Earlier today my friend Saadat sent me the following tweet:
@donnelly_b you need to apply to this: https://t.co/NrYmO1D1ge
— Saadat Qadri (@saadatqadri)
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It’s a link to a new research project by Y Combinator – the famed Silicon Valley seed accelerator. They want to explore the possibility of building new and better cities.
I don’t have the time for something like this, but if any of you are city experts (I know a lot of you are) and you’re based in or willing to be based in San Francisco (I think they are flexible on this), you should absolutely consider applying to be their full time “Cities Researcher.” The deadline is July 30, 2016.
Here’s a taste of what they are thinking about…
There are many high-level questions we want to think through, for example:
- What should a city optimize for?
- How should we measure the effectiveness of a city (what are its KPIs)?
- What values should (or should not) be embedded in a city’s culture?
- How can cities help more of their residents be happy and reach their potential?
- How can we encourage a diverse range of people to live and work in the city?
- How should citizens guide and participate in government?
- How can we make sure a city is constantly evolving and always open to change?
And there are tactical questions we want to dig into, for example:
- How can we make and keep housing affordable? This is critical to us; the cost of housing affects everything else in a city.
- How can we lay out the public and private spaces (and roads) to make a great place to live?
- Can we figure out better zoning laws?
- What is the right role for vehicles in a city?
- Should we have human-driven cars at all?
- How can we have affordable high-speed transit to and from other cities?
- How can we make rules and regulations that are comprehensive while also being easily understandable?
- Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages of text?
- What effects will the new city have on the surrounding community?
The convergence of city building and tech is something that I’m deeply interested in. I also think it’s inevitable. And I think that Toronto – thanks to our robust real estate industry – is in an ideal position to be a leader in this space. So I would love to see someone from here take on this job.
But even if you’re not from Toronto, you should still apply because it’s an exciting initiative :)
I’ve been reading the blog 5 Kids 1 Condo for, I think, about a year now. It’s written by Adrian Crook who is a single dad of 5 kids, living in a 2 bedroom condo in downtown Vancouver. And his blog is about just that.
A few days ago he posted a video of himself speaking at a public meeting in support of a new purpose-built rental building at 18th and Commercial Drive in Vancouver. The proposal includes 110 secured market rental units; 37% of which will be 2 or 3 bedroom apartments. (More information on the project, here.)
It’s rare to see people come out in support of a project at a public meeting. Usually people only show up when they’re grouchy and upset. So today I’d like to share his speech (click here if you can’t see the video below).
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ENWu__HdM?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
I’m curious to know what was shouted right at the beginning after he said that he was in favor of the proposal. I listened a few times but couldn’t figure it out.
In any event, Adrian’s speech touches on a number of important points that transcend this specific development proposal and that are relevant to many of the topics that we discuss here on this blog.
Miriam Zuk and Karen Chapple of the University of California, Berkeley, recently published a research brief called Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships.
It’s a nuanced look at the impact of both market-rate and subsidized housing production on affordability and displacement within the San Francisco Bay Area.
The report is essentially a response to the debate around whether increasing market-rate housing production alone can address affordability and displacement concerns, or whether the only way to do it is through subsidized housing. What they found was that both matter, but…
“What we find largely supports the argument that building more housing, both market-rate and subsidized, will reduce displacement. However, we find that subsidized housing will have a much greater impact on reducing displacement than market-rate housing. We agree that market-rate development is important for many reasons, including reducing housing pressures at the regional scale and housing large segments of the population. However, our analysis strongly suggests that subsidized housing production is even more important when it comes to reducing displacement of low-income households.”
If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend reading the full brief. It’s only 12 pages. I particularly liked the information around filtering and how new housing steps down over time to ultimately serve lower-income households.