I worry about what it says that we no longer allow children to be a part of the public realm. It is deeply anti-urban.
It isn't good for the kids, it probably isn't good for society, and in the long term, I wonder how much these future adults will care about our shared realm.
Kamala's second home in Berkeley, a 5-story "ticky-tacky" (a type of building that's the ancestor of today's 5-over-1's) at 1945 Milvia would have been a modern new building when she lived there. At that point, her mother had graduated and gotten a research job.
Today, located close to jobs and transit, and with rent control that keeps rent stable, these 4-5 story ticky-tacky apartments remain popular with recent graduates in the East Bay who now have a decent income but still need to save money to afford living here.
After the 1970s, Berkeley voters banned both new 3-story boxes and the 5-story ticky-tackys, and as a result, soon found itself in a housing shortage, just as the student population shifted towards having more immigrants and their children, creating today's housing crisis.
#UPDATE to our story on the lawyer who fought his #insurance provider after it denied payment for his doctor-ordered cancer treatment:
A federal judge has ordered Blue Cross and Blue Shield of #Louisiana to pay the full medical bill plus interest & legal fees.
The insurer argued it should only have to pay a fraction of the $96K he'd paid for the treatment.
#Health #HealthCare #BCBS #Lawsuits #Doctors #Patients #News
Blue Cross and Blue Shield denied payment for the proton therapy Robert “Skeeter” Salim’s doctor ordered to fight his throat cancer. But he was no ordinary patient. He was a celebrated litigator. And he was ready to fight.
More pedestrians and bicyclists are getting killed on American streets than at any time in the past 45 years.
It’s easy to blame the vehicles and drivers, but the root cause lies with the folks who design roads and intersections without taking into account driver behavior and vehicle characteristics.
https://theconversation.com/traffic-engineers-build-roads-that-invite-crashes-because-they-rely-on-outdated-research-and-faulty-data-223710
#news
Violent language invites violence.
Such language changes brains and can result in real world consequences.
The power of violent language far exceeds mere words.
And no one has done more to inject violent language into our politics than Donald Trump.
Analysis with @gilduran at the FrameLab Newsletter
https://www.theframelab.org/donald-trump-language-of-violence/
This past weekend at bookstore I came across something relatively new: a section labled "urbanism."
On the one hand, it's great to see urbanity recognized as a topic. For years, books about cities would be buried under architecture, social science, or cultural studies. /1
A good and important piece from Stephen Smith, digging into the massive costs of American elevators in part as a microcosm of our present construction cost issues.
It is vital to be aware of the costs as well as the benefits of any given regulation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/opinion/elevator-construction-regulation-labor-immigration.html
Blair Lorenzo / Fox & The City
Alfred Twu
House Panther 
ProPublica
OyVeidt
The Conversation U.S.
George Lakoff
