David “Build Back NYC” Lee 🌎

94,200

September 2026 points

Scores updated 8 min ago

Tweets: 81
Likes: 518
Retweets: 24
Replies: 37
Quote tweets: 7
2× boosted: 1
Followers: 1,359+10

Every scored tweet

300 per tweet · 100 per like · 200 per reply · 300 per retweet · 300 per quote tweet

Tweet	Likes	Retweets	Replies	Quotes	Boost	Points
Last week, I started building a housing upzoning game. Today, I am launching Upzoned v0.1.0 with free and paid early access tiers. You can just do things, like upzoning all of New York. Get free and $14.99 early access demos here: https://t.co/bgFsulePjX https://t.co/DTsmk3fd31 https://t.co/a09sGTIUoR Aug 6	276	18	11	3	—	36,400
Attempting to propose a Special District zone for Hudson Yards-scale for mixed-use commercial development near the North Brooklyn waterfront. As you can see below, initial opposition to doing so is fierce, paving a significant road ahead to organizing the political capital to seeing this upzoning through. I want a city that is boundless in spirit and in scale, and it is my wish for this game to, at bare minimum, spark questions in the player base for how we can build the city of our dreams not only on our computers, but in our corporeal lives. Aug 2	28	1	1	0	—	3,600
With meteorologists forecasting a strong El Niño that will have significant precipitation effects for NYC, I’m envisioning software and hardware weather tech tools to build to protect our city. But I wouldn’t be here without the skills I learned from @fractaltechnyc. Join! https://t.co/PxLx4JOXnb Aug 31	5	2	0	0	2× Fractal	2,800 1,400 × 2
Very close to launching free and paid early access demos to Upzoned. Have not slept much since Friday but it's been an absolute obsession to get this demo to market. I'm very serious about putting my entire being into this and turning it into my full-time thing Aug 5	16	0	4	0	—	2,700
The original home of Bell Labs and the Manhattan Project shall become the new frontier for technological innovation once more 🤖 https://t.co/ek8QQX6Li7 Aug 22	17	1	0	0	—	2,300
I’m excited to share that my financial model costing out @NYCMayor’s universal public child care program has been featured in the @nytimes this morning. I do wish I was explicitly credited in the piece, but the NYT’s editorial process be what it is. The finding from my model: universal child care for NYC is projected to cost $9b, which is $5b more than what the city spent on child care in 2025. https://t.co/94yymCEb4f Aug 3	12	0	2	1	—	2,200
endeavors I want to achieve before year's end: - publish Upzoned! - change my job (policywise my heart is in foreign policy, trade security, natsec, nuclear weapons + energy, extreme weather mitigation, AI + industrial policy; spiritually I have long left my "domestic social services redistributive policy" arc and am firmly in my "capitalist builder" arc) - develop an aesthetic style that is some dual influence of Hiroshi Nagai and nostalgiacore low-poly / cathode-ray tube 3D animation - build a low-cost and scalable oceanographic instrument that can cheaply collect field measurements of surface velocities - (generally, accrue AI workflows for hardware engineering ranging from scientific instrumentation to whimsical doohickeys) - learn some rudiments in semiconductor chip design Aug 7	12	0	1	0	—	1,700
When you just need to look out of your office window to ensure your game's assets are rendering correctly https://t.co/bqY2HBd8AC Aug 4	10	0	1	0	—	1,500
holy crap upzoning Liberty Island became an option lol (It is federal land and untouchable within NYC's land use laws) https://t.co/IS7gPoR9iT Aug 1	7	0	1	1	—	1,500
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! https://t.co/NEFW50ZJCi Aug 22	8	1	0	0	—	1,400
macOS and Linux distributions are now live! Thanks everyone for your support, please share with your urbanist and nerdy housing policy friends, or just those who love cities and want to build them bigger :-) https://t.co/AaUwyA2Eew https://t.co/OCo0hraPJ3 https://t.co/HwlRVc9wZf Aug 10	6	0	1	1	—	1,400
Excerpt from my latest prompt: 3) clicking on a building with residential zoning should bring up the number of units rent stabilized, and a simple balance sheet showing the cash flow of the building. this may be complex but important: the player needs to care about housing finance, and if their policies are keeping balance sheets of buildings in the green. Too many folks with opinions on housing policy ignore building balance sheet arithmetic. Not in my game. Let's see how Opus 5 does, but my ideal is for every policy decision on housing to confer the spectrum of abundant gains to disastrous financial losses to the player. Aug 1	6	0	1	1	—	1,400
The question before you: can you fix New York City's housing crisis and take our city into the future? Play now: https://t.co/bgFsulePjX https://t.co/1l7bLFD37n Aug 6	8	0	1	0	—	1,300
Thanks to those over the last few days who’ve sent in insightful feedback! The overwhelming theme of people’s feedback is the NIMBYs are, as of now, too OP and the rivalry mechanics need to be balanced more. Working on shipping a patch. https://t.co/HwlRVc9wZf Aug 10	9	0	0	0	—	1,200
@__drewface 5 days, 20 hours, and 22 minutes and counting! Aug 6	7	0	1	0	—	1,200
Many thanks @NYTpatrick for the cite in New York Today https://t.co/yUWexfKg4c https://t.co/h7a1ifJgag Aug 4	7	0	1	0	—	1,200
Excellent content that needs to be propagated 100x on the airwaves. It does sadden me, since climate change was rightfully brought up here, how the first impetus for people brought into environmentalism is doomerism and not exercising some agency to learn climate physics, learn how to engineer climate tech or policy, and do something. Aug 6	7	0	0	0	—	1,000
As-of-right development is now a feature! Within a lot's existing zone, the game engine will randomly select to develop there (given other macroeconomic prerequisites like prop tax rates, out-/in-migration) We've got a cute little development on East Houston Street in Lower Manhattan here. I'm crazy for this voxel crane asset. Aug 3	7	0	0	0	—	1,000
The 2am impulse desire to learn how to DJ Aug 16	4	0	1	0	—	900
@threejs really answering the call for us virtual civ builders https://t.co/aYn5DfaqVA Aug 11	4	0	1	0	—	900
Between the Jones Act waiver and Sens. Todd Young's and Mark Kelly's SHIPS Act, we're witnessing a real resurgence in legislative interest in maritime industrial policy. https://t.co/Uw25jivAK7 Aug 28	2	1	0	0	—	800
Windows launch only today, but MacOS and Linux to come very shortly! Aug 6	5	0	0	0	—	800
Any and all feedback, bug reports, or general comments are welcome! email me at david@upzoned.nyc or use the contact form on the website. Aug 6	3	0	1	0	—	800
We are entering my favorite time of year, when the air crispens, universities and schools ramp up, the United Nations readies for the General Assembly, and visitors worldwide descend on our great city for climate week. https://t.co/gBvV0KCZ5D Aug 25	4	0	0	0	—	700
I think the most fun of game design with Claude is the ability to add small world-building details. My latest /loop prompt involved iterating over a number of new features, one of which is an in-game fictional newspaper titled "The Five Boro Bugle." Aesthetically and substantively, it's a hybrid of @nypost (tabloid articles mocking gaffe-prone local electeds) and @Gothamist (hyper-local pieces ranging from mold proliferating at an apartment building to subway rats dragging calzones up stairs) Functionally, the paper also reports on the performance of the incumbent mayoral administration. I (intentionally) built zero housing to see how the political simulator responds, and as it should, the approval rating of the game mayor dropped from 42% to a measly 5%. Lesson learned: build back better NYC housing! Aug 2	2	0	1	0	—	700
We've got a city on the move! https://t.co/2jdgOAZzdk Aug 2	4	0	0	0	—	700
And that impressment was the chief foreign policy matter of the Jefferson and Madison administration! https://t.co/DuP0wjAopG Aug 28	1	0	1	0	—	600
@janitachalam makes me think of Weber and Tönnies on Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft Aug 16	1	0	1	0	—	600
An example of a simple ledger that is generated for all 856,614 unique lots and informed to the best of the game's ability by the @NYCHousing Housing Vacancy Survey. Buildings in egregious financial straits turn into slums, with residents incentivized to migrate out of NYC and severe political penalties imposed on the dominant faction at the current game state. As such, the player is motivated to always care about building balance sheets, lest demographic and electoral consequences be levied on their gameplay strategy. Aug 1	1	0	1	0	—	600
"Market rents up 9.8% in twelve months (vacancy 1.0%). Tenants are FURIOUS -- incumbents bleed for this in November unless housing gets BUILT." damn @claudeai https://t.co/yGas77aFen Aug 1	1	0	1	0	—	600
@liamdanielduffy The golden door just got ten times taller https://t.co/cdH71ABUBZ Aug 1	3	0	0	0	—	600
@a_leify_boi Thanks! Working to launch soon! Aug 1	3	0	0	0	—	600
There’s one class of state-funded technology, most visibly satellites, space shuttles, Martian rovers, and clandestine technology, that run price tags into the billions and take decades to engineer and deploy. On the opposite end, I’m interested in munitech: low-cost tools that cost < $100, at most a few hundred, that municipalities could deploy at minimal fiscal burden, and cheap enough that any individual could deploy on their own for citizen science. Aug 31	0	0	1	0	—	500
A gross but (I think) cool thought, apologies to those of you who are currently eating. This morning, I had to have NYCDEP snake my building’s sewer line to investigate a break. And it struck me a) how little instrumentation we have in municipal sewage infrastructure, and b) that it would be neat technical problem to engineer sensors that could withstand the sheer hostility of a sewage environment, and transmit data to the outside. Aug 31	0	0	1	0	—	500
I’m imagining a vibe-coded Federal Reserve simulator with an achievement system ranging from “The Maestro” (Greenspan, with celebratory clarinet music to boot) to “Received the (LB) Johnson treatment” (as William McChesney Martin did for refusing to cut rates so more Treasuries could be issued to prosecute Vietnam) Aug 28	0	0	1	0	—	500
American history from the waning years of the Monroe presidency / Era of Good Feelings through to the 1828 election and the rise of the Jacksonian party is aesthetically a dramatic Shakespearean history A rule of three in the Monroe (Henry IV-esque) cabinet members vying for the presidency (Calhoun, Crawford, Quincy Adams), a marvelous and grand villain in Jackson (a Jack Cade or Antony figure), the auspicious death of the father, the elder Adams, in 1826, and the fading away of the founders’ generation in the political leadership There’s gotta be a historical drama streaming series on 1820’s American politics Aug 24	2	0	0	0	—	500
Affordable live classical music in New York City tip: you can go to the websites of the city's music conservatories, like the Juilliard School, and attend free or low-cost performances by students. I would really like to make orchestral and chamber music a larger part of my life again, and this is one way to do it. https://t.co/hZS4ar7baH Aug 19	2	0	0	0	—	500
I did not know we have a map society! Cool! https://t.co/0TAMdANuP2 Aug 19	2	0	0	0	—	500
It’s time to put game theoretic formalism back in gaming https://t.co/77J53ewuSz Aug 11	2	0	0	0	—	500
@danielgolliher @__drewface 🙏 Aug 6	2	0	0	0	—	500
In a past life I was a student in music composition and wanted to write music for video games! For the demo round I resorted to challenge Claude to produce its magnum Opus (5) (get it?), and it was able to generate some 8-bit jazz tracks using JavaScript's Audio() constructor. I also had it 8-bit-ize the key tunes from each of the nine Beethoven symphonies. This it accomplished to... varying degrees, but even ersatz Beethoven is catchy, so I left the tracks in. Aug 5	2	0	0	0	—	500
@__drewface 🙏 Aug 5	2	0	0	0	—	500
matthew mcconaughey voice "gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers in this racket" https://t.co/ITBbL8lL36 Aug 4	2	0	0	0	—	500
I pledge to launch the full version of my game before GTA VI comes out Aug 2	2	0	0	0	—	500
@claudeai This is exciting to see. As a consequence of no one building any housing in NYC and rents rising astronomically high, incumbents got voted out by the drove. Dynamic political logic working! https://t.co/gWtIiorU3F Aug 1	2	0	0	0	—	500
@wordrotator https://t.co/HguAwBzrY7 Aug 28	1	0	0	0	—	400
Special relativity is cool, but computing interest charged to goods transiting at relativistic speeds and accounting for time dilation effects on stationary and moving observers is why we get up in the morning @paulkrugman https://t.co/imHjt6XMNv https://t.co/r49G6QNGWA Aug 25	1	0	0	0	—	400
@__drewface I am reminded of all the fun visuals complex analysis and extending the domain of analytic functions to ℂ entails 🤓 Aug 19	1	0	0	0	—	400
@ZoldenGames this is sick! Aug 16	1	0	0	0	—	400
macOS and Linux distributions are now live! https://t.co/CjAaWUiajU Aug 10	1	0	0	0	—	400
If Claude solves the RH, who wins the million-dollar prize? Anthropic? The person who prompted Claude to the proof? https://t.co/4gn2deZWdy Aug 10	1	0	0	0	—	400
Sounds like cloud microphysics in atmospheric science. Computationally tractable with ML, brutally difficult with numerical simulation of physics equations alone https://t.co/iOxaXZ2KUH Aug 7	1	0	0	0	—	400
@__drewface the unfettered potential of tomorrow https://t.co/YrLbyPryI7 Aug 7	1	0	0	0	—	400
@treball133 @Colin_d_m Five boroughs, but yes Long Island should be upzoned too Aug 7	1	0	0	0	—	400
Demos are launched! https://t.co/C8bEJr9kwt Aug 6	1	0	0	0	—	400
@AVGregR That’s amazing! Would love to chat and learn more about what you’re doing. Aug 3	1	0	0	0	—	400
@InquisitiveUrsa Thank you! Working to launch soon! Aug 1	1	0	0	0	—	400
In general, it is unhelpful for the scientific community to be at the mercy of the political cycle, and bemoan four-year periods in which federal science funding is curtailed. I’m optimistic enough to believe that meaningful and robust scientific data can and ought to be achieved on the cheap, and that we haven’t been nearly as creative about the engineering economics for scientific instrumentation as we could be Aug 31	0	0	0	0	—	300
Often, I think about how to curate an undergraduate physics education. One point I would make in pedagogy is certain structures, like the continuity equation (and broadly, conservation laws in PDE theory), are ubiquitous, and it would be to the benefit of students to fully internalize these “great theorems” as common structures. In undergraduate physics, students will see this form in around four places: heat and diffusion (thermodynamics), mass continuity (fluid mechanics), charge continuity (electrodynamics), and probability continuity (quantum mechanics). It is easier to learn these ideas as instantiations of a single theorem, and not as discrete-not-immediately-related notions. Aug 31	0	0	0	0	—	300
My aspiration: for a continuous science and technological corridor to be built in the expanse stretching from Princeton, NJ to Stony Brook, NY, to serve as a new beating heart for creating the American future. https://t.co/LHM5eda3Um Aug 30	0	0	0	0	—	300
+ hidden achievement titled “Kick ‘em in the rump,” after a call from Nixon to Arthur Burns to pressure the FOMC to cut rates before the 1972 re-election campaign https://t.co/n71a828c4i Aug 28	0	0	0	0	—	300
Some takeaways from Fed Chair Warsh's Jackson Hole keynote: > overall theme is a "quieter Fed," a turn away from forward guidance that has dominated monetary policy communications for much of this century (Bernanke's old quip was MP is 98% talk and 2% action) > (corollary i) some complaints on the interwebs about this retreat from forward guidance, but intuiting macroeconomic dynamics from first principles and empirics rather than performing pseudo-clairvoyance on words seems good? > much more attention given to the 3.7% inflation per the 12-month change in the PCE index than relative stagnation in white-collar hiring. it all sounds like the Chair and the FOMC continue to tell an "inflation" rather than "stagflation" story vis à vis macro price and labor market conditions. > (corollary ii) I think concerns of compromising Fed independence and Warsh appeasing Trump's incessant demands for sharp interest rate cuts are allayed if the FOMC is going all in on an escalated inflation story. > huge front-loading of the AI question, framing the AI spring as a "hyper–Moore's law" with annualized token sales exceeding $100 billion, a 500-plus percent increase in the last year alone. key questions remain: are tokens and compute substitutes or complements for labor, and what will productivity look like writ large? Aug 28	0	0	0	0	—	300
JQA biographies: > John Quincy’s tenure as Secretary of State and in the House of Representatives: hundreds of pages > John Quincy’s tenure as president: half a chapter https://t.co/8ueyzfzAFk Aug 26	0	0	0	0	—	300
There’s an interesting analogue between the classic debate in pure mathematics and statutory law here: could pictures double as rigorous and self-consistent proof or law? I had a professor who swore by the belief that a picture could never substitute for a proof. And yet, geometry has a genre of proof called “proof without words,” e.g. in ascertaining results like the closed form sum of the first n odd numbers. There are entire mathematics books dedicated to proofs without words! Certainly, there are creatures of the law that are pictorial: maps encoding jurisdictional boundaries, legislative districts, and zoning, to name a few. On the other hand, the semantic problem here is a picture merely depicts a singular example, which seemingly cannot stand in for a general claim. Clearly, there is some epistemic threshold a pictorial representation needs to cross to express general truth as opposed to incidental specificity. There’s a broader and fascinating debate to be had here on the jurisprudence of pictorial law, though I am really rambling on some immediate thoughts while laying no hard claims here. Aug 25	0	0	0	0	—	300
I'm horrified to hear of this terrorist plot against my former workplace, and grateful for the heroic efforts of the United States Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation for foiling the would-be attacker. Our State Capitol must forever be a sacred home of the people of this great state, and all those who wish to make the lives of New Yorkers better. There can be no tolerance for those who believe in violence as a legitimate means for any end. May justice be swift in prosecuting this defendant. Aug 20	0	0	0	0	—	300
R. Strauss has me obsessing over Hermann Hesse https://t.co/cF93NWfpfl Aug 20	0	0	0	0	—	300
I love living in the future. https://t.co/DCs0MrW8lo Aug 19	0	0	0	0	—	300
Adding to my reading list https://t.co/ysKf7N2l9V Aug 18	0	0	0	0	—	300
My favorite bits of software engineering entail re-parameterizing climate models to switch between Earth precipitation of water to liquid methane precipitation on Titan https://t.co/8Hp02KhjrA Aug 12	0	0	0	0	—	300
The organizations here are most representative of the policy thoughts I have now, and would love to be affiliated with one or more of them, particularly those thinking about metascience and integrating scientific innovation with state functions. https://t.co/qcOSfTfJ80 Aug 11	0	0	0	0	—	300
I could be really annoying and add an easter egg like this in the NIMBY dynamics to my game https://t.co/BvkmebTHXl Aug 11	0	0	0	0	—	300
@threejsassets @threejs ❤️ 🚀 Aug 11	0	0	0	0	—	300
@janitachalam 🙏 Aug 10	0	0	0	0	—	300
Tip to NYS lawmakers: amend § 206 of the Limited Liability Company Law to strike the newspaper publication requirements, which 47 states have done. Our law, which requires publication in not one but two papers to incorporate a company, is the most onerous in the nation. Aug 10	0	0	0	0	—	300
macOS and Linux distributions are now live! https://t.co/CjAaWUiajU Aug 10	0	0	0	0	—	300
@ahall_research @danielgolliher interesting research on LLM outputs and Japanese elections that correlates with your thoughts on good and truthful writing for the AIs. Aug 8	0	0	0	0	—	300
@Dschf Would love to discuss. Feel free to shoot me a DM Aug 7	0	0	0	0	—	300
I have a reading appetite for some confluence of 1) substantive essays on the economics of frontier market creation from AI that go beyond "proliferation of SaaS products on drastically compressed timelines," particularly in AI's impacts on tractability of hardware problems, and 2) lore- and world building-rich, anti-Hobbesian science fantasy Aug 7	0	0	0	0	—	300
@NYTpatrick 🫡 Aug 4	0	0	0	0	—	300
You know the Upzoned housing crisis has gotten real bad when there's cutthroat competition to find housing in Tottenville, Staten Island https://t.co/U2eA17J6qE Aug 2	0	0	0	0	—	300
Adding an elections simulator with four factions: Socialist Democrats, Market Democrats, Traditionalist Republicans, and Populist Republicans. https://t.co/FtAqyHzqKt Aug 1	0	0	0	0	—	300
Total · 81 tweets in September 2026	518	24	37	7	1 boosted	94,200

Posts, replies, and quote tweets count — native retweets are excluded. Mentioning a project on the boost list doubles that tweet's points.