Housing:

[H1] Seattle may be getting rid of single-family zoning! Wait, no!

[H2] The Anti-planner takes issue with the new HUD fair housing rule. On which, regardless of the merits (I have no real problem with it), I continue to believe represents a liability to Democratic unity.

[H3] Rent-controlled apartments in Sweden are less segregated by income, but more segregated by ethnicity.

[H4] Should a mobile home park be able to ban children?

[H5] I’m a tad skeptical of the plan of this DC developer to build “shared space housing.” You can think of it like dorms or retirement communities, but those places are narrowly selecting.

[H6] When it comes to flipped houses, buyer beware. We found out our house was quasi-flipped some time after we bought it. Oh, and that a dog was left to starve in our basement after an acrimonious divorce.

Work:

[W1] Attention Saul Degraw! Attention Saul Degraw!

[W2] Scott Sumner wonders if the minimum wage hike proposal in the UK has an anti-immigration angle.

[W3] Kansas City is going forward with its attempt to significantly jack up its minimum wage (discussed here). New York, meanwhile, is raising the minimum wage rather selectively. These carve-outs could make for some interesting incentives.

[W4] In his argument against raising the minimum wage, Reihan Salam makes a point that I have in the past: The appropriate minimum wage for Massachusetts is probably not the appropriate minimum wage for Mississippi (even if we assume the same value system). Catherine Rampell makes a similar point here. All of which could bode ill for upstate New York.

[W5] Good walls make good coworkers. I actually found, over the years, that I prefer cubicles to offices and prefer the open environment to a closed one. This is, for me, quite odd.

[W6] In Virginia, it requires 40 hours of training to be a badge-carrying “conservator of the peace”, and 1,500 to be a barber.

Liberalism:

[L1] It turns out, if you remove something unfavorable to liberals in the description, it may be that your social science work is more likely to be published.

[L2] Have recent studies and reports exaggerated the prevalence of racism?

[L3] According to a new study study, conservatives have more self-control than liberals. On the other hand, this may be unhealthy for them.

[L4] I am not surprised that support for government redistribution is falling among the elderly (a lot of what they get, they don’t see as such), but I am a bit surprised about African-Americans?

[L5] This Eric Posner chart sheds some light about why conservatives are so paranoid about Supreme Court picks. A part of me wonders if Roberts and Kennedy see the writing on the wall, regarding the court’s future, and are hoping by playing nice now the future liberal court will play nice when they are in the majority.

Politics:

[P1] Zic sent along this article from the Washington Post that points out that we are indeed reserving the right to our own facts, and wonders what that means for democracy.

[P2] Vote Cruz ’16, Because Let’s Just Get This Over With.

[P3] Judd Legum makes the progressive case for Donald Trump.

[P4] Jesse Ventura is Feeling the Bern.

[P5] Sayeth the Department of Energy: Drill, Baby, Drill.

[P6] It used to be that whenever I took one of those “Which party should you belong to” quizzes, I’d get the Natural Law Party. Maybe that’s what fuels my (so far unsuccessful) desire to like Rand Paul. (I sometimes still use the NLP as a dodge to “Are you a Republican or a Democrat?” questions when I don’t want to answer them.)

Society:

[S1] Perspective! Here are well-placed photographs that make some dogs look huge.

[S2] Atticus Finch’s name is being tarnished due to the release of Go Set a Watchman, but the seeds were already there on account of his rape-denialism and insufficient liberalism in To Kill a Mockingbird.

[S3] Kate Knibbs’s identity was stolen to become a blogger.

[S4] Remember Blockbuster? Over at Hit Coffee, I report that Alaska still has one!

[S5] Highly educated women are reproducing in higher numbers.

[S6] Ermm…

[S7] Puppies are so great. You get them when they’re so tiny and watch them grow… into bears? Imagine the come-down, thinking that you have dogs so smart that they can sit on their behinds, only to discover…

{Front Page image taken from an Alaska Airlines flight. Alaska Airlines is pretty great and I wish they operated on the East Coast.}