Essential City + Tech Stories: 3.22.21
🎧 New UT Podcast: JT Chats with Local Logic about Data and Analytics at the local level
Hello, happy Monday! 🌅
First off, the newest Urban Tech Podcast is now live. It features a recent conversation with the team at Local Logic.
The main focus of the conversation was about the ways data and analytics are increasingly being used at the local level by a variety of stakeholders, including urban planners, developers, nonprofits, and more. I also heard a bit more about Local Logic’s platform and how the company is looking to build a product for these stakeholders.
Where to listen
Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | Select Podcast Player
Also, a few small quick updates on the new product we are building out for Urban Tech right now; I’m hoping to have a landing page for Urban Tech’s paid product later this week, so be on the lookout for some quick updates on that front. Here’s a quick peek at what we’re building behind the scenes:
I want to give a major shout-out to my friend Chintan who is helping me get the site up and running so quickly! If you’re looking for web design help, you should 100% check out his work.
Finally, make sure to sign up for the product waitlist to be the first to know when the site goes live!
Now, let’s dive into the essential stories you need to know to start the week.
Last Monday’s most popular stories:
🥇 Axios: The future of co-working — and WeWork
🥈The New York Times: For Creators, Everything Is for Sale
🥉The New York Times: Inside a Billionaire’s Plan to Influence New York’s Mayoral Race
Urban Tech Archives:
🎙 Podcast: 💻 Why the no-code revolution is coming to local government
📝 Newsletter: How Zillow is planning to hire thousands of new employees
📝 Newsletter: Why Waymo Currently Leads the Race for Autonomous Cars
Essential City + Tech Stories: 3.22.21
👻 San Antonio Express: A year after Texas' COVID restaurant shutdown, ghost kitchens have risen to fill the spaces left behind
🔋 The Verge: Chuck Schumer wants to replace every gas car in America with an electric vehicle
🤑 Cities Today: Wave of US cities to pilot guaranteed income programmes
🌏 Axios: How stalling growth hurts the planet
📜 The 19th: How the COVID stimulus bill could help fight pregnancy-related deaths
🖼 CrunchBase News: The Market Minute: What You Need To Know About NFTs
👻 San Antonio Express: A year after Texas' COVID restaurant shutdown, ghost kitchens have risen to fill the spaces left behind
Mike Sutter, a restaurant critic for the Express, explores how ghost kitchens have risen in popularity in San Antonio to fill the gaps left by local eateries shuttering during COVID:
Today, it’s mostly the masks that remind us how restaurant life has changed, like costumes from a Halloween that never ended. But a year ago, the masks couldn’t save us from the pandemic stay-at-home order that turned out the lights in San Antonio restaurant dining rooms at 11:59 p.m. on March 18.
The doors swung back open at 25 percent capacity May 1, but restaurants already had begun to pivot, staking their immediate futures on more delivery and takeout, bigger patios, touch-free electronic menus, even selling eggs, milk and toilet paper like pop-up bodegas.
🔋 The Verge: Chuck Schumer wants to replace every gas car in America with an electric vehicle
With Democrats in control of Congress and the Whitehouse, plans for ambitious energy policies are lively in Washington right now.
Verge Transportation Reporter Andrew Hawkins recently spoke with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on how he plans to move the conversation in the Senate:
With the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill signed into law, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is ready to tackle the next major challenge: President Joe Biden’s call for a massive infrastructure bill. As part of that package, Schumer said he plans to include his ambitious proposal to get every American to swap their gas-guzzling car for an electric one.
“It’s a bold new plan designed to accelerate America’s transition to all electric vehicles on the road, to developing a charging infrastructure, and to grow American jobs through clean manufacturing,” Schumer told The Verge in a brief interview this week. “And the ultimate goal is to have every car manufactured in America be electric by 2030, and every car on the road be clean by 2040.”
The top-line details of the “cash for clunkers’’-style plan haven’t changed much since Schumer first proposed it in an op-ed in TheNew York Times in late 2019. But the political landscape has certainly shifted in favor of the Democrats, breathing new life into the idea. Under the proposal, anyone who trades in their gas car for an electric one would get a “substantial” point-of-sale discount, Schumer says. He wouldn’t say how much of a discount, only that it would be “deep.” A spokesperson later confirmed they are eyeing rebates that are “more generous” than the current $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
🤑 Cities Today: Wave of US cities to pilot guaranteed income programmes
UBI pilot programs continue to grow in popularity in the U.S. — and increasingly globally as well.
Sara Wray, the editor of Cities Today, explored some of the new programs that have recently popped up:
Earlier this month as he revealed the preliminary results from the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED), former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs said that when he first announced the idea of piloting Guaranteed Income (GI) in 2017, many people “thought we were crazy, that it was a joke”.
But the concept of providing direct cash payments to specific, targeted communities of people is beginning to gain traction in light of growing evidence, political shifts and the economic fallout from the pandemic.
Inspired by Stockton and rallied by Tubbs, who went on to found Mayors for a Guaranteed Income (MGI) in July 2020, several US cities now plan to launch their own pilot schemes which could help increase awareness around GI among communities and policymakers.
The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, which was funded by private donations, distributed US$500 a month for 24 months to 125 recipients. The cash was unconditional, with no strings attached and no work requirements, and recipients were selected randomly from neighbourhoods at or below Stockton’s median household income.
🌏 Axios: How stalling growth hurts the planet
Tensions between growing economies and sustainability are heating up. Axios’ Future Author Bryan Walsh recently looked at the theme:
Some environmentalists and economists are pushing for "degrowth" — stabilizing or even shrinking the economy — to avert environmental catastrophe.
The big picture: Degrowthism may seem like the only reasonable response to the climate challenges we face, but the experience of enforced economic shrinking during the pandemic indicates the pain would outweigh the benefits — especially for the world's poorest.
Where it stands: The global economy shrank by an estimated 4.3% in 2020, according to data from the World Bank.
📜 The 19th: How the COVID stimulus bill could help fight pregnancy-related deaths
The 19th’s Health Reporter Shefali Luthra explored how a small provision in the COVID stimulus bill could help ameliorate pregnancy-related deaths:
A little-noticed provision in the American Recovery Act could boost access to postpartum health care, a step forward in the fight to combat the nation’s pregnancy-related death crisis.
The change gives states the option to extend eligibility for Medicaid — the public insurance plan for low-income people that covers almost half of the nation’s births — so that people can stay covered for a full year after giving birth.
Reproductive health experts have been pushing for this change for years, citing its potential to reduce the United States’ pregnancy-related death rate. Currently, the United States has twice the number of deaths that occur within a year of giving birth than other wealthy nations. Black and Native American women are two to three times more likely than White, Latina and Asian-American women to die within a year of childbirth, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The public health agency notes that most of those deaths are preventable.
🖼 CrunchBase News: The Market Minute: What You Need To Know About NFTs
Find yourself wondering what NFTs are like I was recently? Urban Tech friend Sophia Kunthara at Crunchbase News wrote an awesome explainer last week that cuts through the internet hype:
In short, an NFT is a non-fungible token. Put more simply, it’s something like a digital collectible.
“I think the simplest description of an NFT or a way to think about it is it’s the first time you can actually establish and enforce ownership of a digital asset,” said Zeeshan Feroz, chief growth officer of crypto payments infrastructure startup MoonPay.
NFTs are a way of enforcing property rights on digital properties, Feroz said. The content of the NFT is tied to a token, and that token represents the title of the item.
When you buy an NFT, that ownership is recorded on the blockchain.
Several Interesting Social Posts
Thanks for reading today’s edition!
✌️ JT