Can Scott Wiener Tackle America’s Housing Crisis?

Scott Wiener. (Public Domain).

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. Each week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

Brussels kicking out the cyclists: Conflicts between bike riders and pedestrians in Brussels’ car free zone have caused officials to ban bikes most of the day. Pedestrians had been complaining about the speed of bikes but riders blame the lack of dedicated space for them. Bikes will be now allowed in the zone when delivery trucks are, from 4 a.m. to 11 a.m. (Feargus O’Sullivan and Saim Saeed | Bloomberg CityLab)

Scott Wiener’s next adventure: California State Senator Scott Wiener has announced a run for congress to replace retiring former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco. His work ethic and legislative achievements on policies ranging from housing and transportation are known across the country. But if he’s elected to the US House, will he be able to tackle the housing crisis with the same level of success? (Adam Rogers | Mother Jones)

Kids create affordable housing portal: Beckett Zahedi and Derrick Webster Jr. taught themselves to code during the pandemic and in the memory of some tough housing searches with Beckett’s family, they created a website that combines public data with real estate listings to help people find affordable homes. The question though is why these two kids came up with this site to help people find affordable homes when the city or state should have been building a resource like it. (Dan Levin | New York Times)

Electric vehicle charging program’s actual success: The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program in the IIJA continues to succeed despite being what looked like a political loser during the 2024 election. While not as many chargers have been built as the Biden Administration wanted, the program couldn’t be immediately stopped by the current administration and has set basic rules and guidelines for longer term success. (David Ferris | Politico Magazine)

Ditching DART: Four cities in North Texas have intimated that they will try to leave their membership in Dallas Area Rapid Transit in order to keep transportation money to themselves. If they were to do so, all services would stop inside their boundaries including light rail, commuter rail, and bus service. The cities have said they will set up new microtransit services but many say it’s not a good replacement for the regional network. (Alyssa Fields | Dallas Observer)

Quote of the Week

This is something that I see for cities that are expanding, or…if there’s a gas leak and we need to pull up the sidewalk, and we can implement this [soil conduit] technology at that particular time. It’s the newer trees right now that are dying…with a high mortality, so it’s important to give nutrients to the newer trees, especially in the beginning of their life.

-Environmental designer Vanessa Harden in The Daily Campus discussing how trees can communicate and share resources with proper urban infrastructure.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Cortni Desir, the executive program manager for public transportation at the Connecticut Department of Transportation.

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