This site uses screen captures from Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — to illustrate articles, because tweets which allow republication/retweets are automatically not copyright restricted, but as you can at least glimpse, some of these new houses have been painted awful, awful colors. Here are two hideous images of what’s being built.

These things are a true crime against aesthetics and architecture!

Some North Philly residents are getting new homes to keep them in their ‘heavily gentrified’ neighborhoods

The nonprofit Xiente provides subsidized rental housing and financial coaching to move low-income families into middle class through its Mi Casa program. It plans to develop 100 single-family rentals.

by Michaelle Bond | Earth Day, April 22, 2026 | 5:01 AM EDT

The call that changed Analicia Hernandez’s life came from an unexpected place — the local nonprofit that runs the Norris Square preschool her daughters attended.

Xiente was developing 10 new single-family rental homes for low-income families right in the neighborhood, and the nonprofit would help tenants pay the rent. Would she be interested in living in one of the properties?

Hernandez, who was staying with family, jumped at the chance for her own home.

In November 2024, Hernandez, 26, moved with her two daughters — now in kindergarten and first grade — into a two-bedroom house painted bright pink. The property was part of the first phase of Xiente’s Mi Casa initiative, which aims to keep longtime residents of the Norris Square area from getting priced out as home costs continue to rise, said Michelle Carrera Morales, chief executive officer of Xiente, formerly known as Norris Square Community Alliance.

This would seem to be an unambiguous good, but is it a silver lining on an otherwise dark cloud? If Xiente is subsidizing the rent, what happens when the non-profit runs low on money and can no longer do so? If Xiente is subsidizing the rent, does that not mean that they are trying to maintain an economic mix in a neighborhood which otherwise cannot support such? And if the rent is subsidized, keeping poorer people in the neighborhood, what does that do to economic development in neighborhoods which have otherwise been improving through gentrification?

But here’s the money line:

Mi Casa is a “housing stability initiative” that provides safe and dignified homes, Carrera Morales said. It’s “meant to serve as a bridge” to homeownership, the ultimate goal for Mi Casa clients, and help boost low-income families into the middle class. Mi Casa renters can stay in their homes for up to five years.

So, Miss Hernandez has to be out of her subsidized rental unit by 2031. What happens if she hasn’t been able to build enough money and expected income to find a better apartment or, most hopefully, buy a home?

I get it: the non-profit is trying to do a good thing, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out. If Miss Hernandez doesn’t develop the savings and income to find a different place that isn’t some squalid, roach-ridden dump in Strawberry Mansion, will she be forcibly evicted? With idiots like Sheriff Rochelle Bilal being the ones in charge of enforcing evictions, it could take years.

There is a fundamental problem with welfare — and yes, this is just another form of welfare — that it was always meant to be a temporary helping hand to give recipients a chance to get back on their feet economically. That is what the well-off, well-intentioned people who designed what started as President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs always saw as the future, because they could never conceive of people who either could not or would not work to improve their economic situations, because they could not envision ever not doing so themselves. The existence of inter-generational welfare dependence disproves the ideas of the good and noble people who helped start our welfare programs. The temporary helping hand of welfare has too often become a permanent requirement of assistance.

We can have sympathy for Miss Hernandez and her two young daughters, and hope they really do make it out of the need for public assistance, but if Mi Casa’s anticipated 100 housing units are realized, there will be some of the aided tenants who will not.

That’s part of the problem with the ‘new’ journalistic writing, introducing a single person affected to represent the larger issue; Miss Hernandez and her daughters can be people for whom we have sympathy, yet the new form of journalistic writing is itself biased, trying to spread that sympathy to all of those similarly situated. Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the anus here] like me to see what can and will happen.

My good friend Daniel Pearson — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met him, but even though he’s mostly liberal, he’s a common sense and decent kind of guy, the kind of guy you’d be happy with whom to sit down and drink a cup of Wawa coffee — an editorial writer and columnist with The Philadelphia Inquirer gave his Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — followers a gift article from The Atlantic, on a subject that’s near and dear to his heart, public transportation, and the plague of fare-jumping which has cost the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, SEPTA, millions of dollars in lost revenue, something which puts it in real jeopardy.

San Francisco Solved Metro Vandalism With One Neat Trick

The age of the fare-gate society is here.

By Henry Grabar | Monday, April 20, 2026 | 1:26 PM EDT

Vandals have done some senseless stuff on Bay Area Rapid Transit. They have removed the fire extinguishers from the station walls and sprayed them all over the place, for example. But what particularly vexed Alicia Trost, the chief communications officer for the train system that connects San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, was their destruction of map display cases at stations across the system: “You could not see the maps for years.”

I do not know if the embedded link will take readers to the gift article, but if you click on the illustration, it will take you to Mr Pearson’s tweet, which does have the gift article link.

Now you can. In August, BART completed the installation of new fare gates at station entrances and exits: Six-foot-tall saloon-style doors, made of plexiglass with metal frames, have replaced the waist-high barriers of the 1970s that were easy to duck or jump. The new gates have compelled more riders to pay their fare—revenue is projected to rise by $10 million a year. They have also led to an enormous drop in vandalism. Workers spent nearly 1,000 fewer hours cleaning up after unruly passengers in the six months following the gates’ installation, compared with the six months before. Crime on BART fell by 41 percent last year. Most fare beaters may be just trying to get a free ride, but most vandalism was apparently committed by fare beaters.

This is a success story with lessons for all types of public spaces. Call it “fare-gate theory”: To protect the shared rooms of communal life, human intervention isn’t always necessary, affordable, or desirable. Instead, physical and technological obstacles—an architecture of good behavior—can keep out bad actors and deter the worst impulses of everyone else.

It might seem obvious that addressing fare evasion is an important priority for mass-transit systems struggling with both revenue and a perception of disorder. But in San Francisco and other cities, the question of how riders access the subway—and how they behave on it—has been ensnared by vitriolic debates about fairness, poverty, mobility, social standards, and policing. One left-wing argument is that fare enforcement of any kind is a waste of money that instead could be spent improving commutes and helping low-income residents access the city. That’s part of the logic behind New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pledge to make city buses free. Many transit officials, however, insist that fare enforcement is necessary not just to generate revenue but to maintain standards of decorum that make riders feel safe.

There’s considerably more at the original.

We noted, last July, an article about fare evasion on SEPTA in the Inquirer. The transit authority had significantly increased fare enforcement, but this was the real money line as far as I was concerned:

Transit Police Chief Charles Lawson said the agency has learned so far that the majority of fare evaders are everyday working residents — nurses, lawyers, even city employees with free passes, who, in a rush to catch the train, or out of habit after not paying in recent years, step over the turnstiles.

In other words, a whole lot of people who could pay — nurses in the City of Brotherly Love can easily make over $50 an hour — just didn’t. Some of them are now getting busted, charged with theft of services, which can cost them up to a $300 fine, all to beat a $2.90 fare. SEPTA riders could pay the fare for 100 trips, and it would be less than a $300 fine.

Translation: some “nurses, lawyers and city employees with free passes” are just plain stupid.

It does blow the argument about poverty being the problem out of the water, at least financial poverty. There is, however, a poverty of civility involved, a poverty which allowed the vandalism documented on BART to occur and be left to linger. I’m no one special, and like many other poor people, I grew up without a father after my eighth birthday, but I was still never drawn to graffiti — I noted my disgust to senseless graffiti in Athens here — or other senseless vandalism. I’ve had to take the subway or bus very infrequently in my life, almost always away from home when I did, but not only did I never try to bypass the fares, it never even occurred to me to try.

There was one very frustrating gate for the Paris Metro at the bottom of the Channel Tunnel station 🙁 , and while I might have said darn and heck and shoot at the time, I still paid the fare to get through, and finally the gate cooperated!

Mr Pearson wrote:

People can yell and stomp their feet as much as they want, but the data is extraordinarily clear. Enforce the fare and other forms of bad behavior also decline. Let it go and bad behavior explodes. Septa must avoid the urge to soften penalties in the future.

Think about this. SEPTA and BART, and other public transit agencies are adding fare gates which are harder to jump, to step over, because the earlier turnstile designs simply assumed that people were honest and wouldn’t try to evade fares. Previous lack of enforcement meant that the consequences of bad behavior were removed, but people ought to have some basic honesty in the first place. We shouldn’t have to build evasion-resistant fare gates; we should have people simply paying the fare automatically, because it’s the right thing to do.

How and when did we get away from that?

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain fisked an article from The New York Times, one which tried to make the case that American women postponing childbirth might still have children later in life.

“Fertility delayed is fertility denied” is one of the great maxims of demographics. As a matter of statistical average, postponing parenthood means reducing the total number of children. It requires a few more sentences to explain why this is true, but the fundamental fact is that every woman begins her fertile years at puberty (menarche) and concludes her fertility at menopause. Biology establishes a window of roughly 30 years (roughly ages 15 to 45) during which pregnancy can occur. Let us suppose that the reader is among those who feel a sense of horror about “teenage pregnancy.” While I could argue that this attitude is irrational, I’ll not belabor that point here. But in seeking to eradicate teenage motherhood, what you are attempting to do is to subtract five years from the potential baby-making years of the female population.

Stipulating, then, that no woman should ever give birth before age 20, you still have (in theory) a 25-year period during which births can occur. Ah, but biological fertility declines significantly after age 30, and the risk of birth defects (particularly Down syndrome) increases after age 35. The window for successful childbearing, you see, is actually narrower than the menarche-to-menopause span of 15-to-45 would suggest. That five-year delay you demanded to prevent teenage motherhood has consequences down the line, which is why in recent decades we have had so many 30-something women in crisis at the ticking of their “biological clock.” We cannot go back in time to take advantage of opportunities we have already passed up — fertility delayed is fertility denied.

Liberals don’t want to acknowledge this reality, and for many years have been selling false hope about egg-freezing, IVF and other advanced medical treatments as a panacea for the problems created by attempting to beat the biological clock. Even if you are buying what they’re selling — i.e., that becoming a mom at 45 is medically feasible — does it make sense that any large number of childless women would pursue these expensive procedures? You’ve gone childless for decades, and now at middle age, you’re going to pay tens of thousands of dollars to make a baby? Do you want to be the only 50-year-old mom at your kindergartner’s PTA? And then you’ll be eligible for Social Security by the time this kid graduates high school. This kind of choice just doesn’t make sense, which is why very few women actually do it.

There’s a feminist attitude that strong, smart career women have to build their careers early, along with the accurate-enough problem that career women having children are sometimes “mommy tracked,” making getting that C-suite office unattainable. Of course, most men fail to gain that C-suite office as well.

The feminist attitude also ignores something rarely discussed: while women are now in the labor force just as much as are men, most women, like most men, have jobs, but not anything the feminists would see as careers. But the career-woman ideal, pushed by so many of our friends on the left, and the public school teachers creates another issue which stifles fertility.

In 1975, the age of first marriage for women was 21.1 years; in 2025, it was 28.4 years. Assuming (hah!) that most women want to wait until they’re married to get knocked up have children, that’s another 7.3 years out of fertility.

Then add the fact that in 1975, 66% of all households were headed by a married couple, while only 47% were in 2025, we have a huge population of unmarried single women, women who are (supposedly) less likely to procreate.

Then there’s this. A lady on Twitter styling herself skum wrote:

My boomer mom told me I spend too much on food.

“Just cook at home like we did.”

Mom: Your groceries in 1987 cost $180/mo.
Mine cost $420/mo.
Same items.
Same store brand.

Your kitchen was in a house you owned at 29.

Mine is in apartment I share with a roommate at 34.

I’m not eating out too much.
I’m eating in a different economy.

I passed the salad.
Said nothing.

Being the [insert slang term for the anus here] that I am, it’s unsurprising that I responded with the absolute truth:

“Your kitchen was in a house you owned at 29. Mine is in apartment I share with a roommate at 34.”

Translation: your mother was married by age 29, was being a grown-up, while you’re still playing a being a kid at 34. Marriage is greatest contributor to economic well-being.

Skum didn’t mention having a child, but that she was sharing an apartment with a roommate, so I assume no kids, at age 34. I suppose it’s great that she hasn’t got a bastard child, bastardy being one of the major contributors to poverty, but it also means that if she meets Mr Right, as opposed to Mr Right Now, tomorrow, and gets married, she is still unlikely to get knocked up have a child before age 36. That’s a major factor in the declining birthrate, because a first child at age 36, even if he’s healthy, is still unlikely to be followed by a second child.

Our demographic decline, other than seemingly by illegal immigrants, is a natural result of liberalism.

My good friend Daniel Pearson — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met him, but I follow him on Twitter! — an editorial writer and columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and someone about whom I’ve thrice asked if he could actually be a conservative had sadly missed the boat in his latest column:

The fairly dry proceedings at the Zoning Board of Adjustment are also worth paying attention to if you want to know how the city is and isn’t working. One case from November 2021 has stayed with me.

Padideh Moghaddam and Ramtin Saneekhatam were bringing Moghaddam’s parents over from Iran to live with them. To accommodate the move, they sought to turn their 2,700-square-foot East Kensington rowhouse into a triplex. Like many families, they wanted their parents close by, but also a bit of their own distinct space. The project would not have involved any new construction, just the remodeling of their interior. They would not be adding a car that would compete with neighbors for street parking.

The couple hired an attorney and an architect. After a local neighborhood association surprised them by voting 6-7 against the project, they knocked on doors to gather more support. Eleven neighbors signed their petition. The area is also zoned for mixed-use structures and hosts other, similar multifamily buildings. At the zoning board hearing, their lawyer described it as an easy case. It wasn’t.

One near neighbor called in to oppose the project, dismissing their desire for a small amount of distance and personal space, saying that “they should be able to figure out how to get along and share a kitchen.” Frankly, speculation about the internal dynamics of another household should never be a neighbor’s business, let alone aired at a public hearing. Still, the proposal was voted down unanimously.

Mr Pearson’s column was more about the approval of accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, but that wasn’t the case in this instance; there was to be no external construction, just an interior remodeling. ADUs are controversial, but no ADU was planned. My question is: why would a homeowner need governmental permission for an interior remodel in the first place?

There was no issue here of an unsafe remodel, given that an architect was hired, a reasonably responsible thing to do. I’ve done a couple of remodel jobs myself, though none involved any potential structural issues, and the last thing I ever considered was asking for a stinking permit. Mr Pearson asked why the neighbors stuck their ugly noses in the family’s business: I ask why it was any of the government’s business.

This is where we have far, far, far too much government interference, and while Mr Pearson was annoyed by the decision taken, he expressed no disapproval of the cockamamie idea that it was any of the government’s business in the first place. There might be a place for requiring inspections of structural, electrical and plumbing changes in rowhomes, in homes that are physically attached to other people’s houses in ways which could damage someone else’s property, but the idea that government has any authority over actual interior remodeling is repugnant in itself.