According to the WSJ, New York City is budgeting to collect $30.8 billion in property taxes for fiscal year 2021. These tax bills will go out on June 1 and payments will start becoming due on July 1, which is the start of the city’s… Read More
This week, Toronto City Council approved the largest ever one-year expansion of bike lanes in the city — a total of 40 km. It passed 23 to 2. Here is a map of the approved routes: The Bloor West extension is being accelerated. This will… Read More
Sam Altman’s recent blog post about how to generate ideas for startups has some invaluable tips that I think apply to much more than just new companies. As a reminder, Sam Altman is an entrepreneur and the former president of Y Combinator. So he’s had… Read More
The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design — my alma mater — has just launched a new initiative with Surface Magazine called the Surface Summer School at Penn. A fairly unique partnership between a media company and an accredited university, the goal of… Read More
This week the FT reported that Amazon is in “advanced talks” to acquire the self-driving startup Zoox. This would be Amazon’s first acquisition in the space, though it did lead a $530M funding round in Aurora in early 2019. Zoox last raised two years ago… Read More
People are starting to eat at restaurants again. Here is a recent chart from the WSJ showing seated diners at restaurants on the OpenTable network: OpenTable has been publishing this data since the beginning of the pandemic in something they call “the state of the… Read More
The last thing you probably need at this point is another webinar. But this one could actually be interesting. On May 29th, 2020 at 9:00 AM eastern, the Senseable City Lab at MIT is hosting one called, Tracking epidemics in cities: urban environments and the… Read More
The talk this weekend in Toronto is about how everyone is jamming into downtown parks — like Trinity Bellwoods — to enjoy the beautiful weather and drink outside with friends. Some, including our mayor, are “extremely disappointed” by this selfish behavior. Others are chalking it… Read More
This isn’t a laneway suite per se, but Office Ou here in Toronto recently completed this garage conversion. The idea was to take a typical rear laneway garage and turn it into something that could better house a wide range of uses. As Toronto reconsiders… Read More
The Knight Foundation recently published a report looking at what attaches people to the place in which they live. To get this information, they surveyed over 11,000 Americans, some of which live in urbanized areas and some of which just live in metro areas across… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 