Another Tool to Help Address the Housing Crisis

Most believe renters "throw away" money because they don’t build equity over time. But new startups are hoping to offer  a different approach. For example, when someone rents an apartment in a new complex in Columbus, Ohio, they can now also get a financial stake in the building.

Companies such as Rhove offer the security of ownership with the flexibility of renting. Rhove extends “renterships” to tenants in Rhove-partnered apartment complexes. The arrangements give tenants a stake in the building -- and their assets grow with the property’s value.

Rhove acts as an investor in the property by paying a lump sum to the owners. Tenants earn returns as property owners collect rent from the whole building, and as the property appreciates, the value of the shares increases. Another start-up, Nico, offers a similar concept, launching in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Echo Park, where gentrification threatened to push out some long-time residents. By purchasing rent-stabilized buildings and registering them in a financial trust, Nico offers portfolio shares to residents. This provides an opportunity keep their homes. Such ideas are not new: a real estate investment trust (REIT) is a closed-end investment company that owns assets related to real estate such as buildings, land and real estate securities. REITs sell on the major stock market exchanges just like common stock.

According to Hotpads, a young person will spend $200k+ in rent over the course of his or her lifetime. With many Americans spending a third of their income on rent, it can be difficult to save money to eventually buy a home. And renters generally don’t have the same opportunities to accrue wealth as homeowners. This Harvard study found wide wealth gaps between older homeowners and renters, even when their incomes are similar.

Read more here…

More Robot Cars, More Fun in the City

Drivers are already ditching their cars because of apps like Uber. Imagine what happens when driverless cars hit the roads.

Why bother owning a car when you can easily get where you want via your iPhone? This concept is known as “mobility as a service”, where passengers no longer own to their own cars, instead signing on for transportation-on-demand booked through smartphones.

Perhaps, for instance, a commuting plan that charges by the mile or through a monthly fee, like Netflix. Getting rid of cars in growing urban centers is a smart idea, and the world’s automakers are preparing in various ways. A major switch to subscription transportation requires two components. The first is already well underway: the explosion of ride-hailing apps like Uber, Lyft, Grab and others.
The second is still in the works — driverless cars.

Removing the human from behind the wheel slashes the cost of a taxi ride which will make mobility as a service so cheap in many places, it won’t make financial sense to own a car any longer. Lowering the cost per mile will turbo-charge demand for mobility as a service, likely to become a $10 trillion business, according to Ford Motor Company.

That's why tech giants like Google and Apple are developing their own self-driving systems to take on the world's leading automakers, including Volkswagen, General Motors, Ford, and Toyota.

Eventually, a single smartphone app could connect us to a web of options, such as robo-taxis, self-driving shuttles, on-demand subway or tram, e-bikes, and electric scooters. No more driving ourselves though congested cities. All that parking freed up means more space for pedestrians and parks. Unless it is bad — fleets of individually-owned driverless vehicles loosed upon streets and highways, randomly ferrying individual occupants near and far. Or, with so many shared rides, significantly fewer vehicles will be on the road, where is the need to spend billions on bigger highways?

Autonomous vehicles will revolutionize passenger transport, but they are also rapidly changing the delivery business. Data generated from self-driving cars will provide cities with “a more granular viewpoint into everything from infrastructure wear-and-tear to detailed traffic flow information and even sidewalk congestion patterns,” says Brooks Rainwater, director of the Center for City Solutions at the National League of Cities.

Read more here…  http://fortune.com/2019/02/22/self-driving-cars-cities/

Cities are the source of civilization -- perhaps time to supersede nation-states?

Forward looking individuals are inviting the world’s mayors to collaborate on solving some of humanity’s most vexing problems – Benjamin Barber, Don Tapscott and Richard Florida – who believe that our times and circumstances require nothing less than a global parliament of mayors. This would be a voluntary network of elected municipal officials and others, managed by collaboration and consensus, to advocate for more effective urban policy. Cities, after all, are the birthplace of civilization, and hubs of innovation.

The Global Parliament of Mayors is an unprecedented new experiment in democratic global governance platform by, for, and of cities. Mayors from cities large and small, North and South, developed and emerging, will convene in September 2016 to identify and pursue in common the public goods of citizens around the world

Tapscott is best known for a series of successful business books touting the benefits of collaboration technology, chief among them the 2006 Wikinomics, while Florida is known for his theory of the “creative class”; and Barber has significant experience thinking through the dynamics of democratic governance.

At the Guardian:

We do in fact live in a post-Keynesian epoch – an era in which, for reasons both fiscal and nakedly ideological, most states have retreated from the provision of citizen services they used to undertake as a matter of course. Margaret Thatcher’s sweeping logic of privatisation has had such impact that even egalitarian Finns are now worried about losing their national health service.

Municipal administrators, by contrast – beset by rising waters, crumbling infrastructure and vulnerable populations – are forced to be practical, empirical, and far more immediately accessible to their restive and squabbling constituencies. They don’t enjoy the luxury of ideological posturing. Anyone interested in pragmatic, sleeves-up responses to the various crises that afflict us might therefore be well-advised to look to them for insight.

See this site for more about the Parliament of Mayors

Any 8th-grader knows: replace roads with rails

In SimCity, an old-school Mac game where you build a city through urban planning, zoning, and setting the conditions right for the growing population of Sims, one quickly realizes that roads won't suffice for long.

The original SimCity was met with skepticism when SimCity creator Will Wright came out with a game that was focused on create, and game-play could continue virtually indefinitely, at a time where most games of the time were designed to last mere minutes and end in fiery explosions. SimCity is all about city planning, where you play as an omnisient and civic-minded honorific of Mayor, charged with managing the growth and planning of a simulated metropolis.

Here in the Washington DC area, the Wiehle-Reston East Metro is now open, after months and months of delays the Silver Line has begun service. Soon it will link one of the major airports to the city center.

In the game, we learn the secret to minimizing traffic congestion is a well-planned mass transit system that covers every building in SimCity. With a multitude of options, one can leverage mass transit many ways. One good way is to ensure at least one city in your region has a department of transportation module attached to the city hall. This is how WMATA should function, but, as the organization must content with three jurisdictions — and fight for funding from four sources, all competing — the mass transit mangers for Washington’s subways and busses have a tough situation to deal with. Marylanders don’t want to pay for the Silver Line. People in Northern Virginia don’t want to pay for the Purple Line (let alone law makers in Richmond). And nobody wants to pay for DC.

It wasn’t long ago that Metro was searching for a long-term fix. Of course, I advocate pursing a model like the Paris metro, one of the oldest subways: no more escalators. Save money on fixing the hundreds and hundreds of them, by shutting them off. Turn them into stairs, for the most part. That solves a huge maintenance issue, and perhaps will lead Washingtonians to walk more, and slow down obesity problems.

The GoogleCar Will Change Our Cities, and Our Lives

A revolution in urban mobility, happening as we speak, says Alain Bertaud, senior research scholar at the New York University Urbanization Project.

"Within 10 years, urban transport will be transformed, and the productivity of large cities will improve."

From the outside, the nameless, prototype autonomous car looks like a cross between a golf cart and a Smart Car -- with two doors, two seats. The detailing and placement of the headlights and grille make the front look like a face with big child-sized eyes and a slight smile.

The inside lacks a steering wheel and column, and doesn't have a brake pedal or an accelerator. Classified officially by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) as a Low-Speed Vehicle, a designation notable for its restricted top speed of 25 miles per hour, a regulation-approved glass windshield, the presence of side and rear-view mirrors, and a parking brake, the $150,000 electric Google robo-car can only go around 100 miles before needing a recharge. The autonomous self-driving technology uses pre-built maps overlaid by a real-time map built with a combination of cameras, sensors, and Lidar (a kind of laser "radar").

Bertaud predicts that the future of urban mobility will depend on autonomous vehicles that people use not only for the so-called "first-last mile," to connect people to public transportation systems when they live close to stops and stations, but not close enough, but also for when public transportation systems take too long to go relatively short distances.


The speed restriction falls into this classification of the Neighborhood Electric Vehicle, a sub-classification of the Low-Speed Vehicle that operates in mixed-used environments. Susan Shaheen, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, says, "These are cars that are uniquely different from a standard vehicle, and may be considered as an alternative to vehicle ownership."

In addition to the technological and socioeconomic hurdles the Google car tech faces, it must also win over regulators in each of the 50 states.

Read More at c|net...