We have spoken before about how walkable urban communities punch above their weight. In the US, only about 1.2% of land is, on average, designed and built for walkability. And yet, walkable neighborhoods in the top 35 metro areas account for about 19.1% of total… Read More
All posts tagged “bloomberg”
Hong Kong is building new “light public housing” — why?
We have spoken before about how the average wait time for public housing in Hong Kong is now over 6 years. This is a problem for the quarter million people who are on this list, and so the city has decided to start building modular… Read More
Upsizing in Hong Kong
It is well known that Hong Kong has some of the most unaffordable housing in the world and that one response to this has been to build increasingly smaller homes — some with the moniker of “nano apartments.” But then earlier this year Beijing decided… Read More
The Derek Zoolander autonomous vehicle problem
According to McKinsey, something like $100 billion has been invested in trying to get autonomous vehicles to work and yet the industry remains stuck with problems like this one here: State-of-the-art robot cars also struggle with construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and what the… Read More
New York City proposes a bounty for reporting bike-lane blockers
The general rule when it comes to bike lanes is that, if you build them without some sort of grade-separation, at some point a car is going to park in them. But here are two possible solutions to this problem. The first is that you… Read More
The average wait time for a rent-controlled apartment in Sweden is now over 9 years
I’m not all that familiar with Stockholm’s housing market, but according to this recent article, it would appear that, like most big cities, there isn’t enough affordable housing to go around. This is despite the fact that everyone in Sweden is technically entitled to it.… Read More
Turns out big cities are pretty safe
Conventional wisdom suggests that cities are pretty dangerous. There’s crime, the chance of getting killed, and there are lots of cars, some of which have a tendency to fly off the road and do bad things on occasion. And in some ways, this is true.… Read More
New York City is back
So here’s the headline: More people are moving to Manhattan than before the pandemic. This is true. But an even more accurate description might be that New York City was losing people before the pandemic and it is still losing people. But things have rebounded… Read More
Money as social construct
In Matt Levine’s latest Money Stuff newsletter he talks about how money is really just a social construct. In his words, money is “a way to keep track of what society thinks you deserve in terms of goods and services.” But over the years, we… Read More
Apartment rents in San Francisco have yet to fully recover
On last week’s earnings call, apartment landlord Equity Residential mentioned that the two US markets most impacted by a delayed return to office appear to be San Francisco and Seattle. They went on to say that San Francisco is the only market in which they… Read More