North Korea reportedly built more housing than Los Angeles last year

Pyongyang’s reported housing construction and cellphone assembly numbers expose both North Korea’s economic shift and California’s housing dysfunction

The two best statistics in the WSJ’s genuinely great article on North Korea’s economic boom: Pyongyang built more housing last year than LA. (Says something about CA housing dysfunction). North Korea assembled more cellphones than the US
Ranked #27 on backlist 2026-06-08 (08 Jun 2026 UTC) · by (Peter Harrell) ·

How it ranks: Backlist reads my Twitter/X timeline, scores every tweet for substance with an LLM rubric (not engagement), and publishes the daily top picks with a one-line takeaway. Curated by Surya Dantuluri.