Adam Mongrain
banner
adammongrain.bsky.social
Adam Mongrain
@adammongrain.bsky.social
Director - Housing policy | Directeur - Habitation, Vivre en Ville
Montréal, Québec
EN/FR
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:
November 19, 2025 at 3:48 PM
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
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.
November 18, 2025 at 5:42 PM
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...
November 18, 2025 at 4:37 PM
Can’t claim to be the movement but we do our level best.
November 8, 2025 at 4:42 PM
This is why we make a point of spelling this out very plainly every time we talk about climate and housing policies.
November 7, 2025 at 7:53 PM
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.
November 2, 2025 at 2:39 PM
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.
October 30, 2025 at 12:14 AM
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.
October 29, 2025 at 10:50 PM
City lights
October 29, 2025 at 10:06 PM
@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
October 15, 2025 at 4:56 PM
This book *can* kill, apparently.
October 8, 2025 at 4:51 PM
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.
October 6, 2025 at 7:32 PM
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
September 25, 2025 at 3:35 PM
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.
September 24, 2025 at 5:20 PM
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.
September 24, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Always neat to get a real good opportunity to reup @resnikoff.bsky.social's insights.

www.thenation.com/article/soci...
September 9, 2025 at 3:22 PM
I have found happiness in the city that my younger self could not have imagined. Literally, ontologically outside the realm of imagination.
August 25, 2025 at 11:15 PM
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
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.
August 25, 2025 at 12:54 AM
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...
August 25, 2025 at 12:54 AM
there’s shitty food and then there’s
August 11, 2025 at 1:51 AM
tell me more
July 16, 2025 at 5:24 PM
I spent a week in Natashquan and to my infinite surprise and delight, I would recommend it.
July 4, 2025 at 8:34 PM
I found this reaction image years ago under Ben's first post about this sandwich, and I believe it is the right one.
July 4, 2025 at 6:12 PM