City Building

The architecture of World’s Fairs was something to behold. What happened to this spirit of beauty? These fairs guided the future. The historian Neil Harris wrote, “American expositions provided visions of a higher life set amid heavenly landscapes. Enveloping in their scale, their novelty, their string of surprises, they punctuated their decades like giant exclamation marks.” How influential were these fairs? One in four Americans giving the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, even though the automobile hadn’t been invented. (Source: Disney’s Land) Walt Disney wanted Disneyland to feel like a World’s Fair. He wanted it to be “an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts and a showplace of beauty and magic.” Even the signs and posters at Disneyland echoed the World’s Fair aesthetic.

NYC is replacing eight escalators and upgrading fire alarms, and it's going to cost $62 million. That's about 1/13 of what it cost in today's dollars to build the entire Hoover Dam. https://t.co/sDcaV9J8DP The project is supposed to be done 2nd quarter of 2023. So it's going to take about as long to replace 8 escalators as it took to build the Empire State Building.

I’m a little obsessed with experiments launched by obscure, remote towns to repopulate their cities. This story, from the Isle of Rum in Scotland, is a treat: https://t.co/VuFbHpmKrC Tired: bootstrapping your own village with the homies Wired: Repopulating a remote Scottish island with the homies https://t.co/VuFbHpmKrC

If You Want To Start a New City, Start With a Killer K-12 School.

1 of 15: It has been hard to convey, through anecdotes or data, how bizarre the U.S. housing market has become. For example, a Bethesda, Maryland homebuyer working with @Redfin included in her written offer a pledge to name her first-born child after the seller. She lost. 2 of 15: There are now more Realtors than listings. 3 of 15: Inventory is down 37% year over year to a record low. The typical home sells in 17 days, a record low. Home prices are up a record amount, 24% year over year, to a record high. And still homes sell on average for 1.7% higher than the asking price, another record. 4 of 15: But in two of America’s largest cities, inventory has increased, in New York by 28%, in San Francisco by 77%. San Francisco hasn’t had an inventory increase this large since 2008. And still in both markets, prices are increasing. 5 of 15: In 2020, new-construction permits were *down* 13% in DC and New York, 40% in LA, 48% in Chicago, 50% in Seattle, 79% in San Francisco. Permits were *up* 25% in Miami, 56% in Vegas, 96% in Greenville, 122% in Detroit, 246% in Knoxville. 6 of 15: Lumber prices are up 300%. 7 of 15: In Redfin’s annual survey of nearly 2,000 homebuyers, 63% reported having bid on a home they hadn’t seen in person. 8 of 15: In an April survey of 600 https://t.co/TdSyBabxvH users who had relocated in the past year, about two thirds of the people who moved got a house the same size or bigger, but about the same proportion, two thirds, spent the same or *less* on housing. 9 of 15: Even though most of the people who moved got a bigger home, 78% reported having the same or more disposable income after their move. Idaho home prices could triple and still seem affordable to a Californian. 10 of 15: For low-tax states, 4 people move in for every 1 who leaves. For Texas, this ratio is 5:1; for Florida, 7:1. Cites & states have no leverage to raise taxes, after many promised new money for social justice; the federal government will have to fund long-term investments. 11 of 15: This migration to lower-cost areas may lead to lower workforce participation. For many families @Redfin has relocated, the money saved on housing costs lets one parent stop working. A wave of Redfin customers are retiring early. 12 of 15: Lenders are calling employers to confirm that the homebuyer will have permission to work remotely when the pandemic ends. Rates are lower for loans on primary residences, and the lender also wants to make sure the borrower actually plans to work after getting the loan. 13 of 15: The average housing budget for out-of-towners moving to Nashville was $720K, ~50% higher than locals’ $485K budget. It used to be coastal elites who worried that every adult in the family had to win a career lottery, just to afford a home. Now that feeling may spread. 14 of 15: it’s not just income that’s k-shaped, but mobility. 90% of people earning $100,000+ per year expect to be able to work virtually, compared to 10% of those earning $40,000 or less per year. The folks who need low-cost housing the most have the least flexibility to move. 15 of 15: an investor recently said, with an ancient touch of awe but also greed, that one source of America’s miraculous economic recovery was the bounty of “the land itself.” We have more room to grow than we ever imagined. We just have to make sure that benefits everyone.

it's time to build more 3rd spaces: homes outside of home 🏠 Places of refuge, where people can eat, relax, and commune in order to develop a sense of belonging to a place Gathering places where community is most alive and people are most themselves 🧵of cozy 3rd spaces 👇 https://t.co/oXTh4heZDr 1) 📚☕️ Bookstore-café’s in Asia. A combo of 2 traditional places—a bookstore and a café shop. Many studies have pointed out that the Chinese version of the bookstore-café is one of the most important recreational sites for the youth in China’s urban communities. https://t.co/reZIcjPX0y 2) 🇫🇷 The French Cafe. The sidewalk café emerged 500 yrs ago with the world’s 1st coffeehouses in Saudi Arabia. Today, Paris has thousands of sidewalk cafés, or an incredible “1 café to every 50 people.” It's said that a french cafe is “2/3 atmosphere and 1/3 matter.” https://t.co/gKqA5daI8y 3) 🛁 Bathhouses & hot springs. Some of the earliest descriptions of western bathing practices came from Greece, creating the foundation for modern spa procedures. In Japan, the 1st mention of hot springs is referenced in the Nihon Shoki, written in the 1st century. https://t.co/Df8Ar5YAp9 4) 🍻 German-American Lager Beer Gardens. When Germans came to America, they brought with them their beer gardens. They believed at the base of a viable community life, lay informal socializing. Inclusiveness was central to the coveted atmosphere of the lager beer garden. https://t.co/SI5o4WIFzV 5) 🌇 Main Street. In many small cities in America, the heart of the community was always along a 6-7 block radius called Main Street. However from 1973+, the shopping mall began to replace Main Street as the core of community belonging in America. https://t.co/ok6UKefyqJ 6) 🏋️‍♂️ Chinese Urban Parks or “Senior Playgrounds” The most common demographic in Chinese parks are large groups of elderly pensioners. Morning crowds of elderly people flock to public parks for their daily exercise routine, including dancing, Qiqong or even light gymnastics. https://t.co/rz9hBWWNYC 7) 🕯The English Pub For virtually every English man and woman, a pub exists close by. Every pub-goer has his or her local and every pub is someone’s local Built to human scale, pub are intimate, cozy settings, designed for an immediate neighborhood over a horde of transients. https://t.co/VNFMNbaQGw 8) 🍵 The Asian Tea House. Tea houses first popped up during 265-316 AD & became a fixture in Chinese/Japanese society. While old staples exist - like the Pujiang Tea Garden in Chengdu or Kantoku-tei Teahouse in Tokyo - modern renditions like HeyTea are evolving for youth. https://t.co/907LXZELQg 9) ☕️ Classic Coffeehouses They say that Coffee spurs the intellect; alcohol the emotions. Vienna was the site of some of the 1st coffeehouses in Europe. Today, it serves as the major social center for Viennese life. In 1650, a Jewish man opened the 1st coffeehouse in Oxford https://t.co/QJtbI6TV3o for more on 3rd spaces: https://t.co/witu8vvgE2

Announcement! My new work focus is... I'm building a town for creators. Not from scratch, but by growing a historic town near Austin. Year 1 projects include: New housing, a coworking cafe, boutique hotel & more. I don't think I've ever been so excited to work on something 😃 A few asks: If that sounds cool, follow me for updates! If you know anyone working on anything remotely similar, please tag them or DM me. If you have any interest in investing, DM me for investor info & updates. Can't wait to share more details soon 🎉

Last summer @charliecallinan and I flew to Africa to figure out how to build a city. We had no zero connections, but we networked our way into the upper echelons of multiple African governments, eventually meeting the Vice President of Ghana. Here’s how: In March ’19, we were working together at a hedge fund in NYC. We’d both just left athletics & school to learn how to invest I did surf contests and philosophy. Charlie played football at Boston College and was briefly signed to the @BuffaloBills https://t.co/mj8yLXkS5P We both love public markets investing — savage research, quick turnaround times, and deep thought. But we missed the physicality of sports and wanted an adventure. We wanted to build something on the frontier. We wanted to do something heroic. I had followed @paulmromer, @patrissimo, and the @Seasteading movement since high school, and was obsessed with the idea of building a new city. Over beers, Charlie and I cooked up a plan. We saw the opportunity cost of living in SF & NYC falling due to a loss of community, poor city management, broken infrastructure, and the rise of the cloud labor market. But the timing wasn’t yet right for the city we wanted to build. The market for a @balajis -style exit was still small. We decided to find existing new city projects and learn the nuts and bolts of the industry. In April 2019, we left our jobs at the fund to build the next great city. May - July was maniacal research mode: we read every book we could find on ancient, modern, and future cities. We met with all the top master planned community developers (e.g. Howard Hughes, Tavistock, Brookfield, etc.) Then we spoke to all the awesome people interested in cities in SV: @MarkLutter and @_TamaraWinter (formerly) at @CCIdotCity, @mwiyas, @iaboyeji, @patrissimo, @William_Blake, @micsolana, @ani_pai, @jasoncrawford, and many more. In July, we became convinced that Nigeria was the best market in the world for a new city. A couple projects like @EkoAtlantic were already being built, but given the population growth, there’s room for more (@iaboyeji 👀). Unfortunately, we couldn’t afford the flights. That weekend, Charlie won $2,000 at a golf tournament, taking our bank balance to $2,047. A few days later, @CCI gave us a small grant, so we bought tickets to Nigeria. We packed our bags with a few sites in mind (thanks Google Earth) and no connections. Before we left, two more amazing things happened: 1. After cold emailing hundred of people for intros to awesome people in Nigeria, a DC think tank connected me to @ThisisChale, and 2. I met @alex_dimcevski at a YC Summer School networking party (more on this later). In August, we flew to Lagos. It’s a wild place. Way more chaotic than anything you'll see in the US or EU. Nearly 3x the population of NYC buzzing around streets on motorbikes. @ThisisChale was an amazing host. He took us to one of Nigeria’s private religious towns, Grailland, and to Ondo State. We met with top developers in Lagos like @ronaldchagoury, thanks to an absurd number of cold calls, cold emails, and LinkedIn messages. https://t.co/AxWO1bGT7d I can’t share too much here, but we had a compelling thesis for a new city near Charles’ university, Elizade. There, we met the crew: @SFAjayi, John, Ralph, and many others. We scoped out potential new city sites while eating jollof and catfish. Charles got us a meeting with the Ondo State Government. It went well. https://t.co/NQ6Xjwb8Jl Meanwhile, @alex_dimcevski from the party had told a few people about my project. One of them worked on construction projects in Ghana. He heard we were meeting with the Nigerian govt about building a new city, and offered to connect us to his friends in the Ghanaian govt. After a few weeks in Nigeria, Charlie had to go home. I wanted to go to Ghana to see if Alex's friends' connections were real. With our last thousand dollars, I flew to Ghana for a meeting with a friend of a friend of a person I’d met once over cocktails. I was hoping I wouldn't be kidnapped. When I landed in Ghana, I met Alex’s connection’s friends: Ed and Joyce. They did in fact work for Ghana, and are both brilliant. Ed, Joyce, and I drove around Ghana, touring sites and pitching their colleagues in government on the concept of building a charter city. The trip yielded two interesting new city opportunities, so I flew home extremely energized and ready to dig in further. Back in NYC, Charlie and I bounced around coffee shops and hotel lobbies (for free wifi) trying to figure out how to make our dream of city-building into a reality. Charlie was crashing at his parents’ place and I was sleeping on my aunt’s couch. In early September we spec’d out an initial plan for building and financing a new city in West Africa. We needed to get back ASAP to meet with governments, but we were out of money again. I cold DM’d @byrnehobart because I liked his posts (subscribe here: https://t.co/hTJlKqnqKa). We got coffee, I told him about our mission @bluebookcities, and he wrote us our first check. Newly funded, we flew back to Africa. Based on the success of our previous meetings, we’d been offered a meeting with the Finance Minister. We landed in Accra a few days before the meeting. The day of, he cancelled. We called all of our new connections in the Ghanaian government and discovered that the President of South Africa had flown in for an urgent meeting, which took precedence over ours (what?!). So we found ourselves walking around Accra in full suits, and nothing to do, unsure if we’d get another opportunity to meet the Minister. An hour later, we got a call. “Be in front of the Parliament building in 20 minutes. You are meeting with the Vice President.” We jogged there and waited. A few minutes later, we heard the sirens -- The motorcade was on the way. We got picked up by the Presidential Motorcade, and sped to the Jubilee House (Ghana’s White House), swerving around cars that were slow to get out of our way. When we got out of the sedan, we were still processing what had just happened and what was to come. The Secret Service brought us into the building, and we waited in a clean, white room. Eventually we were brought up to Vice President Bawumia’s office. I can’t share much about our conversation with the Vice President, but he was enthusiastic about the benefits that charter cities could bring to Ghana, and about our plan. After finding a site, meeting with developers, local community leaders, the relevant regulators, and potential partners in other financial centers (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Nairobi, Dar, etc.), we flew back to the US. We raised a small round from @patrissimo, @tylercowen, @jwmares, @sbm367, @dfmerin and a few others to develop legislation that would enable the creation of a charter city in Ghana. Then, COVID happened. Ghana shut its borders in February, and we had no idea when we’d be allowed back in the country. We had limited runway and hadn’t budgeted for a year-long delay in our timeline due to a global pandemic. We weren’t sure what to do. So we did what we thought made the most sense: We booked a flight to Alaska. We’d plan our next move from the mountains. But that’s a story for another day. https://t.co/FM97ar0br9

1/ Why do cities have so many problems? "That's the way they've 'always' been. They're too hard to change." COVID wipes all of that. Not just cities; communities of every size can be reborn. What will it look like? https://twitter.com/chris_herd/status/1260681652872908802 2/ People aren't going to abandon cities outright. There are lots of positives But the world will get a lot less 'spiky' and people are going to start exploring the spectacular places to live in the other 90% of the US https://twitter.com/ryanchris/status/1260358684409880577 3/ People already know that the cost of living between SF vs. literally anywhere else can be staggering There are plenty of people who would live in SF, LA, NYC by choice. But there is an ocean of people who want more https://twitter.com/bryanrbeal/status/1257472953924624385 4/ But just because you hate paying $4K for a studio apt doesn't mean you suddenly know the perfect place to live If you came from a small town, maybe you move back? Or do you move somewhere completely different? https://twitter.com/dhaber/status/1252786279290482689 5/ This is the time to shine for people like @livability who are exploring "what makes small-to-medium sized cities great places to live." 82.8% of the population is urban; that won't necessarily change as much as shift https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/ 6/ People like @BrentBeshore have been telling us all about the benefits and beauties of building outside of the hustle and bustle in the stunning corners of the rest of the world. https://twitter.com/BrentBeshore/status/1259834823507456000 7/ ...nope, not that one. This one. @BrentBeshore https://twitter.com/BrentBeshore/status/1226278390530863104 8/ Also, have you seen the videos of @CapitalCamp - it's unreal. https://vimeo.com/349136072 9/ You see the same beauties from @awilkinson in Victoria, Canada https://twitter.com/awilkinson/status/1258581293471858699 10/ Think about that. Instead of squinting at these views on Twitter, sighing over their setup while you stare at your studio walkup, thinking about how to pay rent, wondering if you can sell both of your kidneys or just one--you could find your own beautiful place. [sad gif] 11/ Maybe your beautiful place is San Francisco, and that's fine. But the barriers to broadening the way we work, live, and civically engage in our communities around the world could shift dramatically https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1260426041077743617 12/ Focused on working in tech? There are already investors making bets in awesome markets like New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Georgia The godfathers of my own career @KickstartFund are helping make Utah a destination for high quality tech https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/business/smallbusiness/venture-capital-move-inland.html 13/ An influx of excited new entrants will transform downtowns all over the country. People like @FallowsDeb and @JamesFallows are already painting character studies of these towns. https://medium.com/@kwharrison13/our-towns-book-review-quotes-d19c1e7bda94 14/ "I am learning that every city has its own founding myth, or origin story -- by which I mean a narrative... that shapes an area's sense of its successes and failures." @JamesFallows https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/08/holland-snowmelt-patient-capital-and-the-revival-of-downtown/278730/ 15/ Maybe one of the most important outcomes? A re-introduction of one part of America to the other. Proximity creates empathy of experience, which can lead to understanding if properly nurtured. @tarawestover https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/tara-westover-trump-rural-america/600916/ 16/ It isn't city-living vs. country-living. You can see cities continue to thrive while getting more affordable AND smaller communities get a lift from new arrivals https://twitter.com/varun_mathur/status/1256721983762546690 17/ The more people who step into the opportunity to get creative with where they live, the more we'll see the world truly get more flat. Maybe then you start to see actual equality balancing? https://medium.com/@kwharrison13/the-new-urban-crisis-book-review-quotes-33a0b7b7bb27 18/ There is a library of things that could change depending on how we all react. https://twitter.com/BrentBeshore/status/1260548736431734786 19/ How will you redesign your own life? Choose Your Own Adventure just became that much more attainable. https://twitter.com/nateliason/status/1260378454874304512