At this time of year, I am always amazed by the number of mass emails that I receive from unknown people and companies. They have my email address, clearly, and yet I only receive one email a year from them – a happy holidays email. I am not opposed to holiday cheer. I love Christmas. But if you’re looking to build any sort of meaningful rapport with an audience, my sense is that you ought to send more than one email a year.
In other news, the Economist published an article this past week talking about how Toronto is attracting disaffected (Indian) tech workers from the US and, more particularly, Silicon Valley. It is largely a story of immigration and diversity. But at the end of it, the Economist also reports that some people are now calling Toronto, Maple Valley. Toronto immediately reacted to this moniker – negatively.
Nobody refers to Toronto as Maple Valley. And these sorts of names are stupid. In the 1990s, the Flatiron District in Manhattan started being called Silicon Alley (at least by some). That name was also stupid. New York is New York. And Toronto is Toronto. If you’re going to assign a nickname, it should not be derivative. And in the case of Toronto, you probably also want to avoid kitschy Canadian stereotypes.
BuildZoom, which is a tool to help people find local contractors, recently looked at construction costs across the US.
Here is their 30-city average index running from 1950 to roughly today:
Here is a chart showing the most and least expensive cities (that is, the cities that deviate the most from their 30-city average):
And here is a chart that compares labor cost appreciation to material costs:
Labor costs account for the bulk of the geographic variation in construction costs and the most expensive cities to build in also tend to have the highest median home prices.
The way to read the above chart is that any city with a y-axis value greater than 1 means that labor costs have appreciated faster than material costs from 2008 to 2017.
In the case of San Francisco, labor costs have appreciated 32.8% (> 1.3) faster than material costs.
Part of this likely has to do with the fact that San Francisco is an expensive city in which to live. People have to be paid more if they’re going to work there.
Full blog post from BuildZoom, here.
Fred Wilson wrote a great post on his blog today about New York City’s “transit mess.”
In it he talks about congestion pricing (which, as you all know, I support); the mess that is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA); and this 37-page report on how to improve the MTA.
Here is an excerpt from his post that I liked, but that won’t be popular with everyone:
That is an idea [congestion pricing] that has been proposed a number of times over the years, most notably by Mayor Bloomberg during his tenure. It is a good idea and long overdue. A dense urban environment should have excellent mass transit and incentives to use it and should have disincentives to drive cars. Taxing cars in Manhattan and using the revenues to maintain and improve our subways seems like an obvious thing to do.
I would encourage you to give his post a read. The New York Times also reported on this topic (and the above recommendations) this week. They called it, 7 ways to fix the MTA (which needs a $60 billion overhaul).