Ned Resnikoff

@resnikoff

Newsletter: Hire me: Pre-order my book!

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Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· 11d

I guess now that she’s not running in a district with a large Jewish population, it’s time to let the dogwhistles sing

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· 13d

Let me absolutely clear: I am not interested in your opinion of Bluesky personality Will Stancil. It is not relevant. It has nothing to do with whether the question "what problem is this intended to solve and will it actually solve that problem" is a legitimate one.

This makes the false assumptions that Stancil is asking questions in good faith and genuinely open to understanding more. "Why won't yo just debate me, bro?" trolls exist in every political alignment, not just the right.

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· 14d

One more blurb for my forthcoming book, BUILD OR DIE. And here's that pre-order link again! bookshop.org/p/books/buil...

“Ned Resnikoff is one of the heroes of the YIMBY movement. While there have been a number of foundational works on our housing crisis written in the past few years, Resnikoff brings something different to the genre—real work in the trenches of the struggle combined with deep theoretical sophistication and a powerful point of view. Build or Die is a destined to be a classic, a book that those who care about making our cities genuine engines of opportunity will continue to reach for in years to come.”—Steven Teles, professor of government and policy, Johns Hopkins University, and senior fellow, Niskanen Center

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· 17d

One more blurb from the great housing champion @buffywicks.bsky.social

“The East Bay district I represent has been rocked by the intertwining crises addressed in Build or Die: soaring housing costs, a strained public transit system, and cities that bear the scars of historic redlining and exclusionary zoning. Our urban centers are in crisis, and our community members suffer the consequences. To understand where we go from here, research like Ned Resnikoff’s is invaluable. With a journalist’s relentless curiosity and a policy analyst’s deep subject matter expertise, Resnikoff has dedicated himself to the betterment of our cities—a defining fight of our times.”—Buffy Wicks, California State assemblymember

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· 17d

Praise for BUILD OR DIE from @jerusalem.bsky.social, @annemariegray.bsky.social, and @yappelbaum.bsky.social. Pre-order today! bookshop.org/p/books/buil...

“Rarely do you find a prescient journalist, a captivating writer, and a committed activist in the same person, but Ned Resnikoff is all three. In Build or Die, Resnikoff explains how a century of political choices produced today’s housing crisis and how Democratic cities, by failing to make good on the promise of competent government, risk becoming complicit in the far right’s campaign to discredit liberalism itself. This is a bracing diagnosis of the housing crisis from one of the best qualified housing journalists of our time.”—Jerusalem Demsas, editor-in-chief of The Argument

“In prose as vital and engaging as the cities he celebrates, Resnikoff offers a compelling guide to fixing our urban spaces—and our democracy.”—Yoni Appelbaum, deputy executive editor, The Atlantic

“Build or Die is a deeply informed account of why the housing, transportation, and governance challenges facing American cities are not inevitable but the result of policy decisions that we can change. Ned Resnikoff is a trusted expert and wise voice in the burgeoning pro-housing movement and speaks from a place of hard-fought experience, rigorous research, and fundamental care. Build or Die is for anyone who cares about the future of American cities—and the hope and promise of American multiracial democracy itself.”—Annemarie Gray, executive director of Open New York

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jul 9

This part is pretty funny though. Intellectual laziness?? At HARVARD????

Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America’s most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text. Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jul 8

Screenshot of Mark from Peep Show with a speech bubble

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jul 7

What on earth www.nytimes.com/2026/07/07/s...

The 39-ish Most Stylish People of 2026, So Far
On red carpets, on set, onstage and even up in space, they captured our attention with their looks.

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jul 7

So much of the national Platner buzz was driven by insecure wordcels desperate to prove they could still hang with the hoi polloi. (Note how he uses "I went to public school" as proof of his plebeian bona fides.) slate.com/news-and-pol...

Like many other Americans, I went to public schools and worked shitty jobs. I spent a year attending community college philosophy classes, and some of the best nights of my life have been spent standing outside a strip-mall GameStop. In those days—closing up pizza restaurants, drinking beers in garages, debating the Iraq War—I came across a lot of guys like Platner. This country is tiled with adrift twentysomething males, beset with incoherent politics, whose opinion about any issue is generated in the 10 seconds after they’ve been asked the question. We’ve shunned those former doofuses and nihilists for so long, even as it becomes clear that the future of the nation hinges on bringing them along. They are not perfect, but you know what? I’ll take as many of them as I can get.

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jul 7

Mehdi Hasan and Zeteo previewed the "Platner is being set up by the Jews" line when the NYT story dropped last month.

Post from Mehdi Hasan on threads, with a screencap of the following excerpt: "Does anyone really believe that the usually cautious New York Times would have run a piece making similarly incendiary claims against an establishment politician, based almost wholly on the uncorroborated allegations of a single source who just happens to be a long-standing activist from the opposing party? Is it any wonder that so many people online see this article as a hit job against an anti-oligarchy, anti-Israel populist?"

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jul 6

Aged like roadkill www.kenklippenstein.com/p/graham-pla...

Headline from Ken Klippenstein's Substack:

Graham Platner Loses Washington's Vote
And yet the era of smoothgroin politicians is coming to an end

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jul 1

67 degrees in the Bay Area while much of the rest of the continental United States cooks in the heat. Another reason why we have a moral imperative to build millions of more homes here, and another reason why Bay Area NIMBYism is soft climate denialism.

A map of the United States from the National Weather Service, showing the current status of the heat wave.

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 26

Hmmm

That 2020s political compass test going around except somehow the result is Alexandre Kojève

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 26

Deleted this because person doesn’t actually have a DSA affiliation (“DSA-aligned” in the hed was misleading)

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 25

Do you guys want to see what the 17th Century French version of a New York Times trendpiece looked like? (From Paul Hazard's The Crisis of the European Mind)

Ladies stipulated that the solution of the problem of squaring the circle

should be the passport, and the only one, to their favours. So, at least, the Journal des Savants gave out, quizzing the popular craze. "Ever since the mathematicians managed to penetrate into the innermost of feminine sanctuaries, and, with the aid of the Mercure Galant, to bring with them the terminology of a science as solid and serious as mathematics, we hear that Cupid's empire is rapidly crumbling, and that no one talks now of anything but problems, corollaries, theorems, right-angles, obtuse angles, rhomboids, and so on. It reports that quite recently there were two young ladies in Paris whose heads had been so turned by this branch of learning that one of them declined to listen to a proposal of marriage unless the candidate for her hand undertook to learn how to make telescopes, so often talked of in the Mercure Galant; while the other young lady positively refused a perfectly eligible suitor simply because he had been unable within a given time, to produce any new idea about 'squaring the circle'" (4th March, 1686).

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 24

Oh my god jewishinsider.com/2026/06/mamd...

“I saw so many connections between what was happening to Palestinians there in Palestine and what was happening to so many communities across the U.S., particularly Black and Latino communities, who have been priced out and pushed out of our homes,” said Avila Chevalier, who — like most candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America — draws her strongest support from predominantly white and highly educated residents of the district.

“When we talk about displacement in the West Bank and Gaza, it is a very similar, visually similar situation, where people who have been in a place for generations, are being displaced because of corporate interests, because of folks who are coming in, claiming the land over, and buying it up and kicking the people who live there out.”

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 24

Loving the relatively low hood height

Visualization showing that the Slate Auto is significantly smaller and less likely to kill kids than the Chevy Silverado

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 24

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 23

publiccomment.blog/p/cosmopolit...

My claim is not that the framers were 21st-century progressives. But there is little doubt that they understood themselves to be universalists and opposed to all distinctions conferred by birth, even as their own position within a patriarchal slave society blinded them to the full implications of this universalism. The fact that they failed to recognize these implications does not mean they didn’t exist; Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King Jr., and Harvey Milk were among those who saw the Declaration of Independence’s full meaning even more clearly than Thomas Jefferson did. Each of them enlisted the Declaration in the liberation struggles of their own time. Closer to the present, even the late philosopher Charles Mills—one of contemporary academia’s sharpest and most eloquent critics of the latent racism in Enlightenment liberal thought—called for the left to embrace political liberalism.

If we accept the premise that the meaning of America’s creed goes further than its original authors grasped, that leads us to a couple of other conclusions. First, it suggests that the American Revolution is, in fact, unfinished; that the Civil War, Reconstruction, the New Deal era, and the Civil Rights movement, among others, can be understood as efforts to bring this revolution to completion. Second, we can conclude that the cosmopolitan and egalitarian ideals of the founding, once unleashed on the world, are too powerful to stuff back in the box for very long.

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 22

I support any and all efforts to encourage a return to blogging / writing and thinking in complete sentences and paragraphs.

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 22

🥴 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Abstract

What makes dense urban form desirable, and for whom? Structured as a critical dialogue, this intervention puts psychoanalysis and affect theory into conversation with Marxian political economy to generate new insights about urban planning and contemporary cultural interpretations of ‘the good life.’ Urban density is conceived here as standing in for a range of sometimes-conflicting individual, professional, and societal desires. In this way, urban planning that takes high-density development as an axiomatic ideal fetishizes densification, obscuring the social relations of the production of space with the simplified idea that ‘if only’ cities and suburbs were as dense as they ‘ought’ to be, then a broad range of desires could be fulfilled. The gap between desire and its fulfillment, however, persists; cities and suburbs can always be denser, taller, better-serviced and higher-yielding. This examination of the ‘desire for density’ exposes the deeper, complex, libidinal impulse for (private-market driven) urban densification while also noting slippages within the field of urban planning that crack open dominant narratives and produce space for alternative fantasies of what the good urban life could be.

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 17

Here's a New York city councilmember threatening to get a bunch of grad students in trouble with the university administration because he doesn't like the recommendations in their research project. Wildly inappropriate IMO and CUNY should tell him to pound sand.

@philwongNYC on X saying: "I will also be reaching out to CUNY to ask why studies like this are being published without students even talking to the community and while including institutions that are totally opposed and were never consulted."

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 16

Learning about the details of the new Iran/US terms

A series of posts from my timeline about the Iran/US negotiations, but in the middle there's a post that says "i'll be honest with you, id din't know the minions had different names"

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 15

Never seen a code that required mandatory setbacks for neckties before

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 15

Utterly juiceless

BALLROOM DANCE — While some potential 2028 contenders for president like Sens. Ruben Gallego and Chris Murphy say they want to tear down Trump’s ballroom, Newsom told NOTUS that he doesn’t see a purpose in destroying something that will have already been built.

“But destruction is not strength,” Newsom added. “We have to be builders. What’s destroyed, history can’t be replaced, so even if you tore it down again, what do you rebuild in its place?”

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 11

Spotted by my wife in the affluent East Bay suburb of Walnut Creek: WET ARE CHARLIE

Bumper sticker meant to say "We Are Charlie" but with an infelicitously placed cross

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 8

publiccomment.blog/p/a-good-day...

When Bass was first elected in 2022, I held onto some dim hope that she would be different from her predecessors. ED 1 in its original form seemed promising. But everything since—including the confounding decision to defang ED 1 just when it was starting to work—has demonstrated Bass’s firm commitment to the untenable status quo in Los Angeles.

A couple of weeks ago, I took a work trip to downtown Los Angeles for the first time in a little while. Every time I visit that neighborhood, it feels a little more broken. The unsheltered homelessness, poverty, and human suffering is a little bit more in your face on each visit; Skid Row always seems a little bit larger than the last time I was there. And while individual LA neighborhoods are eminently walkable, I’m always struck by how hazardous getting between neighborhoods can be. One late afternoon, I decided to take a walk to Echo Park to meet up with a friend, and quickly found myself marooned on a dead-end sidewalk with no crosswalk to the other side, cars whizzing by at high speeds.

Bass is the candidate of letting conditions continue to deteriorate. Spencer Pratt was the candidate of reactionary LA’s shrieking id, a creature of the same malarial swamp that gave us Howard Jarvis. Only Raman has real ideas about how to bring down housing costs, house the city’s enormous homeless population, and open up the city to people who don’t own cars.

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 5

Not doing a quote reply because I don't want to add to a pile-on. But I will say that this is a counsel of despair. If you believe this, you might as well withdraw from political life entirely. Meanwhile, I'm going to keep advocating for good ideas like mandatory speed limiter installation.

I see people are talking about speed limiters as a viable tech in America and everything else aside: I need you all to realize that we destroyed civil society because Applebee's was closed for a few weeks in some states during a deadly pandemic. I don't think we're getting speed limiters

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 4

Maybe next time people will listen.

Ms. Fifield called that a lie.

Mr. Platner, she said, knew when they were dating years ago that the tattoo was a Nazi symbol, and that he called it “my Totenkopf.”

“I would never have known what that was,” she said. “He would joke about it being a Nazi tattoo.”

Ms. Fifield said he told her that he and other members of his unit selected the tattoo because “they were like a death unit, they were killers,” and saw a parallel between their unit and the Nazi Schutzstaffel, or S.S., unit, that used the skull-and-crossbones image.

“They literally, deliberately, selected it because it was relevant to their military unit,” she said.

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff· Jun 1

Ah cool, so the frontrunner for California’s next governor is already signaling he wants to retreat on the state’s climate goals (via POLITICO)