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This is an interesting chart from the New York Times showing the breakdown of (real estate) uses across the largest downtowns/CBDs in the US. It was put together using satellite data and data from CoStar, including their boundary definitions for each downtown/CBD. The point of the chart is to show that some US downtowns are heavily dominated by office square footage. But if you look a bit closer, there are other interesting takeaways. Look at retail in Honolulu, hotels in Austin, and how much residential many US cities have in their CBDs.
In the world of startups, a unicorn is used to refer to a company with a market cap greater than $1 billion. A decacorn, the latest benchmark, is what it sounds like in that it's a company with a market cap greater than $10 billion.
While unicorn status is just one measure, valuations are an important yardstick for cities and countries. How many big new companies are you creating? That is a critical question because, presumably, these big new companies are going to create a bunch of new jobs and generate a lot of new wealth for people.
This recent blog post by Elad Gil is a great summary of what's happening in the world from this perspective. The raw data is also available if you'd like to dig deeper.
Here are the number of new unicorns since October 2020 by city:
I can't open Twitter these days without seeing someone in the tech industry talking about moving or talking about someone who just moved to either Austin or Miami. "What's the best neighborhood in Miami for startups? My friend just moved to Edgewater. Where did so-and-so move?"
Here's a recent article from the WSJ talking about how accelerated tech-fueled growth is straining Austin. And below is a set of charts (from the article) comparing home prices in Austin and San Francisco. (Reminder, the California-to-Texas migratory pattern recorded the highest number of "net movers" last year.)
Silicon Valley, not surprisingly, continues to dominate, followed by New York.
Here is a breakdown for the United States as a whole:
Miami and Austin have been in the news a lot over the past year and their startup scenes may very well be on the rise relative to other US cities. But it's interesting to see other smaller cities on this list, like Salt Lake City, who are, at least right now, holding their own.
I found this last set of two charts particularly interesting:
They are showing unicorn count (first) and unicorn market cap (second) as a percentage of their respective countries. For example, Silicon Valley is sitting at about 47% and 51%, respectively. So about half of all unicorns in the US have originated from this geography.
But for most other cities on this list, the percentage is much higher and, in many cases, it is 100%. (Silicon Valley is perhaps relatively low because the US has lots of other big and important cities.) For me, this shows the continued dominance of cities. If you're building the next great unicorn or decacorn, the data tells us that you're probably doing it in a big city somewhere. And I don't see that changing anytime soon.
But in reading through the article, I am reminded that the challenges facing Austin are not entirely unique. Growing cities all around the world are being put in a position where they need to decide whether they want to remain car-oriented and relatively low-density, or if they want to make the shift toward more transit-oriented urbanism.
It's admittedly not easy, both politically and practically speaking. It's hard to rewrite deeply entrenched built form. But Austin is naturally looking at what happened in San Francisco, where restrictions on new development are thought to be partially (largely?) responsible for the city's unaffordable housing.
According to the same WSJ article, voters in Austin turned down two previous transit proposals. One was in 2000 and the other was in 2014. There was concern over too much urbanization. There was concern it would induce more people to move to the city. And there was concern that it would threaten the city's low-rise single-family homes.
But this year a transit plan was approved that includes three new rail lines, one of which will tunnel through downtown. Provided that Austin can effectively pair this with more housing, more uses, and more density -- which is generally what you need to make transit work -- then it may be well on its way to crossing, if you will, the chasm of urbanity.
Charts: WSJ
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