The MIRA Tower in San Francisco is one of my favorite buildings by Studio Gang and probably my favorite tall building under construction right now. Here’s a video and a few photos from the San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic, John King: When we first… Read More
Earlier in the week, my friend Rodney Wilts of Theia Partners sent me a JLL report called, World Cities: Mapping the Pathways to Success. I am admittedly only getting around to it now. The report proposes a new typology of world cities that looks like… Read More
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… Read More
In Edward Glaeser’s book, Triumph of the City, he argues that the average temperature in January is the single best variable to predict which U.S. cities have grown the most over the last century. Indeed, from July 2015 to July 2016, 10 of the 15… 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
According to a recent study in the New York Times, the average age of a first-time mother in Manhattan is 31.1 years old. In San Francisco County, the number is nearly 32. And in the US as a whole, it was 26.3 in 2016. This… Read More
Joe Cortright recently wrote about a study by Kate Pennington (UC Berkeley), which looked at the impact of housing production on legal eviction in San Francisco. The goal was to figure out if new housing supply actually causes displacement. To do this, Pennington went block-by-block… Read More
The San Francisco Chronicle recently published an article called, “SF residential projects languish as rising costs force developers to cash out.” It talks about the impact that rising costs (both construction and other) are having on new housing supply. Some developers aren’t building even though may… 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
