Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 338

I watched the BlackBerry movie the other week and right away I thought, "whoa, is Jim Balsillie really like that?" Supposedly, kind of . Either way, it was a good movie that naturally ended with the fall of BlackBerry, with Balsillie not getting an NHL team, and with Mike Lazaridis dismissing the first iPhone as a toy. "Who wants to use a phone without a keyboard?"

We all know these stories. In fact, they feel trite in retrospect. There's Blockbuster, Kodak, and countless others. But these moments are clearly a lot harder to identify in the moment. And today, at least for me, it feels like this moment for crypto and blockchains.

It's easy to dismiss this space. Among other things, a blockchain is an objectively worse database . They're slower than today's alternatives. They require more computing power. There's no customer service when something goes wrong. And, it generally costs a lot more to save new information to a blockchain (this cost is called a gas fee).

At the peak of the market in 2021, the average quarterly gas fee (cost per transaction) on the Ethereum network reached about US$37 . Given this, nobody wanted to use this database to buy a $2 coffee. (However, many people were, at least at the time, willing to use it to buy expensive NFTs.)

But as Tomasz Tunguz outlines in this great post called "Gas Gas Revolution", the cost of saving data to a blockchain has dropped dramatically over the last few years. And all signs indicate that this trend is only going to continue. So what happens when it becomes cheap/basically free to save to these worse databases?

Well, if you believe that "decentralized" and open databases are going to unlock powerful new innovations, the correct answer is probably: a lot. And then all of a sudden, they'll be better databases.

There’s no real secret to having a vibrant food truck and street vendor ecosystem. You basically just need to allow it, and then get out of the way and let entrepreneurs do what they do best.

When I went to grad school in Philly, I used to eat from food trucks all the time. I could get a breakfast sandwich and coffee in the morning. I could get a burrito for lunch. And I could get a vegetarian lasagna for dinner. There was no shortage of options.

This same kind of ecosystem does not exist in Toronto, but it’s only because we’ve decided we don’t want it to.

Images: New York City

Back in the spring, I wrote about a study that was done by the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley that measured “downtown recoveries” using mobile phone data.

In other words, it looked at where people’s phones were lingering to try and determine if they were back in the office and doing things downtown.

The headline finding was that San Francisco had the lowest recovery quotient (RT) and that Salt Lake City had the highest, alongside cities like San Diego, Baltimore, and Bakersfield.

But why was there such a spread in recoveries?

One possible explanation was commute times. The cities with the lowest average commute times seemed to generally perform better in this study and have higher recovery quotients. But it’s maybe more nuanced than this.

Here is a recent Brookings article by Tracy Hadden Loh that looks at this same study. And to give just one example, she notes that San Diego’s airport happens to fall within the same zip code as its downtown. Meaning, airport traffic would have been picked up as downtown traffic.

The article also includes the above chart, showing the amount of downtown apartments built since 2019. I don’t think I knew that Chicago was so prolific.