The percentage of single-person households in the US has been steadily increasing since the 1960’s (though the rate of increase has moderated in recent decades). As of last year (2018), 28% of Americans lived alone, according to the US Census Bureau. So about 1 in… Read More
Today was the 2019 Land & Development Conference here in Toronto. I was on a panel in the morning about Proptech. I then sat in on a discussion about construction costs. But after that I had to get back to the office to prepare for… Read More
In 1937, New York created taxi medallions as a way of dealing with the sheer volume of unlicensed cabs in the city. About 12,000 were initially sold. They cost $10. And you needed one, fastened to your car, in order to operate a taxi service.… Read More
Below is a list of the 44 cities found in the 2018 Global Power City Index by the Mori Memorial Foundation’s Institute for Urban Strategies. The index ranks the major cities of the world according to their “magnetism”, which they generally define as a city’s… Read More
People move to cities for a whole host of reasons, whether it be for more money, more affordable housing, and/or better weather. The fastest growing cities in the US, for example, tend to be in the south where it’s warmer and where housing supply is… Read More
On February 1, 2017, an inclusionary zoning ordinance came into effect in Portland, mandating that all new residential projects with 20 or more units dedicate a portion of the building to affordable housing. For the first year, the requirement was 8% of all units for… Read More
I started reading a new book this weekend called, The Global Edge: Miami in the Twenty-First Century. When many (or perhaps most) people think of Miami/Miami Beach, they think of its beaches and resorts. And that is certainly a mainstay of the region’s offering. But… Read More
The European Union uses something called the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (or NUTS) in order to geographically subdivide its member states and collect statistical data. There are three scales: NUTS 1, 2, and 3. And generally speaking, they follow existing administrative boundaries. Or… Read More
Wired’s oral history of how the London startup scene came to be is a good reminder that, typically, a city needs some great big exits (acquisition or IPO) to really kickstart an ecosystem. In the case of Silicon Valley, you could perhaps trace things back… Read More
Last year, Jesse Keenan, Thomas Hill, and Anurag Gumber of Harvard University, published a research paper called, Climate gentrification: from theory to empiricism in Miami-Dade County, Florida. What they were trying to uncover was a possible relationship between climate change and single-family home pricing in… Read More
