlord they were having a baby around the same time the lease was up for renewal.
Community land trusts, cooperatives, nonprofits, universities, local government, etc.
The problem is always financing. If you're going to own a place you need a lot of upfront capital. If you own a place and plan to maximize rent increases it's easy to leverage your new asset to buy more properties. But if you just want to keep it near cost then you need a new infusion of capital for each new property. So, by their nature such endeavors don't grow as fast as rent maximizing landlord can grow.
New Zealand and Australia have very minimal subsidies.
I do wonder what it would be like if our system was designed to feed people rather than to make money.
It's baffling that in Florida the land of oranges you see little cups of pealed that say product of Spain and packaged in Thailand. I know supply chains are complex and labor costs are a big factor but still.
I'm currently working on my fourth book produced using Typst, and it has been nothing but amazing. LLMs struggle with Typst a bit but other than that it has been an absolute joy to work with.
I have a pretty good workflow set up for publishing these books, which are mostly collections of student essays. I use Pandoc to convert the students' Word documents into Typst, then unify the formatting, styles, and headers (mostly via LLMs). From there, I generate both a nice digital PDF and a print-ready PDF using Typst, and then use Pandoc again to convert the Typst into what ultimately becomes an EPUB.
It all works quite beautifully. Most of the challenges I've run into are related to Typst features that don't map cleanly to Pandoc, so I end up adding a few funky conditionals so those features aren't hit when converting via Pandoc. sys.inputs makes that very easy https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/11588
A jobs board for urbanists. I run the newsletter https://urbanismnow.com and our jobs links are some of the most popular and we also get more jobs than we can put each week in the newsletter. So thought I'd spin it out into something a little separate. I've been noodling on it for a while but I think we're about ready to launch.
I've also recently setup Hermes to be a bit of a project manager for my side projects and it's worked quite well. Gave it a little CLI to see my todos, projects, and "areas" (ongoing long term things). Then it bugs me once in a while when a project is going stale. One of the nicest things is being able to add stuff to the past so if I did work on something but it wasn't associated with a todo I just let it know and then it'll backdate that.
@rayb.bsky.social