Stephen Jacob Smith

@stephenjacobsmith

Executive director of the Center for Building in North America (centerforbuilding.org), stephen@centerforbuilding.org. Personal account. Brooklyn, NY.

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Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· 27d

Bold strategy Menin is taken here by responding to the mayor’s “adult in the room” strategy with a “child in the room” strategy of her own. Members elected her a moderate counterweight to a far-left mayor, and neither is acting as advertised – she needs to go.

Menin has also forged ahead with a bill that would outlaw 24-hour shifts for home health aides - another proposal Mamdani trumpeted on the 2025 campaign trail but has declined to commit to backing since becoming mayor amid fiscal and logistical concerns.
Menin's focus on issues that pose political weak spots for Mamdani is putting him in an awkward position.
He's having to backpedal on campaign promises, often by citing fiscal concerns, while the speaker, a more moderate Democrat, takes up the mantle of fighting for progressive policy prescriptions he once championed.
"It is pretty clear what Menin is trying to do with some success, which is identifying progressive legislation that the mayor used to support and no longer does or is more skeptical of — even if it's legislation she wasn't previously particularly hot on - in order to wedge the mayor against his own progressive ideals," Democratic strategist and pollster Evan Roth Smith told Playbook.
"By advancing these bills, Menin has ensured that progressive members of the Council see themselves first and foremost as members of the Council and not as allies of Zohran Mamdani," he continued. "They're showing they're willing to be on the other side of the mayor, and that's important for Menin because what she does not want is for a large bloc of Council members to just be willing to do whatever the mayor wants."
THE RISK FACTOR: The speaker's focus on driving that wedge doesn't come without risk.

Fashioning herself for years as a fiscally hawkish
Democrat, Menin runs the risk of betraying her own ideals - and alienating moderate allies in the Council - by pushing pricey legislation in a tight fiscal environment.
Though he's a member of the chamber's Progressive Caucus, Council member Lincoln Restler recently voiced that very concern about the proposal to issue lump sum payments to paraprofessionals, who often assist students with special needs.
In a private Democratic conference meeting last week, Restler argued the bill is a "huge unfunded commitment" that could cause budgetary headaches in 2027, according to two people with knowledge of his criticism.
Echoing the mayor, Restler also warned that the bill could open "a Pandora's box" for municipal unions seeking to circumvent labor negotiations by approaching the Council directly with requests for resolving economic issues, said the people, who were granted anonymity to discuss the closed-door session.
Menin spokesperson Henry Robins disputed the notion that the bill would saddle the city with an unfunded mandate. The speaker believes the measure will secure savings in the long term as the increased pay will stave off attrition among Department of Education paraprofessionals, preventing an increase in so-called "Carter cases" in which families seek reimbursement for private school tuition to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars annually, Robins said.
As it relates to the broader point about the speaker advancing legislation that puts the mayor in political tight spots, Robins said she's focused on advancing "protections for working New Yorkers."

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· 28d

Lmao, the guy who scammed real estate Twitter is now trying to become a fire reform influencer

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· 28d

A 14-story building on a mid-block side street site in the East Village…Andrew Berman must be throwing up www.nyc.gov/mayors-offic...

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· 28d

Take a look at how this is done in Barcelona (left) vs. NYC (right, outside of Brooklyn tech). Barcelona has a handful of bins per block that they collect up to twice a day. They do not let rotting trash consume 10% of their curbside space for days on end before collection. That is disgusting!

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· 28d

Incredible Wall Street Journal reporting on how this war succeeded in making the Iranian people rise up…to support hardliners within the regime. Secular women showing up to rallies to change “We are the soldiers of Seyyed Mojtaba,” things of that nature. www.wsj.com/world/middle...

The U.S. and mediators say any attempt by Iranian diplomats to find an understanding on the administration of the strait are being sabotaged by hard-liners. Iranian diplomats have told mediators they would like to find a compromise but their hands are tied.
They are under pressure in the streets as well. In regime-managed funeral ceremonies for Khamenei's burial last week, massive crowds unfurled giant banners that read "kill Trump." President Masoud Pezeshkian, a
moderate, was greeted by chants of "Death to the normalizers" and "Death to the traitors."

A 40-year-old female teacher, who had joined the anti-hijab protests in 2022 and subsequently stopped wearing the veil, said she recently participated in a pro-regime rally in Tehran.
"I saw many girls whose clothing would previously have been reprimanded by the government—unveiled, wearing blouses and pants, with manicured nails," she said. They were waving the Iranian flag. The women were joined by male university students sporting tattoos and T-shirts, Western attire frowned upon by the regime. They chanted,
"We are the soldiers of Seyyed Mojtaba," using an honorific title, she said.

Last week, a 34-year-old Tehran-based startup entrepreneur who had long opposed
the regime posted a picture of himself proudly posing in uniform after joining the military.
He was beaten so badly by security forces during the 2022 protests he couldn't move for days. He was tear gassed during the January protests and waited hopefully for the war, thinking the regime was about to be toppled.

But he changed his mind after his uncle's house in Tehran was destroyed in the early days of the war and after scrambling to reach his ex-girlfriend who worked at a civilian ministry near a targeted location. She survived.
"America had made an excuse to support human rights," he said. Then, "they said that a civilization was going to be destroyed, not a regime."
The regime came into the conflict in a weak position. Protests sparked in December by the pressures of a deepening economic crisis spiraled into calls to topple the system. Polls consistently showed no more than 20% of Iranians supported clerical rule.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· 29d

The website of the nonprofit opposing the project linked in the piece sure doesn't make it seem like it's about climate change. If it's "stressing infrastructure even more, especially transportation and parks," that's an argument against building anything *anywhere* in Williamsburg! savetheinlet.org

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· 29d

Weird article. The Times reporter who "write[s] about how New Yorkers are adjusting to global warming" didn't think to ask the opponents of the tall building how building a shorter building would help "navigate climate change"...? www.nytimes.com/2026/07/13/n...

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· 29d

Here are the Google Maps options for traveling from the address he listed to MTA HQ right now. No transit option is possible. No bus to the train station is in walking distance. The nearest MTA rail service is the terminus of Metro-North's Hudson Line, almost 7 miles away.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· 29d

Americans say the best way to stop wildfires from becoming urban fires is to space houses out widely and clear vegetation near them. I bet the Euro model of a tight, hard wildland/urban line (easier to defend) and building houses out of noncombustibles (so structures aren’t fuel) works better.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 13

It’s in the link in the thread, 11.7%

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 12

@lanefab.com identifies three things needed to make this work: accommodative zoning, single-stair reform, and elevator cost reform. Great article!

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 11

Not sure I understand it well enough to give you the best one, but I think this may be it...

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 11

From a "lessons learned" slide on somebody going through the US code/standard development process for the first time. This is very accurate. They love to follow a logical thread and hate to read a study and look at data.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 11

The effect of Barcelona stopping tourism growth will be that prices will rise for touristic services (hotels, food, cruises, etc.), and they will just get richer tourists. They aren’t going to be more “cultural” or whatever nonsense they’re asking for, just richer. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/t...

What does 'not one tourist more' mean?
That the city has decided to fix a flat horizon on a curve that otherwise rises infinitely. We don't want to grow more. We want the tourists that the city already has. There were 15.7 million tourists in the city in 2025 — that's the threshold. Sixteen million is the maximum.
But isn't the tourism board still promoting tourism?
We are not coming at this from an anti-tourist position. But we need to manage tourism in an orderly way, and the first management objective is to change the kinds of tourists who come. Right now, two-thirds are leisure tourists; we want the makeup to be a third business travel, a third cultural travel and a third leisure. So we are doing promotions directed at those niches that are interested in cultural experiences — not just elevated ones, like going to the Liceo, but also popular ones, like live music or festivals.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 10

By now the trees would be fully grown, the ceilings would be a bit too low, the buildings and planning would be a bit out-of-date, the planning would be a bit out of vogue, and the apartments would be imperfectly but reasonable affordable and accessible.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 9

Clearly AI-written text that an engineering professor gave to CNN as a quote. LinkedIn is such a scourge.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 9

Haverford College is not very pedestrian-friendly! They put a bunch of trails between them and all the stuff and transit

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 9

Next-gen packaged terminal heat pumps (PTHPs) in the wild, on a FiDi office-to-resi conversion. I don’t love them and I wish we’d just make proper centralized systems or minisplits easier to install, but they are better than old-school PTACs I guess.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 8

This is him. Respectable and mainstream. Unfortunately we’ve mainstreamed the idea that new market-rate housing is bad, and we should levy huge taxes on it to pay for new subsidized housing. This all follows very logically from the premise of IZ! metra.com/leadership/c...

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 8

I’m sorry, what? New Jersey offers property tax breaks for seniors making up to HALF A MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR? Any number in the six figures seems totally egregious to me, given that’s about NJ’s median household income and a senior’s income is mostly passive newjerseymonitor.com/2026/06/03/g...

The New Jersey Assembly's top Democrat said he does not back proposed cuts to a marquee property tax relief program he championed into law.
Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin said
Wednesday during a telephone town hall hosted by AARP that he believes the $4,000 cap Gov.
Mikie Sherrill has proposed for benefits from the Stay NJ property tax relief program is insufficient.
"I think the net cap on the benefit is something that's important, and I think $4,000 is too low, candidly, so we're trying to find ways to word it," said Coughlin, a Middlesex County Democrat.
Under existing law, Stay NJ promises to cut the property tax bills of any seniors making less than $500,000 in half, to a cap of $6,500. But the $1.2 billion program has faced criticism over its financial feasibility since Coughlin first proposed it in 2023 as a way to prevent senior citizens from moving out of the state.
Though Stay NJ's enabling legislation requires that, among other things, the state maintain reserves equal to at least 12% of annual spending, lawmakers have repeatedly overridden that requirement in budget language.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 7

The developer is making this out to be a very minor issue www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 7

But nobody’s ever going to get to Burj Khalifa height in Midtown. Even in Dubai, it involved a ton of undeveloped land around it

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 7

Relegating Canadian downtowns to “other factors” is underplaying it compared to Orange County, which has literally nothing anybody in Canada would recognize as a downtown. It is not an exaggeration to say that Yellowknife has a stronger job center than OC

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 7

Technically a PTHP (packaged terminal heat pump). NYC developers are very excited about them, and often call them European. But in continental Europe, I’ve only ever seen one “in the wild” on…a temporary construction office at CDG.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 6

The flaw, beyond low frequencies, is Metrolink’s limited stations. DTLA is a weak job center vs. downtown Toronto and is itself sprawling (LAUS isn’t walking distance to DTLA skyscrapers). Almost everybody in OC who works in LA would face at best a 90-min 3-seat ride (bus, Metrolink, bus/LRT/subway)

If anything, the greatest risk in all of this is a pleasant one. Were Los Angeles to actually boost ridership the way Toronto and Brampton have, its comparatively low-capacity rail network would very quickly find itself swamped by the riders the buses delivered to its stations. That, however, is the kind of problem a transit system should hope to have.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 6

What do we think of Sheinbaum’s rail plans? Certainly anything is better than Tren Maya, but are they…good?

Ms Sheinbaum's plans are
Nuevo Laredo
- Monterrey
- Saltillo
Pachuca
Mexico City
more rigorous. Andrés Lajous, the official in charge, says the
Tren Maya
Irapuato
Guadalajara
Querétaro
Toluca
idea is to connect contiguous metropolitan areas: from
PACIFIC OCEAN
Salina Cruz
Coatzacoalcos
Calakmul
station
Mexico City to Pachuca and Querétaro, from Querétaro
Mexico, railways
- Existing
- Under construction and planned
(2025)
(2024-30)
Sources: ATTRAPI; Mexico Projects Hub; Ministry of Infrastructure, Communications and Transportation
towards Irapuato and Guadalajara, and from Saltillo through Monterrey towards
MAP: THE ECONOMIST
Nuevo Laredo (see map).
These lines will connect cities that are slow to drive between, but too close for flying to be smart. Done properly, the trains could save people time, reduce pollution and speed up the economy. They could also stem urban sprawl, since rail makes it easier for people to live in one town while working in another.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 6

New York City “added 38,682 units to its housing stock last year—the most new apartments completed in a single year for the city since 1965, according to the Department of City Planning, when developers rushed to complete buildings before a new zoning resolution.” www.wsj.com/real-estate/...

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 6

Sorry meant to send this

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 5

I’m staying with my half-brother right now who is renting a mid-2000s townhouse in Philly, and when somebody is showering on the third floor, the sanitary drainage stack next to the bedroom on the second floor sounds like a waterfall a few inches from your head.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith· Jul 5

Do we have econometric or otherwise quantitatively rigorous evidence of any determinants of road safety? Intuitively, adding a huge monetary and time tax on driving at the time when drivers are least safe (when they’re young) does seem like it would do something aaafoundation.org/research/rat...