Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 568

Earlier this year, California joined Oregon to become the second state to pass policy that would allow additional housing density in single-family neighborhoods. Set to take effect on January 1, 2022, Senate Bill 9 requires that communities across California allow duplexes -- and in some cases four units if they sever their lot -- in most low-rise neighborhoods.

This is similar to what Toronto is looking at doing , though the details seem to be different. But as I mentioned before, sometimes you can have the broader permissions in place and yet very little building actually takes place because of other land use restrictions or market factors.

People in California seem to get this dynamic, because the Los Angeles Times just reported that some/many cities in California are now looking at local policies that would mitigate the effects of Senate Bill 9. In other words, they're looking at policies that would make it harder to build the housing that this new law was hoping to unlock.

Land use planning is a funny thing.

Here is a report that was just published looking at the feasibility of a fixed transport link between Great Britain and Northern Ireland across the Irish Sea. It is part of a study known as the Union Connectivity Review, but according to the report, this idea has been floating around since at least the middle of the 1800's. This recent report claims to be the most rigorous of the bunch though.

What they discovered is that it would be -- you guessed it -- super expensive. Somewhere in the range of £209 billion for a tunnel crossing and £335 billion for a bridge crossing. And it would take some 30 years before something like this could be operational when you consider planning, design, construction, and the various legal processes that something like this would require.

So the recommendation was to stop and do nothing. But if any of you are curious about what it would take to build across the Irish Sea, here's your chance .

One of the main criticisms of cryptocurrencies is that they consume a lot of energy and are therefore not sustainable. But all blockchains are not created equal and there are different ways in which transactions on a blockchain can be validated.

Bitcoin and Ethereum use something known as "proof of work" (though Ethereum plans to change this sometime next year). This method of validation does indeed use quite a bit of energy.

But another way to validate and maintain security on a network is through something known as " proof of stake ." This is what Solana and many other blockchains are now using. Put differently, there's no "mining" required, which is the work that is so energy intensive.

To demonstrate the difference, the Solana Foundation recently published this comparison chart :

To try and further put this into context, the entire Solana network is currently doing about 20 million transactions per year. Right now, they are claiming that this is equivalent to the electricity usage of about 986 American households.

If you'd like to take a look at the footnotes, click here .