Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at permitting reform prediction markets, ASML’s lack of European sales, a California distributed power plant, Starlink as a planetary barometer, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
No essay this week, but a more involved piece about how the AI that powers modern robots works will be out next week.
Housing and Cities
Following the passage of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, manufactured home producer Cavco has unveiled a HUD-code manufactured home without a permanent steel chassis. [GlobeNewswire]
Related, both Texas and Florida passed laws requiring cities to allow the placement of manufactured homes. As of September 1st Texas’ SB 785 requires cities to allow “by right” placement of manufactured homes (meaning that there’s no discretionary approval or review process) in at least one residential district. [Smart Cities Dive] And as of July 1st Florida requires “qualifying off-site constructed” homes to be allowed by right in any zoning district where single family homes are allowed. [HousingWire]
Austin’s recent decline in housing prices apparently isn’t only due to dramatic increase in supply: a fall in demand in 2023 and 2024 also contributed. [Free Range]
Kalshi has a prediction market for whether a permitting reform law will get passed in 2026. Odds are up to almost 80%. [Kalshi]
Why young Europeans can’t afford to buy homes. “The OECD data covers the average across 20 EU countries. For example, 60% of people born around 1975 owned a home by age 32. This fell to 58% for the 1980 birth cohort and to 52% for those born in 1985.” [Euronews]
A Census map showing the change in housing for US states between 2020 and 2026. Not much terribly surprising here, though I didn’t expect Washington State to be among the states with a large housing increase. [Census Bureau]
Trump wants his Washington DC arch to be equipped with drones and snipers. [NYT]
Manufacturing
ASML, the European manufacturer of semiconductor lithography machines, says that it doesn’t actually sell any machines in Europe currently because no new fabs are being built there. [NL Times]
The US passed Japan to be the second largest installer of industrial robots in 2025, with 38,400 newly-installed robots against Japan’s 36,200. China is still far ahead of both with 354,000, almost 10x the US. [IFR]
From the annals of the ongoing US power transformer shortage: Hitachi Energy plans to build a $500 million plant in Mississippi that would double its capacity to produce power transformers in the 10 to 160 megavolt-ampere range. [Utility Dive]
China’s progress in chipmaking machine market share over the last year. Looks like maybe a net trend upward in marketshare-weighted terms, though a pretty small one. [CSET]
A teardown of two DJI drones, aimed at shedding some light on how it achieves its impressively low manufacturing costs (and what the US might have to do to compete). “By our estimates, DJI not only sustained exceptionally high hardware margins but also grew them from 72% to 79% between 2019 and 2023. For comparison, Apple, a $4.6 trillion dollar company famous for its supply chain, achieved a 53% gross margin on the iPhone 15 Pro Max.” [Arena Physica]
The death of the small car in the US. Between 1981 and 2025 the average weight of new cars rose from 3200 pounds to over 4400 pounds, and the fraction of new cars that were small passenger cars fell from 80% in 1975 to 34% in 2025. “As of 2026, the traditional small car market has shrunk to a handful of remaining options like the Nissan Sentra and the Kia K4. Every other manufacturer has either killed off small-sized models or upgraded them to midsized cars and crossover utility vehicles (CUVs).” [World of Systems]
Trump is working on a “massive” deal to import potash (an ingredient in fertilizer manufacturing) from Belarus, likely in the hopes of reducing potash imports from Canada. [Kyiv Independent]
Saudi Arabia launches a line of EVs, Ceer. [AGBI]