✅ Essential City + Tech Stories: 12.21.20
Zoox unveils its driverless car, a major global hacking story, and several housing stories
Happy Monday! Hope it’s a beautiful day wherever this note finds you. ☀️
Quick updates for our schedule this week:
🗓 UT will publish on Thursday, 12/24 — otherwise known to us as a regular Urban Tech Thursday.
🎙 No podcast this week, so go check out the feed and the episodes we’ve published this month.
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Context for Thursday: In 2021, an area I’m planning to explore across the newsletter and podcast is innovation in logistics. In Thursday’s UT to start looking at some topics underneath this umbrella, we will focus on the shifts of grocery store supply chains and delivery during the pandemic. 🛒
My plan on Thursday is to break down the significant trends you need to know and connect these trends to cities or the urban experience.
Alright, let’s get to it.
Last Monday’s most popular stories:
🥇 The Markup: How Compass Became the Bane of Real Estate
🥈 CityLab: U.S. Renters Could Owe $70 Billion
🥉 The Wall Street Journal: Covid-19, Remote Work Make Austin a Magnet for New Jobs
The City + Tech Stories to Read 12.21.20
🚨Reuters: SolarWinds hackers broke into U.S. cable firm and Arizona county
🚀 The Information: How Johnny Boufarhat Built the Fastest Software Startup ‘Unicorn’ in History
👷♀️ Protocol: How one woman is building the future for Google in Silicon Valley
☕️ The LA Times: This capitalist commune is trying to cure L.A.’s loneliness. Plus there’s free coffee
📦 The San Francisco Chronicle: Amazon spends $200 million for S.F. site once slated for housing
🚙 The New York Times: Kara Swisher: Autonomous Vehicles Take Another Big Leap
🇮🇳 The New York Times: Who Gets to Breathe Clean Air in New Delhi?
🏚 Axios: Hard Truth: American Dream deferred
Reuters: SolarWinds hackers broke into U.S. cable firm and Arizona county, web records show
Not often, there’s one tech story that shines clearly as the biggest story of a week. The recent SolarWinds hacking news seems like a clear example of one, though:
Suspected Russian hackers accessed the systems of a U.S. internet provider and a county government in Arizona as part of a sprawling cyber-espionage campaign disclosed this week, according to an analysis of publicly-available web records.
The hack, which hijacked ubiquitous network management software made by SolarWinds Corp to compromise a raft of U.S. government agencies and was first reported by Reuters, is one of the biggest ever uncovered and has sent security teams around the world scrambling to contain the damage.
I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on cybersecurity policy, but experts like New York Times Reporter Nicole Perlroth are raising major red flags that this situation is unprecedented given the scale and nature of the attack:
The Information: How Johnny Boufarhat Built the Fastest Software Startup ‘Unicorn’ in History
The events sector is one area COVID has wholly upended. The Information’s Zoë Bernard profiled online events startup Hopin, which has reached the “unicorn” valuation of $1 billion by embracing the shift to digital events. 🎈
In the annals of venture capital, Hopin, which enables businesses to host events online, is a unicorn among unicorns: It might be the fastest business software startup to reach a private “unicorn” valuation of $1 billion, let alone the $2.1 billion it reached last month—just under a year after it was founded.
The big question: can Hopin can sustain its trajectory after the pandemic clears? The part of the story I enjoyed most is the analysis of where events go from here:
Regardless of who wins, the market for virtual events is likely to keep growing. Many organizers who were forced to convert to fully online events this year say they are cheaper, easier to organize, accessible by more people, and better for tracking engagement, or how much time people spend in certain panels versus others, compared to in-person gatherings.
Protocol: How one woman is building the future for Google in Silicon Valley
Urban Tech loves a good profile of someone playing a pivotal role in reshaping a local metro. This piece from Protocol highlights Urban Designer Laura Crescimano, who helps lead some of Google’s major urban development projects:
Google is trying to reinvent its physical self by building mixed-use neighborhood developments, and Crescimano's Sitelab urban studio is responsible for designing and planning both the DowntownWest project and the rebuild of the land next to the company's Mountain View headquarters (called North Bayshore). Under Sitelab's guidance, the designs for both have rejected the suburban office parks that defined Silicon Valley's past in favor of urban centers that make the "campus," and Google, disappear.
The piece that stuck out to UT: major companies' desire to move away from the campus model that defined Silicon Valley for decades. 💼
The LA Times: This capitalist commune is trying to cure L.A.’s loneliness. Plus there’s free coffee
This piece from Sam Dean at The LA Times explores an LA coliving operator, Treehouse, which has an interesting approach to the model and story.
Not familiar with the coliving mode? Essentially, it’s multifamily housing optimizing community by featuring furnished apartments and shared common spaces like kitchens, workspaces, and other amenities. It’s an excellent solution for many modern urban professionals looking for flexibility, a turn-key option, and community in housing.
The model is attractive to UT because it continues momentum towards a bigger modern urbanism goal: creating denser, more efficient cities. Also, in our modern world, loneliness, which leads to major mental health issues, is a significant problem globally that we should be fighting!!
Treehouse has some unique pieces to its story that make it compelling:
Treehouse is taking a different tack. Walker and co-founder Joe Green, a tech entrepreneur in the Facebook orbit and big booster of psychedelic research, say they want to create the togetherness of intentional communities like co-ops, communes, or Burning Man without the anticapitalist politics or freegan cuisine. In an era when luxury is synonymous with isolation — private jets, private islands, Uber Black versus Uber Pool — they’re betting that real community can be packaged as a premium, an amenity that keeps atomization at bay as surely as heated floors banish cold feet.
I’m a little skeptical if the play will work given the complicated economics of operating a coliving business, especially in the age of COVID. While I’m skeptical, some investors who I respect in this space are investors, so I’m going to keep an open mind:
Alexis Ohanian, who started the online community Reddit, chipped in, as did L.A. investor Arlan Hamilton and Justin Kan, who co-founded the streaming platform Twitch.
Speaking of coliving, Urban Tech friend Ajay Kumar and his firm The HouseMonk recently published a detailed report about COVID’s impact on the sector. It’s excellent, thorough, and Ajay is one of my favorite thinkers on Proptech. Go check it out, so my pitch to get him on the Urban Tech Podcast gets a tad easier! 🙏
The San Francisco Chronicle: Amazon spends $200 million for S.F. site once slated for housing
A major urban storyline we'll remember post-COVID is the massive CapEx investments and real estate expansions we've seen from Tech's most prominent players, particularly the FAANG companies.
This story out of San Francisco is another example of the trend:
Amazon’s“Seattle e-commerce giant Amazon paid $200 million to buy a San Francisco site where it plans to build a new delivery station, expanding its massive shipping infrastructure in an urban center. The property’s former owner had envisioned offices and housing on the site a few blocks from the city’s Caltrain station.
The news is particularly controversial because denser housing, which SF drastically needs, was proposed for the site 😞:
Under one recent proposal, 1,000 homes could have been built on the site.
The New York Times: Kara Swisher: Autonomous Vehicles Take Another Big Leap
Last week, self-driving car company Zoox (owned by Amazon) unveiled its highly anticipated electric, autonomous vehicle. While the design received snark on Tech Twitter, last week’s announcement was another big moment for driverless cars.
I think Kara Swisher’s take on her ride was both candid and insightful on the event:
It was a big step up from my first outing in the Google car. Zoox offered a smooth ride and little of the herky-jerky stops and starts of some autonomous travel. And the Zoox car is less threatening than the cars we see on the road today — it’s all smooth edges and rounded corners, taking us adults back to our Little Tikes days.
Still, I have always felt nervous about fully autonomous transportation — no steering wheel, dashboard, pedals or any means of control by the passenger. Up until now, autonomous vehicles have mostly been like retrofitted cars, with a driver at the ready to intervene in case of emergency.
In October, I wrote why Waymo was leading the race for driverless cars, given the stage is driverless ridesharing service in Arizona.
Zoox certainly shows it needs to be considered a leading player in the space, particularly with the Amazon behemoth behind it.
I'm still incredibly interested to see if and how the Zoox technology is leveraged within Amazon for automation in logistics.
This value-add still seems like a huge reason why Amazon would spend the capital to acquire and fund a moonshot idea like driverless cars.
The New York Times: Interactive: Who Gets to Breathe Clean Air in New Delhi?
Some of the most significant equity issues in cities involve necessary access to clean water and air. This interactive from The New York Times provides a detailed visual of how economic class determines health outcomes.
The piece is highly visual so go check it out, but this data point was incredibly stunning:
Still, over the course of one day, Monu [whose family couldn’t afford purifers] was exposed to about four times as much pollution as Aamya [whose family has purifers]. A long-term, consistent disparity like that could steal around five years more life from someone in Monu’s position, compared with an upper-middle-class child like Aamya.
Axios: Hard Truth: American Dream deferred
Homeownership, a key theme of the “American Dream,” remains a pipe dream for many individuals — especially people of color — in America.
From an Axios’ deep dive on housing equity:
Non-white Americans have a harder time than white homebuyers finding homes and financing them at affordable rates using traditional mortgages.
The homeownership gap between Black and white Americans is worse today than when race-based housing laws and policies were in effect decades ago, Axios' Felix Salmon reports.
Why it matters: Unequal access to mortgage financing has had a predictable effect: Non-white Americans have much lower homeownership rates, lower wealth and a higher degree of financial precarity, especially Black Americans
The big picture: Redlined maps are gone, but the inequality they helped create has endured. Limiting the ability to build wealth through the value of a home touches future generations since houses can be passed on as inheritance, and also tapped for anything from college funds to seed money to start a business.
There’s lots of great data and insights in the piece on equity issues in housing as a whole. Ownership and access to mortgages isn’t the only issue. Issues in the rental market (like COVID’s economic fallout) impact minorities at far higher rates:
By the numbers: Locked out of homeownership, people of color overwhelmingly rent.
More than half of Black American and Latino households are renters, according to USAFacts, while Asian and Native American renters fall just under that threshold.
Compare that to the 27% of white households that rent.
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