Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈
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maxdubler.com
Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈
@maxdubler.com
Posting for California YIMBY about housing, and for myself about skateboarding and cameras. Tradeoffs are real. he/him

📍 San Francisco
Pinned
Salesperson: and as you can see, the jacket has this wonderful red lining

Me, an urban planner, eyes narrowing: it has WHAT
Reposted by Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈
I've done a lot of housing advocacy in Marin. We have 9,000 units in the pipeline. We'd have nothing without the state-level reforms.
November 11, 2025 at 3:40 AM
Reposted by Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈
Don’t worry, this is not true. The city of LA and the state of California are ensuring that nothing except luxury single-family mansions (with the occasional guest house ADU for visitors/the help) can be built in Pacific Palisades.
Trump on Newsom: "He did something even worse than that. He's now taking a big section of Palisades or some area and he's gonna build low income income where they used to have luxury housing."
November 11, 2025 at 1:03 AM
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November 11, 2025 at 12:18 AM
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I cannot recommend this piece by @maxdubler.com enough. It articulates very well some of the key differences between the YIMBY and Strong Towns movements regarding housing. It mostly comes down to state preemption and political strategy. Ideology vs. pragmatism.
On The Tension Between YIMBYism and Strong Towns — Max Dubler
Special thanks to those who gave their thoughtful feedback on this piece. The past couple of months have seen quite a bit of Discourse about the differences between Strong Towns and YIMB...
www.maxdubler.com
November 10, 2025 at 10:52 PM
I am not a crazy ideologue. I just think that the richest society in human history has a moral responsibility to welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, treat the sick, and house the homeless. If doing that requires forcing comfortably-housed people to accept neighborhood change, I'm ok with that.
Probably the key part of this piece. It comes down to the following: "What does prioritizing millionaire homeowners’ aversion to change over the needs of the poor and unhoused do to our souls?"
November 10, 2025 at 11:04 PM
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"While strengthening local government is an admirable goal, I do not believe that preserving local control over land use is more important than building homes."

Good faith discussion of strategies and stakes in housing shortage vs. local control debates (mostly California content, but BC-relevant!)
November 10, 2025 at 10:12 PM
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"What does prioritizing millionaire homeowners’ aversion to change over the needs of the poor and unhoused do to our souls?" is a truly ice cold line from @maxdubler.com

www.maxdubler.com/blog/2025/11...
#yimby
On The Tension Between YIMBYism and Strong Towns — Max Dubler
Special thanks to those who gave their thoughtful feedback on this piece. The past couple of months have seen quite a bit of Discourse about the differences between Strong Towns and YIMB...
www.maxdubler.com
November 10, 2025 at 10:06 PM
Reposted by Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈
Good write up. Honestly as someone who reviewed housing elements at HCD, I found that time and again local planners and consultants used sneaky tactics to reduce the feasibility of multifamily housing. I find the insistence on local bottom-up reform to solve the housing crisis hopelessly naive.
November 10, 2025 at 8:43 PM
Reposted by Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈
I really enjoyed this breakdown of the implications of the Strong Towns approach, and this counterpoint to Marohn is very compelling. A supposedly socialist former city council member in Sacramento repeatedly spoke of the need to prioritize these millionaires over more housing. Why?
November 10, 2025 at 9:14 PM
Reposted by Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈
After doing over a decade of activism on the ground to get more homes built here in California. This line is the crux of why purely local reforms do not work.

You can have hundreds of hours of community meetings and still will not convince a critical mass of people to build an apartment complex
November 10, 2025 at 9:20 PM
It is completely maddening that you can find 1-3 block examples of fantastic street improvements like this planted median in the Richmond all over San Francisco but they never get built at scale.

See also: bulb outs on Noe street, raised crosswalks and stamped concrete paving on Pearl street, etc.
November 10, 2025 at 4:16 AM
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A large share of politics coded as “left” on this site is in fact reactionary nostalgia - an inchoate belief that times were better in the good old days and nebulous forces have taken that from us.
November 9, 2025 at 7:01 PM
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November 9, 2025 at 7:09 PM
Reposted by Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈
In 2018, then-Mayor Ada Colau called Barcelona’s new 30% inclusionary housing requirement for projects over 600m^2 a “paradigm shift,” making housing “a right and not a commodity.” It was supposed to produce 330 affordable units a year. The reality: just 31 affordable apartments in all these years.
November 9, 2025 at 6:28 PM
While I don’t ride or die for Pete Buttigieg, the vitriol directed at him is completely insane.

“When I was younger I wished that I could have taken a pill to turn me straight; but I have accepted and embraced my identity now” is an *extremely* common sentiment from Millennial and older gay people!
When Pete Buttigieg says he would take medicine that makes gay men straight. What do you think is Mr. Buttigieg's attitude towards gays, men and medicine?
November 9, 2025 at 7:39 PM
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Architects are excited because they know that under glorious communist regime of Comrade Mamdani, brutalism is so back
November 9, 2025 at 5:46 PM
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I think we should make it legal and easy to build starter homes like townhouses and condominium apartments in more places so people can get on the homeownership ladder affordable without having to sign up for 50 year loans they’ll probably never pay off.
Oh good. the 50-year mortgage. That should solve everything.
November 9, 2025 at 3:40 AM
I think we should make it legal and easy to build starter homes like townhouses and condominium apartments in more places so people can get on the homeownership ladder affordable without having to sign up for 50 year loans they’ll probably never pay off.
Oh good. the 50-year mortgage. That should solve everything.
November 9, 2025 at 3:40 AM
Reposted by Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈
pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.
A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death.

Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written."

Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating.
🧪🧬🧫
James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who died Thursday at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers.
www.statnews.com
November 9, 2025 at 12:55 AM
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November 8, 2025 at 9:02 PM
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November 8, 2025 at 9:19 PM
Happy “big ass coat season” to all who celebrate.
November 8, 2025 at 6:59 PM
Reposted by Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈
oh so these people do pay attention to who politicians follow on social media, they just don’t care that the vice president follows a bunch of actual neo-nazis
Axios tried to bust James Talarico for following adult content creators on Instagram and I'm genuinely impressed by his campaign's response
November 8, 2025 at 4:39 PM
Reposted by Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈
Freedom of movement is a universal human right, get over it chuds
November 7, 2025 at 4:55 PM