Essential City + Tech Stories: 3.15.21
Hey there! John, here. Hope your weekend was magical.
My weekend was filled with family time and pups:
A few quick notes:
🚨 The latest episode of the Urban Tech Podcast is now live! It features my recent conversation with Thomas Knights, the head of Strava’s Metro Project.
Where to listen 🎧
Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | Select Podcast Player
Finally, thanks to everyone who has been so supportive and joined the Urban Tech Beta group! We now have over 160 people signed up as of this morning. I’m blown away by the folks who are offering to help shape this product from its earliest days.
Here is an updated look at where folks work who are signed up to participate in the beta later this month:
Now, let’s dive into the essential stories you need to know to start the week! 💥
Last Monday’s most popular stories:
🥇 CityMonitor: Bookstores should be an essential part of the 15-minute city
🥈Spin: Bringing Micromobility Equity into Focus
🥉NextCity: Boise’s Affordable Housing Land Trust Strategy Includes Office Conversions
Urban Tech Archives:
🎙 Podcast: The Ways One Mobility Company is Trying to Break Into NYC
📝 Newsletter: 🔬The Bill Gurley Test for Determining a Tech Hub
Essential City + Tech Stories: 3.15.21
😡 CityLab: Maps Reveal Redlined Areas Face Higher Flood Risks
👀 The Wall Street Journal: Lucid, Long Before SPAC, Promised to Build Saudi Auto Plant
🗳 The New York Times: Inside a Billionaire’s Plan to Influence New York’s Mayoral Race
🤑 The New York Times: For Creators, Everything Is for Sale
😡 CityLab: Maps Reveal Redlined Areas Face Higher Flood Risks
Kriston Capps and Christopher Cannon at CityLab published an incredible piece earlier this morning, which uses Redfin data to show the correlation between historic redlining and flood dangers:
Flooding is a rising threat across the U.S., with homeowners facing as much as $19 billion in damages every year. What puts a neighborhood at high risk for flooding? Geography is key, but new data reveal another factor that can be determinative, too: race.
Contemporary maps for flood risk overlap in striking ways with New Deal–era maps used by the federal government to assess risk for mortgage lending. When appraisers mapped cities for the federal Homeowners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s, they assigned grades to neighborhoods based on several factors, race high among them. Black and immigrant neighborhoods were deemed undesirable, marked by yellow or red lines designating these areas “declining” or “hazardous”—a racist practice known as redlining.
These historically redlined neighborhoods suffer a far higher risk of flooding today, according to new research from Redfin, the Seattle-based real-estate brokerage.
Using flood risk data from the nonprofit First Street Foundation and redlining maps from the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project, Redfin assessed racial disparities in flood risk across dozens of major metro areas.
👀 The Wall Street Journal: Lucid, Long Before SPAC, Promised to Build Saudi Auto Plant
There’s major excitement in the electric auto market right now — and not just for Tesla.
Summer Said and Ben Foldy at The Wall Street Journal published a story examining the complicated geopolitical landscape for one hot EV company:
Electric-car startup Lucid Motors Inc. has an undisclosed commitment to build an assembly plant in Saudi Arabia, a potentially costly promise the company made after accepting more than $1 billion in financing from the Saudi Public Investment Fund in 2018, according to people familiar with the matter.
The plant promise represents a significant investment commitment for the startup, which hasn’t yet sold a car from its one existing factory in Arizona. It is also a potential boon for Saudi Arabia, which has struggled to lure Western companies to the country in the wake of the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Last month, Lucid agreed to a special-purpose acquisition company merger, a deal that if consummated would allow it to trade publicly later this year. The merger agreement valued the Silicon Valley startup at some $24 billion.
🗳The New York Times: Inside a Billionaire’s Plan to Influence New York’s Mayoral Race
The race for Mayor of New York is arguably the most anticipated U.S. election this year. Dana Rubenstein explains how Real Estate Developer Stephen Ross is looking to influence the race:
The billionaire developer Stephen M. Ross is rallying fellow business leaders to commit tens of millions of dollars in an effort to push moderate Democrats to vote in the June mayoral primary in New York and “change the future course of the city.”
Mr. Ross has scheduled a meeting for Monday to detail his plans to launch the super PAC to “help us get this mayoral election right,” according to an email he sent to colleagues that was reviewed by The New York Times.
The campaign would not initially support a specific candidate, but Mr. Ross, the chairman and founder of Related Companies, stressed that the “winner of the Democratic primary for mayor in June will decide if NYC will rebound or languish.”
The effort is the starkest example of business leaders using their money and influence to elect a pro-business mayor who would steer New York’s recovery from the pandemic, and to hurt the chances of progressive-leaning candidates whose positions — like slashing the Police Department budget and raising taxes on the rich — alarm many business leaders.
💼Axios: The future of co-working — and WeWork
Axios Business Reporter Erica Pandey took a look at the future landscape for coworking:
Before the pandemic, the co-working revolution, led by WeWork, was well underway. Then suddenly, sharing desks and beer on tap with strangers became unthinkable.
Yes, but: WeWork — and its investors — are betting that co-working still has a bright future. The company is in advanced discussions to go public via a SPAC sponsored by Vivek Ranadivé's Bow Capital Management, per multiple sources.
What's happening: The post-pandemic working world will be all about flexibility. The vast majority of workers want hybrid in-person/office work. That's pushing companies — especially smaller ones — to be nimble with their office space, and co-working is often the answer.
🤑 The New York Times: For Creators, Everything Is for Sale
Using new tools and platforms, creators are increasingly able to run sophisticated businesses from almost anywhere.
New York Times Reporter Taylor Lorenz explores the trend:
A rash of new start-ups are making it easier for digital creators to monetize every aspect of their life — down to what they eat, who they hang out with and who they respond to on TikTok.
Tens of millions of people around the globe consider themselves creators, and the creator economy represents the “fastest-growing type of small business,” according to a 2020 report by the venture capital firm SignalFire.
But as the market gets more and more competitive — and the platforms and their algorithms remain unreliable — creators are devising new, hyper-specific revenue streams.
One comes in the form of NewNew, a start-up in Los Angeles, that describes its product as creating a “human stock market.” On the app, fans pay to vote in polls to control some of a creator’s day-to-day decisions.
Several Interesting Social Posts
Thanks for reading today’s edition! 🙏
Don’t forget to sign up for the Urban Tech Beta waitlist if you haven’t already done so.
✌️ JT