Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Florida’s property tax rollback, projected PCB shortages, the end of Tesla’s Cybertruck, the lack of progress in carbon storage, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Housekeeping items this week: I accidentally emailed out this week’s essay, How Do Building Codes Affect the Price of Housing, to paid members only instead of all subscribers. This has been fixed, and it’s available now for everyone. I think a couple people may have signed up for paid subscriptions specifically because of this — if this is you, let me know and I’ll issue you a refund.
Housing and Cities
From the annals of “the return of the property tax revolt”: this week Florida approved an amendment to exempt a larger portion of a person’s home from property tax. It’s estimated to reduce government revenues by nearly $5 billion in 2027-2028 alone. [HousingWire]
And from the annals of “frontier AI models are surprisingly capable at things you wouldn’t expect them to be”: AI models are apparently now pretty good at generating permit-quality construction documents. People have been making flavors of this claim for a while, but this is the first time I’ve seen it made from an actual architect. “Drawing upon my background as an architect, I tested 13 older and newly released AI models to measure their technical drawing abilities. I found that the strongest drafting model at the time of writing is Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5, released in September of 2026. With some skilled guidance, Opus 5.5 is capable of producing sophisticated drafting and permit-quality architectural drawing sets for simple buildings.” [Substack]
A new paper estimates that wildfire risk to US buildings could triple by 2060. “We reconstruct fire risk to structures from 1945-2023 and project its evolution through 2060 across the U.S. using high-resolution historical data on area burned, settlement patterns, and fire impacts. Under business-as-usual conditions with no adaptation, structural losses are projected to nearly triple nationwide, with 133,200–449,100 buildings expected to be damaged or destroyed by mid-century.” [Nature]
Opponents of a housing project being planned above a San Francisco Safeway are suing the project under a provision of the 1871 Civil Rights Act, originally passed to combat violence from the Ku Klux Klan. [HousingWire]
Manufacturing
Chinese robot manufacturer Unitree’s factory operations remain (surprisingly?) manual. “At the end of 2025 all of Unitree’s machinery was worth about $1.7 million on its books, at a company that made almost 32,000 robots that year: some $50 of machinery per robot!” [X]
One of Intel’s fabs in Israel was shut down for 2 weeks after an explosion that killed two people, possibly due to a gas cylinder malfunction. [Tom’s Hardware]
Are printed circuit boards the next AI datacenter-induced component shortage? “We’ve seen huge demand/supply driven price rises in RAM, GPUs, SSDs, and more through 2026. Now that most basic and unglamorous electronics necessity, the PCB, looks set to join them. A news report published by Nikkei Asia quotes several leading PC and PCB industry managers, making it clear we are going to see PCB (and PCB subcomponent) shortages and price rises in the coming months.” [Tom’s Hardware]
BYD sold more electric vehicles in October than the entire US did the entire third quarter. [Electrek] And more than 50% of heavy trucks sold in China in September were EVs. [Electrek]
Blake Scholl, CEO of supersonic airliner startup Boom, says it’s now spending most of its resources working on the power-generating gas turbine for AI data centers, and once that’s been developed it will shift focus back to the airliner. [X] Related, if any of my readers work at Kalshi or Polymarket, I would love a prediction market for the Boom airliner.
Related, I liked this idea from Scholl: use AI to check for weird edge cases in aircraft flight control software. [X]