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Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

Right. I think it was from @peark.es that I read the quote "nothing like a price to change a sentiment" and I think we have to be extra thorough when we account for revealed preferences in housing, accounting for price dynamism and non-fungibility. This is how we broach the subject in the book:

A page from the Opening Doors housing policy book. The sentence 'What’s the point of talking about my ‘consumer preferences’ when
I only buy what I can afford?' is highlighted.

November 19, 2025 at 3:48 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

My favorite study to start thinking through this is this HUD one on Section 8 voucher success rates. The authors find that makes a bigger impact on absorption than a very loose market (7-10% vacancy).

www.huduser.gov/portal//Publ...

November 18, 2025 at 9:22 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

I think the insights of Waldman and Ganz about the essence (and the dangers) of nationalism should inform the practical way we think about who the beneficiaries of housing policy are. They are bound to be strangers before they are neighbors - or brothers.

I had an argument with a friend: He insisted that Jews were only really safe in Israel among fellow Jews. I pointed out the absurdity of this since Jews were quite evidently not particularly safe in Israel. Then he shifted: “Well, at least if you died there, you’d die amongst your brothers.” This is what I mean about nationalism being a doctrine of despair: ultimately, when you pull back the layers, nationalism is about desiring death, death for others and death for yourself. A warm, comfortable death for you, and a violent, cold, and terrible death for the other guy. It choses being subsumed in a mass to avoid the terrible difficulty of remaining human that rises to the fore in tragic moments like this one. When I die, I hope it will be here in New York, the promised land, surrounded by my brothers: all the different peoples of the world.

November 18, 2025 at 5:42 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

It's also an important part of @maxdubler.com's argument in favor of uploading land use responsabilities to regional or national levels. We are killing our neighbors with these failures of solidarity, and we are dying from the shame of our failings.

www.maxdubler.com/blog/2025/11...

Those of us who do housing reform work in California do not have the luxury of that distance. Many of us struggle to afford housing. Nearly all of us have friends who have moved away due to the high cost of rent or the seeming impossibility of becoming a homeowner. We constantly bear witness to the suffering of the tens of thousands of people who are forced to sleep outside every night and live with the knowledge that many of them die every day. This close proximity to the human costs of California’s disastrous housing policy, combined with experience of listening to housing opponents’ arguments, focuses the mind and clarifies the stakes.

November 18, 2025 at 4:37 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

Can’t claim to be the movement but we do our level best.

November 8, 2025 at 4:42 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

This is why we make a point of spelling this out very plainly every time we talk about climate and housing policies.

But does protection alone make a living environment
sustainable? Clearly not. As a society, the point of adopting
sustainability policies is inevitably to ensure that we
can sustain, and even expand, our current activities. If the
point were to free the planet entirely from the burden of
humankind, these policies would advocate ending human
society altogether. It logically follows that we must
consider both the environment and humankind when
reflecting on sustainability.

November 7, 2025 at 7:53 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

Reminded of @mtsw.bsky.social’s point about some leftist naivety on the gilets jaunes - that the optics of popular uprising manage to convince people that it is a proletarian revolution in essence.

The events narrated in Making also took place during a long and controversial war, and Thompson discusses at length the phenomenon of the “‘Church and King’ mob”—groups of prowar, anti-radical thugs who terrorized dissidents. Although they gave the appearance of reflecting the organic nationalism of the people, sometimes even targeting wealthy individuals, Thompson insists they must be understood as simply an arm of those in power. A “Church and King” mob might be composed of thick-necked men who work with their hands; this does not make it a working-class revolution.

November 2, 2025 at 2:39 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

Your thoughts on social rents have been very useful. It's not explicitly in the text but we did try to account for how social positioning and social rent extraction were things we needed to grapple with to pitch a convincing story to curious but unaware parties.

ON THE
OTHER SIDE
OF THESE DOORS

The best writing on housing isn’t really about the housing itself.
It’s about the freedom to choose where and how we live,
to belong to a community, and to pursue the lives we dream
of for ourselves. It inspires agency, hope, and ambition. It’s
also about our relationships with our environment and with
one another; it brings to light what we haven’t always had,
and what we might still gain. What these discussions
share is the understanding that housing and real estate are
different concepts. They recognize that beyond wood and
brick, what’s truly at the heart of our debates on housing
is the space we allow ourselves, the space we claim, and the
space we wish to inhabit.

What drives us in striving to solve the housing crisis is not
concern for the health of the housing stock, it’s the dream
of a fairer and more equitable system. The real goal is
to create conditions for everyone to thrive, flourish, and
pursue happiness. It’s in our pursuit for dignity and freedom
that we’ll find the courage to reject the crisis we’ve been
handed down and at last demand what we are all owed.
By way of conclusion, we want to emphasize that opening
these doors is both a collective effort and an individual one.
As citizens, voters, colleagues, and even as neighbours,
we are agents of change: our task is to decide where we
can personally make a difference. The doors that open onto
sustainable affordability are held closed by a number of
locks: governance challenges, technology gaps, outdated
regulations, economic constraints, and a lack of solidarity.
But each and every one of us holds a key.
We need to start opening these doors—one person at a
time, until we’re all holding them open together—and meet
each other on the other side.

October 30, 2025 at 12:14 AM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

I have a lot of big feelings about this. I got the housing bug around 2011, at a time where the relative affordability of Québec was taken for granted. At the time, I was reading a bunch of nascent YIMBY stuff from the US and thought that the basic observations held true for the cities here.

A graph detailing to progression of single family home prices in the province of Québec, with a general increase of +104% between 2009 and 2023.

October 29, 2025 at 10:50 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

City lights

Picture of a sunset over the Villeray neighborhood in Montreal

October 29, 2025 at 10:06 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

@alexbaca.bsky.social, to a room full of planners in 2021: you are planning with your own selves in mind

Four years later, we finally got it in writing

A picture of a page. The last sentences are the highlight:

lLnd use planning is a creative exercise: we envision and design environments in which we see ourselves-and which inevitably reflect our own values and sensibilities. It simply comes with the territory.

October 15, 2025 at 4:56 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

This book *can* kill, apparently.

The cover of "Governing Canada - A Guide to the Tradecraft of Politics" by Michael Wernick.

October 8, 2025 at 4:51 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

It is an important piece. Again this is stuff I already believe but we try to anchor all of our advocacy around the idea of residential mobility (instead of affordability) because the point of an ideal, affordable residential stock would be to let people choose where and how they live.

A screen capture of a part of the linked article. It reads: "The seemingly clear barrier between putting down roots and moving around suddenly becomes very difficult to pin down when you reframe this all a little bit. Localism might not have very much to do with staying in place. Moving forms, spreads, and grows cultures, ideas, and groups. And crucially, as Fong and Appelbaum note, these communities that form as a result of mobility also enhance places for those who stay. Those who move are not doing so at the expense of the communities they leave behind. When all’s said and done, such mobility is to the benefit of those receiving and losing residents. Suppressing the movement of people can also backfire: the housing/mobility crisis also makes it difficult for many people to stay in communities and put down roots, because of high housing costs. Ironically, making mobility easier will also make sticking around easier."
The last two sentences are highlighted.

October 6, 2025 at 7:32 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

Twitter gets a lot of rightfully deserved scorn for its crypto scammers but the true believers on LinkedIn are, in some interesting ways, a thousand times more annoying

Comment from Lee Feldman on LinkedIn:

Bitcoin replaces houses as the primary pristine asset/ store of value. Houses return to their natural price based on utility value. People can afford them and live in them.

September 25, 2025 at 3:35 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

I reread @lioneltrolling.bsky.social's We Don't Live In A Society something like 20 times, because it so rightly sees the normalization of spontaneous violence as a reaction to "the shame of being perceived", and I wonder openly to what extent we choose to kill, or let die, out of shame.

We’re far from the myth of the frontiersman, the minuteman, the cowboy, the gunslinger, which as heroic images always were covering up more murderous realities, but at least were attractive ideals of self-reliance or communal self-defense. In place of self-reliance, we now have only the nightmare obverse of the life of a solitary individual: paranoia, solipsism, selfishness, seeing in every shadow a conspiracy against the self. A “they” out there, someone you have to get before they get you, or someone who just isn’t really a human being to you anymore. Because what’s a human being, anyway? For that notion to exist you have to recognize others and be recognized, to live in a community. People? They are just something that angers you, that thwarts you, humiliates you, so why not lash out? Kill them, then yourself—anything to break the unbearable shame of being perceived. Arming the public has not created heroic Beowulfs, ready to do selfless deeds, but so many Grendels, driven mad by the sounds of conviviality, stealing into our halls from the swamps, and shedding blood to avenge the offense done to them by basic humanity.

September 24, 2025 at 5:20 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

But the part that stuck with me is not the broader argument about the subway being safe and cool. It's the short paragraph about how the experience of being homeless in public transit is so much worse for the homeless people than the people sharing space with them.

There are homeless people on the subway. They are there because they have no homes. Some of them are mentally ill. If you ride the subway a lot, it is possible that you will see a homeless person who does not smell good sleeping on a train. It is possible that you will see a mentally ill person ranting and raving. This may make you uncomfortable. But imagine how they feel. Not only are they homeless, but they are also in need of mental health treatment, and they don’t have it, and instead they are consigned to riding a train all day, where people constantly move away from them and view them with disgust. An awful fate.

September 24, 2025 at 5:20 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

Always neat to get a real good opportunity to reup @resnikoff.bsky.social's insights.

www.thenation.com/article/soci...

Selected text from the linked article:

It may, at first glance, seem like productive firms would, in contrast to rentier capital, uniformly support land-use deregulation so they would have more opportunities to build. But many builders are either indifferent to pro-housing reforms or actively opposed to them. (One recent example: the president of San Francisco’s Residential Builders Association saying, in defiance of all evidence to the contrary, “San Francisco does not have a zoning problem.”) That is because developers tend to specialize: Land-use reforms that encourage the creation of more infill apartment buildings do little to help the builders of sprawling single-family subdivisions, and may in fact hurt their bottom line by creating a release valve for pent-up housing demand.

September 9, 2025 at 3:22 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

I have found happiness in the city that my younger self could not have imagined. Literally, ontologically outside the realm of imagination.

A photo of OP’s POV overlooking a Montreal alley behind an apartment on the third floor.

August 25, 2025 at 11:15 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

End of August porch beer. I don’t know if people where there is no winter know what it is to hang on to t-shirt weather like Indiana Jones falling off the cliff.

August 25, 2025 at 11:10 PM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

For instance I play a lot of badminton and I take it pretty seriously. Here is me in my super fresh team t-shirt at last season’s interclub championship.

A picture of OP from the back on a badminton court. The t-shirt reads « A. MONGRAIN - BAM! »

August 25, 2025 at 12:54 AM

Adam Mongrain

@adammongrain.bsky.social

If you can’t read French, good for you. It’s still time to look away!

This is a bit of news about a kid’s soccer team being DQ’d from a major tournament because parents were asking 9 and 10 year old girls to prove they were girls by pulling down their pants.

www.lapresse.ca/sports/socce...