Doubling down to build out Urban Tech 👀
A Conversation w/ Local Logic on Location Data and Analytics
Hey everyone! John, here. I hope your week is going beautifully. 🙌
Before diving into today’s conversation with Local Logic, I wanted briefly share a quick update on the product we are working on for Urban Tech; plus a brief personal update that is far less interesting but still important.
Over 140 people have signed up for the beta for Urban Tech’s product. My technical team and I are still figuring out what we can get out the door in the next couple of weeks, but I’m hopeful a beta of the product will include more content, a job board of some kind, and maybe some exclusive content if I can get some good interviews before May.
Here are some of the organizations that people work at who are helping shape the product:
The feedback from all of you and my partners helping me fund this has exceeded my wildest dreams.
Because of this, and to protect myself from burnout, I’ve decided that I will pause my graduate education at USC to fully commit to building a product and company that will live up to our expectations.
Let me be clear: I am planning on going back to USC and getting my degree. Becoming a Trojan was one of the key experiences that helped me start Urban Tech.
The reason I’m hitting pause, though, is that frankly, there just arent enough hours in the day to be a full-time grad student, publish multiple newsletters weekly, record and edit multiple podcasts weekly, ensure my puppy Fitz is getting the love he needs, and provide myself with some semblance of a personal life — also sleep is very cool!
Urban Tech is the most meaningful work that I’ve personally done, so I’m happy to throw more of myself into this journey.
If you’re interested in helping me figure out the building blocks for this product, please sign up for the beta list here. I should have more details in the next week or two to begin kicking it off.
A few programming notes. I’ll be publishing the audio from my interview with Vincent and Sara a little later today. On Saturday, I plan to publish the podcast of my recent conversation with Tom Knights from Strava.
This week, I got to talk with the team at Local Logic, a startup focused on building a data platform and analytics tools for real estate developers and cities. I spoke with Local Logic's CEO Vincent-Charles Hodder and Head of Industry Relations Sara Maffey. Both of them are incredibly thoughtful about cities and the elements that go into placemaking.
They taught me so much about how we can more effectively think about using data and analytics in our cities.
JT: It feels like there's a big technology infusion in urban planning right now. Can you share a bit about how you're thinking about this trend and maybe what's new about it compared to other points in time?
Vincent-Charles Hodder: So, like we, we were never planning on starting a company. Really. We were geeking out doing a master's degree, and we were seeing that there was more and more data becoming available on cities every month.
And you had cities like New York, which are good in terms of open data platforms. And they were producing a ton of new data sets, which was happening on a local level throughout old Canada. And the United States, which was a big, change, right?
Specifically in Montreal, where we're based, we were part of that very first platform. We were working as students; we were working on this project. We were working with Montreal, figuring out which data sets would be the most useful for us to do our research on, which was a really interesting place to be.
We noticed this back then, and transportation planners are the ones that we're using data the most straight. It was almost at the intersection of engineering and urban planning. And there was the most data available. Cause to me, that's why it seems like that's where like transportation planners have been on the data kind of this data spot maybe earlier because they realized that like sensors could help make the flow.
I don't know. At least that's my sense of it. And there's like GTA GCFS data. And I think there was a sense of stratification of data across different mediums or transportation systems. And so that's where a lot of dabbing and calling the two other co-founders, they were interested in transportation planning.
And so they saw the value of data and transportation planning. And then. When you're applying it to something like the urban design or other disciplines within urban planning, you're seeing that their use of data is much less frequent. Because I think a lot of times they're just wasn't enough data available.
Yeah, there was a project in Montreal where the parks department was trying to use data to understand parks and green spaces to better plan and build services or activities that would bring more of the population to use these spaces. And there just wasn't any data to do that.
They used traffic counters to see if people were using, at what frequency, at what times of the day. And then we're able to start building policies around that. But ultimately, what we're seeing is there's this huge shift towards capturing more gain on cities, but then making it publicly available, which I think is such an interesting concept for what we call downstream innovation.
And it's kind of part of the reflection that we have, where the more data that's becoming available on cities, the more stakeholders will be able to take. Action on that data and have a wider reflection on the impacts of their specific discipline or their specific silo with urban planning or within cities in general on the rest of the ecosystem.
JT: That makes a lot of sense. Sara, since you're based in the U.S., what differences do you see between how we handle data and privacy compared to Canada? It just feels like Canada is having a much different conversation, and privacy is just thought of in a more nuanced way compared to us here in the States.
Sara Maffey: I think you're right that Canada is having a very different conversation than the U.S. I think just going off what Vince just said, though, that being on the economic development side for so long, I think that. Things like that could happen in larger cities that could gather more data and analyze it, understand, and make decisions based on it.
But the vast majority of our communities in the U.S. don't have that kind of capacity even to try to get that data. And so you have these processes in place where you're, having like public input sessions where maybe only the people who are. Against a certain project or maybe are focused on one issue go up.
The idea of understanding what consumers, what the citizens, the community wants, and then connect that to the development side and to the economic development organization side, where you're actually in conversations with developers, you are making decisions on what's going to be built.
There's a real disconnect from that right now. One of the things that our platform can do is try almost to democratize the understanding of what communities want and bring them to that a place where it doesn't exist right now.
JT: I love that. I used to work in New York, so I was very familiar with the community board process, and that's, I think, a very specific example and very niche to New York, but there are similar processes for getting economic development done in other cities.
I've met founders trying to streamline that process and public comment more generally, but it's really hard to crack that problem.
VC: That's so interesting. Functionally, the problem that we're seeing now is that cities are incredibly complex ecosystems where everything is interrelated. And I think we all understand that the problem is that in each discipline that we call stakeholders in cities, each stakeholder will work in a silo.
So they're going to think about whatever they're doing, independently of all the other elements in that city. So if you think about the private sector or residential or real estate developers at large, they're thinking about what they're doing from their perspective. From the financial risk analysis of the project that they're going to be building yet, whether or not you end up living in that development, it's going to impact the entirety of that neighborhood of that city.
And that's something that. We think that data could help solve by introducing an objective quantitative perspective on the impact of that development. Yes, on the real estate market at large and on environmental, social components that are very real and will have lasting impacts on the makeup of that neighborhood or that city for the next hundred years.
And I think by bringing data into that conversation, we're able to introduce many more perspectives. Voices as to what is the highest and best use for that specific parcel line. Yeah. It was maybe building a hundred stories. The condo tower is from a financial point of view is. It is the best, highest, and best use, but from a social-environmental point of view, from a community-building point of view, from a livability point of view, it might be detrimental.
And so I think introducing those factors in the way that the private sector is thinking about the highest and best use, but also. Exposing those realities to the public sector enables us to have a more honest conversation about what should be built in where and how to optimize that for more than just one factor, based on whatever perspective you might have given what you do in the urban setup.
JT: It also seems like urban planners in Canada have a stronger position to make and push policy forward. In the U.S., they are very at the will of elected officials to help them, which seems like one big difference between the U.S. and Canada.
VC: So for us, I think we were a bunch of urban planners, but we call it, we say we're urban planners, turned data scientists, we're applying data stuff from planning to discipline. And, what's interesting is that I think you're right about it and the work in the US. Yes, urban planners are an interesting perspective city, government, and same way.
But when we first started this and went back to what I was saying earlier, We never intended to build this company. What we wanted to do is have an impact. We identify two stakeholders that we call that had an impact on the way that cities were built. But the first one was citizens, right?
Where you choose to live, where you choose to live based on where your kids go to school, where you shop, where you work, where you hang out, has a huge implication on the long-term sustainability of cities, and that, that, decision as to where you live is Pretty complex, right? You need to buy the right house in the right neighborhood.
And so what we wanted to do is saying let's provide descriptive information on the location that enables consumers. To consider location attributes in the same way, they would the number of bedrooms and bathrooms in the house, right? And so we built these location scores, which essentially quantifies from zero to 10, a bunch of different things, like always level access to transportation, access, grocery stores, et cetera, et cetera.
We started with that audience first because we said consumers could shape cities based on whatever their demand is for the real estate market. The second stakeholder and the one I think that we're pumped to work with now, and Sara is focusing a lot of our time on this, are real estate developers, right?
The people are functionally building our cities in the private sector, like it or not. And they're the ones putting up the money and going out and building what we're seeing in our day-to-day lives. And so we wanted to make sure to start that dialogue with that audience. So saying, look, there's.
If we can reduce her risk, we can increase her financial return. Still, we can also enable you to have a more positive social, environmental impact from the work you're doing to respond to the real medicines. And I think that has a huge opportunity for us to change what is being built.
And then eventually, I think it's starting to work with municipalities. They're saying, look, we get a really good handle on how the private sector is thinking about things. And what we're seeing is that there's an openness to start using more data. And the way that policy is being written to either update out of date policy or thinking about how to structure the private sector in their work better.
SM: In Atlanta, for example, we have recently passed legislation that allows accessory dwelling units, for example, and to maximize not maximize, but add additional units to a site that was. Previously like a single-family so that we can get more density ITP inside the perimeter, as we say here because that's really, it's the only way we're going to respond to this growing need for affordable workforce housing within the city itself.
And so that's one way I think that. Our city planning has responded to the need from developers who say, okay, this is you. You need us to be building more workforce housing, but where are we going to do this? We need to respond with how we're zoning parcels. And so that's one of the things we're adding.
Nationally in the US and Canada to understand the zoning of sites, because I think that's one of the first things you need to understand as you're trying to think about what your performance will look like for a project, for example.
JT: Like the density conversation, I feel like embracing more density in the U S. Quickly coming and is happening very fast.
I'm just curious to pay a lot of attention to how cities like Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix, like how they're trying to attract this next generation of tech talent and embrace density to provide housing for everyone.
SM: This conversation was something that I was super focused on, probably because I'm nerdy about this pre-COVID; it's only accelerated during this time when people are exercising that choice. And one of the things that I think cities can do and do with various degrees of success tell the story of what it's like to live there.
To attract that talent. We'll have to know that it's going to be a cool place, and place-making active placemaking and telling the story of your city is important to attracting talent. So I think that there are certain cities that Austin, everyone knows they have that reputation already.
In Atlanta, we have a few initiatives; one of them is ChooseATL, which is focused on telling the story of Atlanta's culture. We have a lot of really cool stuff that comes out of Atlanta that people can do.
JT: I talked to a friend a few years ago who said Atlanta was like going to be the market, like the corporate headquarters there alone. It's like a very I think people realize Atlanta is like a good place to be.
SM: I think that there's a lot of secondary and tertiary cities that have been investing in the sense of place for a while right now. They're reaping the benefits of that because they have the track record to say, Hey, we are a cool place. Now that people choose and look for more affordable places to live but still have that cool experience. Those are the cities that you see people flocking to.
There are a lot of cities in North Carolina and just throughout the Sunbelt. And that's really; I think what's driving that. That migration of talent and attracting that talent is probably like the leader of where we need to be paying attention to where the development's going to be happening.
JT: Yeah. No, and that's such an interesting the way I think about it, and I'm in California. As the conversation, it's like, why is everyone leaving San Francisco.
I'm curious, and I think there’s a lot of skepticism about data, and issues of the surveillance state.
And I think in the U.S., like our modern idea of the surveillance state is shaped by I know in my opinion, like the Iraq war, the Bush administration, the Patriot Act.
And so I'm curious, how are you trying to like, get people in urban planning, or like to trust a data company?
VC: I think sadly, maybe where we are right now with data in cities is just trying to understand what's there. So w what we're trying to do essentially is build a digital representation of cities through data.
So it's understanding, okay, what's there, and why does it matter? And what we mean by why it matters is saying if you go outside your house right now, and you get that, you intuitively understand what it's like to be in that space. That's made up of thousands of different points of data that you're able to process in your brain rapidly.
And then, you can easily compare and contrast one location. Let's say Atlanta to Austin, and he can say there are similarities, there are differences. And that's done by the setback of the house to the sidewalk. It's the canopy of trees. It's going to be your sense of security.
It's going to be thousands of pieces of information that you're—connecting to make up that sense of place. We want to do that with data, right? So it's essentially building that map of a city through data.
What that allows us to do then is to compare one location with another really, easily. So you're mentioning the similarities between Phoenix and Atlanta or Austin. The reality is that there are subsets of neighborhoods within those cities that are very similar and then subsets of other cities that have other neighborhoods that are very different.
We want to be able to do to digitize the doc process. By doing so you can then start analyzing cities and understanding what makes up that feeling that, intuitive understanding that sense of place for each neighborhood or each city in the U.S., and then start understanding migration patterns or whatever it is, changes in those cities to a understand what's there.
Then ultimately. Predict what's going to happen. And ultimately, and this is the Holy grail for us, could we use data to start prescribing what should be built based on what we're seeing happen. And so really starting to take out that. This is what I despise the most that are in binding is saying. Oh, I know I'm an urban planner.I know what we should do, which is bullshit.
JT: I completely agree. And I think that's part of the problem when you look at the stories of Robert Moses in New York and like it's people coming into cities and saying, I know this is what the people need and not asking the communities to join in the process of figuring it out.
VC: And so suddenly when you have that digital representation of cities through data, And you're starting to build the models on top of it and start understanding what makes up that ceiling. Then you can objectively understand what should be there or what could be there based on what we're seeing happen.
And I think that becomes interesting because not only does it allow for really innovative new concepts, it a lot also allows us to start measuring other things. Going back to that silo idea of saying, for only optimizing for financial return or only optimizing for another element, we're probably not.
We are finding the best-optimized land use. And, I think we have a responsibility to make damn sure that what we're building today is appropriate for the next hundred years because it's going to stay there for a very long time. And with, as you mentioned, natural immunization and more and more pressure being put on societies, I think we need to develop our cities in a sustainable way that will last us.
For a long time, and will enable us to increase the capacity of our urban centers for all this new population. No, I love that point. And I think that's a lot of the themes that I see in like why I was like, Oh, I want to build a media company to explore it and stuff. So I love all that I don't want to. I know you are both super busy and don't wanna take up too much more of your time, but what's on deck for the platform for the company.
JT: What do you have in the works? Is there anything that readers or listeners should be paying attention to?
SM: We're doing a ton of work on our local analytics platform. So I think over the next six months, we're just going to see so much more data and functionality built into that platform. That's exciting. And so we've launched our early adopters' program, and I would encourage your listeners to reach out and learn more about that program because I think it's a great way to just.
Get in there, explore what our platform can do from a data perspective and test it against maybe projects that they've done in the past, and understand what's available to them because I think that where we're headed is where Vince was saying that I, that ability to predict and prescribe that highest and best use of a site is where we're going to be using our data to get to.
And so we would love to have people on that. Journey with us and giving us feedback on how to make our platform the best it can be. No, that's it.
VC: If you're an investor active in the real estate space or just data curious, do reach out. What we want to enable is, make this data as, as available as possible and enable downstream innovation.
And so if you're an academic if you're a city. And you want to see what kind of data we might have or our capacity as to how to process data. We want to talk to you, and we want to explore those opportunities because, ultimately our, mission as a company is to help others build cities that will be more sustainable in the long run.
And that worked for the people that live in them. And so, to do that, we need to partner with some amazing people and then actually make it happen on the ground.
Thanks for reading this week’s edition! Please continue to share Urban Tech with your networks so we can continue to grow. 📈
Talk soon,
✌️ JT