urbanism

Nitter

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-one-saw-coming-kevin-133000274.html

“No one saw this coming,” entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary said in a recent interview with Larry Kudlow of Fox Business. And O’Leary believes the issue will manifest itself in the regional banking sector. “These banks are going to fail,” he said, “because up to 40% of their portfolios … are in commercial real estate.”

Carloads on a semi-frequent commuter line? We love to see it!

Lausanne is arguably the smallest city with a metro in the world (rubber-tired M2). Line M1 however is entirely single-track, with passing points at most stations. The trains run every 7-8 minutes,and every 5 minutes at rush hour. It was originally branded as a tram line but was rebranded as a metro line to match the other rubber-tired metro line built in the city, M2. I love this weird "metro" line.

thought this would be a good video to share on this comm

Why Are Rails Shaped Like That?

An overview of the wheel/rail interactions and part of the railway engineering series.

In the 19th century, railway engineering was all about how to build railroads. Modern rail engineering focuses on getting the most out of the system. It might not look like much when you see a train passing by, but a huge amount of research, testing, and engineering went into the shape of those rails and wheels.

archive.today • Worried About Living in a Flood Zone? Try a House That Floats. - The New York Times

The cowards have comments off.

Incredibly soothing yet informative mini-doco of the time we let a train roll away from a platform and zoom over 15km into the city because the driver got off to take a shit and forgot to apply the park brake.

To be more specific, this is the Piraeus–Kifissia Railway in 1982, which functioned similarly to a metro but was not officially a metro line until it was modernized and merged with another line to become Metro Line 1 in 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens%E2%80%93Piraeus_Electric_Railways

Archive

While at any given time these groups may purport to speak for individual homeowners, small landlords of color, or the general public, the board members of the real estate groups behind them are almost exclusively white men who own, on average, five thousand units of housing each. Between 2018 and 2022, these groups collectively donated a combined $8.8 million to political candidates, spent over $2.3 million on legal efforts to overturn rent stabilization, and dropped $7.7 million on lobbying, including hiring the MirRam Group, cofounded by the father of Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.

. . .

The narrative of the “woke” mom-and-pop landlord has since been taken up across the country. During public hearings about a new rent control program in St. Paul, an opponent—on Zoom from a beach vacation, naturally—characterized the policy as a form of redlining. Small landlords seeking to roll back rent control in Portland, Maine, adopted progressive language to do so, with ​​some arguing that their willingness to rent to asylum seekers, those on federal housing vouchers, and other marginalized communities demonstrates notable liberal bonafides. In Seattle, opposition to a local measure was led by a mom-and-pop group called Seattle Grassroots Landpeople. A Democratic city councilwoman in Minneapolis who led the charge to scrap consideration of a rent control program derided tenant advocates as “wealthy beer drinking pants rolled up white men” who need to “get out of mommy’s basement.” In a landlord forum, she described her role as “getting ready, putting my lipstick on, curling my hair and selling our message. [Landlords] are the experts at giving me what I’m selling.”

Outside of New York, this dynamic has played out most notably in California. The successful fight against Los Angeles’s pandemic eviction moratorium was led in part by the ​​Coalition of Small Rental Property Owners, “a California-based advocacy group that mostly represents black and Latinx landlords.” This past February, one small landlord launched a hunger strike to push for the end of Alameda County’s eviction moratorium, calling himself and other immigrant landlords “victims of government abuse.” The moratorium was ended by April.

DB class 472 on Hamburg S-bahn

https://sovietmodernism.com/

"Hotel Cosmos"

"National Library of Kosova, Pristina"

"House of Unions, Minsk, Belarus"

"Ministry of Roads Building, Tbilisi, Georgia"

"Culture Palace of Railway Workers, Chisinau, Moldova"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/us/in-rare-alliance-democrats-and-republicans-seek-legal-power-to-clear-homeless-camps.html