Manhattan traffic by Trevis Rothwell licensed under Creative Commons.

The MTA receives greenlight from the Biden Administration to move forward with congestion pricing in Manhattan. What’s next for the McMansion? How housing organizers in Barcelona might continue progressive reforms.

Congestion pricing moves forward in NYC: The Federal Highway Administration has signaled that it will allow New York City to move forward with a congestion pricing scheme by approving an Environmental Assessment of the project. A draft “Finding of No Significant Impact” (FONSI) will be up for review for a month. While the MTA hasn’t decided on prices yet, they’re considering charging passenger vehicles $9 to $23 and $12 to $82 for trucks to enter Central Manhattan. Implementation is not likely to happen for another year as the MTA officials will need to set up tolling infrastructure in Manhattan. (Danielle Muoio Dunn | Politico)

The next evolution of the McMansion: The Great Recession imprinted the McMansion on the collective consciousness of Americans. Kate Wagner started her blog, McMansion Hell, to ridicule these huge homes with mixed architectural styles. She espouses the McMansion as an expression of “American bourgeois life,” where homeowners are unconcerned about the negative effects of their homes on the urban fabric and the climate. (Kate Wagner | Baffler)

Lessons from Barcelona’s radical governance: After the Great Recession, housing and other advocates began organizing a new way to govern outside of political parties and were wildly popular as people wanted change. Now, eight years later after a lot of positive reforms, the groups are the incumbents and have to figure out how to continue progressive reforms and long-lasting change while other forces chip away at their support. (Mark Engler and Paul Engler | Waging Nonviolence)

Let’s randomize America: Dalton Conley suggests, in a thought experiment, that we should think about how we can randomly reshuffle America to make everything far more equitable. The idea is that we’ve already sorted ourselves by neighborhood and politics and income, but that we should rethink ways our social contract is based on place. One way could be a randomized system of tax pods that allow us to pay into a system that distributes value across the country. (Dalton Conley | The New Yorker)

El Paso climate charter vote fails: Environmental activists in El Paso Texas gathered enough signatures to get Proposition K, which would enshrine climate change policies into the city charter, on the ballot. Some changes this would have brought include bringing the city’s electric utility company back under city control and tracking air pollution. The ballot measure received opposition from organizations like the El Paso Chamber and a Houston-based oil and gas front group. The measure was rejected by 82% of voters. (Diego Mendoza-Moyers | El Paso Matters)

Quote of the Week

“Among the most exciting parts of the IRA is the invitation it presents for organizers to create proof of concept for public power as an alternative to for-profit energy. While for decades, only private companies with massive tax liability were able to use renewable energy tax credits, public power providers, local and tribal governments, and others can now take advantage of an uncapped pool of IRA-provided funds to construct their own not-for-profit clean energy installations.”

Kate Aronoff in Dissent Magazine discusses how the Inflation Reduction Act could lead to more publicly-owned power companies.

This week on the podcast, we’re joined by Mike Salisbury of Denver’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability & Resiliency to talk about the city’s e-bike rebate program.