Here is an interesting look at the economic geography of the recent US election. Similar to what they did for the last presidential election, Brookings has just analyzed each candidate's aggregate share of US GDP broken down by the counties that they won. That's what the above diagram represents. The blue and red tiles are showing the relative size of each county's economy.
In 2016, Clinton won 472 counties with nearly 66 million votes. These counties accounted for about 64% of US GDP at the time. Trump, on the other hand, won 2,584 counties with nearly 63 million votes. But these counties represented only about 36% of US GDP. (Note that Trump won the election with fewer total votes. This is the electoral college at work.)
When Brookings published the above findings, votes were still outstanding for 11 counties. Most of them low-output. Still, Biden has won 477 counties with well over 75 million votes. These Democratic counties now account for about 70% of overall US GDP. Virtually every big economy county went to Biden in this last election. Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, and so on.
This is a big deal because it shows the great economic divide that exists in the US, as well as in many (most?) other countries around the world. This is the urban vs. rural divide. Places with very different economic bases and, therefore, very different sets of priorities.
Diagram: Brookings
According to a recent Wall Street Journal review of property and corporate records, Travis Kalanick's ghost kitchen startup, called CloudKitchens, has spent over $130 million over the past two years buying more than 40 properties in about two dozen cities.
Travis is co-founder and the former CEO of Uber and this latest startup provides commercial kitchens to restauranteurs who are looking for a low-cost way to launch delivery-only food concepts.
In some ways, it can be compared to coworking spaces for delivery-only restaurants. Instead of renting a full restaurant space, you lease 200-300 square feet of real estate at a lower cost address. CloudKitchens then handles all of the distribution and fulfillment, effectively lowering the barriers to entry for food startups.
Some of the properties that they have been buying include a vacant restaurant space in Miami Beach for $9.2 million (May 2020) and an industrial property in Queens, New York for $6.6 million (March 2020). They've also bought in cities like Portland and Las Vegas.
As you might imagine, now is a pretty good time to be buying some of these properties. And if you think about it, there are some real cost advantages to what they are doing, not to mention some co-working-style arbitrage on the real estate.
The company is apparently going to great lengths to conceal what and where they are buying. But what is perhaps more interesting is their asset-heavy approach. They're buying lots of real estate, which is inline with what companies like Opendoor are doing, but is distinct from Uber's asset-light approach.
It is also different from what many other ghost kitchen startups are doing. It seems that most are leasing their spaces. There has to be a reason for this difference.
A friend of mine sent me this video today in a brief email that basically said, "you're gonna love it." Naturally he was right. It's great. The 10-minute video is about how creative agency Work & Co rethought and redesigned New York City's subway map for today's digital age. Rather than a static map, which is historically how all cities have communicated their transit networks, they created a digital map that changes both as you interact with and as the network itself changes (closures, time of day, etc.). This means that they no longer had to make certain design compromises. They no longer had to choose between geometry (clarity of representation) and geography (accuracy of representation). The system does both.