Over the third quarter of 2026, we published sixteen “What we’re reading” roundups and spotlights covering research and policy developments across housing, energy, science funding, clinical trials, and more. This digest contains condensed highlights from those posts, organized by theme. Click the linked dates for full details.
Housing
Evan Soltas has a first-of-its-kind paper measuring permitting and construction durations across 60 US cities. A standardized 20-unit apartment takes 4.6 years in coastal cities but just two years in the Sunbelt. Each additional year of permitting is associated with 39% higher rents. (September 16)
The ROAD Act’s ~47 housing sections require 124 discrete implementation actions across eleven agencies, with 58 due in the first year. HUD owns 88 of them and is down 27-30% in staffing. (July 15)
IFP and Pew published a state and local guide to ROAD Act implementation. The jurisdictions that move first on zoning, codes, and permitting will capture the new federal dollars. (August 12)
North Carolina became the first state to eliminate nearly all mandated parking minimums statewide. The coalition story is remarkable: the bill united environmentalists, farmers, developers, and business leaders. (July 22)
Mercatus’s fourth annual state YIMBY tracker is out: 350 housing supply bills introduced across 40 states, 89 enacted in 28. The YIMBY frontier has moved into moderate-cost states like Idaho, Kansas, and Michigan. (August 26)
Building code reform in Chicago may matter more than zoning reform at the margin: five-story buildings spiked after a 2019 code change allowed cheaper Type III construction, a full year before the more famous Connected Communities zoning reform. (August 28)
California housers dubbed 2026 the “Year of Fees.” AB 2074 requires the seven largest cities to designate transit hub districts with 150-foot baselines and streamlined approval for highrise housing. (September 2)
California’s SB 79 took effect July 1, establishing statewide zoning standards for increased density near major transit stops. Cities are taking markedly different approaches to implementation. (July 8)
Halina Bennet’s summer housing roundup: California’s AB 179 replaces fragmented affordable housing financing with a single application; SF slashed its inclusionary mandate from 15% to 5%; Massachusetts folded a “YIGBY” provision into law. (July 22)
Over 80% of residents in expensive areas accepted at least one hypothetical housing proposal when offered cash compensation. But when compensation was offered as a parks fund rather than direct cash, residents demanded ten times more. (July 22)
Michael Wiebe’s living literature review on upzoning finds it consistently increases supply and brings costs down. But the link is complicated: upzone where demolition is required, and you’ll need to upzone by a larger amount. (July 15)
Legalizing manufactured housing requires legalizing starter homes. Emily Hamilton finds land cheap enough to support a single-section home covers under 1% of zoned land in most metros at current lot minimums. (September 30)
Samuel Hughes asks again whether beauty can solve the housing crisis. NIMBYism predates modernism, but the historical conservation movement that froze city centers could plausibly be a response to it. (August 5)
Brian Potter asks whether cheaper labor or materials can cut housing costs. Mostly no, but the puzzle of how HUD Code homes achieve 50%+ savings while multifamily modular doesn’t remains unsolved. (August 5)
Kimberly Burnett writes at Niskanen on HUD’s new guidance for modular housing: regulate by performance standards rather than prescribed construction methods. Modular is still only ~3% of US single-family homes vs. 28% in Japan. (July 8)
Maxwell Tabarrok estimates how the Endangered Species Act affects housing: listing an animal species leads to a ~10% drop in nearby permitting rates. The Trump administration’s new interpretation could greatly weaken these effects. (August 5)
Homebuilders like Lennar have cut average selling prices 25% since 2022 and can rapidly pivot to starter homes wherever they’re legalized, but California cities are building nowhere near their RHNA housing targets. (August 19)
When owning a home becomes out of reach, people give up: a working paper by Lee and Yoo finds the share of Millennials who expect to rent forever rose from 15% to 25% between 2018 and 2022, and those with $0 saved for a down payment jumped from 48% to 67%. (September 16)
Jerusalem Demsas delivers a devastating response to a proposal for WWII-style public housing: that wartime buildout mostly created substandard homes where families shared bathrooms and kitchens. (September 2)
Energy
Electricity prices matter less than you’d think: a 10% rise cuts consumption by under 2% on average, and the most careful studies find almost no effect at all. Firm capacity will likely continue to be needed. (July 29)
11 western states agreed to improve coordination and permitting for transmission. DOE’s draft report found transmission congestion costs reached $12 billion in 2024. (July 15)
Texas faces its next big transmission challenge: bringing high-voltage lines back to West Texas for Permian basin oil, gas, and data centers. Cost allocation fights between ratepayers and beneficiaries loom. (September 2)
PJM filed plans for large load integration: generator-load matchmaking plus curtailment requirements for data centers. It’s explicitly not a long-term solution for the 50-60 GW shortfall expected over the next decade. (August 12)
A new working paper finds data center announcements now cause property value drops of ~3% within 3 miles and ~7% within a mile. Before 2021, announcements barely moved prices; since then, discounts have become front-loaded. (September 16)
Trump v. Slaughter held that the president can fire commissioners at independent agencies without cause. Over the long term, this could reshape policy at FERC and NRC in hard-to-predict ways. (July 8)
Regulated utilities kept coal running 9 percentage points longer than deregulated markets because “used and useful” standards create perverse incentives to keep expensive legacy facilities operating. (August 5)
The US only has one steel plant making grain-oriented electrical steel (GOES) for transformers, and its GOES is lower-quality than Japanese and Korean mills. Ryan Alimento makes the case for industrial policy here. (August 19)
Energy shortages in Africa illustrate distinct failure modes: Nigeria’s grid dysfunction, Ghana’s long-dated power contracts, South Africa’s post-outage drag, and Egypt’s demand growth staring down barely sufficient capacity. (August 19)
Canadian wildfires: unlike US fires, these aren’t mainly about institutional mismanagement. Boreal forests were never managed, and higher temperatures directly drive more burning. The health effects were barely integrated into climate models. (July 22)
Innovation Policy
OMB’s proposed grantmaking rewrite drew 200K+ comments, roughly 94% opposed. Opposition was largely grassroots; support was almost entirely from a single form-letter campaign. (July 15)
NSF is on track for its worst grantmaking year since 1985 (~2,200 awards vs. the typical ~6,000). PhD admissions at top research universities fell 15% this year after dropping 11% last year. (July 15)
27% of all NIH documents ever reviewed by OIRA were reviewed this year. NIH seems to be the subject of special political attention, with no comparable uptick at NSF. (September 23)
NIH proposed replacing numerical peer review scores with three bins: “most competitive,” “competitive,” and “not discussed.” It could encourage more holistic portfolio creation or give political appointees more authority. (August 26)
The Trump administration is considering a $100K fee on international students using OPT visas, on top of new 4-year visa limits too short for a PhD. A new report estimates these policies would shrink the STEM PhD workforce by 11.5%. (August 5)
Refine partnered with the AEA and Econometric Society for AI-assisted technical review. It’s narrow for now (pre-publication audit, not publication decisions), but a meaningful step for research evaluation. (August 13)
A big new CBO report estimates each federal dollar spent on R&D grows GDP by $1.98 to $5.15 depending on methodology. Even the smaller number implies R&D is an incredible deal. (July 22)
Fieldhouse, Mertens, and coauthors find the US captures only about half the returns to its own R&D, with the other half benefiting the rest of the world. US R&D is an even better deal than we thought. (July 29)
The Astera metascience essay contest winners explored AI and science: using scaling laws to decide what data to collect, opening file drawers at near-zero cost, and mapping the literature to identify promising gaps. (July 8)
OpenAI announced a resolution of the Navier-Stokes problem using 10,000 coordinating agents. Terry Tao wrote presciently about why this troubled him, and 25 Fields Medalists released A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics. The dead-ends may matter more than the answers. (September 16)
AI can now propose scientific ideas faster than we can validate them. Agents can digest entire fields and suggest leads, but can’t say whether they work. The validation gap is widening, not closing, which is why the lab automation investments matter. (August 20)
For America’s 250th, Science published three pieces tracing the institutional shifts that built the modern scientific enterprise: Johns Hopkins in 1876, the rise and fall of the corporate research lab, and OSRD inventing the federal R&D contract. (July 8)
“A Taxonomy of R&D Orgs“ distills the differences between research organizations into nine key parameters, from project timeline to IP strategy. Both taxonomy and history. (August 5)
Kevin Munger writes that the threat isn’t AI replacing universities but academics reacting defensively. The middle path: let AI absorb grunt work and redirect time to things only universities do well. (September 2)
Over 18,000 questionable images found across 15 commercial antibody suppliers, with digital alterations suggesting some antibodies were never actually tested. How much scientific time has been wasted chasing false leads? (September 2)
Clinical Trials
The first personalized cancer vaccine succeeded in phase 3: Moderna and Merck’s intismeran autogene showed a 49% reduction in melanoma recurrence, sending Moderna’s stock up 177% in a day. (August 26)
Anthropic launched Claude Science and announced plans to develop drugs of its own, focusing on neglected diseases. They’re building their own wet lab. The big question: will they go through clinical trials? (July 8)
Ruxandra Teslo and Adam Kroetsch explain why Australia does phase 1 trials faster: streamlined pathways, proportional risk requirements, weekly meetings with regulators, and parallel scientific and ethical review. (September 16)
China may be moving toward stricter clinical trial regulation after two gene therapy deaths and a cover-up. Order 818 restricts investigator-initiated trials and tightens manufacturing standards. (August 12)
The FDA issued draft guidance saying one trial with confirmatory evidence can satisfy the evidentiary standard. Biostatistician Kaspar Rufibach argues a single larger trial or a different second trial would be better than an identical repeat. (August 5)
Kalshi launched prediction markets on clinical trial outcomes. The case for patient empowerment is weak, but they could help surface fraud earlier and inform follow-on research. Maintaining trial integrity will become more important. (July 23)
The Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak has surpassed 2,000 deaths and we don’t know if the existing Zaire vaccine protects against it. Pandemic preparedness shouldn’t be so narrow: we need broad-spectrum diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments. (August 12)
Priority review vouchers reveal how much faster approval is worth: firms pay ~$200M for a four-month speedup, and more than half earn an additional $200M+ in sales from it. (September 30)
Antimicrobial resistance: new antibiotics are needed but may sit in reserve unused, making pharma investment irrational. The US PASTEUR Act failed; the UK already has a “Netflix for antimicrobials” model. (September 2)
The FDA is struggling to rehire after losing ~3,100 staff last year. HR teams also lost staff, and DOGE consolidated admin teams into one understaffed office. (September 23)
Witold Więcek argues market shapers should help design clinical trials too: platform trials testing five drugs against one placebo are far more efficient than five separate trials. (July 22)
State capacity
Alex Mechanick calls the 1970s shift “the hostile turn“ and argues that procedural obstacles, not substantive regulations, are what made it impossible to build. The fix: rethink the Administrative Procedures Act. (July 29)
Jen Pahlka spotlights North Carolina’s Public Modernization Workforce Act: civil service reform that streamlines hiring, introduces upward feedback, and makes it easier to retain high performers. (July 29)
The “cascade of rigidity“: each layer of government interprets the one above it more stringently. Marina Nitze’s fix for foster care licensing: make better model standards and let the same copy-paste machinery carry them. 39 states adopted them. (September 30)
David Schleicher tracks the post-Covid property tax revolt: Texas adopted $51B in cuts, Florida may exempt most homeowners from non-school property taxes. Property tax generates up to 30% of state-local revenue. (September 23)
More abundance
Jason Crawford, Jerusalem Demsas, and Kelsey Piper read the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence through the lens of abundance. (July 8)
On Think Tanks surveyed 299 think tanks across 94 countries. 40% hold less than three months of reserves, and pessimism is worst in the wealthiest regions. (September 23)
Europe’s market cap went from a third smaller than the US in 2008 to a third the size in 2023. The problem: successful European firms can’t scale. VC supply gaps widened and firms are tied to national rather than continental markets. (August 12)
Patrick Collison, Mario Draghi, and Luis Garicano announced the Rhine Group, a forum to convene European leaders to discuss how to get Europe to compete, build, and grow again. (August 26)
Spanish productivity is low, but not because Spaniards work too little: they work ~300 more hours a year than Germans. Empty Spain and unaffordable Spain turn out to be one problem. (September 2)
Team Announcements
Willow Latham-Proenca published What to expect from energy abundance.
Alex Armlovich published Transit-Oriented Development Is a Surprisingly Underrated Path to Ending America’s Housing Problems.
Matt Clancy published The Non-Material Consequences of Growth, on how slowing growth shapes trust, democracy, and zero-sum thinking.
Matt Clancy published the Q2 2026 Progress Report.
Dylan Matthews published We Have a Chance to Fix the Jones Act.
Jordan Dworkin published Ordinary Abundance, a website and essay on looking at our lives through the eyes of past generations.
Saloni Dattani’s TED talk is now available to watch.
Saloni Dattani published an interactive clinical trial bottlenecks game.
The team published What we wish we were reading, a Borges-inspired special edition on articles and books that don’t exist yet.
Caleb Watney published A Long Sequence of Small, Correct Decisions, announcing his new role overseeing AGF and leading CG’s government relations and AI policy work.
CG launched Launchpad Funds, an RFP for new funds organized around one outcome.
Coefficient Giving is now on Substack!
Other Announcements
The ROAD to Housing Act was signed into law, the first major federal housing legislation in roughly 30 years.
The most comprehensive permitting bill to date was introduced by a bipartisan committee.
IFP published a report on reforming Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act.
Adam Kroetsch joined IFP to advance their work on FDA policy and clinical trial abundance.
Michigan adopted the four-story single-stair rule statewide, with jurisdictions that have their own fire departments able to go up to six stories.
YIMBY Melbourne launched the Australian Zoning Atlas, mapping planning controls across all major Australian cities.
The Inclusive Abundance Institute published “The Biggest Housing Bill in 30 Years Is Now Law.“
California YIMBY was named a Fast Company 2026 World-Changing Ideas winner.
The Institute for Replication launched a newsletter tracking their work on verifying key findings across the social sciences.
Arnold Ventures and IFP launched US Energy Data, a searchable interface for EIA data covering prices, generation, demand, and reliability across all 50 states.
Ruxandra Teslo published an op-ed in the New York Times on clinical trial reform.
The OpenAI Foundation announced funding for CTD Commons, a project to preserve regulatory data from failed drug development programs.
John Mangin was appointed to NYC’s Board of Standards and Appeals, a win supported by Open New York.
Asimov Press is back from a six-month hiatus with a sharpened focus on biotech reporting.
Works in Progress hosted the second iteration of its Invisible College.