Building new housing — in the places that really need it — is exceedingly difficult. This recent New York Times article by Conor Dougherty is a good example of that. It tells the story of a man named Steve Falk. Steve was previously city manager… Read More
The Shed in Hudson Yards has an exhibition on right now called Manual Override. It features the work of five artists. One of those artists is Lynn Hershman Leeson, who is known for exploring the relationship between humans and technology (naturally, she lives in the… Read More
A few weeks ago the WSJ published an article about Toronto’s growing tech talent pool, arguing that its base now rivals the top US cities, but that it may not be an entirely good thing for the city’s ecosystem. I wrote about it here. This… Read More
We are in West Virginia now, where the only kind of housing that we have come across is — not surprisingly — low-density, detached, and single-family. Indeed, approximately 75% of the residential land across the entire US is estimated to be zoned for detached single-family… Read More
Fred Wilson made an interesting remark in his recent post about the current “IPO bonanza” that is taking place in the tech space. He is, of course, talking about the recent IPO of Lyft, the recent S-1 filings from Pinterest and others, and the expected… Read More
The University of Toronto School of Cities recently looked at the changing economic geography of Fortune 500 companies across the US from 1975 to 2017. Here is a diagram of the results taken from CityLab: New York sits at the top with 70 corporate headquarters… Read More
Proposition C will be on San Francisco’s ballots this November 6th, 2018. If approved by voters, the following additional taxes would be levied on businesses in order to create a dedicated fund to both support and prevent homelessness in the city: For businesses that pay… Read More
The Economist recently argued that Silicon Valley’s innovation hegemony is waning and that it is a product of two factors: there appears to be more innovation happening elsewhere (good news), but that innovation in general also seems to be harder to achieve (bad news). Here… Read More
We have talked a lot on this blog about the concentration of economic activity in global cities. Here is an old post about a paper called “winner-take-all-cities”, which documents the overrepresentation of talent, economic activity, innovation, and wealth creation in a select number of alpha cities.… Read More
I was out for drinks recently with a friend of mine who is a developer in California and she mentioned a few things to me that I thought were really interesting. First, she talked about how virtually nothing gets built in the Bay Area “as of… Read More
