Happy Monday! Hope you’re weekend was fantastic. It was a very happy weekend in my apartment. 🐶
My new roommate, Fitz(gerald) moved into my apartment in Downtown Los Angeles; he’s also UT employee number two!!
Last Monday’s most popular stories:
🥇 TechCrunch: Getaway, a startup building tiny cabins, raises $41.7M
🥈 The New York Times: 2020 Is the Summer of the Road Trip. Unless You’re Black.
🥉 Axios: Public parks, reimagined for the COVID era
Urban Tech Archives:
🎙 Podcast: 🔦 The opaque systems and processes of global trade
📝 Newsletter: 🔦 The opaque systems and processes of global trade
📝 Newsletter: 🧠 How Design Shapes Human Experience
Essential City + Tech Stories: 2.21.21
😡 The Washington Post: Internal report cites HUD for lead poisoning in East Chicago, Ind., children. More could be at risk.
🥊 The New York Times: Texas Grid Failure Stirs Feud Between Cities and State
🚨 TechCrunch: RapidSOS raises $85M for a big data platform aimed at emergency responders
🚲 Streetsblog: The Bike Parking Revolution is Here (With Your Help)!
🍸 TechCrunch: Olive offers a more sustainable e-commerce experience
🔋The New York Times: Opinion | There’s One Big Problem With Electric Cars
😡 The Washington Post: Internal report cites HUD for lead poisoning in East Chicago, Ind., children. More could be at risk.
Tracy Jan reported on a housing trend that's still far too familiar in the U.S.:
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has for years neglected to enforce its own environmental regulations, resulting in lead poisoning of children in at least one public housing development and potentially jeopardizing residents’ health in thousands of other federally subsidized apartments near contaminated sites, according to an inspector general report obtained by The Washington Post.
The agency’s watchdog reviewed HUD’s efforts to identify and mitigate health risks to residents of public housing near toxic waste dumps after the East Chicago, Ind., apartment complex, where tenants had been living with lead contamination for more than four decades, was deemed uninhabitable in 2016.
🥊 The New York Times: Texas Grid Failure Stirs Feud Between Cities and State
Last week’s weather in Texas was one of those stories that captured the entire nation’s attention. It also brought a lot of attention to public utilities and the complicated policy frameworks involved with energy markets:
For the Republicans who have run Texas state government for years, trying to undermine the Democrats who lead the state’s largest cities has been a blood sport for years. They have sought to overrule local officials on disputes involving everything from pandemic restrictions and plastic bag bans to protections for immigrants.
But this week, the collapse of the state’s power grid gave Democrats a chance to turn the tables. With the state reeling from a rare winter storm that caused widespread power outages, Democrats have mobilized public anger over the Republicans’ oversight of the energy industry, opening a new front in their battle to erode the party’s dominance of every statewide office and both chambers of the legislature…
…Much of the rest of the United States features electricity systems that are interconnected, but Texas has long stood out for having its own grid. While the system has been praised by hard-line conservatives as an example of the state’s go-it-alone mettle, the unusual setup originated when the Democrats who once wielded control over Texas politics sought to shield companies in the state from federal regulators overseeing interstate electricity sales.
The Republicans who rose to power in Texas in the 1990s had their own ideas about turbocharging the electricity industry. Around that time, Texas energy giants like Enron (before its spectacular collapse in a 2001 accounting scandal) were winning plaudits for aggressive moves into power markets around the United States and the world.
🚨 TechCrunch: RapidSOS raises $85M for a big data platform aimed at emergency responders
On the note of disasters and doing better to prep and respond to them, Ingrid Lunden reported on a new funding round for a startup focused on this area:
Emergency response services have been one of the unsung heroes of the last chaotic year, providing essential and urgent medical and other assistance during a period that has faced not just the usual run of natural and man-made disasters, but a global health pandemic to boot.
Today, a startup that is building tools to make it easier for emergency response teams to do their jobs by providing them with more immediate data about callers and their circumstances is announcing a big round of funding as it continues to grow.
RapidSOS, which has built a data platform for emergency response services, has closed a Series C of $85 million, money that it will be using to build in more integrations to provide its customers with better and bigger data sets, and to continue expanding its operations after providing data to assist in addressing some 150 million emergencies in 2020 — which works out to some 400,000 emergencies per day.
🚲 Streetsblog: The Bike Parking Revolution is Here (With Your Help)!
Out of NYC a couple of weeks ago, Gersh Kuntzman describes a new micromobility partnership:
You say you want a revolution? Well, you need to start doing what you can.
Oonee — the secure bike parking company that the de Blasio administration can’t figure out what to do with — will install two new compact, ad-free curbside pods somewhere in the city, based on suggestions from the public. (Vote here.)
The units, which hold about six or seven bikes, plus a pump for public use, were funded by Voi, the scooter company. Oonee has previously sited larger pods in pilot programs near the Barclays Center, the Staten Island Ferry terminal in Manhattan and in Journal Square in Jersey City, but company founder Shabazz Stuart believes the smaller units could be rapidly deployed everywhere, once the city gives the green light and investors see that the concept works.
🍸 TechCrunch: Olive offers a more sustainable e-commerce experience
It seems like consumers are demanding, leading to innovation to support the new wants of consumers for more sustainable e-commerce:
Nate Faust has spent years in the e-commerce business — he was a vice president at Quidsi (which ran Diapers.com and Soap.com), co-founder and COO at Jet (acquired by Walmart for $3.3 billion) and then a senior vice president at Walmart.
Over time, he said it slowly dawned on him that it’s “crazy” that 25 years after the industry started, it’s still relying on “single-use, one-way packaging.” That’s annoying for consumers to deal with and has a real environmental impact, but, Faust said, “If any single retailer were to try to tackle this problem right now on their own, they would run up into a huge cost increase to pay for this more expensive packaging and this two-way shipping.”
So he’s looking to change that with his new startup, Olive, which consolidates a shopper’s purchases into a single weekly delivery in a reusable package.
Keep this stat in mind: “U.S. non-food retail is now 25% eCommerce according to U.S. Census data” [source].
🔋 The New York Times: There’s One Big Problem With Electric Cars
New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote a thoughtful piece last week explaining why we shouldn’t put all of our eggs in the electric car basket:
The planet will be much better off if we switch to electric cars. But gauzy visions of the guilt-free highways of tomorrow could easily distract us from the larger and more entrenched problem with America’s transportation system.
That problem isn’t just gas-fueled cars but car-fueled lives — a view of the world in which huge private automobiles are the default method of getting around. In this way E.V.s represent a very American answer to climate change: To deal with an expensive, dangerous, extremely resource-intensive machine that has helped bring about the destruction of the planet, let’s all buy this new version, which runs on a different fuel.
Several Interesting Social Posts
As always, thank you for reading today’s edition! Have a wonderful week.
See you on Urban Tech Thursday. The podcast and newsletter will feature a conversion with Urbanist and Journalist Greg Lindsay.
Greg is someone whose work has helped me better understand the complex systems of cities, and he was kind enough to offer some time to share his insights with UT.
✌️ JT