Reading List 06/13/2026
Homes being built on top of libraries, Patriot missile manufacturing, an effort to construct new US coal plants, a tunnel between the US and Russia, and more.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at homes being built on top of libraries, Patriot missile manufacturing, an effort to construct new US coal plants, a tunnel between the US and Russia, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Housing
Apparently the hot new trend is to combine housing developments with libraries, either by building housing on the site of an existing library, or building a new library as part of a larger development project. “The projects would be part of a nationwide trend, joining similar efforts in the suburbs of Washington and the cities of Boston, Cleveland and Milwaukee. An October 2025 report from the Urban Institute, a nonprofit research group, found that more than 1,800 apartments had been built across the United States as part of developments combining libraries and housing. A number of such projects have moved forward in New York City, including at the Sunset Park Library in Brooklyn, the Inwood Library in Manhattan and the Grand Concourse Library in the Bronx.” [NYT]
Claims about housing construction in Taiwan. [X]
Manufacturing
It apparently takes more than two years(!) to build a Patriot missile. The article is thin on details, but this mostly seems to be due to the time suppliers need to make individual parts and subcomponents. [WSJ]
Claims that on the order of 90% all the semiconductor lithography equipment that’s ever been made is still in use. [X]
Chinese car manufacturer BYD wants to unseat Toyota as the world’s biggest carmaker in five years. [The Guardian] And in spite of the sky-high tariffs on Chinese vehicles, some Chinese car manufacturers have apparently established a small presence in the US in anticipation of future US sales. [Jalopnik]
The US adds a bunch of major Chinese manufacturers, including car manufacturer BYD, robot manufacturer Unitree, and battery manufacturer CALB to its list of “Chinese military suppliers,” which can make it more complicated for US companies to do business with them. [CarNewsChina]
Ford is trying to get more people into the skilled trades. [WSJ]
Google orders 3 million TPUs from Intel. [Tom’s Hardware] And SemiAnalysis thinks that things for Intel are looking up, and the company should raise capital. [SemiAnalysis]
Energy
Solar energy supplies more electricity than coal in the US for the first time. “Solar supplied 12.8% of US electricity last month while coal accounted for 12.2%, according to a report Wednesday from the clean energy think tank Ember, which analyzed monthly and hourly data from the US Energy Information Administration.” [Bloomberg] At its peak in the 1980s, coal supplied roughly 55% of US electricity.
But even though coal is in long-term decline, it’s not going down without a fight. The data center boom is keeping coal plants that were slated for closure operating longer. [The Register] And the Trump administration wants to use the Defense Production Act to build two new coal plants in Alaska and West Virginia. [Bloomberg] There hasn’t been a utility-scale coal plant built in the US since 2013.